Chapter 5
Perceptions
By almost all reasonable measures, the Jews have had a remarkable historical journey. The length and challenges of that journey have instilled in them a pair of competing sensibilities: a frequent feeling of vulnerability, as if the next major crisis is around the corner; and a somewhat mythic feeling of invulnerability insofar as Jews have survived trials large and small for thousands of years. This latter sentiment should not obscure the fact that Jews are flesh and blood people, who have lived tangible lives filled with adventure, joy, and tragedy.
This rather banal point assumes greater significance when we recall that “Jews” have also been an idea, a construct crafted by non-Jews to perform various functions. In a 1988 book, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard juxtaposed real-life Jews to “the jews,” emphasizing the lower case and plural form to connote the symbolic alien group that European society constantly constructed in order to attack or expel.
There is, in fact, a longer genealogy to this idea of the idea of the Jew. Spinoza hints at it in the seventeenth century in A Theologico-Political Treatise when he maintained that one of the key preservative forces of Jewish life was the “universal hate” of the Gentile. This notion of the Gentile construction of the Jew became even more explicit when antisemitism announced itself with aplomb in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, Karl Lueger, who ran for office on an openly antisemitic platform, captured that brashness when responding to a question about why he had Jewish friends: “I decide,” he provocatively declared, “who is a Jew.”
A half century later, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre provided a more tempered view of the phenomenon by which the antisemite defines the Jew. In Réflexions sur la question juive (1946; published in English as Anti-Semite and Jew), he identified the distinctive role that the Jew played as “the stranger, the intruder, the unassimilated at the very heart of our society.” This status prompted Sartre to offer his own iconic definition of the Jew as “the one whom other men consider a Jew.” More recently, the historian David Nirenberg has written a sweeping account in Anti-Judaism (2013) of how the idea of Judaism—or more accurately, opposition to it—has been an organizing principle of Western civilization.
This line of thought attests to the fact that the reputation of Jews far exceeds their numbers. While constituting a miniscule minority in virtually every society of which they have been part, they have been the source of persistent rumors, fears, allegations, and conspiracy theories. The resulting body of anti-Jewish expression has a certain spectral—and counterintuitive—quality, since it often has been formulated in the physical absence of Jews. Indeed, antisemitism reaches its highest rates, according to the 2014 Anti-Defamation League global survey, where the smallest percentage of Jews lives—for example, in the Middle East, where nearly 75 percent harbor antisemitic views, or in eastern Europe at 34 percent.
On what does this antipathy rest? What is it about Jews that haunts those among whom they dwell—and even more, those among whom they do not dwell? In response, it must be said that Jews not only have harbored a sense of their own uniqueness throughout their long history, but also have been disproportionately represented in a variety of domains that capture the attention of antisemites, including business, academia, and political activism. And yet, those factors still cannot explain the amount of mental energy and paranoia that goes into imagining the Jew as a nefarious force intent on global domination. This is the foundational pillar of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has the dubious distinction of being the most popular piece of antisemitic literature ever written, having been disseminated in millions of copies. The Protocols was drafted in the early twentieth century as a purported set of transcripts of meetings of Jewish leaders intent on subverting the existing world order through a mix of capitalism and communism. This mix affords a bit of insight into the staying power of anti-Jewish expression. It is such that it can embrace opposite representations of the Jew—for example, arch capitalist and revolutionary communist, ultra-pious separatist and rootless cosmopolitan—in the same breath.
But again, why the Jews? Why have they, of all groups, merited this attention across time and space? And how did they manage to withstand it? The answers, as this book suggests, are interrelated. The Jews—or their precursors, the ancient Israelites—developed a sense of their chosenness at an early stage in their collective life. Later they spawned and posed a challenge to Christianity, which claimed that it had inherited the mantle of the true Israel—and came to regard latter-day Jews as stiff-necked and obsolete. Rather than fold and disappear in the face of this new movement, Jews persisted in their beliefs and practices, matching Christian claims of exceptionalism with their own. They combined a measure of theological contempt with recognition of the indispensability of interaction with the wider Gentile world. In the course of that interaction, they found new sources of economic sustenance and cultural expression, while also encountering incredulity and disappointment, especially in the Christian world, that they refused to surrender their way of life. The resulting hostility reaffirmed their own sense of difference, which then fed into renewed Gentile resentment and condemnation.
