Steal This Idea: Why Judaism Says No to Microlooting
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You can't understand it without putting God into the picture.
Antisemitism doesn't make sense. That's the point.
Every other form of bigotry follows a recognizable logic: the majority fears or despises a minority that is different, foreign, threatening. Racism, xenophobia, sectarianism -- they're ugly, but they're legible. They target the stranger, the outsider, the group that doesn't fit.
Antisemitism operates on entirely different rules. Jews get blamed for contradictory things simultaneously, in every era, in every country, across the full spectrum of politics. In pre-war Europe, the left called Jews capitalists. The right called them communists. Today in America, the far right blames Jews for opening the borders. The far left says Jews invented apartheid policing. When Jews were poor, their poverty was a crime. When they became wealthy, their wealth was a conspiracy. When they had no homeland, they were rootless parasites. Now that they have one, they're colonialists.
Whatever a given society decides is its greatest moral evil -- Jews get linked to it. Always. The charge changes. The target doesn't.
This is not a coincidence. It's a clue.
When scholars study antisemitism, there's one conclusion they work very hard to avoid: that it might have something to do with Jewishness itself.
That discomfort is understandable. It sounds dangerously close to blaming the victim. But the refusal to ask the question leaves us without an answer -- and without an answer, we can't respond.
Anne Frank got closer than most. In her diary, she wrote: "It might even be our religion from which the world learns good. And for that reason, and that reason alone, do we now suffer." It's a remarkable line from a teenage girl hiding in an attic. When the Broadway producers adapted her diary, they cut it. In its place, they substituted something vague about how persecution just shifts from group to group throughout history. It's almost certainly that the producers were secular Jews who found the original too uncomfortable -- too suggestive that there might be something specific about Jewish identity that draws this hatred. Better to generalize it away.
But the question Anne Frank was asking deserves a serious answer.
At a recent conference on antisemitism in Jerusalem, conservative thinker Dinesh D'Souza was interviewed by Israeli journalist Gadi Taub. D'Souza made a move that most people in that room probably weren't expecting. He said you cannot understand antisemitism in purely secular terms.
He started with envy. In Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan observes Adam and Eve for the first time and feels hatred toward them -- not because they have wronged him, but because of what they are. Their beauty, their goodness, their intimacy with God. Satan can't destroy God, so he goes after the things God loves.
D'Souza applied that framework directly to the Jews. Jews have historically been the people through whom the moral law entered the world. If you believe, he argued, that there is a cosmic struggle between the forces of moral order and the forces that resist it, then antisemitism looks less like ordinary bigotry and more like a spiritual campaign. An attack on the Jews becomes a way of attacking the source.
This might sound like theological speculation. It's not just that.
The most striking corroboration of this thesis comes from the least expected source: Adolf Hitler.
Herman Rauschning was a senior Nazi official who broke with Hitler before the war and spent the rest of his life trying to warn the world about what Nazism truly was. In his 1941 book The Beast from the Abyss, Rauschning describes Hitler's actual worldview -- not the propaganda, but the core belief.
Hitler, Rauschning explains, wanted a world governed by pure power. Social Darwinism in its rawest form: the strong dominate, the weak perish, and the strongest race -- which he believed to be the Aryan one -- rules everything. What stood in the way of that vision was conscience. And conscience, Hitler believed, was a Jewish invention.
Think about what that means. Hitler wasn't primarily a racial antisemite in the way we usually picture it. At the deepest level, he was at war with a set of ideas -- and he traced those ideas to their source.
The ideas he hated: that every human being is created in the image of God and therefore has inherent worth. That you cannot kill a child because it's disabled. That the poor, the widow, the stranger deserve protection, not exploitation. That justice is not the privilege of the powerful. That war is not glorious but a necessary evil, and that peace is the dream. That every child -- not just the children of elites -- deserves an education.
Hitler literally wrote: "The Jews have inflicted two wounds on mankind -- circumcision on the body and conscience on the soul."
He believed that as long as even one Jew remained alive in the world -- even one who knew nothing of Jewish practice, who had never set foot in a synagogue -- that person would be, in his words, a source of "fresh sedition," a carrier of the moral virus. That's why extermination was the only solution in his mind. You can't destroy an idea by suppressing its institutions. You have to kill every person in whom it lives.
He was wrong about a great many things. But he understood something about Jewish history that most secular Jews have never been taught.
