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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?

With everything going on in the world, it's notable that this article from the upcoming May issue of The Atlantic is featured as the One Story to Read Today. It deserves to be closely studied- not just skimmed and written off as "progressivism gone amok."

Earlier in the thread, @JTarrou theorizes on politics replacing religion:

Given our emerging consensus that politics is replacing religion as the dividing line of society, and taking on many of the same functions, perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.

I'm not shy about being a Holocaust Revisionist, and I'm aware that it seems to be a strange hobby horse to the vast majority of people including most here. Why dedicate so much time and credibility to this issue? It's not profitable, it's extremely low status, there's an extremely low chance of Revisionist criticisms of the narrative breaking through the mainstream in the near future. Ostensibly it's a controversy surrounding history rather than an immediately relevant cultural or technological issue. The reasoning is simple: the Holocaust already is the religion in the West that fulfills the function proposed by JTarrou. Long before I would cite any Revisionist or anti-Semite to make that case, I would plead for anybody who doubts that to closely read this Atlantic piece by Horn.

The Holocaust religion is growing and evolving with technology, and the motives have never been more transparent.

... well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates. Public figures who make anti-Semitic statements are invited to tour Holocaust museums; schools respond to anti-Semitic incidents by hosting Holocaust speakers and implementing Holocaust lesson plans...

If you read the article title maybe hoping for some nuance or self-reflection on the Holocaust Industry, you will be disappointed. According to Horn, Holocaust education is essential, but it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews, particularly in young children.

One of Horn's chief complaints is that Holocaust education fails to impart on children the uniqueness of Jews. On the one hand, this is a fair criticism of Holocaust curriculum which is rife with the "Jews were completely normal and, one day for no reason at all, everybody hated them." On the other hand, it makes the political motivations of the Holocaust religion more transparent: the uniqueness and particularity of Jews should be explicitly taught and celebrated as curriculum. Jews aren't normal, they are special. If that sounds like an uncharitable interpretation, consider this exchange she had with a Holocaust educator:

“If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”

But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms? ...

I was baffled. Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?

“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”

But Jews don’t do that, I said. Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam; Jews don’t believe that anyone needs to become Jewish in order to be a good person, or to enjoy an afterlife, or to be “saved.” This seemed to be yet another basic fact of Jewish identity that no one had bothered to teach or learn.

Gas Chamber Simulacra

The Dallas Holocaust Museum was opened in 2019 and features prominently in her article: it covers an entire city block in the historical downtown district (Dara complains that it has almost two wings dedicated to the suffering of other minorities in a noble act of self-erasure). If this isn't a proselytizing religion then I do not know what is. Many thousands of children will be herded to these temples of tolerance to Learn their Lessons.

They will be taught the moral thesis of the world, Jews, and the moral antithesis, Hitler. They will sit in the pews learning from the saintly apparition about the Holocaust, using a conversational AI that is no doubt archaic compared to what will soon be displayed in Holocaust museums across the world. They will write down the lessons they have learned and make pledges (i.e. to "welcome and help new immigrants coming into Chicago").

The article covers the ways technology is used to teach the Holocaust to children in the form of holograms, AI, and VR. Dana describes a VR exhibit at one of the museums that takes the viewer on a first-person adventure from a boxcar to inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz.

A way Forward

Still, according to Dara, this doesn't achieve the primary objective of fighting anti-Semitism, which she dubs as a "Western mind virus" in the vein of the critical theorists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists who preceded Holocaust remembrance in diagnosing the Gentile authoritarian personality. Dara emphasizes:

The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism.

Dara's idea of a credible explanation for why Jews were targeted is revealed near the conclusion:

“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?” ...

More blank stares. Finally, one woman said, “Are you talking about the Old Testament?”

“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”

“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said.

I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”

I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.

