The Eternal Mystery of Self-Hating Jews

The long history of Jews who loathed their brethren may help us understand those who do so today.

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This is a guest essay written by Benjamin Kerstein of “No Delusions, No Despair.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Among many Jews, there are few questions more fraught than that of self-hatred.

Today, with self-hating Jews supporting openly genocidal antisemites, the question is all the more pressing. 

At first glance, this seems counterintuitive. The overwhelming majority of world Jewry supports Israel in general and in its current war. At the same time, that overwhelming majority is enraged at and frightened by the wave of antisemitism unleashed by the Red-Green Alliance between the progressive Left and Muslim antisemites. In this sense, self-hating Jews have never been less relevant to Jewish life.

Nonetheless, they are there and their effect is profoundly deleterious. In particular, the provide the antisemites with the perfect excuse, so often expressed that it has become a banal cliche: Since some Jews oppose Israel and support us, we cannot be antisemitic.

While we should take some comfort in the fact that today’s antisemites are still reluctant to acknowledge their antisemitism, we should not discount the effectiveness of this argument in the eyes of non-Jews. 

Jews often forget that almost all non-Jews are wholly ignorant of Judaism, the Jewish community’s internal politics, and the views of the Jewish majority. As a result, it is disturbingly easy for non-Jews to accept the antisemites’ argument and conclude that there is no reason to properly stigmatize the antisemites.

Thankfully, the antisemites’ defense is less effective at the moment than it has been in the past. Though left largely unreported by the media, large numbers — perhaps a majority — of non-Jews were horrified by Hamas’ October 7th atrocities. They find the mass demonstrations in support of the massacre repulsive and the pro-genocide protester-terrorists disgusting. Moreover, particularly in Europe, there is growing acknowledgement that, if the Red-Green Alliance grows stronger, non-Jews may well be the next to be massacred.

Still, self-hating Jews remain a weapon that could become more potent as Israel’s war drags on. In addition, thanks to social media, the world now has the attention span of a gnat. As a result, the memories of the October 7th horror may soon fade. The desire to appease the Red-Green Alliance, which has shown a terrifying capacity for nihilistic violence, could grow stronger. In such a situation, self-hating Jews will be essential to the Alliance’s war on the Jews.

This makes the self-hating Jew a phenomenon that is essential to understand. The problem with this is that, for centuries, it has been remarkably stubborn in its capacity to defy understanding.

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The self-hating Jew is certainly not a modern phenomenon. Since ancient times, there have been Jews who rejected their identity and actively sought to harm their former brethren.

Nonetheless, it is important to point out how remarkably rare the phenomenon has been — as it is today. The paradox is that the very rarity of such Jews allows them to do wildly disproportionate damage. By exploiting their knowledge of Judaism and the cache that their former identity gives them as unimpeachable witnesses, they have caused considerable carnage.

Religious Jews today often point to the mityavnim, the “Hellenists” or “Hellenizers” of the Maccabean era, as the first self-hating Jews. The term refers to the Jews who assimilated into the prevailing Greek culture that emerged following the conquests of Alexander the Great.

In the stories surrounding Hanukkah, the Hellenizers are identified as collaborators with oppressive non-Jewish authorities — authorities that sought to destroy Jewish religion and culture in the Land of Israel. The Maccabean revolt, it is said, was as much against the Hellenizers as against the Seleucid Empire that ruled the Land.

In religious discourse, this archetype of the “Hellenizer” as self-hating Jew or Jewish antisemite is often expanded to include all Jews of assimilationist or simply secular tendencies. In its most extreme form, the late far-Right rabbi Meir Kahane used it to refer to any Jew who disagreed with Meir Kahane. Still, it is a potent image and describes a phenomenon that is not entirely exaggerated: The Jew who, by adopting or assimilating into non-Jewish culture, ends up hating himself and his people.

It does not appear, however, that this form of extreme “Hellenization” was widespread or common in the ancient world. Enormous numbers of ancient Jews in the Land of Israel and the great centers of the Diaspora like Alexandria adopted Greek culture and language to a certain extent. Indeed, it appears that many of them lost the ability to read or speak Hebrew, requiring the first translations of the Bible into Greek. 

