“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

At a time when I was simultaneously becoming more agnostic/atheist and more Jewish (perhaps in the tradition of Isaac Deutcher who recognized a place within Judaism for non-believing Jews), I quite naturally posed the age old question of just what it means to be a Jew. Parts of my quest to answer this question for myself have become diaries on various blogs. Genetic, cultural, tribal, religious, nationalistic and historical definitions of Judaism all combine into a mish mash that must be confusing to non-Jews but that I have come to see as a very key aspect to Jewish identity. I have come to see this identity crisis as a core part of Judaism that goes back as far as we can trace.

That’s how I think. Immerse in the complexity and maybe even add to that complexity with some paradoxes: atheists can be perfectly good Jews, identity crisis can be a defining feature of identity, etc.

My wife thinks differently than I. And her response to the question of Jewish identity was characteristically terse and to the point:

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

I think one reason why this occurred to my wife is thanks to a visit we made to Eastern Europe. In both Latvia and Russia we found that people immediately spotted us as Jews. We never got that feeling in America or Israel. In both America and Israel we were seen as Americans, period. Should we wish to indicate our Jewishness we could, but no one spotted us from a distance and categorized us as Jews. In Latvia and Russia, the recognition was immediate. Sometimes it was matter of fact. On a night train from Latvia to Moscow, a route with few tourists, the woman who checked our tickets look at my wife’s name and first asked if we were Polish. We said no. Her next guess was Israeli. As far as I know nothing about us suggests Israeli, but that was her second guess. Only on her third guess did she pick American. But that was trivial. She was friendly and kind through the entire ride.

In Latvia we were recognized as Jews by some construction workers and their jeers were not that hard to figure out even if we couldn’t understand their language. Similar things happened in Petersburg, Russia, where swastika graffiti and “White Power” T-shirts were also a frequent sight. People could see we were Jewish and hated us for it. Yet most Americans and Israelis would see us and simply think “American.” For the record, my boss while I lived in Japan also saw me as very “American” and he is familiar with English speaking gaijin of all sorts, from Birts to Scots to Aussies.

The Spanish Inquisition (a version of which still exists in more benign form today in the Vatican) had several targets. Jews and Protestants could be brutally killed at will. But one main target was was the conversos, Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism by the Spanish. Somehow these ambiguous people, once Jewish, now not, were seen as one of the biggest threats by the Spanish Catholic Church. At first the Papacy did not agree and was happy to welcome converted Jews, but some Popes, like Paul IV, took the attitude of the Inquisition and saw these converts, no matter how Christian, as suspect and was known to burn them alive from time to time. In fact, it didn’t even matter if your family had been good, practicing Catholics for generations, the taint of having once been Jewish remained and the Inquisition was always a threat.

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

The intellectual underpinnings of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitism partly came from a British author named Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Supposedly a historian (yet seemingly ignorant of much history) Chamberlain hypothesized that civilizations and great nations rose by expelling Jews and fell when they became “polluted” by Jews. Needless to say, people like Himmler pissed themselves with glee when they read this and used it as one basis of their policy towards the Jews.

The 1935 Nuremburg Laws enshrined what many Jews already knew. It didn’t matter who you were, what you believed or what you worshipped, if you had any Jewish ancestry you were Jewish. Or, put more popularly in 1930’s Germany:

“Was er glaubt is einerlei
In der Rasse liegt die Schweinerei.”

Translated in Melvin Konner’s book Unsettled as:

“It doesn’t matter what his faith,
the piggishness is in the race.”

Which, in effect, says the same thing my wife says:

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

The first step towards genocide is to define your target as less than human. This is a common motif in human history. Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka have done this during their terrible civil war. Hutu and Tutsis have done this. Americans did it regarding blacks and Native Americans. Japanese have done it regarding Koreans and Chinese. And, of course, many have done it regarding the Jews.

Accuse your target of cannibalism. Call him an animal or a pig or a dog. Say “they are not like us.” That particularly chilling line was used by an Italian factory owner describing his African workers in a Current TV segment on African immigrants in Italy. What this means is, “they aren’t REAL humans so I don’t have to treat them the same way I treat REAL humans.”

Virulent anti-Semitism in Poland and other nations in Eastern Europe did not begin nor end with the Nazi occupation. Poland had anti-Jewish laws similar to those the Nazis had in place before 1939. And anti-Jewish attacks continued in Poland after liberation, lasting well into 1946. The nearly complete extermination and expulsion of the Jews from Poland, where once there were 3.5 million Jews, was a collaboration between Poles and Germans. And the 21st century has seen a large increase in anti-Semitism worldwide, particularly since 9/11, interestingly enough. Though such a surge is not the equivalent of the massive pogroms and torture that has been seen coming in waves from the Middle Ages on, such surges have in the past preceded pogroms.

Growing up I was barely Jewish. We would take the Jewish holidays off from school each year, but that didn’t mean we did anything Jewish. On Yom Kippur, the day of fasting and atonement, we would take off from school and have Mu Shu pork at our favorite Chinese restaurant. That was the kind of Jew we were.

But history and current events have taught me that it doesn’t matter what I worship, what I say or what I eat. There are many out there who would kill me for being Jewish. And my wife is right. That realization shapes my personal identity, making me more Jewish than I probably would choose to be otherwise. It leads me to support Israel more strongly than I might otherwise because, in the final analysis, the only difference between now and, say, 1920’s Europe for Jews is the existence of Israel. The Shoah could happen again, right here and right now. And, as in the 1920’s and 1930’s, many nations would probably refuse to take Jewish refugees. But at least there is Israel. For the first time since the Roman Empire (excepting the semi-mythical Kingdom of the Khazars) there is one place on earth where being Jewish is accepted, normal and relatively safe. And there is a well-armed, pretty kick ass Jewish army for the first time since perhaps the Maccabees…even if, like the Maccabees, that army sometimes resorts to brutality that I cannot accept. But I can’t help but be thankful that army is there, that Jewish state is there. I once pointed out to a Muslim friend that it is the only place in the world where being Jewish is completely the accepted norm, compared with the majority of the world where either Islam or Christianity is the accepted norm. He thought about it and recognized in it a parallel to his own Shi’a, a branch of Islam that often has been persecuted and rarely has had a nation to call home. Currently Iran is, to my knowledge, the only nation where Shi’a Islam is the dominant belief, though several Sunni dominated nations have large Shi’a populations.

I should also note that I recognize a similar reason for a Palestinian state. Although Palestinians share a religion with a large chunk of the world’s population, ethnically they are marginalized and mistreated even by their fellow Muslims. They, too, have no state to call their own and are vulnerable because of it. That is one of many reasons why I support the existence of two viable states, Israel and Palestine.

History is filled with examples of my wife’s statement. The Spanish Inquisition, Chamberlain’s stupid historical theories, and the Nazi’s genocidal applications of those stupid historical theories are merely a few examples. And I don’t expect this to go away. But the realization that it exists does help me understand my own identity and my identity within a larger society. My friend’s comparison with Shi’a Islam aside, I am not sure how applicable my own thoughts about my Jewish identity translates to understanding the experience of other minority and threatened groups. But I strongly suspect that there is a shared psychology, if not actual shared experience, that can be used to help understand the experience of other such groups.