“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

I wonder what Safe AI-powered simulacra will be used on my children when they become of age, scientifically optimized to train their perception of Jews - and their own identity. Horn has no shortage of ideas:

Back at home, I thought again about the Holocaust holograms and the Auschwitz VR, and realized what I wanted. I want a VR experience of the Strashun Library in Vilna, the now-destroyed research center full of Yiddish writers and historians documenting centuries of Jewish life. I want a VR of a night at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—and a VR of a Yiddish theater in New York. I want holograms of the modern writers and scholars who revived the Hebrew language from the dead—and I definitely want an AI component, so I can ask them how they did it. I want a VR of the writing of a Torah scroll in 2023, and then of people chanting aloud from it through the year, until the year is out and it’s read all over again—because the book never changes, but its readers do. I want a VR about Jewish literacy: the letters, the languages, the paradoxical stories, the methods of education, the encouragement of questions. I want a VR tour of Jerusalem, and another of Tel Aviv. I want holograms of Hebrew poets and Ladino singers and Israeli artists and American Jewish chefs. I want a VR for the conclusion of Daf Yomi, the massive worldwide celebration for those who study a page a day of the Talmud and finally finish it after seven and a half years. I want a VR of Sabbath dinners. I want a VR...

I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews does. There is .. no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor.

[edited this comment significantly to clarify + to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]

Re: “Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion”, it should be noted that Judaism is an ethno-religion. An ethno-religion that doesn’t convert also runs into some moral quandaries. There’s a big movement in the Jewish World based around Chabad, and according to the foundational text of Chabad, the Tanya, gentiles have a naturally more evil soul and Jews have a soul with a “divine spark”. This is a mainstream lesson at Chabad-friendly synagogues. The religion of Judaism in its more conservative variants is extremist in this sense. “Praying three times a day that apostates have no hope” is also normative, which can be contrasted to the Christian prayer of praying for conversion and enlightenment.

This is nutpicking. I am not a Jewish theologian and I am pretty confident you aren't either, but selectively pulling excerpts from Jewish texts to "prove" that Jews all secretly believe that gentiles are animals and also believe in lying and stoning people is the same sort of thing you can do with any holy texts. We know this because people play the same game with Christians and Muslims. Shall we play a game of "What Christians actually believe according to the Bible"? We'd get plenty of Christians stepping up to explain how that's being taken out of context, and whether or not it is, it is certainly not what mainstream Christians believe.

Statements like this:

It cannot exist amicably with any other religion.

Are inflammatory enough to require a lot more evidence than just "Some Jewish texts can be interpreted in crazy ways." If you want to paint Jews as a secret conspiracy to enslave all the goyim.... well, don't. Try actually engaging honestly with Jews say they believe in their own words. (And if you're going to stick with "But they're lying because their religion tells them to lie to us," well, you haven't presented nearly enough evidence of such a conspiracy.)

"Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion” because Judaism is an ethno-religion

No, Judaism is not a proselytizing religion because Judaism holds that all righteous persons, regardless of religion, are rewarded after death. In contrast, Christianity teaches that only Christians are rewarded, so of course it is a proselytizing religion; if you believe that, you have a moral duty to convert others. Adherents of Judaism or religions with similar beliefs have no such moral duty.

Does your «Judaism» teach that all branches and forms of Judaism, from endogamous neo-archaic dynasties like Satmar to mainline Orthodoxy to the most progressive Reform synagogue ordaining intersex mixed-race converts as Rebes, are more similar in their teaching than all denominations of Christianity? Is there perhaps some Jewish equivalent of the Holy See, with a legible publicly available teaching which all Jews are doctrine-bound to comply with?

In my understanding, the opposite is the case, and you are suffering from the outgroup homogenity bias here, while disingenuously asserting homogeneity in your own camp. But also, your interpretation is objectively… non-traditional.

And the issue of promised postmortem reward is debatable even for Jews, nevermind Gentiles.

You seem to be assuming that the person you are replying to is Jewish, which their comment doesn't say.

To be fair: yes, contra @Ioper I happen to assume @Gdanning is probably ethnically Jewish (of secular or semi-secular persuasion), although I might be totally wrong and have never cared much or looked into this; he has interesting things to say about law and that's where my engagement for the most part ends.

