Jewish Cosmology of Victimhood
Ask any non-Jewish American what his or her personal link is to the Roman era, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and other epics of human history and he will tell you: nothing. He knows nothing about it. And he doesn't care. For such a late twentieth century American to reflect on his own roots back to, say, medievalism, is to look with the naked eye for Mars: it is a vague dot, reputed by others to exist, in the remotest distance. Indistinct. Unfathomable. Something eternally elusive, lost forever.
Few Americans can trace their family history more than a few generations, if that. Throughout anyone's own ancestral lineage, however, going back deeply into time, there obviously exists their own share of participants -- as both perpetrators and victims -- in great and minor wars, massacres, invasions, famines, epidemics, and other disasters of every kind. Presuming five procreative generations per century, exponentially, any human being alive today can theoretically claim direct genetic lineage to over a thousand ancestors back to 1800, over 37,000 people to 1700, over a million back to the year 1600, and over a staggering billion human beings back to 1400 (thirty generations). Whatever the mathematically realistic number, (and Jewish history claims 4,000 years) the deeper we go back into history, the more we must consider the veritable Milky Way of humanity that preceded us in direct ancestral lineage; people of every imaginable sort, and they all knew well the melancholic chords of human suffering, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally. Every single one of them.
Today's Americans of French, British, Italian or other European descent find themselves today lumped together in the generic "white" American community. Their respective ancestries are stirred together, gone. Their European origins mean little to them; they are homogenized in the New World, their identities now expressed -- for better or worse -- in the icons of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid, Babe Ruth, the hallowed Constitution, even McDonald's hamburgers, or other superficial national icons that ancestrally have nothing directly to do with them.
The typical American's alienation, disinterest, and lack of connection to distant history is not characteristic of modern Jews. On the contrary. A stone thrown in spite through a Jewish window in Italy in the fourteenth century is a stone thrown into Jewish hearts today. The actions against Jews by desperate thugs in Poland in the eighteenth century are dumped on Gentile doorsteps in our time by Jews who are still grieving, still embittered, still seeking redress. And when we turn, in more recent history, to the bestial deeds of Adolf Hitler to conquer the world, we find that Jews have pulled tightly in a circle to proclaim that everything sinister in the whole world malevolently labors against them, and them only.
Ultimately, it is a central article of modern Jewish faith -- reflecting both secular and religious attitudes, formed and hardened over the ages -- that to be Jewish is to be always maltreated for innocence by others. Or, perhaps more correctly to Jewish eyes, as part of this innocence, being Jewish is to be a victim for the crime of being superior to their persecutors. This claim to superiority was originally religiously based, as God's "Chosen People" of Old Testament tradition. And this Jewish preoccupation -- as being victims of their self-presumed superiority -- has been passed down, religiously, over the ages (traditionally epitomized in Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall to bemoan their communal fate, manifest also in the likes of the volume Sefer Yosifon, anonymously compiled in the tenth century as a litany of Jewish complaints and miseries). In the aftermath of Hitler's atrocities against Jews during World War II, this world-view has come to define, more tightly than any other aspect of Jewish tradition -- and now highly politicized -- modern Jewish self-identity.
But is this true? From the evidence we have already seen, are Jews correctly depicted as history's consummate, incomparable, and innocent victims? Have Jews preeminently and collectively suffered more than all other human beings, "victims of centuries of persecution and bigotry?" [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 378] And for no reason? |