This was a complex cycle in which both parties, Jews and Gentiles, had agency. The Jews’ chosenness and the Gentiles’ inversion of it created friction. For much of their relationship, that friction was livable. The two sides dwelt together in the same cities and towns, gaining greater familiarity, exchanging cultural values, and at the same time, sharpening a sense of difference toward one another.
This relationship of mutual perception was fragile, but long-standing. In the twentieth century, two developments threatened to undo it. First, the flood of murderous violence unleashed in the Holocaust removed the largest population of Jews in the world from proximity to their Christian neighbors in eastern Europe. And second, Jews in North America achieved an unsurpassed level of acceptance that began to dissolve the social boundaries that separated Jew from Gentile.
And yet these two countervailing trends have not altogether shattered the age-old mutual perceptions. Even as Jews have assimilated into American and other Western societies, losing many traces of their forebears’ distinctiveness, many have retained the fight against antisemitism as a defining credo of their existence. They have established organizations devoted to that fight, which also serve to fortify their own sense of identity. They have also devoted substantial time and resources to memorializing the Holocaust, especially as the generation of concentration camp survivors passes from the world. This work remains a top Jewish communal priority—and a key source of Jewish identity. In fact, in the Pew Research Center’s 2013 Portrait of Jewish Americans, “remembering the Holocaust” was considered the most essential part of being Jewish. Meanwhile, for much of the Gentile world, the Jews (or per Lyotard, the “jews” as idea) remain an ongoing enigma after Auschwitz, alternately admired, resented, and reviled depending where and when one turns. Over the course of their history, Jews have indeed cast a powerful spell on the Gentile imagination, falling into different categories of offense that together make them a common target.
“A novel form of worship opposed to all that is practised by other men”
It was the Roman historian Tacitus who credited the biblical Moses with crafting “a novel form of worship” that differed from all others in his major chronicle of Rome, The Histories. Tacitus did not see the advent of Judaism as a salutary development. Rather, he was filled with the contempt Romans often had of foreigners when describing them; thus, practitioners of Judaism were wicked, lascivious, indolent, and beholden to rituals that were “sinister and revolting,” particularly the practice of circumcision.
The notion that Judaism was distinct from other religions—and that its adherents were intent on keeping separate from the rest of society—preceded the Roman era. The earlier Greek historian Manetho (third century bce) inveighed against the Jews’ practices and behavior, as reported by Josephus.
And yet the perception of Jewish religious difference became a far more serious issue in the Christian era, especially given the claim that Jews were culpable for the death of Jesus Christ. Christian theologians, as was noted, did not recommend the Jews’ eradication. But they were intent on demonstrating the superiority of Christianity. Jews, for their part, interpreted Christian enmity not as a refutation of their religion but as a trial whose end was the affirmation of their own religion.
This rivalry turned more heated as Christianity established its center in Europe in the early Middle Ages (fifth to tenth centuries ce). Jews shared among themselves a disparaging polemical work in Hebrew, Toldot Yeshu (The history of Jesus) that depicted Jesus as an illegitimate child who became a philandering faith-healer. Christians captured the nature of the relationship between the two religions in the statue “Ecclesia et Synagoga” (Church and Synagogue) that was placed on cathedrals throughout medieval Europe, including Notre Dame in Paris. The statue depicts two women figures, one, Ecclesia, who stands upright and looks ahead with crown on head and cross staff in hand; the other woman figure, Synagoga, has a bowed head, is blindfolded, has a broken staff in one hand and is losing control of a book of scripture in the other. In this stark contrast, Christianity is the source of vision, truth, and the future, whereas Judaism is broken, blind, and a vestige of the past.