This, however, is based on a multi-year history of reading him and has almost nothing to do with my response to that particular comment. My phrase your «Judaism» is supposed to mean «your notion of Judaism, as you define it here» or perhaps «Judaism in the sense as it's described by you in this chain and others in similar contexts you seem to refer to», and does not depend on any particular belief about Gdanning's own allegiance and object-level religious attitude.

No, he assumes that Jews are his ingroup. Progressives treat trans-people as their ingroup, that doesn't mean they're trans.

[edited this comment to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]

Judaism is (paradoxically) proselytizing for born-Jews who don’t practice, often trying to bring them into practicing the ethnoreligion again. Israel spends funds on this, as do numerous Jewish groups, not to mention Birth Right and Right of Return. Some Conservative Chabad Jews in Israel are so perturbed by Christians that just this year two Knesset members drafted a law to make Christian proselytizing illegal. Israel of course also forbids Kohen-ethnicity Jews from marrying Christians — does this sound like a belief system that primarily values righteousness and believe the righteous are equally rewarded? I would say no. They believe Israel (the people) have a special place, given a special spiritually-infused soul which God favors via communication and spiritual privileges. Judaism also has a mild caste system within the religion: Kohen and Levite descended bloodlines have special treatments and obligations in Temples, and laws are written in Israel to protect these bloodlines.

While it is true that Judaism believes that jews and non-jews have souls of different types, the characterization of that belief as "only a Jew can be a full-formed person" is inaccurate. The "animal soul" that you speak of is common to both jews and non-jews, and is more properly rendered as "the animating spirit." In addition, the word which you translate as "apostates," is more properly translated as "informers."

The kelipah is the source of both the Jewish and gentile soul “animal” soul, but the “kelipah nogah“ is unique to Jews, while all gentile souls come from lesser kelipot. This is found in chapter 1 of the Tanya which you can find on chabad.org.

He [[in the Tanya]] explains that a Jew has two souls – a Godly soul, which partakes in some fashion in the actual substance of God Himself, and an animalistic soul, which descends from klipat noga, the evil that contains within it an admixture of divine light. Therefore, he explains, any good character trait found in a Jew reflects the essential goodness found in his soul. The soul of a gentile, however, according to the Tanya, is purely animalistic and not Godly. It descends from the evil forces that have no potential for goodness in them whatsoever. Therefore, any good deeds performed by gentiles are done for ulterior motives and cannot possibly reflect essential goodness.

According to this philosophy, a gentile is not merely a lower form of life, but is essentially and irredeemably evil; his substance derives from the sitra achra, the evil forces that threaten all goodness and purity in the world

the Tanya

Googling while wondering if you misspelled Talmud ... this is a religious philosophy book published in 1796, whose general philosophy is subscribed to by nearly 0.7% of Jewish people? The Book of Mormon is nearly as old, and represents approximately the same fraction of followers of Jesus. That doesn't prove you wrong (hey, there are tons of Book of Mormon verses that most non-Mormon Christians would agree with, too, even if they think the reason was just "Joseph Smith wrote Bible fan-fiction"), but supporting a broad claim would require citing a broader source.

If you're not making a broad claim, that's fine too, but "extremists of X can't coexist with non-X" is a depressingly broad claim in another way: you can't say it's anything special about Judaism. Muslims who think apostasy should be a capital crime are currently supermajorities in whole countries. Modern Christians are mostly better, but that seems to be a result of exhausting the alternatives first (the European Wars of Religion killed millions; some German states would have seen less population loss if they'd had another Black Plague instead) and remembering their problems (they now know that the next step beyond "we all have to be Christian" is "yeah, friend? which kind?"...). There are some religions that specifically disclaim violent and extremist ... wait, no, not Buddhists too? If you step away from religion completely, it's true that atheists have needed to find some other holy sacred all-important cause to kill millions of people for, and this seems like an improvement because then the cause at least isn't directly tied to the atheism, but it does make me fear that there's some nearly-inextricable tie to human psychology.

