Universal Scapegoat: Ancient Empires and the Invention of Antisemitism (Part 2)
How a portable religion survived the ancient world, baffled its neighbors, and inadvertently contributed to the blueprint for global prejudice.
From the perspective of the Jews ancient and modern, they were simply following the orders of their One True God. From their neighbors’ perspective, to whom Yahweh had not reached out personally, and about whom He had trash-talked to his so-called ‘chosen people’ according to their prophets, it sounded understandably a little dotty and hey, maybe just made up?
In my last article I explored the origins of antisemitism beginning with the hiving off of a certain group of Canaanites who became the Hebrews, later the Israelites, and finally, the Jews. I explored practices, self-isolation, self-elevation and a partially mythologized Old Testament military history. Here, we continue the journey through ancient antisemitism.
Imperial overlords: Babylon and Persia
The stories of the twice-destroyed Temple of Jerusalem start with King Nebuchadnezzar who destroyed the First Temple when Judah’s king stopped paying a rather hefty tribute. ‘Tribute’ was akin to either a bribe or a tax to ensure protection and that the powerful kingdom would not invade. We pay taxes today, partly to support a national defense, but ‘tribute’ was perhaps more akin to a Mafia practice known as a ‘protection racket’.
Nice little kingdom ya got heah, Judah. Would be a real shame if someone destroyed it. Why don’t you pay us to make shooah no one gives you any trouble, unnahstan?
Predictably, Nebuchadnezzar kicked the Judeans’ asses, destroyed the temple (the First Destruction), and sent them away into the Babylonian Exile. Many returned several decades later, eventually rebuilding the Second Temple after Persia’s King Cyrus the Great conquered the hell out of Babylon and it fell. He wisely returned some control to Jewish lives and—this is important—recognized that this was their ancestral land and specifically decreed that they could rebuild their Temple, and restored many of their previous rights. Cyrus’s reasoning was that happy subjects were less inclined to rebel. He also returned what had been looted by Nebuchadnezzar’s army.
The ‘ancestral land’ piece is important because it recognized even back then that Israel was where Jews had ancient ties.
The Hellenistic period (3rd-2nd centuries BCE)
The ancestors of the Jews may have laid the foundations of friction with their neighbors, but they assimilated somewhat during the Hellenistic period and experienced greater acceptance from the kings.
The Hellenes demonstrated less hostility to Jews, who were themselves better-accommodating subjects to the empire. Jews served in the military and were given land rights in the third-to-second century BCE. But the same grievances against them remained, and contributed to real hatred, oppression, and discrimination. Refusing to respect and honor local polytheistic gods grated on a society where religion and civic life were inseparable. Some of the earliest diatribes against Jews labeling them as ‘seclusive’, ‘alien’ and ‘misanthropic’ came from Hellenic writers.
The Macedonian Seleucid empire was formed by one of Alexander the Great’s top generals after he died, spanning what’s now Turkey and Syria through Persia and northern India. The Hanukkah story originated in this period after the Seleucid conquest of Jerusalem, and Jews were permitted to govern themselves in accordance with Torah law. Some Jews had petitioned to form their own polis, Antiocheia, next to Jerusalem.
Then the tensions between Hellenized traditionalist Jews broke out into an internal war, leading Antiochus IV to suppress it in view of what he regarded as a treasonous rebellion. He stripped the remaining Jews of their rights, their self-governance, and their Temple, which became one honoring the Greek gods. King Antiochus did what Greek kings were wont to do back then, command worship or at least honoring of the local gods, and executing anyone who objected. This led to the Maccabean revolt and the Jews’ famous victory over their persecutors. They reclaimed their Temple, and the Seleucids gave up trying to control them.
If only Antiochus had left well enough alone, right? To our modern eyes, and especially Americans with a fractious history of defying authority, it’s hard not to applaud the scrappy Jews for their chutzpah. Still, it didn’t make them any more popular with their pagan neighbors, and the polemics against them continued.
It didn’t help that the victors formed the Hasmonean Kingdom in the aftermath and then embarked upon real conquests of their neighbors, forcing them to convert to Judaism which, surprisingly, did not win them any popularity contests and made them no different from those who had once oppressed them. The Jews weren’t a people in a position to rule over others historically, nor were they proselytizers for most of their existence, but their actions shocked even the Jewish scribe Josephus.
The Jews’ actual conquests, coupled with their mythologized victories in the Bible, have less to do with religion than just bog-standard political desires of conquest and enforced assimilation of others. Plus, compelled religious conversion enabled them to expand their numbers.
