The Arrogance of the Ignoramusi and their Followers

Judaism is based upon books. It's a highly intellectual culture. As a general statement, the most important Jews have mostly been scholars. The most important of all Jewish political figures, King David, is mostly remembered for his literary output, not for his military escapades. For millenia, Jews were more literate than their surrounding society.

Of course, not all Jews were scholars, that wouldn't have been possible. Until about 250 years ago, the non-scholars,however, fit into the second aspect of Jewish culture, namely its communal form. In a tiny nutshell, the Jews were the people who remembered the Jewish story; moreover, they remembered it in a Jewish way, encapsulated in the sentence "In every generation everyone must regard themselves as if they themselves had left Egypt".

This statement appears in the Hagadah of Pessach, the text used to commemorate Exodus every Spring. Most likely it was an early version of the Hagadah that served Jesus and his Disciples at the Last Supper, which was the Seder evening; the present form of the Hagada is probably at least 1700 years old, although the oldest full version I'm aware of comes from Rav Saadia Gaon in the 10th century - so, a mere thousand years ago. The same text also enumerates four "types" of Jewish men: the scholar, the simpleton, the one who doesn't know to ask.. and the wicked one. The wicked one is clearly educated, but he distances himself from his community with the arrogant question "What are these customs you people use?"

And why am I mentioning all this, you ask? Mostly to point out that the concept of what makes a wicked Jew is at least a thousand years old, and it's quite clear: Not being analytic and posing hard questions, which is after all the main occupation of the scholars, and not being ignorant. A wicked Jew is scornful, derisive, and mocking.

Having set him up, unfortunately I can't give you Benny Ziper's mockery in English because this time, for whatever reason, the folks at Haaretz didn't translate it. It's over here in Hebrew, if that's any help. So I'll give you some of the highlights:

The thing this people like most are corpses. Give them corpses and they'll dance around them, singing and crying, like a tribe of Indians.

To say that the dead sons of someone else are also my sons, is a form of fascism, because to think that a nation is a group of people with blood connections is a fascist concept.

This is a people who are so insane that their obsession with death has enslaved them.

We're back in the frame of mind of the victims of the pogroms, which is rather strange since unlike them we're pretty powerful, but we refuse to give up the status of victims and to cry Oy Vey and Gewald all the time.

Just like with the Orientals. They love mass spectacles of death....

And so on and so on. You get the general idea. In this particular piece, Ziper went all the way overboard, which may be why his editors thought it better not to translate him, but anyone who follows Haaretz and other platforms of the Israeli far left will recognize the sentiments immediately. The themes are quite banal. No one who knows anything about what Judaism is would take them seriously, but then, most critics of the Jewish State really don't have the faintest idea about Judaism, and for them, the Zipers of this world must be the real thing, and since they're saying what the critics want to hear, they're held up as shining examples of the "good Israelis" who give us such valuable insights into the dark recesses of the Israeli mind and psyche.

A dynamic which was recognized for what it is before Islam was invented, in the days when the Roman empire had not yet succumbed to the (European) Barbarians.