Two Kinds of Jew - A Sketch on Jewish Identity

 Let me sketch out a cartoon-like version of two kinds of Jews – or rather two forms of feeling life within contemporary Diaspora Jews, two stances towards Jewishness that animates or motivates (consciously or unconsciously) our everyday lives as Jews.

There is the ‘Pesach Jew’ and the ‘Purim Jew’.

If you are a ‘Pesach Jew’ you will be stirred by the central themes of the story of liberation as described in the book of Exodus: that an oppressed people were freed from slavery and then went on to receive a moral vision about how to live in the world.

The ‘Pesach Jew’ will have imbibed the idea that the revelation at Sinai taught a traumatised people that justice, compassion and lovingkindness were qualities that resided in the human heart; and that the Jewish role in the world was to enact these attributes and qualities both within their own community and in relation to those who lived beyond their own tribe or nation.

In other words, the ’Pesach Jew’ has internalised the symbolism of the Torah story, a story that highlights and values freedom from oppression, and links it directly to an ethical vision: that the Jewish people are to be a “light to the nations”. The ‘Pesach Jew’ recognises that the oft-repeated Biblical idea  that ‘you shall love the stranger and the outsider because you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ is at the moral core of what it means to be Jewish. The Jewish soul is one that is sensitive to the sufferings of others and is determined that a central part of being Jewish involves reaching out to express care for Jews and non-Jews alike.

For the ‘Pesach Jew’ this stance depends on memory - sometimes unconsciously inherited memory -  the long arc of Jewish memory that links the mythic past of the people  with their continued existence now. We tell the story over and over to keep alive the memory of where we came from; and to keep alive the ethical commitment stemming from that memory. Inherited memory becomes a motivator for ethical and social action.

And the ‘Purim Jew’? What moves the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’? The Purim story – based on the Biblical Book of Esther - contains one aspect of the Jewish story that has never left us: that there exist in the world people who dislike us, hate us, want to persecute us. In the story, the anti-hero Haman foments a plan, backed by royal decree, to rid the Persian kingdom of its Jews. Over the generations, Haman’s animus against the Jews, as outsiders in Persia, has been enacted time and again. Although the narrative is historically unreliable, the anti-Jewish legislation that it describes has a powerful historical resonance. The story is an archetype of antisemitic hatred. It is a strand of Biblical literature that still reverberates in the heart of our Jewish community. For the ‘Purim Jew’, the experience of anti-Jewish antipathy – or the fear of it - is at the heart of one’s Jewish identity. 

Remaining Jewish becomes an act of defiance towards the antisemite. What the ‘Purim Jew’ learns from Jewish history is a stubborn refusal to leave the world stage. For the ‘Purim Jew’ the Jewish soul is marinated in feelings of victimhood and in the bloody-minded determination not to let Jewry’s enemies have the last word. Survival is all.

Of course the ‘Purim Jew’ is also keeping alive memory – memory of historical antipathy to Jews, aggression towards Jews, persecution of Jews – but this is selective memory. This is memory only able to - or only wanting to - hear this motif, this melody, within the symphony played out over centuries of interactions between Jews and non-Jews. For the ‘Purim Jew’ there is no creative or mutually beneficial social and cultural intercourse between Jews and the inhabitants of the lands in which they have resided – there is merely suspicion and worse.  

This is the kind of memory which is operating when Jews say they feel ‘existentially threatened’ by the current upsurge in reported antisemitism in the UK and abroad. That upsurge is shocking and disturbing and needs to be monitored and prosecuted - and vigilance is absolutely necessary for us Diaspora Jews. One can feel saddened by this, or angry – or both – but it may be useful to try to keep a sense of proportion about it. We aren’t in the 1930s Germany of antisemitic state legislation and institutional persecution – we are dealing with small groups, and lone individuals, emboldened to enact their prejudices online, sometimes in person, and as horrible and frightening as this can be, in the UK we have the backing of a legal system and police to help us contain this unpleasantness and these threats when they come.

It can be difficult to keep a sense of perspective about this here in London because the kind of memory that gets triggered in us is the memory at the heart of the ‘Purim Jew’: the selective memory of Jews as the ones who are eternally hated and persecuted. And of course it is this kind of memory that is particularly operative in Israel when people are saying they feel ‘existentially threatened’.

The October 7^th barbarism has powerfully triggered this deeply-lodged strand of feeling in the Jewish-Israeli psyche and one can see how traumatic the events of that day have been, how they are resonating still in the psyches of the people, and indeed how the excruciating pain connected with the hostage situation is truly dementing. Our hearts do go out to those who are going through this: there is no family in Israel unaffected by either the immediate connection with hostages and their families, or those who lost loved ones on October 7^th, or those who have lost loved ones in the fighting that has ensued, or those still displaced from their homes. All of these need support and solidarity in whatever way it can be shown.   

Even if I have over these months offered a critique of certain aspects of Israel’s Zionist  story or its current political responses, I have tried never to lose sight of the human drama that is ongoing for the people going through this. It has sometimes been difficult to balance my empathy for those who are going through this embattled saga, with my other concerns about the meaning of these events within the longer arc of Jewish history and its meaning for us Jews who sit here in the Diaspora, who are realising that what happens over there is having a direct impact on us over here. This ongoing drama can also feel dementing in the suburbs of London – not least in the attempt to hold in mind and take to heart the anguish of Palestinian suffering alongside that of Jewish suffering.

The categories of ‘Purim Jew’ and ‘Pesach Jew’ are inevitably a bit simplistic – I said they were cartoon-like, they are a kind of shorthand – because we can recognise that the ‘Pesach Jew’ might value the themes of liberation and a commitment to justice and equality and compassion, but the story – like the Purim story - is also rooted in victimisation, that ancient antipathy towards us. It wasn’t called antisemitism then, in Egypt, but the Biblical saga is about the oppression of an alien people living in the midst of a majority culture. That’s the strand of ‘Purim’ in the Pesach story, and it lives inside even the most secular or humanitarian-minded ‘Pesach Jew’: the archaic memory, intergenerational memory, of being strangers in strange lands, is still alive however securely integrated one now feels, however culturally assimilated one is.

I have no doubt we will get through this period of doubt, darkness, inner dividedness - it’s going to take time for the external situation to be resolved, and of course there are different pictures of what ‘resolved’ might look like. So we here in the UK are going to have to live with heightened feelings of insecurity for a while longer – this, one intuits, is going to be a long journey.

[partially based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 17^th, 2024]