Judaism Is Not the West’s Moral Certificate

Something has shifted inside part of the Israeli right and part of the American Jewish establishment. This is not merely a normal movement toward conservatism. Jews, like everyone else, have every right to be conservative, liberal, religious, secular, nationalist, universalist, skeptical, traditional, or politically homeless. The problem is not conservatism as such. The problem is the growing temptation to seek external legitimacy in Western conservatism, as if Judaism itself no longer had enough language to speak about law, memory, violence, state power, family, borders, obligation, and responsibility.

That temptation is dangerous because it works like a virus. It does not enter through open hatred. It enters through praise. It says to Jews: you are the foundation of our civilization, the biblical source of our moral order, the proof that the West still has a soul, the living witness that tradition matters. It says to Israel: you are the front line of the West, the outpost of civilization, the shield against barbarism, the nation that still knows how to fight.

This sounds like recognition. But recognition can also be a form of capture.

Judaism becomes useful when it confirms someone else’s story. Jews become welcome when they stabilize someone else’s civilizational anxiety. Israel becomes loved when it serves as the military and symbolic proof that the West still possesses courage. In such a structure, Judaism is not being listened to. It is being used.

There is a nearly obscene paradox here. The same Western languages of family, tradition, order, faith, nation, moral community, rootedness, and civilizational defense were for centuries used against Jews. In the name of Christian truth, Jews were placed as hardened witnesses of error. In the name of organic national community, they were described as alien bodies. In the name of moral purity, rootedness, land, and family, they were accused of decay, cosmopolitanism, disloyalty, and corruption. In the name of civilization, Jews were excluded, humiliated, denied rights, attacked in pogroms, and eventually placed inside the modern machinery that made the Shoah possible.

And now this same civilizational language is supposed to give a certificate to parts of the Israeli and American Jewish right?

This is not reconciliation. It is historical self-hypnosis.

The point is not that every contemporary conservative is responsible for the crimes of the past. That would be too easy and too cheap. The point is more serious: words have histories. “Tradition,” “family,” “nation,” “civilization,” “rootedness,” and “order” are not innocent words unless they pass through judgment. Without such judgment, they can again become tools of exclusion. The object may change. The costume may change. The rhetoric may change. But the form remains familiar: someone is named a threat to the organic whole and must be disciplined, removed, silenced, or subordinated.

Formerly, Jews were told: you do not belong to our civilization. Today, Jews are told: you are the foundation of our civilization. Both sentences can be forms of capture if, in both cases, someone else decides what Jews are supposed to be inside his story.

This is why the new alliance between parts of the Jewish right and Western conservatism should be examined without sentimentality. Judaism has been translated by others many times before.........

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