The assertion of the theological inferiority of Judaism found ample visual and physicalized representation in medieval Christendom. Jews were depicted as devil-like, possessed of horns and a tail, and singularly intent on continuing to attack Jesus by desecrating the sacramental host wafer that represented Christ’s body in Roman Catholic doctrine. Closely related was a range of descriptions of Jews as a female pig known as the Judensau and as beset by a foul smell distinct to them (graced with the Latin name foetor Judaicus). All of these images betray a degree of knowledge, even intimate knowledge, by Christians of Jewish habits—and a complete inversion of that knowledge. Thus, Jews’ fastidious attention to hygiene and good health was converted into an assertion of their utter filth.
Images of the Jews’ dirtiness assumed even more sinister form when blood entered into the story. The claim that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood—for example, to prepare the unleavened bread eaten during Passover (matsah) or to poison wells—stood at the heart of the infamous blood libel whose origins extend back to the twelfth century in Norwich, England (1144). This accusation was destined for a long future, making hundreds of appearances in the Middle Ages. The modern era witnessed a new proliferation of ritual murder charges, perhaps most famously in Damascus, Syria, in 1840 when local Jews were accused of kidnapping and using the blood of an Italian monk for the preparation of matsah on Passover. Later in the century, the claim of murder by Jews for ritual purposes cropped up in both Hungary (1882) and Austria (1899). And in the early twentieth century, a Russian Jew named Mendel Beilis was accused of ritual murder of a Christian child in Kiev in 1913. The case of Beilis, who was acquitted of the charges, was memorialized fifty years later in Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer (1966).
Blood-based allegations against Jews endure to this day, especially in the Arab and Muslim worlds (where Jews are largely absent, although a frequent target of vilification). Former Egyptian president Muhamad Morsi made reference in a 2010 interview to Zionists as “bloodsuckers” and “descendants of apes and pigs.” In 2015, a website run by an Iranian parliamentarian referred to the Jews as “history’s most bloodthirsty people.” Meanwhile, in the United States, Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, pronounced this judgment on American Jews in 1996:
You are wicked deceivers of the American people. You have sucked their blood. You are not real Jews, those of you that are not real Jews. You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell.
The leap from the original charge of deicide to allegations of the uncleanliness of Jews to their putative quest for blood indicates the snaking, inconsistent, and tenacious nature of anti-Jewish expression. It also reveals how earlier claims based on religion served as the foundation for other sorts of charges that cast Jews as an almost mystical and demonic force.
“Money is the jealous God of Israel”
Karl Marx’s notorious assertion that “money is the jealous God of Israel,” drawn from his essay “On the Jewish Question” (1844), foregrounds another deep-seated perception of Jews as unfailingly avaricious and acquisitive. Some have pointed to Marx’s background as a baptized Jew to suggest that he was filled with self-loathing—and thus game to expose the unrestrained material appetite of Jews. In his defense, others have argued that he treated Jews and Judaism in metaphorical terms in this essay and, in fact, used the occasion to promote the emancipation of Jews in European society.
Resolving the question of his true motives is less important here than recognizing that Marx was repeating a commonplace trope in equating Jews and money, or Judaism and commerce. The exaggerated forms that it took in the twentieth century ranged from the conspiratorial claims of world financial domination in The Protocols to the depiction of Jews as exploitive “blood-suckers.”
In antiquity, anti-Jewish writers typically focused on the bizarre religious practices and social aloofness of Jews. But an early hint may reside in the story in the Gospel of Matthew (21:12) in which Jesus chases out the money-changers positioned in the courtyards of the Second Temple; this scene was immortalized in a painting by the Renaissance artist El Greco in 1600. The association between Jews and money became more explicit in the Middle Ages, especially as Christian rulers and clerics tightened restrictions on money-lending among members of their religion, thereby opening up an opportunity for Jews to fill the void. What was often regarded as an essential function by political leaders could be and often was treated with anger by the Christian populace, which generated new stereotypes of Jewish behavior. Thus, the image of the greedy money-lender joined in the growing demonization of the Jew in medieval Christian popular culture. In a curious anticipation of the present day, the actual presence of Jews was not required to propagate the image. After all, the most notorious representation of this Jewish type may well be Shylock, Shakespeare’s protagonist in the late-sixteenth-century play “The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare constructed his profile of the hard-driving Jewish money-lender—who went so far as to demand an actual pound of flesh from the borrower, Antonio—despite the fact that Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 and would not be readmitted until 1656. This profile was a leap of imagination based less on personal contact than on inherited assumptions about Jews.
