Understanding Anti-Semitism Through History

Join us as we follow the long, twisted history of how the Jew became the world’s most famous and infamous outsider. As the ancient Israelites approach the Promised Land, the Moabites are afraid and use a word for fear that rhymes with outsider. We’ll trace this stereotype of the Jew as an outsider from Pharaoh to Balaam to Haman to the modern university seminar room and to recent campus protests.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform and now on YouTube. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. If you like what you hear, give us a star or two. Say something nice.

This week’s Parasha is Balak. In this iconic narrative of how the non-Jew hates and then loves the Jew, we explore the myth of otherness and the Jew as an idea in the modern and postmodern world. So join us for the Jew as Other. You know, Rabbi, when I was reading the Parsha this week, I noticed in the beginning they wanted to curse us and then they wanted to bless us. It’s kind of like antisemitism, you know, you don’t know whether the curse is a curse or the blessing is a blessing.

Adam Mintz [2:08 – 2:09]: I think that’s fair.

Geoffrey Stern [2:10 – 3:55]: So I think this week I win an award for discovering what I was going to talk about in the context of the first three psukim. In one word, as I said in the intro, in Numbers 22:3, it says Moab was alarmed because the people were so numerous, talking about the Israelites. Moab dreaded the Israelites. In Hebrew, it says vayagar Moav. Moab was alarmed. The Hebrew word for “gor”, we all know it from the word ger, it means to sojourn, to be a stranger, to abide, temporarily dwell. But it also means to stir up trouble, strife, quarrel, gather together, to stir up strife. It means to dread, to fear, to stand in awe.

That’s amazing. To me, on the one hand, it means to fear, and on the other hand, it means to stand in awe, to be afraid. I mean, if you think about it, Rabbi. And now you can get an insight into what I was thinking. This word is so pregnant with all of this baggage. This was not a standard fear. Was it the fear of the stranger? Was it the fear of Rav, who they said they were so numerous? Is it of all the “millions of people coming over the border”? I mean, it’s kind of in one word. It has so much nuance to it. It really got me thinking that this was the Parasha and Balaam as the one who wanted to curse and ended up blessing, to really dive into this worship that we have for the Jew as the other.

Adam Mintz [3:55 – 4:11]: This is fantastic. And of course, “Ki Rav hu”, also is a pregnant phrase which is hard to know. What does that really mean? The Egyptians were also worried that we were too many. Pharaoh said, lest we become too many. The Egyptians say, right?

Geoffrey Stern [4:11 – 5:43]: I mean, in Exodus 1:8, they say a new king arose over Egypt. And he said, look at these people. Look at the Israelite people. They’re too numerous for us. It is funny, and I don’t have an answer on this one, because that’s not a typical trope of anti-Israelite or anti-Jewish hatred that we kind of find. But it does come up in these two texts, and we’ll see in others too, kind of like they kind of multiply like rabbits, you know? Maybe it’s that kind of sense of it.

But again, the first association that we have to something where the Israelites were seen as, I’ve always read it, as another. But I think we’re going to have to control ourselves a little bit as a people that were numerous was Exodus in the mouth of Pharaoh. And then of course, in Esther, the Megillah of Esther, we have in chapter three, verse eight, Haman said to Ahasuerus, there is a certain people that is scattered and dispersed amongst the other people in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws. And it is not in your majesty’s interest to tolerate them. This is specific to these people. Whereas the other thing, you could say it’s just an immigrant. You could say it’s the stranger here. We’re getting this specificity. These people keep different laws, right?

Adam Mintz [5:44 – 6:02]: Yeah. I mean, this doesn’t say they’re too many. This is right. Am_ekhad, Mephozara, Mefhorad. There’s a certain people scattered and dispersed among the other people. It might be scattered and dispersed is a, is the same thing as being too many, right? That right, Geoffrey? That’s hard to know.

Geoffrey Stern [6:03 – 7:21]: It almost feels like whack-a-mole that wherever you look, they pop up. So they don’t have to be a lot of them. They’re just peppered everywhere. I think there is a connection, and it is an enigma that here we are, the smallest minority, and the first thing we come up against is our numbers. The Septuagint has a slightly, it adds information to its quote-unquote translation. So in the Septuagint, it says that they have laws contrary to those of every nation. Of every nation. It adds and continually disregards the ordinance of the kings.