Rauschning's analysis echoes something buried in classical Jewish sources. The Hebrew word for Sinai -- the mountain where, according to tradition, the Torah (Jewish law and teachings) was given to the Jewish people -- is phonetically close to the Hebrew word sinah, meaning hatred. The ancient rabbis noticed this and drew a deliberate connection: the moment the Torah was given at Sinai, hatred entered the world.
Not because the Torah was bad. Because it made demands. It introduced conscience into human civilization, and conscience has never been universally welcome.
Father Edward Flannery, a Catholic priest who wrote one of the most comprehensive scholarly histories of antisemitism, The Anguish of the Jews, put it this way: the antisemite is not really the Jew's enemy. He is his own. He finds the moral demands of religion an unbearable weight. He develops an unconscious hostility to God, to the law, to the moral structure of reality. And he projects that hostility outward -- onto the people who carry it. By attacking the Jews, he is trying to strike out at the conscience that haunts him.
Whatever society's current definition of evil is -- the antisemite finds a way to attach it to the Jews. Why? Because the Jews represent moral accountability. And the dark part of every human being, the part that wants to live without accountability, hates that.
None of this is an argument for Jewish superiority. The Torah is relentlessly honest about Jewish failures -- the Bible is largely a record of the Jewish people falling short of its own ideals. That honesty is itself part of what makes the tradition remarkable.
But here's the uncomfortable question the antisemitism thesis forces on us: if Jews are hated because they represent something, what happens when they stop representing it?
The Torah describes the Jewish people as a people with a specific purpose: to absorb a set of values and demonstrate that it's possible to build a civilization on them. Not perfect, but oriented toward justice, toward conscience, toward the sanctity of every human life. The Hebrew concept of tikkun olam -- repair of the world -- is the destination. The Torah is the instruction manual.
When Jews live that out, the world benefits. The values spread -- through Christianity, through Islam, through the political philosophy of the American Founding Fathers, who consciously drew on the Hebrew Bible and on 17th-century political thinkers who modeled their ideas on the ancient Israelite commonwealth. Harvard professor Eric Nelson documents this in his book The Hebrew Republic. The Founders weren't Jewish. Some of them weren't even friendly to Jews. But they believed that the only political model God had ever actually given humanity was the one in the Hebrew Bible, so they studied it.
That's the ripple effect of a people taking its mission seriously.
Military power can defeat Hamas or Hezbollah. It cannot defeat antisemitism. Education can expose hatred and name it for what it is. It cannot eradicate it. These things matter -- we have to do them -- but they're treating symptoms, not causes.
The thesis shared by D'Souza, by Rauschning, by Flannery, and -- surprisingly -- by Hitler himself, suggests something more radical: antisemitism is a reaction. It is the world's hatred of its own conscience, directed at the people who carry it. The way to defeat it is not to fight it on its own terms. It is to be what the haters claim you're not.
Live the values. Hold yourself to the standards. Not because the world is fair -- it isn't, and the double standard applied to Jews and to Israel is grotesque. But because the standard was never about fairness. It was about what kind of world you're trying to build.
The Hebrew word Torah comes from a root meaning both teaching and light. Tikkun olam -- repair of the world -- is not a metaphor. It's a program. Every generation that shines the light makes the world a little less dark. Every generation that abandons it leaves a vacancy that hatred is quick to fill.
The call of antisemitism, at its deepest level, is not a call to fight back. It's a call to step up.
Watch Rabbi Daniel Rowe’s video below
0:00 Why Anti-Semitism Is Unlike ANY Other Hatred
1:32 Anne Frank's Line That Hollywood DELETED
5:02 Dinesh D'Souza's Bombshell Theory in Jerusalem
7:17 Milton's Satan — The Key That Unlocks Everything
10:12 What Hitler's Own Confidant Secretly Revealed
16:10 The 2,000-Year-Old Talmudic Secret Behind It All
21:17 The REAL Answer to Anti-Semitism (Not What You Think)
The idea that the Torah is antisemitic is crazier than I ever thought of being on on my worst day! The Torah tells us that those who came before us were imperfect. King David is one of my ancestors, whose traits, even the negative ones, he had, I have today. The Torah tells us Hashem creates imperfect people and shows us how we can do better without having to do the impossible. It tells us we don't have to be afraid to go to Hashem or be rejected because we messed up. As one who was raised in Christianity, their addition to the Bible has created more hellfire and brimstone sermons and admonishment than the Torah ever could. The difference is I don't have to be perfect for Hashem to love me unconditionally. Hashem is always there to comfort, help, and lead us to change.
