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Link to Transcript and Substack post: https://open.substack.com/pub/madlik/p/jew-as-other
(ג)וַיָּ֨גׇר מוֹאָ֜ב מִפְּנֵ֥י הָעָ֛ם מְאֹ֖ד כִּ֣י רַב־ה֑וּא וַיָּ֣קׇץ מוֹאָ֔ב מִפְּנֵ֖י בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃
(3) Moab was alarmed because that people was so numerous. Moab dreaded the Israelites,
גּוּר (v) heb
to sojourn, abide, dwell in, dwell with, remain, inhabit, be a stranger, be continuing, surely(Qal)to sojourn, dwell for a time
to abide, stay, temporarily dwell
(Hithpolel)to seek hospitality with
to assemble oneself
to stir up trouble, strife, quarrel, gather together(Qal)to stir up strife
to quarrel
(Hithpolel) to excite oneself
to dread, fear, stand in awe, be afraid(Qal)to fear, be afraid
to be in awe, stand in awe
Source: מקור: Open Scriptures on GitHub
Creator: יוצר: Based on the work of Larry Pierce at the Online Bible
(ח) וַיָּ֥קׇם מֶֽלֶךְ־חָדָ֖שׁ עַל־מִצְרָ֑יִם אֲשֶׁ֥ר לֹֽא־יָדַ֖ע אֶת־יוֹסֵֽף׃ (ט) וַיֹּ֖אמֶר אֶל־עַמּ֑וֹ הִנֵּ֗ה עַ֚ם בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל רַ֥ב וְעָצ֖וּם מִמֶּֽנּוּ׃ (י) הָ֥בָה נִֽתְחַכְּמָ֖ה ל֑וֹ פֶּן־יִרְבֶּ֗ה וְהָיָ֞ה כִּֽי־תִקְרֶ֤אנָה מִלְחָמָה֙ וְנוֹסַ֤ף גַּם־הוּא֙ עַל־שֹׂ֣נְאֵ֔ינוּ וְנִלְחַם־בָּ֖נוּ וְעָלָ֥ה מִן־הָאָֽרֶץ׃ (יא) וַיָּשִׂ֤ימוּ עָלָיו֙ שָׂרֵ֣י מִסִּ֔ים לְמַ֥עַן עַנֹּת֖וֹ בְּסִבְלֹתָ֑ם וַיִּ֜בֶן עָרֵ֤י מִסְכְּנוֹת֙ לְפַרְעֹ֔ה אֶת־פִּתֹ֖ם וְאֶת־רַעַמְסֵֽס׃
(8) A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. (9) And he said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. (10) Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.” (11) So they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor; and they built garrison cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Raamses.
גּ
(ח) וַיֹּ֤אמֶר הָמָן֙ לַמֶּ֣לֶךְ אֲחַשְׁוֵר֔וֹשׁ יֶשְׁנ֣וֹ עַם־אֶחָ֗ד מְפֻזָּ֤ר וּמְפֹרָד֙ בֵּ֣ין הָֽעַמִּ֔ים בְּכֹ֖ל מְדִינ֣וֹת מַלְכוּתֶ֑ךָ וְדָתֵיהֶ֞ם שֹׁנ֣וֹת מִכׇּל־עָ֗ם וְאֶת־דָּתֵ֤י הַמֶּ֙לֶךְ֙ אֵינָ֣ם עֹשִׂ֔ים וְלַמֶּ֥לֶךְ אֵין־שֹׁוֶ֖ה לְהַנִּיחָֽם׃
(8) Haman then said to King Ahasuerus, “There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws; and it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them.
…[A]mong all the nations in the world there is scattered a certain hostile people, who have laws contrary to those of every nation and continually disregard the ordinances of the kings, so that the unifying of the kingdom which we honorably intend cannot be brought about. We understand that this people, and it alone, stands constantly in opposition to all men, perversely following a strange manner of life and laws, and is ill-disposed to our government, doing all the harm they can so that our kingdom may not attain stability.
[This addition to the book of Esther is found in the Septuagint between verses 13 and 14 of Esther 3. In the King James Version, the verses quoted are labelled Esther 13:4-5. The translation above is from the The Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).] See: Haman’s Antisemitism: What Did He Not Like About the Jews? Prof. Rabbi Marty Lockshin
The central accusation here is that the Jews undermine the political stability of the country, and make it impossible for the king to make his “kingdom peaceable and open to travel throughout all its extent, to re-establish the peace which all men desire.” The scholar of early Judaism Peter Schäfer offers a different understanding of the text, seeing in the Greek a claim that the Jews are “the only people who are in the state of military alertness always and against everyone.”