So here, it’s kind of universalizing their differences, where in the mouth of the original Haman, he’s saying to a particular king in a particular country so that the unifying of the kingdom which we honorably intend cannot be brought about. So that kind of adds something that they break down the unity of the culture and it says so that our kingdom may not attain stability. So they’re numerous, but they’re sprinkled everywhere, and they kind of break down their unity. And if you think about Haman and Ahasuerus, from Hodu to Cush, he had an empire.

Adam Mintz [7:21 – 7:23]: They break down, right.

Geoffrey Stern [7:23 – 8:30]: So there is an article in thetoah.com and it’s called “What Did Haman Not Like About the Jews?” by Professor Marty Lockshin. And I quote him a little bit in this section of our discussion because we only have the two main sources of this anti-Israelite agenda. I think I’m adding a new one today by saying when the Moabites looked at the Jews or the Israelites and said vayagar, we’re afraid of this stranger. I think you can put it into the same context. But he basically says that if you read the Septuagint, the idea is they undermine the political stability of a country.

There’s a scholar named Peter Schaeffer who has his own interpretation. The Jews are the only people who are in the state of military alertness always and against everyone. I mean, I see that more in the Exodus thing where Pharaoh says they are many and they could be a third column. They could unite with the enemy.

Adam Mintz [8:30 – 8:44]: It’s hard to know in this week’s Parasha what it means. They’re too many. What is he afraid of? That therefore they’re going to attack us? That therefore they’re going to run through us? What exactly are they afraid of?

Geoffrey Stern [8:44 – 9:39]: Yeah, I mean, the main takeaway that I took from what the Septuagint did and the reason why it’s so important to look at how these ideas developed. The Septuagint was already giving an explanation of what they thought other people were thinking of them. Kind of like the grasshoppers of the spies. According to Schaeffer, Greek texts confirm that these Jewish authors correctly understood the thoughts of many of their gentile neighbors. So we’re almost getting a mirror of what others were saying about the Jews. This unsociability. They just didn’t assimilate.

They didn’t blend in. And maybe that again is why there are so many. You could have an empire from Hodu until Cush with millions of people. But if there’s only one people that’s not blending in, they look like a lot. Maybe that’s part of it.

Adam Mintz [9:39 – 9:41]: Yeah, that is interesting. That’s good.

Geoffrey Stern [9:42 – 11:44]: So in terms of. We’ve looked at the Septuagint and again, I quoted a little bit. Even Josephus also says there is a certain wicked nation. He now adds, not only are they scattered and many, but they. And not only don’t they follow our laws, they’re wicked. Everybody is kind of laying onto this criticism of the Israelites, of the Jews. In our own texts, in the Talmud, in Megillah 13b, it says, and their laws are diverse from those of our people quoting the Megillat Esther as they do not eat from our food, nor do they marry from our women, nor do they marry off their women to us, nor do they keep the king’s laws. They spend the entire year in idleness as they are constantly saying Shehi pehi, which is an acronym for Shabbat and Pesach.

So now we’re getting that they don’t contribute to society. More importantly, they have different laws that make them not be like us. The commentary here says the rabbis view antisemitism as a direct and even understandable result of the Jews observing Jewish law. It’s almost turning this question, and there are some of the midrashim that blame it on God. Why are people hating us so? Because you gave us these laws that make it so that if a fly falls into a glass of wine, we’re allowed to drink it. But if the non-Jewish king touches the wine, we can’t touch it. You make us look terrible, God. Fascinating that we Jews saw the source of this. I won’t call it antisemitism yet, but this hatred for the Jewish people because God gave burdened us with These laws that made us different, where we couldn’t open up the market on the Saturday, so forth and so on. Kind of interesting.

Adam Mintz [11:46 – 12:03]: Very, very. This is a great gemara, right? Because it kind of. It gives the impression that we look bad, that the reason for anti-Semitism is that we look bad. And it’s blaming God. God, you give us the rules, or the rabbis give us the rules that make us look bad.

Geoffrey Stern [12:03 – 14:43]: It also kind of goes against something, which is when bad things happen to the Jewish people, it’s because we’re not keeping the laws. Here, this is saying, God, we keep your laws. Get us only hatred, only mixed bag results. There’s one last rabbinic source that I want to quote. It’s called Targum Sheni. They don’t know exactly when it was written, but it gives a kind of a laundry list of all the reasons why, in the view of the rabbinic tradition, why people hate the Jews. It says that they are proud and haughty. You know, they think they’re better than us. That was a little bit of what we saw with the drinking of the wine. If a non-Jew touches it, all of a sudden, they can’t drink it. They practice laws and customs that are different from those of every other nation and country and do not walk according to all laws, nor have pleasure in our customs, nor do they serve the king.