I think it is simpler than this. Only two other groups really hate us, Christians and Moslems.
The Romans hated us prior to Christianity because we were the one people whom they couldn't subdue. After Christianity they hated us because by continuing to exist we proved the fundamental premise of Christianity is false.
That premise says the man they misnamed Jesus was the Messiah promised to the Jews. But we repudiated that claim. Therefore, either Chrisianity is false or all the Jews since Jesus have denied God. Since Christians could not face the first possibility, they seized on the second.
(I'm out of space.)
Don't forget that other religion, Communism/Marxism. Whereas the Christian and Moslem claimed to "upgrade" Judaism and it's claim on Divine revelation, Marxism denounces any attempt to become more "godly" and denies the whole idea. Their religion's dogma is dialectical MATERIALISM. No quest of the spiritual here!
The Jews not only believe in God but also in the concept of private property. Don't forget that along with Das Kapital, Marx also wrote a tract called "A World Without Jews".
Let's not confuse hating a religion and hating those who adhere to the religion. Many here have heaped hate on Christianity and/or Islam, but do they hate all Christians and Muslims? I hope not. If they did, then an antisemitic reaction would be entirely justified, wouldn't it?
it does make sense when Dinesh explains antisemitism as the fight against moral law. Nothing else has adequately addressed why antisemitism exists. Thank you Dinesh
D'Souza isn't the first person to have said this. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and Dennis Prager say something similar in their book Why the Jews. After examining all the reasons analysts have proposed for antisemitism, they suggest what D'Souza does: it's a resentment of Judaism itself, because Judaism is the taproot, the source, of moral accountability. I believe that to be the argument that Rabbi Raphael Shore also advances in his new book, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Jew? I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I believe he says he searched for an answer and found it in Hitler's statement that the Jew introduced conscience into the world. Russian author Vasily Grossman says it this way: "Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I'll tell you what you're guilty of."
In a nutshell: We took away their fun.
Given that their "fun" is largely to hurt others (whether deliberately or just carelessly), for most people that's a Tikkun.
I really liked this article. My dad often calls to discuss this issue with me. The general consensus is that Jew hatred, as a concept, begins with jealousy. The fact that we are hated religiously, geographically, and culturally, my dad posits, has its roots in jealousy. While reading this article, I can possibly complete his thought process. This quote says it perfectly "Whatever society's current definition of evil is -- the antisemite finds a way to attach it to the Jews. Why? Because the Jews represent moral accountability. And the dark part of every human being, the part that wants to live without accountability, hates that."
I think the main reason that countless people hated Jews during their 4,000 years’ journey through human history are Moses 1OCommandments and other prescribed morals in the Old Testament which demand moral behaviour including:Thou Shall Not Kill, Thou Shall Not Steal,Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery,Thous Shall Have A Daly Of Rest For Yourself And Animals,You Should Respect Yourself and most important you are held totally responsible for your behaviour and accountable.
Why does ADS always supports the enemies of the Jews, are they really Jewish before Christianity and Islam was Judaism, it is like a lazy students copied the answers to the test, and then blames the original person that had the right answers so Judaism is the original test paper and answers and the others religion mixed up and twisted distorted, warped their copies of the test and made one big chulent and call it Christianity and Islam, and some gullible people believe the copy cats not the original, ADS will pick the forgery painting not the original from the famous painter, this is my example about Judaism and the other two knock offs of Judaism , and very poor ones at the forgery
Since you are addressing me directly, I'll respond.
The difference between our views is that I look at the world as it is, not from some idealized perspective. Christians and Muslims view their religions as improvements on Judaism. Ideas can be made better and that's how they see it. That's how it is, whether you like it or not.
The article is about antisemitism. Nobody likes to be told that their religion is a fake. Jews trying to push this message on Christians and Muslims will only increase antisemitism. We need to stop doing this. We have to accept that Christians will remain Christians and Muslims will remain Muslims. There are billions more of them than there are of us. That is our reality.
The article no where says that other religions are "fake". On the contrary, Christianity and Islam are praised for helping to spread the idea of moral responsibility.
Also, there is absolutely no mandate in Judaism to convert others and there is no hint here of wishing to do so.
Umm ... I was responding to a specific comment from Judy. Did you read the comment I was responding to? Or did you intend to respond to Judy, in which case ... thank you for agreeing with me, and in which case you might write "should be praised" rather than "are praised"?