[T]hat there was a certain wicked nation scattered throughout the habitable land ruled by him, which was unfriendly and unsocial [emphasis added] and neither had the same religion nor practiced the same laws as others, “but both by its customs and practices it is the enemy of your people and of all mankind.” Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 11: 212-213, Ralph Marcus translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 417, cited by Schäfer, Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)
Schäfer concludes that some Jewish authors understood that the essence of antisemitism in the Greco-Roman world was “the allegation of amixia, ‘unsociability,’ and of a [Jewish] way of life that is hostile to and, therefore, dangerous to all humankind.” According to Schäfer, Greek texts confirm that these Jewish authors correctly understood the thoughts of many of their gentile neighbors.
״וְדָתֵיהֶם שׁוֹנוֹת מִכׇּל עָם״, דְּלָא אָכְלִי מִינַּן וְלָא נָסְבִי מִינַּן וְלָא מִנַּסְבִי לַן. ״וְאֶת דָּתֵי הַמֶּלֶךְ אֵינָם עוֹשִׂים״, דְּמַפְּקִי לְכוּלָּא שַׁתָּא בְּשִׁהֵי פִּהֵי. ״וְלַמֶּלֶךְ אֵין שֹׁוֶה לְהַנִּיחָם״, דְּאָכְלוּ וְשָׁתוּ וּמְבַזּוּ לֵיהּ לְמַלְכָּא, וַאֲפִילּוּ נוֹפֵל זְבוּב בְּכוֹסוֹ שֶׁל אֶחָד מֵהֶן — זוֹרְקוֹ וְשׁוֹתֵהוּ, וְאִם אֲדוֹנִי הַמֶּלֶךְ נוֹגֵעַ בְּכוֹסוֹ שֶׁל אֶחָד מֵהֶן — חוֹבְטוֹ בַּקַּרְקַע וְאֵינוֹ שׁוֹתֵהוּ.
Haman continued: “And their laws are diverse from those of every people” (Esther 3:8), as they do not eat from our food, nor do they marry from our women, nor do they marry off their women to us. “Nor do they keep the king’s laws” (Esther 3:8). They spend the entire year in idleness, as they are constantly saying: Shehi pehi, an acronym for: It is Shabbat today [Shabbat hayom]; it is Passover today [Pesaḥ hayom]. The verse continues: “Therefore it does not profit the king to tolerate them,” as they eat and drink and scorn the throne. And a proof of this is that even if a fly falls into the cup of one of them, he will throw the fly out and drink the wine it fell into, but if my master the king were to touch the glass of one of them, he would throw it to the ground, and would not drink it, since it is prohibited to drink wine that was touched by a gentile.
The rabbis view antisemitism as a direct and even understandable result of the Jews observing Jewish law. - Lockshin ibid.
ואמר המן למלכא אחשורוש אית עמא חד דיהודאי מתבדר ומטלטל ביני עממיא בכל מדינת מלכותך גיותנין ורוחא רמא מלקטין פישרי טבת ויתבין בחצבי תמוז ועובדיהון שניין מכל עמא ונימוסיהון מכל מדינן ובנימוסנא לא מהלכין ועובדנא לא צביא נפשיהון ועיבידתא דמלכא ליתיהון עבדין. וכד חזיין לנא רקקין בארעא וחזיין לנא כמידעם מסאב. וכד אנחנא נפקין למימר ולמשמע ולמעבד בעיבידתיה דמלכא מנהון סלקין בשורין ופרסין גידרין ועלין בחדרין ונפקין בחצופין. וכד אנחנא רהטין מתפוס יתהון מהדרין וקיימין מברקין עיניהון וחרקין שיניהון ומבטשין רגליהון ומבהלין יתהון ולית אנחנא יכלין למתפש יתהון. מן בנתיהון לא יהבין לנא ומן בנאתנא לא נסבין להון ומן דדבר מנהון למעבד עיבידתיה דמלכא מפיק ליומא בשיהי פיהי. ויומא דאינון צביין למזבן מננא אמרין לנא יומא שריא הוא ויומא דאנחנא צביין למזבן מינהון אסרין עלינן שווקין ואמרין לנא יומא אסירא הוא.