Nonetheless, almost none of these Hellenized Jews were actively hostile toward their own people. Many of them, such as the philosopher Philo, were fiercely loyal to their communities, defended them against their enemies, and advocated for them before the non-Jewish authorities. The Kitos War of 115-to-117 CE indicates that Jewish identity in the largely Greek-speaking Diaspora was firm enough to result in a widespread and extremely violent revolt.

Even the historian Josephus, who had surrendered to the Romans in the Jewish Revolt of 66-to-74 CE and become the client of the imperial Flavian dynasty that destroyed the Temple, wrote the lengthy essay “Against Apion” in order to denounce the Jews’ ancient opponents. The Hellenized Jews may have assimilated, but they did not abandon.

One notable exception was Tiberius Julius Alexander, the scion of a prominent Alexandrian Jewish family who became a high-ranking Roman military and political official. The Alexandrian Jews were often subjected to anti-Jewish violence, and during one clash with the non-Jews of the region, Tiberius led the Roman military response that put down the Jews to devastating effect.

He also took part in the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE and thus played a part in the Temple’s destruction, though to what extent is not clear. In this case, we have a Jew who became so Romanized that, for all intents and purposes, he was not a Roman first and a Jew second, but a Roman only. This exchange of identities permitted him to commit horrendous violence against his own people.

In some ways, the most famous of all the “Hellenizing” villains was Elisha ben Abuyah, a prominent Torah sage who became a heretic. In the rabbinic literature, he is an archetypal character, usually referred to only as “Acher” — Hebrew for “the Other.” It is said that he embraced heresy due to his proclivities for Greek culture and eventually became a violent hater of his people, going so far as to murder Torah students. 

It is not clear precisely what occasioned Elisha’s heresy. Besides the influence of Greek culture, it is also said that he misinterpreted a mystical vision of God’s throne, leading him to heretical dualism, and that he witnessed events that led him to question the existence of divine justice.

Obviously, much of this is legendary, but in general terms, it seems clear that Elisha grew disillusioned with rabbinic Judaism and either embraced heresy or became something as close to an atheist as was possible at the time. Whether he then turned to violent anti-Jewish actions is uncertain, but it is by no means impossible.

The real truth about Elisha ben Abuyah can never be known. In a sense, however, the historical truth is somewhat irrelevant. In the rabbinic literature, Elisha is less a historical figure than a literary personification of a specific type: The Jew who is or becomes “acher” — other to his people.

In rabbinic thought, such a Jew is created by the failure of religious principle or, in a sense, religious courage. Faced with the pressures of the outside world and forced into doubt by what the orthodox consider irresponsible theological or mystical speculations, this Jew eventually casts the principles of Judaism aside. 

This “other” goes further than that, however. He does not simply go on his way in a non-Jewish life. He turns to destroy the life he has left. 

This is described metaphorically in the Talmudic story of four rabbis, including Elisha, who enter “the orchard” — usually interpreted as a mystical vision of God and the divine throne. The Talmud recounts that one rabbi died, another went insane, and one emerged safely. Of Elisha, it is said: “Acher chopped down the saplings.” It was not enough for Elisha to leave the orchard unenlightened; he had to destroy what he found.

The Middle Ages made clear the enormous importance of the role played by such apostates in attacks on both Jews and Judaism itself. Most striking of all is that the earliest incidence of the blood libel appears to have been either prompted or buttressed by the claims of an apostate. 

In 1144, the Jewish community of Norwich, England was accused of the ritual murder of a boy named William, who would be hailed as a martyr and given the unofficial title “Saint William of Norwich,” though he was never officially canonized. The details of the case and the accusers’ sadistic fantasies of the tortures to which the Jews had allegedly subjected William are too complex to be fully described here. Importantly, however, it appears that the ultimate source or at least confirmation of the blood accusation came from an apostate Jew.

The chronicler Thomas of Monmouth, in his hagiography of William, wrote:

“As a proof of the truth and credibility of the matter we now adduce something which we have heard from the lips of Theobald, who was once a Jew, and afterwards a monk. He verily told us that in the ancient writings of his father, it was written that the Jews, without the shedding of human blood, could neither obtain their freedom, nor could they ever return to their fatherland.”