That said, the association between Jews and money was not an invention out of whole cloth. Jews were highly visible in vocations based in finance in medieval and early modern times. They were drawn to lucrative albeit dangerous commercial activities such as money-lending, tax-farming, and liquor production from which they had not been excluded. They developed considerable expertise in these domains and used their family and broader social networks to expand the scale of their trade. On the basis of these features, the German sociologist Werner Sombart argued in 1911 that it was Jews, impatient with the pace of medieval commerce, who laid the foundations for the modern capitalist system. Undoubtedly Jewish economic agents, from the court Jews to large German or Sephardic Jewish banking families, played an important role in helping to build national and international financial institutions in early modern and modern times. That said, it would be a mistake to reduce the complex evolution of capitalism to the actions of a small cohort of wealthy Jewish bankers.
Herein lies the complexity of the phenomenon. In the modern age Jews continue to be prominently and even overly represented in the upper echelons of banking and finance throughout the developed world. Moreover, Jews have been attracted to some forms of commerce, and not others, because they were permitted or encouraged to enter those fields. By the twentieth century, the accrued commercial acumen of the Jews and the abandonment of some anti-Jewish restrictions yielded high rates of affluence in many countries.
9. The Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer (The Stormer), published from 1923 to 1945, regularly ran sensationalist headlines and grotesque caricatures that vilified Jews. The headline of this front page reads, “Who Is the Enemy?” and the bottom declares, “The Jews Are Our Misfortune,” a common antisemitic phrase since the late nineteenth century. The cartoon depicts a greedy Jew exploiting a fallen Europe.
That does not mean that there is a gene that disposes Jews toward money or commerce. In fact, while accused by antisemites of attempting to exploit others for their material gain, Jews have been as likely, if not likelier, to be involved in progressive and radical political movements that challenge capitalism. Alternately cast as communist subverters, economic parasites, and greedy capitalists, they have suffered from the remarkable malleability of antisemitism. Versions of all of those images, for example, surfaced in Nazi propaganda attacks on Jews, especially in the infamous German newspaper Der Stürmer (published from 1923 to 1945), which published material on a weekly basis. They echoed Adolf Hitler’s own opinion of Jews, as expressed in his semi-autobiographical Mein Kampf (My Struggle), from which his subordinates liberally borrowed in devising the Final Solution.
“The world’s foremost problem”
One of the most recurrent images in the modern age has been the allegation of a Jewish ambition to achieve worldwide domination found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not surprisingly, this assertion preceded the Protocols, becoming a popular claim in the very era in which the term “antisemitism” was born. In 1879, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr founded a League of Antisemites with the intention of repelling the influence of Jews in public life. In Marr’s view, Jews, who represented about 1 percent of the German population in his day, waged battle against the Western world and vanquished it.
The 1870s—the decade during which Marr developed his new doctrine—were marked by social and economic instability. The sequence of major events that followed the Franco-Prussian War—military triumph, political unification, and economic collapse—set Germans on edge. In this environment, Jews became a vulnerable target, even though they had by this point become deeply rooted in German language, culture, and national identity. But it was precisely this assimilation that concerned the new antisemites. German legal scholar Karl Eugen Duehring declared in 1881 that it was the baptized Jews who were the gravest threats, because they were able to gain access to all corners of society without inhibition and thus assert their hegemonic aims.
Claims such as this placed a stain of permanence on Jewish identity that could not be erased, casting further doubt on the ability of Jews to be loyal citizens. Anti-Jewish words could and did lead to action in the late nineteenth century. Jews were held responsible for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (1881), prompting a wave of violent pogroms. And the accusation against Alfred Dreyfus in France in 1894 rendered all French Jews suspect in the eyes of the anti-Dreyfusards.