It goes on to say, when we try to catch them, they turn around and stand staring at us, gnash their teeth, stamp their feet, and so frighten us that we are not able to take hold of them. We do not marry their daughters, they do not marry ours. Any of them taken for the service of the king passes the day in idleness with all kinds of excuses, such as today is Shabbat, today is Passover. It really, I think, reflects on how the Jews saw themselves through the eyes of the non-Jews. But they did understand that they had a culture that was not easily assimilated. It comes very quickly. I think what we’re starting to see is that maybe the scholar that we’re going to end with, who says that this whole concept of the Jew as the other, this universal of the other, does not really apply to the ancient traditions. What he’s saying is this is particular to the Jews. You can’t extrapolate from this. This is not just any people that is different gets hated. No, the Jewish people have their laws, they have their traditions. It’s very particularistic.

I think what he’s challenging us to do is to say this otherness is a kind of a modern creation. It made me look at these texts slightly differently. I must say, if you look at them and you read them without projecting, it really is talking about a particular people who are hated for a particular reason.

Adam Mintz [14:44 – 14:59]: Yeah. I mean, that’s an interesting idea, that otherness is modern. It’s not only vis a vis the Jews that we define ourselves versus the other person. That’s the way modern society is kind of divided.

Geoffrey Stern [15:00 – 16:29]: Yeah. The only argument that I’m going to give against this to say that otherness is a modern construct is the famous two phrases that now follow. These are not unique and singular phrases. These are phrases that every progressive and every universalist will talk upon to say that no, the stranger is a construct. In Exodus 23, it says, you shall not oppress a stranger. For you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourself been strangers in the land of Egypt. Could you make this into particularistic? You shall not oppress the immigrant because you were an immigrant. You shall not oppress the merchant with a backpack who travels the itinerant merchant. You could, but clearly what it’s saying is universalize this concept of a stranger because you were a stranger. It’s a thing.

In Deuteronomy 10:19, it says, you must befriend the stranger V’ahavata et HaGer, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I think if you had to make an argument that even in our ancient texts, we realized that we weren’t just experiencing this as a particular people, but we were a universal construct. You would look at these verses. We were the strangers, therefore you have to love the stranger.

Adam Mintz [16:29 – 16:47]: I’ll just say there’s a movement from Exodus to Deuteronomy. Because in Exodus it says you shouldn’t oppress the stranger. In Deuteronomy it says, you should love the stranger. That’s interesting, right? It’s almost like when the Jews are about to enter the land, it’s not enough not to oppress. They have to actually love.

Geoffrey Stern [16:48 – 16:49]: It’s an escalation.

Adam Mintz [16:49 – 16:50]: Right.

Geoffrey Stern [16:50 – 17:21]: So we’re going to spend the rest to read, and I can only tell our listeners, if you can, go to Substack and look for Hussein Aboubakr Mansour He has a Substack and he wrote this past week. It’s gotten a lot of comments. The Jew After Otherness, A Metacritique of Modern Judaism. It is fascinating, erudite writing. We will not do him justice today.

Geoffrey Stern [17:21 – 17:52]: But I wanted to convey some of his ideas in terms of who he is. He did write an autobiography. Basically, he was born in Egypt. His brother became an imam, inspiring young people to become jihadists. He left home. He found. He searched out Jews and Israel. He forged relationships. He was made a refugee by Barack Obama in 2012. He is a public speaker who has spoken with StandWithUs. He wrote a book called Minority of One: The Unchaining of the Arab Mind. He writes in Commentary, Newsweek, the Jewish Journal, Times of Israel, and Mosaic. This is a lover of the Jews and of Israel, but extremely erudite. So I think you have to take what he says very seriously. And he writes as follows. There is no more sacred category in the postmodern moral imagination than that of the Other. It is invoked with reverence, defended with zeal, and guarded as the guarantor of all ethical meaning. To be other is not merely to be different, but to be invested with a kind of secular sanctity.

