The Jewish Oyster Problem

From Tablet (MAY 4, 2024)

In the Kuzari, one of the great Jewish philosophical treatises of the Middle Ages, Rabbi Judah Halevi depicts a fictional dialogue between the king of the Khazars and a rabbi. The rabbi points out that Jews are peace-loving and that they don’t kill like others. We can imagine the wink of the Khazar when he says, “This might be so if your humility were voluntary, but it is involuntary, and if you had power you would slay.” Ouch, responds the rabbi. Or more precisely, “Thou hast touched our weak spot, O King of the Khazars.” (Kuzari 115).

Judah Halevi understands that there’s nothing intrinsically more moral about Jews. It was our tribulations that made us uniquely nonviolent, and absent those, we may well revert to being like any other people and “slay” just like them. Yet, while aware of that reality, Judah Halevi didn’t oppose the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty. Rather, the opposite: There’s a proto-Zionism in Halevi that led him to emigrate to Jerusalem. In his native Spain he had experienced the vulnerability of living at the whims of both Muslim and Christian rulers. He saw powerlessness as an unmitigated tragedy, and he illustrated as a moral failing the attempt to disguise that powerlessness as a virtue.

Read the full article by Andres Spokoiny in Tablet.