Funny how power works that way. Le plus ça change.
Roman rule & destruction of the Second Temple, (70 CE)
What happened next explains why the Babylonian empire gets such a bad rap in the Bible and may well be what St. John the Divine was writing about in Revelation.
So, here we are now in the Roman period, where another Great Jewish Revolt, a rebellion against excessive taxation and oppressive domination ended with utter defeat at the hands of General Titus during the Roman period. The remaining rebels took sanctuary in the Temple, where the Romans murdered them and then torched it.
To our modern normie anti-antisemitic eyes, it reads as another story of resistant Jews who just wanted to be left alone to live their lives in accordance with their God. St. John didn’t dare criticize Rome, the Second Temple destroyers, so he used Babylon as a metaphor, imagining/fantasizing God’s wrath against Jewish persecutors.
A new connection to the evolution of antisemitism stemming from this period occurred later when early Christian fathers argued that the two Destructions were a sign that God had rejected the Jews, the first stirrings of Christian antisemitism.
The Anatomy of a Holy Rebellion
The religion that would one day become Judaism began as a calculated strategy to remain strong and defend against imperial kingdoms: The Assyrians and Babylonians. It was based on commonly-understood suzerainty covenants demanding absolute allegiance to leaders which included neither foreign alliances nor foreign gods. In its earliest iteration, the Hebrews-cum-Israelites were henotheists, acknowledging there were other gods, but that their own was the One True One. Yahweh himself admitted it in the First Commandment:
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; - Exodus 20:5
Gee, not too over-the-top…
But, it’s what held the Israelites together.
Later, cultural fences were erected by the priests to further insulate the Jews from ‘corrupting’ practices around them (like, you know polytheism!); and in fact, the semi-assimilated Hellenic Jews were criticized for associating and socializing with the Greeks; there were also economic irritants as the Hellenes, with their property rights and military careers, had more money than the backwards-seeming traditionalists stuck in the past.
The early priests did what so many marginalized communities have always done: Used their persecution by others to claim divine validation, a useful explanation to keep a hated people together when it might be more tempting to give in and assimilate. Christians later turned persecution into a near-religious fetish, based in the terrible treatment they received from the Romans, but then, like the Jews and so many others, they turned around and oppressed everyone within reach.
Instead of throwing heretics and pagans to the lions, Christians burnt them at the stake.
‘God’s chosen people’ began as a strict moral burden of accountability, but over the centuries began to sound too much like “Father loves us best!” The covenant of protection by Yahweh was specifically granted to the Israelites out of love and to keep the promise he’d made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Furthermore, the Jews were small in number and demonstrably weak; Yahweh apparently favored the underdog, as so many of us do today. Also, and here’s where it gets a little fictiony again, it was offered later as thanks for their ‘liberation’ from Egypt, a story for which archaeologists and historians agree there is no evidence of slavery, liberation or wandering around in the desert for forty years. I posed this evidence-deficient question to an Orthodox Jew I used to speak with online thirty years ago who also had no real answer. His theory: ‘The shifting sands may have covered it up?”
Not for today’s sophisticated archaeological discovery techniques. But, to be fair, the Iliad and the Odyssey are also a mixture of ancient history and mythology.
The monotheistic tradition and desire for sovereignty was an early effort in self-government and egalitarianism. Rejecting foreign kings was a response to the relentless conquest and subjugation of others at the time, and a rejection of royal tyranny.
Ironically, the Babylonian Exile seems to have been the catalyst that transformed the uppity rebels into a global, portable religion. Defeat and exile meant that your god was defeated and about as dead as your political aspirations. But rather than calling the end to a great, centuries-long effort and simply assimilating, the remnants of the Jews instead turned their culture and religion into a portable text-based one and removed the ties to the land, and embraced monotheism completely.
They turned to textualizing (and occasionally fictionalizing, as we have seen) everything about their religion. They laid down the early groundwork for the synagogue system by gathering in small groups to pray and study. Animal sacrifice, with no Temple anymore, fell out of practice and they stuck with the rituals that didn’t require it, and scattered to found other communities (“The Diaspora”). This resulted in a massive psychological shift for the Jews: They realized they no longer had to defend one piece of land, that they could go forth and be Jewish outside of Israel.