And Haman spake to King Ahhashverosh: "There is a certain people of the Jews, scattered and thrown about among the nations in all the provinces of the empire; they are proud and haughty, they bathe in Tebeth in tepid water, and in Tamuz they sit in cold baths. They practise laws and customs which are different from those of every other nation and country, and do not walk according to our laws, nor have pleasure in our customs, nor do they serve the king. When they see us they spit on the ground, and consider us in the light of an unclean thing. When we go to them and order them to do some service to the king, then they jump down the walls, break down the fences, and make their escape through the gaps. When we try to catch them, they turn round and stand staring at us, gnash with their teeth, stamp with their feet, and so frighten us that we are not able to take hold of them. We do not marry their daughters, and they do not marry ours. Is any of them taken for the service of the king, he passes the day in idleness, with all kinds of excuses, such as to-day is the Sabbath, to-day is Passover. The day on which they want to buy from us they call a lawful day, and the day on which we want to buy something from them they call an unlawful day, and they close the market for us.
Targum Sheni is especially difficult to date, and scholars have provided dates of composition ranging from the fourth to the 11th centuries, with a date somewhere in the middle being the most likely.
Targum Sheni (Esth. 3:8), a midrashic “translation” and expansion of the book of Esther into Aramaic, probably dating from the 8th or 9th century,[21] provides a window into what some medieval Jews thought that gentiles were saying about them, by creating one of the longest and most interesting Jewish expansions of Haman’s antisemitic allegations - Lockshin ibid.
(ט) וְגֵ֖ר לֹ֣א תִלְחָ֑ץ וְאַתֶּ֗ם יְדַעְתֶּם֙ אֶת־נֶ֣פֶשׁ הַגֵּ֔ר כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃
(9) You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.
(יט) וַאֲהַבְתֶּ֖ם אֶת־הַגֵּ֑ר כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃
(19) You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is the director of the Endowment for Middle East Truth’s Program for Emerging Democratic Voices from the Middle East. Hussein was born in Cairo, Egypt into a family who raised another son to be an imam inspiring young people to become Jihadists. His critical intellect led him to find out more about Israel and Jews and to forge friendships with Israelis. Hussein received political asylum in the United States under President Barack Obama in 2012 and worked as an instructor for language and culture at the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, California. He then went on to work as an educator and public speaker for StandWithUs, educating students about cultural and geopolitical issues in the Middle East and helping them counter anti-Semitism. Hussein wrote an autobiography, Minority of One: The Unchaining of the Arab Mind, and his articles have appeared in Commentary, Newsweek, the Jewish Journal, JNS.org, Times of Israel, and Mosaic.
There is no more sacred category in the postmodern moral imagination than that of the Other. It is invoked with reverence, defended with zeal, and guarded as the guarantor of all ethical meaning. To be Other is not merely to be different, but to be invested with a kind of secular sanctity, the unassailable dignity of the marginal, the displaced, the wounded. Since the mid-twentieth century, “Otherness” has become not just a conceptual tool, but a liturgical core of liberal self-understanding: a moral totem through which the modern subject flatters himself as just, inclusive, and cosmopolitan.
Thus, this essay begins with a simple, if heretical, proposition: the dominant cultural conception of Judaism today, canonized in academic, political, and communal discourse alike, is not a retrieval of something ancient but the fabrication of something modern.
It is not the Judaism of Sinai or Babylon, nor even of Cordoba or Vilna, but of Berlin, Paris, and New York. It is the Judaism of Hegelian philosophy, Enlightenment ambivalence, liberal sanctimony, and post-Christian longing. It is a Juda-ism: an -ism in the modern sense, constructed in the hurricanes of nineteenth-century European thought and codified through the traumas of the twentieth. Like all modern -isms, it is a symbolic technology—a hollow abstraction fashioned in the aftermath of metaphysical collapse, seeking to fill the void left by the retreat of transcendence. And at its core lies a single, all-encompassing predicate: the Jew as Other.
The Jew was no longer a person simply living his life; he was performing someone else’s metaphor, for once the Jew accepted this position—this function—as the sacred Other, he ceased to be a subject of covenant and became an object of culture (itself a modern pantheon of idols). He traded the particularity of Torah for the abstract universalism of suffering. And in doing so, he entered into a game whose rules were not his own, and whose prize could always be withdrawn. For if the Other is sacred only so long as he suffers, then Jewish sovereignty is a sacrilege. And if the Other is sacred only so long as he critiques power, then Jewish power becomes a betrayal.