“Hence it was laid down by them in ancient times that every year they must sacrifice a Christian in some part of the world to the Most High God in scorn and contempt of Christ, that so they might avenge their sufferings on Him; inasmuch as it was because of Christ’s death that they had been shut out from their own country, and were in exile as slaves in a foreign land.”

This passage is remarkable in that it demonstrates how the blood libel, despite the passage of centuries, has remained relatively unchanged. Even more remarkable is that, according to Thomas, Theobald elaborated on his accusation with a strikingly modern conspiracy theory — a kind of proto-Elders of Zion:

“Wherefore the chief men and Rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain assemble together at Narbonne, where the Royal seed [resides], and where they are held in the highest estimation, and they cast lots for all the countries which the Jews inhabit; and whatever country the lot falls upon, its metropolis has to carry out the same method with the other towns and cities, and the place whose lot is drawn has to fulfill the duty imposed by authority.”

“Now in that year in which we know that William, God’s glorious martyr, was slain, it happened that the lot fell upon the Norwich Jews, and all the synagogues in England signified, by letter or by message, their consent that the wickedness should be carried out at Norwich.”

Then, Theobald is directly quoted as saying:

“I was at that time at Cambridge, a Jew among Jews, and the commission of the crime was no secret to me. But in process of time, as I became acquainted with the glorious display of miracles which the divine power carried out through the merits of the blessed martyr William, I became much afraid, and following the dictates of my conscience, I forsook Judaism, and turned to the Christian faith.”

Much as many antisemites do today, Thomas emphasized Theobald’s Jewish origins as proof of Theobald’s claims, saying, “The words of a converted Jew we reckon to be all the truer, in that we received them as uttered by one who was a converted enemy, and also had been privy to the secrets of our enemies.”

Again, the degree to which the antisemitic themes and archetypes surrounding this case have remained almost entirely unchanged even in our ostensibly modern age is remarkable: There are the perfidious Jews who hate and kill gentiles out of pure evil; the international Jewish conspiracy to commit these heinous crimes; the pure-hearted Jew who, out of his own pangs of conscience, renounces his people and exposes their atrocities; and the use of this Jew as definitive proof of the initial accusations.

It is possible, of course, that Theobald the apostate never existed. He may have been a legendary figure emerging out of the popular imagination in order to confirm and justify the antisemitic myth that had grown up around the death of William of Norwich. Moreover, it is not unthinkable that Thomas simply made him up out of whole cloth. Nonetheless, it is difficult not to conclude that, while Thomas may have elaborated upon or exaggerated the story of Theobald, there is likely something in it.

In particular, the claims attributed to Theobald are so vast and elaborate — down to specific place names like Narbonne and detailed theological explanations of the Jews’ actions — that it seems unlikely they did not emerge from the mind of a single, highly intelligent individual.

There is also a strikingly intimate quality to these claims, touching as they do on the Jewish messianic yearning to return to Israel, their hatred of the sufferings of exile, and their desire for some kind of recompense from their persecutors. The conspiracy theory reads like the work of a man who knew the truth about the Jews of his time — a truth a gentile was unlikely to know — and then exploited this knowledge in order to spin a web of lies so compelling that it captured the imaginations of antisemites for generations.

The infamous 13th-century apostate Nicholas Donin was less prone to sadistic fantasy than Theobald, but the immediate damage he caused was far more widespread. He was, in many ways, the chief instigator of the Church’s campaigns against the Talmud. 

Donin’s origins and beliefs are somewhat obscure, but he appears to have been a not-untalented student of the Torah who, like Elisha ben Abuyah, adopted heretical ideas that eventually led him to apostasy and hatred of his former brethren. 

The 19th-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz wrote poetically of what resulted. He stated:

“This domestic peace of the Jews was, however, soon to be destroyed; even from their intellectual asylum they were to be driven forth. The leader in the movement was a baptized Jew, who incited the temporal and the spiritual powers against his former co-religionists.” 

Graetz described Donin as “a Talmudist from La Rochelle, in the north of France” who “conceived doubts of the validity of the Talmud and the oral law. For this he was excommunicated by the French rabbis. Having no position either among Jews or among Christians, Donin determined to accept baptism, and assumed the name of Nicholas. Filled with hatred against the rabbis and the Talmud, the apostate determined to revenge himself on both. Probably urged on by the clergy, he became the instigator of the great autos-da-fé of the Jews and their writings.”