I take issue with your 0.7 percent figure. While it may be accurate in the context of all jews, it is unhelpful here, where the topic is orthodox or ultra-orthodox Jewry, of whom Chabad is a far larger percentage. Tanya is not only the foundational text of Chabad, but is also studied by many non-Chabad Jews interested in Hasidic thought. In that sense it is worth far more than 'fanfiction', it is one of the main theological works of Hasidism, even if it is not the foundational text of any sect other than Chabad. I do, however agree that it is insufficient as a source from which to make broader generalizations about jews. My earlier reply to Coffee Enjoyer was based on the Nefesh Hachaim, which is a work written against Tanya. I should not have made that point in the form of "Judaism believes."

Chabad is a wildly influential center of Jewish culture in America. There are Chabad houses on many major college campuses and they influence Jewish culture at large. There are 2900 Chabad “houses” of influence in America. Their official membership is not the extent of their influence. This is something I ought to have clarified in my comment, which is my mistake. Just quoting from the Wikipedia, which you are free to disagree with but hopefully for a reason,

Unlike most Haredi groups, which are self-segregating, Chabad operates mainly in the wider world and caters to secularized Jews.

The number of those who sporadically or regularly attend Chabad events is far larger; in 2005 the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs reported that up to one million Jews attend Chabad services at least once a year.[9][10][11] In a 2020 study, the Pew Research Center found that 16% of American Jews attend Chabad services regularly or semi-regularly

In recent years, Chabad has greatly expanded its outreach on university and college campuses. Chabad Student Centers are active on over 100 campuses, and Chabad offers varied activities at an additional 150 universities worldwide.[124][failed verification] Professor Alan Dershowitz has said "Chabad's presence on college campuses today is absolutely crucial," and "we cannot rest until Chabad is on every major college campus in the world

Yes, that Alan Dershowitz. We’re not talking about a few devout Amish-like Jews. Chabad has huge, growing influence on the Jewish world.

Chabad has set up an extensive network of camps around the world, most using the name Gan Israel, a name chosen by Schneerson although the first overnight camp was the girls division called Camp Emunah. There are 1,200 sites serving 210,000 children – most of whom do not come from Orthodox homes.

Further reading

Does Chabad influence Jewish beliefs about Gentile souls? That purported inherent Jewish contempt for Gentile souls was the bailey, right? I thought "You can find such awful beliefs in one subsect's founder's centuries-old book" was a small motte to retreat to, but "The sect gives Jewish college kids community centers and only 84% of Jews aren't 'semi-regular' service attendees" is a motte so tightly walled in I can't even find a window from which to see out. Wait until you hear about the Salvation Army.

Even the "network of camps" stuff needs fleshing out. I went to (Christian) religious summer camp at one point as a kid. We never got an "unbaptized babies end up in hell" lesson there, though, despite it being fairly fundamental to the denomination's roots. Do Chabad camp attendees get the adults' "Gentile souls are crummy" lessons, or is "eh, gloss over the creepy stuff in front of the kids" a common trait?

We did get the "Abraham was great for being willing to kill his son when the voices only he could hear told him to" lesson occasionally in (again, Christian) church. Likewise for Noah's Ark and non-Noahs' Watery Graves, though that was treated as more parable than literal. I also reached the "Moses getting chided by God for not quite being genocidal enough" parts when reading the Bible by myself. There is indeed lots of really awful stuff in actual Jewish scripture! The catch is that it got eagerly adopted by billions of Christians, too, because "form moral judgments independently" and "treat all human life as equally sacred, yes even some of those outsiders" haven't been very popular among any groups. That Chabad book actually predates the last time some Christian authorities hanged a man for heresy! ("according to Ripoll, it was not necessary to hear Mass in order to save one's soul from damnation"? String him up, for that?) The claim that Judaism has "moral quandaries" is impossible to argue against, but suggesting that it's somehow special in this respect can't be done without ignoring all other human ideology, and then picking out one subsect to speak for a whole is like a willful rejection of all the tragicomedy of religious belief, Jewish belief in particular.

Please note that the Talmud is a record of historical debates, and therefore includes records of many positions which are advanced, considered, and then rejected. In ths case, Sanhedrin 59 is the section concerning Torah study and Gentiles, and the view that Gentiles should not study Torah is contested and rebutted - it goes on to say that "even a gentile who engages in Torah study is considered like a High Priest".