He says otherness has become not just a conceptual tool, but a liturgical core of liberal self-understanding. I mean, this guy is going deep, and he’s going strong. A moral totem through which the modern subject flatters himself as just, inclusive, and cosmopolitan. Thus, this essay begins with a simple, if heretical, premise: the dominant cultural conception of Judaism today, canonized in academic, political, and communal discourse alike, is not a retrieval of something ancient, but the fabrication of something modern. So he’s arguing that this whole deification of being an Other is something that happened in the modern world, right? And he calls it, is Judaism an ism in the modern sense?

Like all modern isms, it is a symbolic technology, a hollow abstraction. And at its core lies a single, all-encompassing predicate: the Jew as Other. The Jew was no longer a person simply living his life; he was performing someone else’s metaphor. For once the Jew accepted this position, this function as the sacred Other, he ceased to be a subject of covenant and became an object of culture.

That’s an amazing line. He really gets into this. He says, in doing so, he entered into a game whose rules were not his own and whose prize could always be withdrawn. For if the Other is sacred only so long as he suffers, then Jewish sovereignty is a sacrilege. And if the Other is sacred only so long as he critiques power, then Jewish power becomes betrayal. He really traces this concept of otherness through Marxism, through Hegelism, through philosophy, through all of the different trends, and he brings it into modern times.

He says the version of modern Jewish identity we cast with the semantical field of otherness is structured around a constellation of derivative tropes. The Jewish exile, the Jewish diasporic, the Jewish victim, the Jewish prophetic, the Jewish countercultural herald—as a critique of power, as a therapist of Christian repression, as a feminine foil, as the homosexual antithesis to the white Christian, heterosexual philistine. I mean, oh my goodness, this worship of the other—what he argues is it came, it was created on the Jew to make this idea of the Jew as an idea.

I’ve once, in another podcast, talked about how I’m always concerned about people who love mankind in the abstract. So he is making a radical argument that the Jew is a particular and is not a universal. And when we let ourselves become a universal, we set ourselves up for what is happening today, which is it is being taken away from us, and we are actually suffering as a result of it. So he says, where once a Jew stood as the sanctified symbol of suffering, he is now displaced by newer sacrificial icons: the Palestinian, the post-colonial subaltern, the indigenous avatar. These figures now claim exclusive rights to victimhood, demanding not just recognition but liturgical primacy. The new Jews of the new Jerusalem.

In this postmodern symbolic economy, Jews are not only decentered; they are condemned forever, having occupied the sacred space of otherness. Wow, wait. It is such an interesting, fascinating read, and as I started by saying, count me guilty. I have always really been so proud of the fact that we Jews have been the outsider, that we Jews have been that catalyst, that we Jews have played a role as helping society move forward. And I think we can be proud of that. And I won’t give to this guy 100%.

I do believe that there is. When it says loving the ger, it is talking about the ger. In the abstract, it is loving others. Because when you can extrapolate from who you are to somebody else, you are universalizing to a degree. But how does this all strike you? You’ve got to read the long-form essay. It is just fascinating.

Yeah, I mean, so what’s the punchline? We started with the verse that talked about, you know, vayagar moab, you know, that they were afraid of the stranger. So how do you understand that in light of this essay? So the way I see it, and again, I paint it in the context of, here we have a prophet of the non-Jews, an intellectual poet, an artist who is going to curse the Jews, curse the Israelites, if you will, and he turns around and he ultimately ends up blessing them. You could make the argument he was afraid. And then he somehow embraced them.

And I think part of what I took from what this guy is saying, and we’re going to move a little bit forward with him in terms of how he sees Zionism and how he sees what the opposite of the Jew as other is. I think that it really fits into the punchline of Balaam, because at the end, what does Balaam say? He says, Ma Tovu Ohalecha Yaakov how goodly are your tents. How many great societies, great empires have been characterized as wonderful tents. The tent is the opposite of an edifice. The tent is the opposite of an empire (or an ‘ism). But I think ultimately what this guy is telling us is that.

And by the way, that verse that I just quoted is not just a simple throwaway line. It’s probably in your synagogue over, over or on the Aron where the Torah is. It is the first thing that Israelite, a modern-day Jew, Israelite says when he walks into his sanctuary. How goodly are your simple tents. So I think that what he is saying is that we Jews, we were swept in universalism, in all of these isms. We let ourselves become that caricature, and as a result, we lost touch. And that’s what I think you loved about what he said, where he was going.

He says the Jews are no more studying the Bei Medrash He literally says that this was what they were learning in academia. They were no longer splitting hairs of halacha. What can you do in this situation? What can you not do? They were rather talking in terms of universal peace and goodwill to man. And what he simply is arguing is that the Jew, and he doesn’t claim that we invented it, he really is arguing that it was imposed on us. I think that’s an interesting question or argument that could be raised.