Donin eventually managed to gain an audience with Pope Gregory IX. Before the pontiff, he denounced the Talmud, claiming that it defamed Jesus and his mother Mary, along with other alleged execrable admonitions and laws. Graetz wrote:

“He had stated that the Talmudical writings taught that it was a meritorious action to kill even the best among the Christians; that a Christian who rested on the Sabbath day or studied the Law was to be punished with death; that it was lawful to deceive a Christian; that Jews were permitted to break a promise made on oath; and he had made many other lying assertions.”

Perhaps well aware of what might have the most impact on Gregory, “Donin demonstrated to the pope that it was the Talmud which prevented the Jews from accepting Christianity, and that without it they would certainly give up their unbelief.” The temptation to act on such a claim, with its promise of achieving the conversion of the Jews that Christianity had failed to induce for centuries, must have been irresistible.

Donin’s audience with the pope set off a wave of “trials” of the Talmud. In some, rabbis were invited to defend the document and given relative freedom of speech. But, as all knew was inevitable, the Talmud was found wanting and, more often than not, consigned to the flames. 

This was a grievous blow to the Jewish community, whose entire way of life was, in many ways, based upon Talmudic law. In short, wrote Graetz, Donin aided the Church in “waging successful war against the Synagogue.” 

It was fortunate that, in most parts of Christendom, the bans and burnings were only sparsely enforced, being dependent on the whims of local rulers. The medieval world lacked the vast system of oppression only a modern totalitarian state can construct.

Unlike Theobald, it is certain that Nicholas Donin existed. His activities are well-documented. Nor is there anything mysterious about his motivations. One rabbi called upon to defend the Talmud at trial, Yechiel of Paris, cut to the heart of the matter. He denounced Donin as driven by “feelings of malice and revenge against his former co-religionists, who had expelled him from their community on account of his heresy.”

Perhaps the strangest of all the apostates was Jacob Frank. This 18th-century messianist was one in a long line of self-declared saviors of the Jews who ultimately fell into heresy. Indeed, he followed on the heels of perhaps the most famous of all the false messiahs: Shabtai Tzvi, whose 17th-century messianic movement briefly captured the imagination of much of the Jewish world before he converted to Islam under the duress of the Ottoman Sultan.

While the vast majority of those who had believed in Shabtai abandoned him in bitter disillusionment after his apostasy, a handful did not. Some secretly kept the faith while presenting themselves as orthodox members of the Jewish community. Others broke off into their own sects. One group, like Shabtai, converted to Islam while maintaining their messianic beliefs in secret. These “crypto-Sabbatians” came to be known to outsiders as the Donmeh and remnants of the sect still survive in modern Turkey.

Frank never became a member of one of these sects, but he was influenced by them in forming his own. His crypto-Sabbatianism was, by and large, a cult of personality centered on himself. It also involved practices that were abhorrent to the orthodox Jewish community, possibly including antinomian sexual rituals. In particular, the charge was leveled that the Frankists engaged in group sex of some kind.

Slowly pushed out of the Jewish community, which made use of the herem (excommunication) against him and his followers, Frank began to break with Judaism entirely. Ultimately, this took the form of mass conversion. Frank cut a deal with the Church authorities in Poland: In exchange for denouncing the Jewish community, the Church would accept the baptism of him and all his followers.

The price, however, was a heavy one: In an official disputation with prominent rabbis that took place in Lvov in 1759, Frank and his sect were required not only to condemn the Talmud in the same terms as previous apostates, but also to testify to the truth of the blood libel. 

The great scholar of the Kabbalah Gershom Scholem believed that the Frankists’ endorsement of the blood libel was driven by a familiar motivation: revenge. In particular, revenge against the rabbinical establishment that had driven the Frankists out of the Jewish community.

“The members of the sect, in fact, were reluctant to make the accusation at all, and did so only at the instigation of the Catholic clergy, which was interested in using them for purposes of its own, having nothing to do with their Sabbatian background,” Scholem wrote. “That they finally agreed to collaborate in the scheme can be explained by their desire to wreak vengeance on their rabbinical persecutors.”