This is what’s so remarkable about the relentless survival of the people today: Their culture and religion are one of two that survived from ancient times. All major pagan religions died out, and newer ones emerged. Zoroastrianism is the other BCE religion to survive modern times, but with a much smaller population of less than 150,000. Judaism today isn’t what was practiced before the Exile, but circumcision, dietary laws and many other core practices remain unchanged since the priests first decreed them in the boonies of Canaan.
From Ancient Frictions to Modern Scapegoats
This has been a very thumbnail-sketch exploration of the earliest origins of antisemitism and how it emerged from the earliest pastoralists. None of it excuses the loathsome display of antisemitism today, which differentiates those who have learned the lessons of European antisemitism and the Holocaust, and those who haven’t. Modern antisemites have only themselves to blame for the re-creation of Israel; had it not been for the genuinely genocidal Final Solution, twentieth-century Jews wouldn’t have needed a country of their own in which they could feel safe, however much one can feel safe when surrounded by antisemitic enemies of a younger religion in desperate need of a Reformation.
Jews today aren’t making the same mistakes their ancestors did (mostly; the ultra-Orthodox are somewhat up for debate), and they shouldn’t be held accountable for it, just as Christians justifiably get tired of hearing about the Inquisitions, the witch hunts, the persecution of Jews, Muslims, ‘heretical’ Christian sects and offshoots, and others. Those deplorable actions happened hundreds of years ago (thousands for Israelite abuses of neighbors, real or imagined) and today Jews number globally around 15.8 million, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank. The numbers would be higher but for the Holocaust.
Jews have ties as ancient to the former Land of Canaan as those who call themselves ‘Palestinians’.
In fact, Jews and Palestinians are closely related to each other: They share the same Levantine genetic pool. The long-running Middle East conflict is essentially the world’s oldest civil war; as science shows that over 70% of Jewish men and half of Arab men studied inherited the Y chromosomes of the same paternal ancestors who lived there for the past few thousand years. They possess, as geneticist Michael Hammer found, a Y chromosome ‘almost indistinguishable’ from that of Jews.
Israel was formed for the Ashkenazi Jews fleeing Europe, but shortly after populated further with all the unwanted Mizrahi (Arab) Jews pushed out by the surrounding nations once the Islamic governments and leaders now had a place to send them.
The Holocaust, and Islamic antisemitism, created the State of Israel.
And never in its creation did it state that the existing ‘Palestinians’ had no right to stay there, and the 1948 Declaration of Independence explicitly asked the Arab residents to stay and help rebuild the nation as equal citizens.
Although, to be fair, there were plenty of examples of Israeli abuses against them over the decades they are justifiably still angry about, especially as these human rights abuses and land acquisition occurred less than a century ago, and not in 1000 BCE.
Why does everyone hate the Jews so persistently?
Why Jews have remained the relentless victims of a particularly pernicious and millennia-long hate campaign has continued to mystify me. Something was missing. When I couldn’t figure it out, I presented the question to Google Gemini: Why have the Jews persisted as the ‘buttmonkeys’ of the world?
To which the AI response was redemptive antisemitism and punching-up scapegoating.
Regular racism ‘punches down’, but when you portray your enemy as shifty, greedy, usurious, and a secret cabal controlling the world with puppet strings, well, now you’re righteous! Now it’s David against Goliath: Except Goliath is said to be the tiny state and their massive enemies the David.
The 2,000 years after the Jewish Diaspora saw both Christians and Muslims baking antisemitism into their religions, codifying it for the world. The Evil Jew has become a cultural metaphor even for people who have never met a single Jew; Poland lost most of them during the Holocaust but today remains highly antisemitic. With today’s obsession with billionaires and their alleged control of the world (Jewish or not), when people want explanations for why their lives aren’t the way they want them to be, they reach for explanations, and the Evil Controlling Jew is always at the top of the hatesack.
Jews have long been the ultimate scapegoat. The white supremacist right views them as seeking to destroy white culture through ‘The Great Replacement Theory’. The far left views historically highly successful Jews (themselves created by antisemites who barred them from holding normal jobs) as evil capitalists, colonialists, and privileged Westerners, ignoring the history of imperialist, colonialist Christianity and Islam. The Christian extremist today regards them as heretics and ‘Christ killers’, who need Jews to die in the apocalyptic war if you interpret the Bible the way fundamentalist Millennialists do.
I hope this has enlightened folks a little. There’s much more than can be said but I focused on pre-Christian antisemitism as we’re all familiar with Christian and Islamic antisemitism. If you managed to make it this far, thanks for sticking with this long-ass essay!
Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!
Comments