But nonetheless, it was a contribution to world thought in terms of the modern and postmodern world that has really come back to bite us and is part of the reason that we have. It is so hard for us to defend our position. It’s defending what’s happening in the Middle East, which is anything but universal. It is particularistic to the core. And we’re accused of giving up our universal values. And what he’s trying to do is to bring that back.

And I think we’ll read a little more because I would like to get into how he characterizes the return to sovereignty and the Zionist thought less as a political movement and more as a rejection of this Jew as an idea, Jew as the other. He says, after the Jews accepted this mantra. The Jew was no longer a person simply living his life. He was performing someone else’s metaphor. For once the Jew accepted this position, this function as the sacred other, he ceased to be a subject of covenant and became an object of culture. He traded the particularity of Torah for the abstract universalism of suffering. And in doing so, he entered into a game whose rules were not his own.

That’s an interesting idea, that we traded the particularity of Torah to the abstract universalism of suffering. That is the other. We kind of live on the fact that we’re persecuted. We need anti-Semitism And getting back to our sources, they were celebrating the particularism, or at least they were fingering the particularism as why people hate us.

Adam Mintz [28:15 – 28:23]: That’s what I’m pointing out. That’s going all the way back, that we’re particular in terms of suffering. We’re the ones who suffer.

Geoffrey Stern [28:23 – 28:36]: We are the ones who suffer. But I think, yeah, and made a holy cross of carrying the cross of suffering. We were the Jesus of the world, so to speak.

Adam Mintz [28:36 – 28:36]: Correct.

Geoffrey Stern [28:37 – 30:02]: So he says this was not a Judaism of observance or transmission. I mean, Rabbi, this guy, this Muslim Arab is teaching us Jews what our Judaism is. When we took on this universalism, we were giving away Jewish observance and this concept of transmission.

It was a Judaism of metaphor. The Jew for this milieu became a counterculture icon. So he goes along and now he’s going to talk about Zionism. And he says, against this long historical backdrop, Zionism, at least in its modern mainstream articulation, emerged as a radical departure.

It did not deny that Jews had been cast as others, but it refused to treat that condition as metaphysical, eternal, or ethically redemptive. It met the idol with indifference. Zionism’s implicit philosophical wager was that Jewish otherness was not a mystery to be explained nor a symbol to be sublimated, but a political condition to be reversed.

Zionism offered a brutally terrestrial thesis that exile, statelessness, and persecution were not myths to be interpreted, but facts to be overcome. The cure was not dialectics, but sovereignty, really. And he says, that’s what Ahad Ha’am.

Adam Mintz [30:02 – 30:04]: This guy’s speaking, a nation like all others.

Geoffrey Stern [30:06 – 31:44]: And then he goes one more step, and then I’m going to finish. And he says that what’s happening in Israel today is ultimately at the core that we just want to be a simple people. We just want to not be the other. And this highfalutin type of concept. We want to be not a concept, but a particular, and he talks about that the left in Israel that isn’t willing to accept that reduces Judaism to a set of liberal democratic values, and the right, who has sacralized nationalism that interprets Halacha as the constitutional blueprint for a maximal territorial state, is also going away from it. They’re trying to universalize and conceptualize. They’re getting into the ism of all of it.

What he’s saying is, if we looked at the sources that we were looking about, for the most part, they are very particular. We are just a people that has our strange customs, and we sometimes create dissonance because people don’t want everybody to be the same. But we have to worry about who we are. Ultimately, that’s what the pure Zionism of the people who started the country is. And that’s how we have to kind of revisit our sources. That’s what we’ve tried to do today, to revisit those sources and to question how much of this otherness is actually imposed upon us and how much of it was homegrown and should be embraced by us.

Adam Mintz [31:45 – 31:57]: Fantastic. This was an amazing article. Thank you, Geoffrey. Hope everybody enjoys this article. For this Shabbat, enjoy the Parasha. We’ll see you next week to talk about Parashat Pinchas. Enjoy, everybody. Shabbat Shalom.

Geoffrey Stern [31:57 – 32:13]: Shabbat Shalom. Check out on Substack “The Jew After Otherness” by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour Shabbat Shalom, and let us all discover what makes us unique and not universal. Shabbat Shalom.