This version of modern Jewish identity, recast within the semantic field of Otherness, is structured around a constellation of derivative tropes: the Jew as exile, the Jew as diasporic, the Jew as victim, the Jew as prophetic conscience. The Jew as countercultural herald, as a critique of power, as a therapist of Christian repression, as a feminine foil, as the homosexual antithesis to the white, Christian, heterosexual philistine. These tropes did not emerge from Jewish thought or halakhic tradition; contrary to the hallucinations of antisemite and his mirror image, the Jewish Studies’ professor, they weren't born in the Beit Midrash but from European elite anxiety, revolutionary fantasy, and post-Enlightenment neurosis.
This trap worked particularly for Jews interested in self-worship, a human tragedy, but not knowing that their self-worship idol is actually a deceptive surface covering the self-worship idol of others. A falsehood masquerading as another falsehood, all portals to hell.
And now, this construction, always fragile, always borrowed, has entered its crisis. For in the twilight of Western metaphysics, postcoloniality has risen not merely as a politics, but as a rival postmodern theology: one that no longer even attempts to gesture toward meaning but hungers for domination over the meaningful. Its highest prize is not land, nor law, nor even liberation—but moral centrality. And it demands to be the only recognized Other. Where once the Jew stood as the sanctified symbol of suffering, he is now displaced by newer sacrificial icons: the Palestinian, the postcolonial subaltern, the indigenous avatar. These figures now claim exclusive rights to victimhood, demanding not just recognition but liturgical primacy, the New Jews of the New Jerusalem. In this postmodern symbolic economy, Jews are not only decentered, they are condemned for ever having occupied the sacred space.
This symbolic figure, the Jew as Other, was never a product of Jewish self-description.
What was once the language of covenant and law was refashioned into the language of exile and protest. The sacred call of Sinai was supplanted by the secular tropes of marginality, identity, and “moral witness.” The Jew was no longer the one who received command; he was the one who suffered meaning. In this configuration, victimhood became vocation. Alienation became moral authority. The theological became therapeutic. This is not merely a defense of theology against its secular rivals, nor a celestial duel between abstractions, divine or atheistic. What is at stake is also the erasure of real Jewish life, the ordinary, covenantal, and mundane existence of millions who never sought to become metaphors in the dramas of high culture, and who lived their tradition not as universal symbol but as sustenance. In the cultural Juda-ism, the internal life of Jewish tradition was flattened into its external representation. The Jew was no longer a person simply living his life; he was performing someone else’s metaphor, for once the Jew accepted this position—this function—as the sacred Other, he ceased to be a subject of covenant and became an object of culture (itself a modern pantheon of idols). He traded the particularity of Torah for the abstract universalism of suffering. And in doing so, he entered into a game whose rules were not his own, and whose prize could always be withdrawn. For if the Other is sacred only so long as he suffers, then Jewish sovereignty is a sacrilege. And if the Other is sacred only so long as he critiques power, then Jewish power becomes a betrayal.
This allowed for a new form of “liberation,” in which the Jew could be redeemed simply by assuming the role of revolutionary conscience, liberating himself through the relentless critique and deconstruction of the West and its power.
In effect, Otherness became the sacred axis of a new secular theology. It functioned not as a sociological observation, but as a theological premise: the Other was not merely different, but redemptive. Around this category, a moral order was constructed; complete with its own liturgy of guilt, its canon of victims, and its promise of absolution. To align with the Other became an act of moral purification; to speak for the Other, a form of secular priesthood. The Other was no longer outside power, but the very condition by which the powerful could be made morally whole and power can be justified. The Other, in effect, became the site of the New Papacy.
And thus, the old trinity, Jew, Woman, Homosexual, began to give way to the new: Palestinian, Refugee, Trans. A new faith, built not on the Law or the Church, but on the altar of the idol of Otherness.