The United States was not immune to the frenzy and panic. In the early twentieth century, the Michigan industrialist Henry Ford seized upon the claim of Jewish world domination and made it a centerpiece of the newspaper he published from 1919 to 1927, the Dearborn Independent, which became the second most widely circulated newspaper in the United States at the time (aided by the distribution network of the Ford Motor Company). Ford drew heavily on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the newspaper, fueling a mean streak of xenophobia throughout the country. He also collected a number of articles from the paper into a multivolume series that railed against Jews, the first book of which was titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (1920). Although Ford was forced to issue a public apology in 1927, the German government granted him a prestigious honor, the Grand Cross of the Eagle, in 1938. In fact, Adolf Hitler was said to have gained inspiration from Ford, with whom he shared a fear of the global Jewish threat.
More than half a century after Hitler’s attempted genocide of the Jewish people, the myth of Jewish world domination still lives on. A quick Internet search of “Jewish World Domination” yields more than 500,000 results, reflecting a loose and unruly alliance of far-right conspiracy groups, neo-Nazis, and Muslim politicians.
10. The American industrialist Henry Ford, best known for his role in developing the Model T automobile, published the Dearborn Independent, which became a mass-circulation newspaper in the 1920s filled with antisemitic and xenophobic articles. The main article in the September 11, 1920, edition focused on alleged Jewish control of the press, which was part of a series later published as a book under the title The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.
The burdens and benefits of exceptionalism
The record of assailing, stigmatizing, and inflicting violence on Jews has been called the “longest hatred.” Enduring for millennia and assuming multiple and often contradictory forms, the project of Jew-hatred has not only been about Jews. It also has lent a sense of coherence and purpose to societies the world over. Jews have been repeatedly cast as aliens, serving as a mirror onto the host society’s own sense of self and collective insecurities.
The mirroring effect has been two way, since Jews have also reshaped and reinforced their sense of self in response to the stigma of the Gentile. In fact, antisemitism, up to a certain limit, has been a regular, if ironic, force of preservation for Jews. The tipping point comes when anti-Jewish expression reaches the precipice of murderous violence, at which point the preservative effects disappear.
And yet, as pervasive as antisemitism has been, it is important to emphasize again that it has not been the only factor defining relations between Jews and non-Jews. It is not simply that Jews have managed to live peaceably, if not always happily, next to their Gentile neighbors. It is not simply that they have absorbed the language, culture, and habits of the host societies, while sharing with those societies their own cultural proclivities. It is also that non-Jews have manifested “philosemitic” attitudes toward Jews, based on a healthy, and at times exaggerated, appreciation of their virtues.
This is a familiar phenomenon in the modern age. Nineteenth-century Christian Zionists in England and present-day Evangelical Christians in the United States have professed love for Jews because of their shared connection to the Holy Land. In the Asian world, a noticeable and growing body of literature is devoted to the Jews that speaks of their veneration for education and business. One popular Chinese writer, for example, calls the Jews “the most intelligent, mysterious, and the wealthiest people in the world.” This adulation can at times linger at the border between respect and dangerous caricature, especially when addressing the Jews’ financial success and global influence. But it is important to acknowledge that many people in the world today declare their affection and admiration, rather than contempt and hate, for Jews.
And this is not a product only of more recent times. When he heard of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II was said to have asked of his Spanish colleague: “How can you consider King Ferdinand a wise ruler when he impoverished his own land and enriched ours?”