On a purely anecdotal level this has tracked with my experience with Jewish communities and synagogues - I mention the above passage in particular because I once discussed some of these questions (specifically the relation of Gentiles to Torah) with a few rabbis, brought up this dispute in the Talmud, and the response I got was a smiling rabbi saying, "Like you." I ended up attending a Torah study for a while and being part of a beit midrash.

Obviously synagogues vary widely in their level of welcome, but I bring this up just to have a contrary example present as well. There is tremendous internal debate within Judaism - even the link you provided above points to a record of debates about the status of Gentiles, and cites the very Gemara passage I mentioned above.

I think there's a tendency you get in many external critiques of religion that simply read a given sacred text, draw a lot of surface-level assumptions from it, and therefore conclude that either the religion is painfully anti-human and cruel, or that almost all practitioners of the religion are hypocrites. I'd suggest that it's often better to pay more attention to what is actually practiced - not that sacred texts don't matter, but those texts are held as part of interpretive communities. The history of the text's reception and interpretation, and then the way it is applied communally, are inseparable from its meaning.

What's the difference with the other monotheistic religions? Thinking others are destined to hell is worse than believing them to be less than a fully formed person. In any case it doesn't matter what people believe, only their actions matter.

The certainty all non-believers go to hell is not mainstream Christian belief. It was debated in the first century, and Catholics (eg) believe righteous non-believers may go to Heaven (yet the Church is the only certain, ordained, and expedient way of salvation). But it’s also different for another reason. A hypothetically hegemonic Catholicism allows anyone to be 100% Christian and 100% loved by God. A hypothetically hegemonic conservative Judaism excludes much of the world from ever being 100% loved by God, or Jewish in the eyes of religious authorities. So you’re cutting people off, excluding them purely based on DNA. That’s a huge zero day bug in the religion’s code that demands criticism and condemnation. How, in 2023, do we have a religion where the most important criterion is not what you do, or even what you believe, but your DNA? How can you really have a religion that says a child immediately adopted by a Jewish woman will never be loved by God?

The certainty all non-believers go to hell is not mainstream Christian belief.

Yes it is. It may not be fashionable in the biggest denominations today, but it is both the historic teaching of the Catholic Church and the current belief of many influential denominations.

"Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and to maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins" - Unam Sanctam: Bull of Pope Boniface VIII promulgated November 18, 1302

This statement meets all of the criteria outlined in The First Vatican Council for an ex-cathedra infallible teaching. The idea that, "righteous non-believers may go to Heaven (yet the Church is the only certain, ordained, and expedient way of salvation)," is modernist bullshit. Any orthodox Catholic prior to 1800 would have immediately recognized that proposition as heretical.

Someone who dies and is buried in a graveyard goes to the grave. But christians also say that he goes to heaven or hell. As far as I understand it, its impossible to go to two different places at the same time, so what gives? If that phrase is not to be taken literally, then they should start using a more sincere phrase to describe that notion, maybe like 'a copy of him is created in heaven/hell', or 'recreated in heaven/hell'.

Really?

Baptism of desire isn't something new or even controversial I assumed?

And yet, Protestants.

I'll add that, in my experience, I've heard this as a common Islamic criticism of Judaism as well. Islam is very clear that everybody is made good and beloved by God and is of equal intrinsic worth. God sent prophets to every nation, and everyone regardless of ethnicity or race or culture can become a Muslim and be saved. That door is always open, and sometimes I talk to Muslims about how they could never sympathise with Judaism because it excludes so much of humanity. Jews are no better and no worse than anyone else.

It makes for an interesting contrast with Christianity. In Islam, the history of Israel is in a sense unimportant. God sent prophets to all peoples to teach them his ways, and eventually summed up and collected them all in the Final Prophet. Israel is a historically relevant case of this happening, because it influenced so much of the rest of the Middle East, and provided cultural context for the final revelation, but it isn't theologically relevant, in any deep sense. We know the prophets of Israel well because they're described in detail in the Tanakh, but the prophets of Israel are not intrinsically any better than any other prophets.

