Jewish Identity, Anti-Semitism, and Tikkun Olam: Part Two

Continuing a thought experiment

Hannah Arendt, political philosopher

I want to dive deeper on themes I raised last time, about Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, before leaving this subject. What I say should be held lightly, because, honestly, what do I know? This is only my personal perspective — my thought experiment. Feel free to disagree with me. I may very well be wrong. 

I think, because of the Jews’ unique history, we acquired a number of traits that got reinforced over centuries. These traits made us amazingly successful in the world, compared to the tiny size of our population. Yet they also created certain weaknesses — a few Achilles’ heels. These weaknesses are not only problems because they can be exploited by anti-Semites. They shape practices that some successful Jews employ in finance and industry, with world-changing effects. 

As a people with a particular sense of destiny and, perhaps (I tend to think), a role to fulfill in the prophetic unfolding of humanity’s story on Earth, the Jews, in modern times, have often failed to act as benevolent agents. Instead of following Tikkun olam, dedicated to helping the spiritual evolution of humanity, some Jews attain great wealth and influence by exploiting human weakness or pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Of course, people from many traditions ruthlessly exploit financial or industrial opportunities, despite negative consequences for the Earth and human societies. Exploitation is, unfortunately, woven into the DNA of human history. In the modern era, the logic extends from the Enclosure Acts to redlining ghettos, from 500 years of colonialism to today’s predatory financial Capitalism, culminating in episodes like the 2008 subprime mortgage crash and last week’s FTX meltdown. It is not that Jews are more culpable than other groups; it is just that, for such a small population, we show up disproportionately in these corrupt spectacles. This, unfortunately, lends credence to anti-Semitic delusions of secret conspiracies and New World Order cabals. 

It feels odd, almost wrong, to point at particular individuals or lineages (the Rothschilds, etcetera) — as it adds to the negative cast given to Jews through history. But a discussion requires specifics. Examples of what I mean include: Jewish executives in the music industry promoting hip hop stars who glamorized drugs, particularly crack, during an epidemic of addiction. The Sackler family pushing Oxycontin through their family-owned pharmaceutical company, despite its hyper-addictive properties. Mark Zuckerberg and Meta knowing their algorithms incited an onslaught of teen suicides and led people into QANON and Trump-ism. Zuckerberg didn’t address these problems, probably because engagement – however unhealthy or socially destructive – benefited Meta in the short-term. There is also Edgar Bernays, the father of modern public relations and Sigmund Freud’s nephew, who coined the term, “Manufacturing consent.” Focus of the Adam Curtis documentary, The Century of the Self, Bernays convinced the ruling elite they needed to control popular opinion through the persuasive techniques he mastered.

Bernie Madoff, is of course, an archetypal example of the issues I am exploring, as is Sam Bankman Freed. But there is also Larry Fink, CEO of Black Rock, one of the most powerful people in the world. Since 2018, Fink has promoted environmentalism as a new corporate responsibility. Yet Black Rock continues to invest heavily in ecologically destructive enterprises. Overseeing $87 billion in fossil fuel investments, Fink was rated one of the worst “climate villains” by The Guardian in 2021. In the financial world – where many Jews thrive at the pinnacle of power – the drive for short-term profit seems to overwhelm other considerations, despite long-term consequences. 

For many centuries, the position of Jews in the world was very precarious. As a stateless people, we were often denied rights and abused. Poor Jews were outcast, subject to pogroms, beatings, rapes, and mass murders, demonized as an “other.” At a time when most people were illiterate, Jewish religious practices focused on developing critical analysis and literacy: Study and commentary on sacred Jewish texts, particularly the Torah. As society became more complex and text-based in the modern era, the Jews’ refined capacity for critical thinking and analysis gave us a tremendous advantage in business and other intellectual disciplines ranging from literature to physics to computer science. 

While Jews were forbidden from practicing many ordinary professions, we performed a crucial function by serving the nobility as moneylenders and bankers. The European aristocracy, who needed access to financial capital, made strategic alliances with Jewish financiers, such as the Rothschild family. Jewish financiers, as a transnational and apolitical “other,” were able to fulfill a necessary function in the modern period, through the Industrial Revolution. 

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wove a complex narrative as she explored the unique trajectory of European Jews. She wrote: 

Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people, unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumscribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this concept, avoided all political action for two thousand years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none.

That historically conditioned tendency to abdicate responsibility for social consequences of actions taken – rather than some utterly false, delusional construct of a world Jewish conspiracy – is part of what I am seeking to address here. 

The bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th Century enshrined universal human rights, which included equal rights for Jews. The Jews enthusiastically joined the forces of progress and Democracy that freed them from their second-class status. As Norman Cohn wrote in Warrant for Genocide: “In politics Jews naturally tended to side with the liberal and democratic forces which alone could guarantee and increase their liberties.” In the 19th Century, “a feeling of suddenly liberated energies made many Jews exceptionally enterprising, exceptionally given to experiment and innovation. In industry and commerce, politics and journalism, Jews became identified with everything that was most wholeheartedly modern.” Historical memory is why someone like George Soros – far from being the center of any secret conspiracy – uses a good part of his fortune to promote democracies and open societies. 

In An Empire of his Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler writes about the founders of the major Hollywood studios and agencies, who were East European Jews, immigrants from impoverished backgrounds. They yearned to assimilate completely into the fabric of American life. They created a mythic fantasy of American greatness through the movies they produced. Yet they became targets for successive campaigns of anti-Semitism, repeatedly accused of undermining traditional American values or sabotaging the country:

Ducking from these assaults, the Jews became the phantoms of the film history they had created, haunting it but never really able to inhabit it. What deepened the pathos was that while the Hollywood Jews were being assailed by know-nothings for conspiring against traditional American values and the power structure that maintained them, they were desperately embracing those values and working to enter the power structure. Above all things, they wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews; they wanted to reinvent themselves here as new men.

Modernization and liberalization are not only creative but also disintegrative forces. With the development of Capitalism and the modern nation-state, Karl Marx wrote, “All that is solid melts into air:” Traditional social bonds dissolved. This close identification between Jews and modernism also meant that regressive political movements – authoritarianism in its various masks – would in the past, and still today, target the Jews, the exemplars of this process, as their inevitable scapegoat. 

It’s astonishing to what extent Jewish intellectuals formulated what became the philosophical substrate of the modern world. One only has to think of Sigmund Freud in psychology, Marx in economics, and Albert Einstein in physics. All of them rewrote the received story of the world in profound, unanticipated ways. Freud discovered, beneath our conscious life, a much larger realm of unconscious thoughts and motivations. Marx defined, similarly, a previously invisible relationship between the accumulation of capital and systemic oppression. Einstein dismantled the simple logic of linear, Newtonian time, impelling us into a subjective, relative cosmos. These were powerful, destabilizing insights – it always seems to fall to the outsider to find the new pattern which, otherwise, stays hidden and obscure, but, once noticed, changes everything.