Is our quest for social justice eroding the foundations of civil society?
There are have been countless attempts through the ages to explain the source of antisemitism. Sigmund Freud (like many before him) identified cultural “otherness” as the source of Gentile animus toward the Jews.
However, history refutes Freud’s hypothesis. The violent oppression of the Syrian-Greeks following the rise of Jewish Hellenism, the auto-de-fe of the Spanish Inquisition following the conversion of the Marranos, and the incineration of countless acculturated German Jews in Hitler’s crematoria all prove that assimilation intensifies, rather than inhibits, anti-Semitism.
In fact, that very “otherness” has earned the Jews admiration and praise. The non-Jewish historian Paul Johnson echoed sentiments expressed by John Adams, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and Winston Churchill when he wrote in his History of the Jews —
To [the Jews] we owe the ideas of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience, and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience, and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal, and love as the foundation of justice; and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.
Why should such high-minded idealism produce hatred? The answer can be found in the schoolyard.
Torah Ideals 