While the blood accusation in this case did not lead to widespread violence, the Church authorities found the Frankists’ concession sufficient and the entire community was baptized. The sect continued to practice its own religion in secret, however, and crypto-Frankists remained a factor in both the Jewish and Christian communities for decades afterwards.

Frank’s impulse towards the destruction of the Jewish community through the endorsement of the worst antisemitic accusations appears to have emerged out of his own personality. Unlike Theobald and Donin, Frankism is a recent enough phenomenon to provide extensive insight into the psychology of its leader. In this regard, Scholem is unsparing. He asserted: “From the standpoint of sexual pathology it can hardly be doubted that Frank himself was a diseased individual” and refers to him as “every bit the depraved and unscrupulous person he is supposed to have been.”

Frank, Scholem stated, “will always be remembered as one of the most frightening phenomena in the whole of Jewish history: a religious leader who, whether for purely self-interested motives or otherwise, was in all his actions a truly corrupt and degenerate individual.”

This pathology expressed itself in Frank’s theology, which Scholem believed was both heretical and highly detailed. “Frank was a nihilist,” Scholem wrote, “and his nihilism possessed a rare authenticity. Certainly, its primitive ferocity is frightening to behold. … We are confronted in his person with the extraordinary spectacle of a powerful and tyrannical soul living in the middle of the eighteenth century and yet immersed entirely in a mythological world of its own making. Out of the ideas of Sabbatianism, a movement in which he was apparently raised and educated, Frank was able to weave a complete myth of religious nihilism.”

Frank’s nihilism culminated in his desire for absolute destruction, which he saw as fundamentally redemptive. Frank stated: “It is my task to annihilate all this so that the Good God can reveal Himself. … Wherever Adam trod a city was built, but wherever I set foot all will be destroyed, for I came into this world only to destroy and to annihilate. But what I build will last forever.”

In this final assertion, thankfully, Frank was wrong. Judaism survived him as it had survived and would survive its other hostile apostates. Nonetheless, Frank’s ethos is telling. He did not just become openly destructive and antisemitic due to his apostasy. It appears that it was his destructive ambitions and hatred of Judaism that led to his apostasy. It is by no means unreasonable to imagine that the same may well have been true of Theobald and Donin.

In these pre-modern examples of anti-Jewish apostates, there appear to be several phenomena that are universal:

1. The embrace of heresy and eventual conversion to either a personal sect or another religion.

2. A strong desire for vengeance against one’s former brethren.

3. The willingness to cast aside conventional morality in order to accomplish this.

4. The embrace and even invention of antisemitic myths, stereotypes, and libels.

5. The use of non-Jewish authorities, to which the apostates offer fealty and service, against the Jewish community.

6. The non-Jewish authorities’ exploitation of the Jewish origins of the apostates as proof of their antisemitic claims. In effect, the assertion that, “If a Jew is saying it, it must be true.”

It should be clear that all of these qualities have held true in the modern era, with the one exception of outright apostasy itself. This may be because apostasy is no longer necessary.

In a secular age, conversion need not take place in any official manner. Nor need one convert at all. One can simply leave Judaism, at least in spirit, without embracing any other faith. One can become the amorphous and deracinated atom, adhering to principles that, while perhaps of quasi-religious origin, are affiliated with no worldly church.

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If this is the anatomy of Jewish self-hatred, then we must inquire into its origins. That is: What motivates the Jew, in any era, to turn against his people, adopt a counter-identity, and then use it to malicious ends?

First, there are the avaricious motives: Quite often, being a self-hating Jew yields substantial benefits. This should not be surprising. Contrary to antisemitic stereotypes, it is non-Jews who run the world. Those who hate the Jews can offer substantial rewards to any Jew willing to help the antisemites realize their sinister ambitions. These benefits include fame, social acceptance, fetishization by the non-Jewish majority, and, of course, large amounts of money. 

It is highly unlikely that, for example, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, or Peter Beinart would enjoy the high profile and financial boon they have received were they not highly useful to those willing to put up the cash. If they were not so relentlessly hostile toward their own community, they would be seen by non-Jews as banal — just another Jew. Because they are the man biting the dog, however, they are seen as inherently interesting, and thus worth paying for.