I believe what my mom( obm) told me from her mom ( obm) that hatred comes from jealousy, that thread and jealousy are twins, the world got jealous that Hashem chose the Jewish people and gave us the Torah, but anyone that wants to convert to Judaism can, I remember a cartoon called underdog, so what is wrong with Judaism for protecting the underdogs of society, and the Jewish version of charity it is interesting that the other two religions Christianity and Islam are based on twisted and warped coping of Judaism, these both religions did not come up with any real ideas, and some non Jews have a problem with the oral Torah, which is basically a Jewish law book, because it has to with issues of law, people being anti Jewish doesn't make sense,
Thank you try much for this article.
Israel is called to be a light unto the gentiles, a light which will never be diminished.
The demonic hatred, culminating in the holocaust, is proof of that fact.
I have never heard of even half of the polarizing reasons you have given for why antisemitism exists; but, I can tell you this:
The reason antisemitism exists is because we do not teach the world that the only alternative to Judaism is Noahidism.
To be a light to the world.
It all circles back to us.
A brilliant article, and I agree with almost every point. But under NO CONDITIONS would I group Islam in with Christianity or Judaism. Islam is about world dominance, not justice or the value of life. Every nation “embracing” Islam is crippled by war and self destructive ideology.
No. This article is way off the mark. The Israelites didn't invent morality and there was plenty of hatred before Sinai. Much of the worst Jew-hatred is from people who believe in God and who believe themselves to be living God-given values and standards. You need to look elsewhere for an explanation.
Non-Jewish people who are proud of their personal integrity would find the insinuations of this article and several of the comments below to be highly offensive. As such, we are only throwing fuel on the fire by our own arrogance.
"The year 1000 finds the Jews in relatively stable living conditions for the time," notes the quoted Father Edward Flannery. "Two centuries later, they were almost pariahs; three later, victims of terror." What made the difference? How is it that, although the majority of Jews until 1700 CE lived in the Islamic cultural sphere, 99.8 percent of all Jewish victims of persecution during the Christian-Islamic era (7th-20th century) died in the countries of Europe most adorned with crosses, while the wealthy Jewish communities in China and Japan, as well as the agro-artisan "Beni Israel" in India, "did neither provoke hatred nor experience persecution" and Jews lived incomparably more safely in Islamic countries than where no child escapes the sight of the manger child tortured by "the Jews"?
Not quite. Christianity and Islam are anti-semitic to their core. Their religious leaders teach their Jew hatred and their supposed superiority to everyone they can. This poison gives a green light to people's darkest parts of their brain and hormones----- permission to be sadistic.
They came second and third, knowing deeply that they are spin-offs of something very spiritually powerful and----most importantly-----we are called "Chosen". They think that "Chosen" means better than, more loved by and special to G-d. So----out of "sibling rivalry" that rivals Cain's jealuosy of Abel----these 2 religions teach their Jew-hating venom to their adherents. Instead, they need to learn that "Chosen" means that our job as Jews is to teach every human that they are "chosen".
Many thanks for this article. It explains a lot. I appreciate this knowledge!
Not all Christians are antisemitic ….many identify Jews as Gods Chosen People….those Christians who don’t have misinterpreted the Bible, and ignore that Yeshua quoted from the TANACH. The Christian Church is as divided on this issue as Judaism. ✡️
While your first paragraph has some truth to it, your second paragraph is profoundly wrong. From their perspective, they "know deeply" that Judaism was imperfect and that the Jewish nation was destroyed 2000 years ago. Both Christians and Muslims believe that they have "perfected" the religion and their success is evidence that they are the ones who are favoured now. They would tell you that it is the Jews who are the jealous ones.
And what is it that you think we should teach? If your starting position is that Christianity and Islam are antisemitic to their core, won't you be teaching a whole lot of anti-Christian and anti-Muslim venom?
Christianity caused the Holocaust
Even After the Holocaust , much of
Christianity reminded deeply Anti-Semitic and Anti-Israel and
Christian Anti-Semitism is sadly making a comeback
Anti-semitism in America comes from the Left.
They are not Christians but secular.
This is incorrect. Let me know if you'd like a list of right wing Americans who are anti Semitic. What does "Jews will not replace us" mean? (Unite the Right).
Excellent article! Thanks from the heart.
Thank you for publishing this article.
Many thanks for this article, it is admirable, clever . and acceptable even for not only Jews, I hope.
Wow! he expresses this with amazing clarity and reason.
There is lot of plain jealousy in Antisemitism - of socio-economic successes, of choseness, of history....
Outstanding article!