by Gavin Ashenden, TCW
WE LIVE in a time of deep ignorance. Our social judgements are driven more by passing emotive impressions than facts.
The phenomenon of anti-Semitism needs some description, explanation and analysis if we are to do anything at all to repudiate it.
Hanukkah is the Jewish festival of light. It commemorates the recovery and rededication of the Second Temple in the 2nd century after the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire, Greeks who had invaded and conquered Israel. Antiochus Epiphanes tried genocide, and failed. The Jews fought back. It’s all in the Book of Maccabees.
The Romans came against the Jews next, with the destruction of the (Second) Temple in AD70. The Jews were scattered to the four winds. But arguably a threat greater than any of the previous empires arose with Muhammad (570-632). Islam is the most intense form of anti-Semitism the Jews have encountered and today calls for their genocide (‘from the river to the sea’).
Its longevity and complexity derive from the spiritual as well as the political and personal elements. Muhammad claimed to be a prophet in the Jewish tradition. The Jews thought not. And Islam has been taking revenge on them ever since.
In the earliest phase of his prophetic experience, Muhammad did not conceive of himself as founding a new religion in opposition to Judaism. On the contrary, he understood his message as a restoration of the original monotheism of Abraham, continuous with the biblical prophetic tradition already possessed by the Jews.
The Koran’s early rhetoric reflects this. Jewish and biblical figures — Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, or at least the version of those figures who emerged through Muhammad’s visions — are treated with reverence, and Jews are designated ‘Ahl al-Kitāb’, ‘People of the Book’.