Zionism, Jews and the coming inquisition

Roma Pride has announced that Jewish LGBT+ groups will not be allowed to take part in their parade this year, because they have done too little to distance themselves from what Roma Pride calls the “genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government”.

It is not clear whether Roma Pride made every group seeking to take part make a declaration about Israel’s actions in Gaza, or just the Jews, but either way, this incident speaks to a truth that the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks brought to our attention almost 20 years ago.

He famously called antisemitism a “mutating virus”. In its first iteration it was based on religion. Jews were hated because they rejected Christianity, and they clung tenaciously to their own faith. That was the medieval antisemitism, powered by the teachings of the Church. The second stage was a racial antisemitism. Jews were hated for their ethnicity, even their biology. That was the antisemitism of the Nazis.

The third, and current form, is that Jews are hated for their state. Jews are the subject of attack for their nationalism, their belief in their right to self-determination, in other words for Zionism and as Zionists.

I want to add two further details to this analysis. The first is to point out what medieval and contemporary antisemitism have in common, which sets them apart from the racial antisemitism of the Third Reich. In medieval times, the way for a Jew to escape antisemitism was conversion to Christianity (or, in Muslim countries, to Islam). If they repudiated Judaism and adopted Christianity, then not only would they escape hatred and prejudice, they would often be regarded as heroes. Figures such as Nicholas Donin and Pablo Christiani, who converted from Judaism to Christianity in 13th century France and Spain became celebrated figures in European Christian society and determined enemies of Judaism, at the forefront of attempts to ban or burn the Talmud.

Something very similar is happening today. A Jew is told they can escape the hatred that comes with their association with the State of Israel, by condemning that state, and preferably Zionism entirely. The figures who do this follow in the footsteps of Donin and Christiani. They become heroes to the Jew-haters and the greatest scourges to the vast majority of the Jewish community that will not take the same step, and repudiate their national identity and right to self-determination in their ancient homeland.

This seems obviously different to racial antisemitism. The problem with being a Jew in the face of a Nazi is that there is no remedy. In the Nazi understanding, race is inherent, it is in the blood. There is nothing that can be said or done about it.

But here comes the second new point and it is a warning from history; the distinction is not as simple as that.

It is true that when there are just a small number of Jewish converts, either to Christianity or to antizionism, they are welcomed, feted and put on a pedestal by their new community. But when Jews apostatised in large numbers, even though that is the stated goal of their oppressors, they are immediately mistrusted, suspected, pressed for ever increasing proofs of their sincerity and ultimately persecuted even more viciously than before.

That is the story of the medieval inquisition. Following mass conversions to Christianity, especially in Spain after 1391, the Church authorities could not believe that these “New Christians” were authentic. They were no longer open, believing Jews, which was bad enough, now they were heretical Christians; conforming on the outside but clinging secretly to their old beliefs. Sometimes they were, and sometimes they weren’t, but everyone was swept up.

The result was the Inquisition, which spent hundreds of years interrogating, torturing and burning men and women who claimed they had made the leap out of Judaism, prompted by a profoundly antisemitic atmosphere, but now found their predicament was, if anything, worse.

That is what faces the Jewish community today if large numbers repudiate Zionism as a way to escape antisemitism. The first few will be accepted and rejoiced over, but once the trickle becomes a flow, we will see a modern-day inquisition set up, which will examine whatever Jews and Jewish organisations say and do for ideological purity, on pain of excommunication.

Jewish antizionists will be targeted, bullied and forced to make the declarations of their new beliefs over and over again and in increasingly extreme terms. And in the end, whatever they do, they will not be believed. They will be burned to the stake again, either literally or figuratively and their abandonment of their community will have done them no good. That will be a tragedy both for sincere Jewish antizionists whose comrades will turn against them, and for those who adopt the antizionist creed as a way to find safety and acceptance.

Antisemitism does indeed mutate, but we should also pay attention to what remains the same, because that should affect the decisions the Jews make.

Rabbi Benjamin Elton is senior minister at The Great Synagogue, Sydney.