This is ironic because, in reality, if the likes of Chomsky, Finkelstein, and Beinart are anything, they are certainly uninteresting. They are nothing more than run-of-the-mill hardline Palestinian nationalists and, in the case of Chomsky and Finkelstein, highly conventional antisemites. Were they non-Jews, there is no chance that anyone would pay such fervent attention to them. 

This has psychological benefits as well, because it allows self-hating Jews to feel important. That this importance is granted them solely because of their Jewish origins is another irony, as well as psychologically irrelevant. We all desire to feel important. The temptation to engage in self-debasement in order to do so is intense and not everyone has the capacity to resist it. Ego can be a very sinister thing.

The price to be paid for this egoism, however, is substantial. Because the self-hating Jew’s importance is umbilically connected to his willingness to condemn his brethren, he must engage in a perpetual struggle to prove that he still rejects his natural allegiance. The self-hating Jew is always on trial and the verdict is always pending. The trial does not and cannot end. 

As a result, the self-hating Jew must constantly prove himself trustworthy and loyal to non-Jews. And not just to non-Jews, but to antisemites who can turn on them at any moment. The sword of Damocles suspended above the non-Jew is very sharp. It threatens the self-hating Jew with becoming the target of the very hatred he himself embraces and legitimizes.

This may explain the intense violence with which the self-hating Jew treats other Jews. In pre-modern times, it is very possible that the likes of Theobald, Donin, and Frank were driven by precisely this unhappy provisional existence. They may have converted to Christianity, but their loyalties were always in question. Thus, they had to be “more Christian than the Christians.” The only way to prove that they were, they likely believed, was to be even more antisemitic than the Christians. They felt that by not only separating themselves from but actively hating the Jews, the more Christian they became.

This psychological dysfunction is quite evident today. It is not a coincidence that the rhetoric of modern self-hating Jews is so hysterical that it often borders on—or crosses into — the outright deranged. Few antisemites have been as histrionic in their denunciations as Chomsky or Finkelstein.

For example, the former has embraced conspiracy theories regarding the supposed immensity of Jewish power and privilege, while the latter has explicitly compared Jews to carnivorous animals and accused them of craven exploitation of the memory of the Holocaust. The denizens of the organizations IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace are no less violent in their rhetoric.

As noted above, the phenomenon of outright conversion rarely exists among today’s self-hating Jews. Nonetheless, there is a kind of conversion involved. In most cases, the self-hating Jew has examined Judaism through the lens of specific ideologies and found it wanting. This is not “heresy” because heresy, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists in the modern world. But there is something like the essential meaning of heresy, which is the split from the general worldview or norm of the Jewish community and the embrace of something quite other to it.

At the moment, most self-hating Jews view Judaism through the lens of the progressive Left. Jews like Chomsky, Finkelstein, or Beinart assess Judaism’s conformity to the principles of the progressive Left and conclude that Judaism is supremacist, racist, privileged, and “white,” among other ideological crimes and deviations.

The problem with this should be obvious: Judaism is an immensely ancient faith. Progressivism, in historical perspective, is extremely young — two centuries old at best. It is inevitable that Judaism will contain principles and beliefs that do not conform with those of progressivism. There is no way things could be otherwise. But in every case in which Judaism finds itself opposed to progressivism, the self-hating Jews privilege progressivism over Judaism.

This is every Jews’ right, in a certain sense. But it does indicate a certain poverty of thought. That is, few self-hating Jews appear to consider the possibility that, at least on certain issues, Judaism might be right and progressivism wrong; that the ancient principles and beliefs might have such extraordinary longevity for a reason. The self-hating Jew often appears uninterested in examining his own ideas as critically as he examines those of Judaism. He possesses no skepticism of his own principles. 

This is a kind of intellectual suicide. One should never leave one’s own principles unexamined, and Judaism certainly does not do so, considering its vast corpus of analysis and argument. It is perfectly legitimate to deem certain Jewish principles or beliefs inferior to those of progressivism. It is not legitimate to refuse to think about whether one ought to do so. Whenever Judaism places the moral tyranny of progressivism in question, the self-hating Jew always affirms the tyranny, not the question.