Bayezid believed that Jews would be a force for good in his realm, chiefly for the usual reasons of their economic utility. On rare occasion, the appreciation extended beyond utility. One fascinating early case arose in the heart of medieval Christian Europe in 1235, when the Jews of the German town of Fulda were accused of the blood libel. Fulda was under the control of Frederick II, the polyglot Holy Roman Emperor whom the late nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burchkhardt called the first modern ruler. Upon hearing news of the libel, he set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the matter. When the first commission could not deliver a clear judgment, he convened a second commission that fully exonerated the Jews in 1236. In his letter of refutation, Frederick II not only affirmed the right to “security and peaceful status of the Jews of Germany,” but also placed the Jews under his personal jurisdiction as servants of the court. Furthermore, Frederick dismissed out of hand the proposition that Jews would murder Christian children to use their blood. “Precisely the opposite,” he clarified, “they guard against the intake of all blood, as we find expressly in the biblical book which is called in Hebrew, ‘Bereshit’ [Genesis], in the laws given by Moses and in the Jewish decrees which are called in Hebrew, ‘Talmud.’ ”
This effort to understand and evince sympathy for the beliefs and practices of Jews, in the face of considerable opposing pressure, makes Frederick’s statement an interesting exception among medieval Christian rulers. Many of them formally tolerated Jews in their midst, but they did so solely on the grounds of their utility. It was not until the late eighteenth century that a more enduring shift in the nature of debates about Jews occurred. An important trailblazer was Christian Wilhelm Dohm, the Prussian legal scholar and friend of Moses Mendelssohn, who contemplated the rights and responsibilities of citizens at a crucial moment of change in European life. In 1781, Dohm wrote an essay titled “On the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews” in which he averred that there was nothing in Judaism to prevent a Jew from “being a good citizen, if only the government will give him a citizen’s rights.” At the same time, Dohm was a product of his time inasmuch as he conceded that “the Jews may be more morally corrupt than other nations.” But, and here appears the Enlightenment social engineer in Dohm, he continued: “this supposed greater moral corruption of the Jews is a necessary and natural consequence of the oppressed conditions in which they have been living for so many centuries.” The presumed corruption of the Jews would disappear if they were liberated from externally imposed burdens.
Nearly a decade later, in August 1790, President George Washington followed up a visit to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, with a letter that discarded the old conditional language of toleration and replaced it with a grander vision of equality. Washington concluded with the hope that “the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
To a great extent, Jews have realized the promise of Washington’s America. They have been much admired, in no small part because of the belief that they are the progenitors of the biblical spirit on which America was built. It was this recognition that prompted Washington’s successor, John Adams, to declare of the Jews in 1808: “They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth.”
Jews have also been admired because of their deep commitment to education, self-improvement, group cohesion, and assistance to others. Of course, that admiration is not universally held. The United States has had its share of xenophobic and antisemitic agitators, including Henry Ford and his fellow Michigander, the vitriolic radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin. And yet, the Jewish experience in the United States is unprecedented in terms of the freedom, degree of integration, and affluence that Jews have achieved. Whereas serious barriers prevented Jews as recently as the 1960s from gaining unfettered access to universities, business opportunities, social clubs, and political office in the United States, these restrictions have almost all vanished. No longer hobbled by social constraints of old, Jews in America seem to be inhabiting a Golden Age with few parallels in their long history. In fact, they were the most admired religious group in America in a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center, a remarkable development in light of the history of the idea of the Jew in Gentile eyes.
Two countervailing scenarios can unravel this Golden Age. One is the previously theoretical question of how Jews would survive in a society devoid of antisemitism. Never having confronted it before, it is not clear how they would fare without the negative reinforcement of Jew-hatred, which has been a consistent and consistently preservative force. Especially in the modern period, when traditional forms of Jewish identity rooted in faith and ritual practice have waned somewhat or greatly, antisemitism has often served as a source of cohesion for Jews. Indeed, many Jews have defined and continue to define their identity in terms akin to Sigmund Freud, who, only when he encountered antisemites at the University of Vienna, “was made familiar with the fate of being in the Opposition.”
And yet, the prospect that antisemitism will no longer be a preservative force—because it has been altogether eradicated—is premature. Anti-Jewish expression is following a pattern of historic decline in America, tempered somewhat by the new visibility of the “alt-right,” with its mix of white nationalism and Nazi sympathizing. But the same cannot be said for the rest of the world. The other major center of Jewish life, the State of Israel, was conceived as a safe haven against antisemitism. It has developed a strong military that defends its citizens and, to an extent, Jews around the world. But Israel also stands at the center of a whirling and worsening conflict with the Palestinians that has fanned the flames of antisemitism in various parts of the world. Especially striking is its recurrence in Europe seventy years after the end of the Second World War.
In the face of the seeming decline of antisemitism in one key setting and rising rates in others, Jews again face challenges. From their two main centers, North America and Israel, and in smaller communities around the world, they will need to draw on all of their rich historical experience to make their way in the twenty-first century. That they have not only survived, but also flourished for millennia—prompting Winston Churchill to call them “the most formidable and the most remarkable race that has ever appeared in the world”—is the result of an uncanny ability to navigate between the poles of assimilation and antisemitism.