To be “Jewish” is to be Other; to be Other is to either be victimized or to be a rebel; either to suffer and to give meaning to a world that no longer believes in meaning or to rebel and to help destroy a world that lacks meaning
The figure who most fully dramatized this shift was Frano-American critic George Steiner, the diasporic European Jew par excellence, Steiner presented the Jew as the eternal exile whose only remaining homeland was the text, whose only nation was literature, whose only covenant was the ethical burden of memory. His famous formulation, “the text is the homeland of the Jew”, was not a poetic metaphor; it was a philosophical thesis, a post-theological substitute for tradition, and a polemic against Zionism.
This was not a Judaism of observance or transmission. It was a Judaism of metaphor. The Jew, for this milieu, became a counterculture icon, the symbol of liberal critique and dissent: the perpetual outsider who, precisely by not belonging, could illuminate the contradictions of belonging itself. The Holocaust furnished the moral gravity; psychoanalysis supplied the grammar; liberalism supplied the prestige; Marxism offered the structure of historical understanding, critique, and sene of mission. Together, they produced a new leftwing synthesis: to be Jewish was to be in exile, and to be in exile was to speak, or perform speaking, truth to power.
Jewishness became a prototype: a moralized identity founded not on law or lineage, but on loss, displacement, and symbolic utility.
Against this long historical backdrop Zionism, at least in its most mainstream articulation, emerged as a radical departure. It did not deny that Jews had been cast as Others, but it refused to treat that condition as metaphysical, eternal, or ethically redemptive. It met the idol with indifference. Zionism's implicit philosophical wager was this: that Jewish otherness was not a mystery to be explained, nor a symbol to be sublimated, but a political condition to be reversed.
Zionism offered a brutally terrestrial thesis: that exile, statelessness, and persecution were not myths to be interpreted but facts to be overcome. The cure was not dialectics but sovereignty.
To become, in Ahad Ha’am’s early phrasing, “a nation like all others.” In that demand lay the scandal of Zionism.
Zionism thus represents a unique conceptual move in the genealogy of Jewish otherness: it posits Otherness not as a tragic metaphysical inheritance, nor as an ethical vocation, but as a historical distortion to be corrected. It is not the identity of the Jew and it is not what makes the Jew a Jew. And in doing so, it reveals the stakes of the entire symbolic edifice that preceded it. For if Otherness is not essential, functional, or ontological, but contingent, then the whole modern aesthetic of Juda-ism begins to unravel. What is left is not the sacred Jew, the abstract Jew, the redemptive Jew, but the actual Jew: desiring, planning, building, failing, remembering, authoring, reading, and defending a life not of symbols, but of sovereignty.
Yet intellectual honesty demands that we acknowledge another development within Zionism, one far more enduring than the mythic tribalism of the Canaanite avant-garde. From both the secular left and the religious-nationalist right, there have emerged Zionist projects that seek not merely to secure the Jewish people politically, but to redefine Judaism itself in political terms, that is, more Juda-ism. These currents, though divergent in their aims, share a common logic: the subsumption of Torah under the sovereignty of the modern state, or the instrumentalization of tradition in service of ideological goals. On the left, this often takes the form of a civic or ethical nationalism that reduces Judaism to a set of liberal democratic values, retroactively projected onto the prophetic tradition. (This was a loud voice during the judicial reform protest movement in Israel.) On the right, it manifests as a sacralized nationalism that interprets halakha as the constitutional blueprint for a maximalist territorial state. (Also, currently present in Israeli politics.) In both cases, the infinite, non-sovereign demands of Torah are collapsed into the finite categories of modern politics.
Juda-ism becomes not a revealed structure of obligation, but a malleable reservoir of symbols, selectively mobilized to justify power, identity, or territory. This, too, is a form of idol-making and conceptual reductionism, wherein the covenant is flattened into citizenship and the divine voice is domesticated by the state. (I fully admit the complexity of such problems and do not pretend that I have solutions.)
And then came the reckoning. As postcolonial and racial discourses began to dominate the university, many found themselves displaced from the very moral economy they had helped construct. To their astonishment, they were no longer seen as the emblematic Other, but as representatives of whiteness, power, and colonial complicity. The Jew, once upheld as the paradigm of suffering, now stood accused of success.The identity that had once served as moral capital was suddenly recoded as privilege. What they had thought was the universalization of their pain turned out to be a temporary station on the way to new, more politically useful victims.
(ה) מַה־טֹּ֥בוּ אֹהָלֶ֖יךָ יַעֲקֹ֑ב מִשְׁכְּנֹתֶ֖יךָ יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃
(5) How fair are your tents, O Jacob, Your dwellings, O Israel!