In this, there is an element of adolescent rebellion. Especially if he grew up in a normative Jewish environment — as Theobald put it, as “a Jew among Jews” — the self-hating Jew often appears to be an arrested adolescent, still engaged in the petty revolt that is essential to forming one’s own identity and beliefs, but admits of no nuance or exploration. It is mere rebellion and revenge.

Such things have their place, but if they are to have any legitimacy, they must be tempered by sober reflection. For the self-hating Jew, however, his rebellion always becomes a form of revenge defined by perpetual and unshakeable hostility. Defining himself as an independent person becomes nothing more than an act of violence.

Judaism, unsurprisingly, is well aware of this phenomenon. It is personified in the “wicked son” of the Passover Haggadah, who asks, “What does all this mean to you?” The “you” is interpreted as the wicked son consciously separating himself from the ceremony and with it the Exodus from Egypt — the foundation of Jewish identity. 

The wicked son is contrasted with the wise son, the simple son, and the son who does not know how to ask. These sons do not separate themselves, but engage in various forms of curiosity, inquiry, or puzzlement.

It is my belief that the person of the wicked son is not a pure condemnation. More likely, the Haggadah is saying that each of us has the four sons inside us. They contrast and contend with each other. Eventually, we must choose between them, and it is preferable not to choose the wicked son. Nonetheless, the wicked son is part of us, and perhaps has his value.

Certainly, to declare oneself independent in some way is essential to achieving maturity. It is when one becomes purely the wicked son that trouble begins; not least because it inherently involves the denial or destruction of the wisdom, simplicity, or inarticulate puzzlement that all exist alongside rebellion. Self-hating Jews choose only rebellion, and thus become wicked. This is not only destructive; it is also a dereliction — a betrayal of the self.

If we are to grant any sympathy to the self-hating Jew, we must acknowledge that he is an understandable phenomenon. It is a simple fact that, at certain times (such as the one in which we find ourselves today) it is extremely difficult to be a Jew.

Antisemitism is a terrifying thing and to feel the weight of what often seems to be the entire world’s hatred is sometimes impossible to withstand. Recently, I have had friends, many with a strong Jewish identity, tell me that they no longer want to be Jewish. One told me, “I don’t want to be associated with something that’s so hated.”

Among my friends and I imagine most Jews, these are temporary states of anguish upon which they would never act, but they are perfectly understandable. They are moments in which we despair of the injustice of the world. We feel helpless and hopeless and wish things were otherwise. And before us is the possibility of simply sloughing off the terrible weight of Jewish identity and becoming something else; something that is not hated and does not subject us to such anguish.

Compounding this is something that often distresses and dements us: The thought that “The whole world can’t be wrong.” The sheer mass of antisemitism, the enormous number of those who embrace it, forces us to ask whether the Jews can be right and the entire world wrong. Indeed, a great many people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have answered this question in the negative. We can hardly be blamed for asking the question, since, in many ways, it feels as if the entire world simply could not be so clearly deranged.

The problem is that the world most certainly can be so deranged. This is, in fact, a matter of historical record. The evidence is irrefutable. Some 100 years ago, the great Zionist intellectual Ehad Ha’am presented this evidence. He required only one proof: the blood libel. For centuries, he pointed out, almost the entire non-Jewish world believed that the Jews engaged in hideous secret rituals in which they murdered Christian children and drank their blood.

And during all this time, every Jew in the world knew this was a psychotic fantasy. The Jews were right and the entire world wrong. This ought to give us some dark comfort. It is horrendous that the world is capable of such derangement, but this derangement, in and of itself, gives us the means to resist it.

It is beyond the powers of the self-hating Jew to mount this resistance. In the face of the world’s derangement, he submits. For this, we are obligated, at least to some extent, to pity him. Nonetheless, we must not forget that, precisely because of his submission, we are obligated to resist him along with the world. 

We must do so if only because the damage the self-hating Jew can do is immense. Whether they are the Theobalds and Donins of the past or the Chomskys and Finkelsteins of today, Jews have been and will be wounded and killed because of what self-hating Jews say and do. For this, the self-hating Jew stands condemned. 

If there is any consolation to be found in the self-hating Jew, it is that we have successfully resisted him the past. We should harbor no delusions on this score, but nor should we despair. There is every reason to think we will successfully resist him now.

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