The Jewish political instinct since emancipation has been a defensive one. The issue here, however, is that this instinct no longer serves Jews.

Last month, yet another report was published detailing record levels of antisemitic incidents across the Western world. There were the familiar condemnations from public officials under whose watch this hatred had been allowed to fester and burn, and there were the familiar assurances that more education, more awareness campaigns, more Holocaust remembrance initiatives would stem the tide. (The number of British schools marking Holocaust Remembrance Day has dropped by nearly 60 percent since 7 October.)

This sort of education has been the defining message of global Jewish communal strategy for decades: surely, if antisemitism is born of ignorance, then knowledge will cure it? Surely, if we teach the Holocaust, fund interfaith dialogue and showcase Jewish contributions to science, to literature, to medicine, build museums and compile commission reports, eventually the world will understand? But hatred is an illogical thing, and the illogical hardly ever needs to listen to what is reasonable.

But we have educated and commemorated and dialogued: tens of millions have been spent across Europe and North America on tolerance programming and remembrance initiatives; Holocaust education is mandatory in much of the Western world, and Jewish history is more accessible than at any point in modern times. Still, though, the hatred returns, albeit rebranded somewhat.

The issue here is that institutions nowadays are treating antisemitism as if it were merely a gross misunderstanding that would evaporate upon contact with fact. Those on the ground know that it is not.

I spoke previously about the ‘rebranding’ of antisemitism: across the centuries, the accusation mutates, but the hostility remains ugly: in medieval Europe, Jews were condemned as ‘Christ-killers’; In the early modern kingdoms, they were expelled as economic parasites; in late nineteenth-century France, they were framed as disloyal officers. In twentieth-century Germany, they became a racial contaminant; in the Soviet Union, they were ‘rootless cosmopolitans’; and even today, in certain academic and activist circles that shall not be named, they are recast as settler-colonialists and global manipulators with the claim that ‘not all Jews fit our criteria for a settler-colonialist, so we aren’t against all Jews’ – just the majority.

This continuity ought to force an uncomfortable question among us: what if antisemitism is not primarily an issue of ignorance, but instead of resentment? Resentment, see, does not dissolve when presented with evidence to the contrary, but only seeks new vocabulary to adapt itself to the moral language of the age. The antisemite of the twelfth century spoke the language of theology; the antisemite of the twentieth, the language of race; the antisemite of the twenty-first, a twisted language of human rights.

There was a growing expectation following 7 October that, after another gruesome slaughter of Jews, the most in a single day since those of the Holocaust, that liberal democracies would at last outgrow this pattern and rise beyond it, and that the worst would only belong to history.

But 8 October suggested otherwise.

Diaspora history has conditioned Jews towards a particular reflex to appeal upwards, petition the sovereign and demonstrate loyalty and usefulness. This is a rational reflex, but it is yet to prove useful in the twenty-first century. What if our premise is flawed? If this is so, then the strategy of ‘education leads to acceptance’ is, at best, incomplete.

None of this is to absolve the antisemite of responsibility, nor does it suggest that security measures or legal advocacy are unnecessary, but security is not a strategy in itself; a strategy must be forward-looking. The Jew who has seen the 8 October is not simply the Jew who has newly discovered who his friends are not, but the Jew who has remembered that his identity cannot be dependent on external validation: he does not measure Jewish success by trending hashtags or favourable editorials in his favourite newspapers, but instead on the continuity of the Jewish people.

We have now reached the deeper problem: when a people speaks of itself primarily as persecuted, it should not be surprised when it is treated as vulnerable. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If you teach a young child that he will never be able to read no matter how much effort he spends, he will likely stay illiterate for the rest of his life. The same is true of the Jews.

And not only is this true of the Jews, but it is true of the global audience as well. This is a global audience of people who have watched cautionary video after cautionary video, all with the same message: that Jews suffer from antisemitism, and it is prudent that we stand up and fight it. The only issue with this is that we are a weak species by mind: we wait for others to take the lead for us to comfortably follow. When communal energy is directed almost entirely towards documenting hostility, public identity begins to orbit around the injury dealt to the Jews. The Jewish story becomes, then, in the eyes of both others and ourselves, a catalogue of suffering punctuated by brief interludes of tolerance.

The Jewish story, however, is not primarily one of persecution, but of endurance – of intellectual audacity, of stubborn continuity, and a civilisation that has survived empires, expulsions and genocides. Yet, modern Jewish discourse often defaults to the language of alarm. Panels on antisemitism, after all, draw larger crowds than panels on Jewish philosophy. Even young Jews such as myself are taught how to recognise hostility before they are taught why their inheritance is even worth defending in the first place!

Nations and communities can never be respected because they persuade others of their victimhood. They are respected because they project confidence in their own legitimacy.

The State of Israel, for all its political turmoil, understood this principle from the moment of its founding. If it were taught that Israel was founded because of the Holocaust, then the moment the world ceased to care about the Holocaust would be the moment the world ceased to care about the continuity of the State of Israel. That sentiment is still heavily kept, but it is untrue. Israel does not exist because of the Holocaust; it exists despite it.

Diaspora Jewry must absorb this lesson quickly, or it will soon find itself in a very sticky position.

This, of course, does not mean abandoning remembrance altogether, nor does it mean ignoring antisemitism, but our vigilance must not define our identity. If we wish to alter how Jews are perceived, we might begin by altering how we present ourselves. We ought to place less emphasis on explaining why we deserve to exist, and more emphasis on building as though our existence requires no justification – what thing worth existing must explain why it deserves to exist?

This is the task ahead: to invest not merely in combating hatred, but in projecting strength: to produce art, scholarship and leadership not as acts of defiance, but as expressions of normalcy. If Jewish continuity in the twenty-first century is to be secured, it will not be because the world has finally, after millennia, suddenly understood us. It will be, rather, because we have presented ourselves as one of history’s most enduring peoples. The world may or may not approve; that, as ever, will depend on forces that are simply beyond our control. Strength, however, is not.

The Jews ought to remember that we are, in the words of the film Jojo Rabbit, ‘descended from those who wrestle angels and kill giants. We were chosen by God!’

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)