For Christians, on the other hand, the history of Israel specifically does matter - Jesus is the messiah and king of Israel, the summation of that nation's history, but in a way that somehow 'breaks out' and expands to the entire world. The New Testament is full of quite painful wrestling with what this means, and how you get from Israel to the New Creation in which all are one in Christ. So Christianity still has to reckon with Israel in a way that Islam doesn't.

most of the stories in islam are plagiarized from judaism and most of the prophets mentioned in them are jewish prophets. for example, islam claims that the kibla shrine in mecca (holiest place in islam) was built by abraham, the father of the jewish people, even thought this is false and mohamed said this just to legitimize the place that was previously a pagan shrine.

Certainly Islam is very strongly influenced by Judaism and Christianity. The Qur'an is full of stories and references from the Hebrew scriptures.

What I want to argue is that as a theological category, Israel doesn't cause the sort of problems for Islam that it does for Christianity. Israel is relevant for Muhammad and early Islamic Arabia in a contingent, historical sense, but only in a contingent sense. God's covenant with Israel matters because it happens to have been a very influential one in the region, but that's all. The Final Revelation to Muhammad isn't dependent on the covenant with Israel.

That is, Israel is not special in Islam. It had a covenant with God and prophets sent from God, but so did every nation - see Qur'an 16:36 and 40:78.

This is not really the case in Judaism or in Christianity. In both of those traditions, you sometimes get the idea that God might have spoken or sent prophets to other nations to warn them, but this is relatively radical. Rather, both seem to take the view that God revealed himself only to Israel. That's why in Romans 1:18-21 Paul need to present an argument as to why the Gentiles are at fault for failing to recognise God. Likewise in the sermon in Acts 17, he invokes 'the times of human ignorance', suggesting that there was some period in which God was not known to the Gentiles, which might be a mitigating factor for their ignorance.

So Israel retains a central significance for them. For better or for worse, it was the place where God first made himself known to mankind, and everything proceeds from there.

That said, both Judaism and Christianity have the idea that in some sense Israel is supposed to illustrate or reveal God to the nations. As I understand it ancient Judaism was somewhat more 'evangelical' than modern Judaism, and allowed for actively going out and attempting to convince Gentiles to worship the God of Abraham, but even in modern Judaism, there is the idea that because of Israel's faithfulness all the nations will come to recognise and worship God. They will not become Jews, but they will know God.

Exactly how this will happen has been disputed. There are passages that you can read as implying a sort of empire, e.g. Deuteronomy 15:6, but that is not a common understanding now, and I believe now it's usually thought to be a sort of global moral influence, as in e.g. Exodus 19:6, with Israel as a 'kingdom of priests'. At any rate, there's the idea of Israel as a light on a hill - God using Israel as a vehicle for the salvation of the world.

What that would look like is, again, unclear, and sometimes it might be something left for the messiah, so all Jews need to do now is follow the mitzvot and live righteous lives, as good examples to the world. Sometimes I believe very liberal Jewish teachers have suggested that Jesus or Muhammad might have been means by which God made himself known beyond the Jewish people. That doesn't mean endorsing everything in Christianity or Islam, but prophets to the Gentiles, so to speak. That said that is a very liberal move. At any rate, I think the exact way it will work continues to be a matter of reasonable debate among Jews.

Christianity, at any rate, does think it knows how God used Israel for the salvation of the world. For Christians, Israel becomes a sort of prelude to Christ - it was, like John the Baptist, there to make straight the way. This does not indicate any special righteousness on behalf of the Jewish people, for all have sinned equally and fallen short of God's glory, but merely that this was the history that led up to Christ. Israel's relevance is subsumed within Christ's relevance. The old covenant with Israel is not negated - on the contrary, it is fulfilled - but it becomes part of the new covenant in Christ's body, which is for all people.

There's still massive debate within Christianity as to exactly how this works, and I won't rehearse arguments over supersessionism or dual covenant theology or anything else, but I think pretty much all Christians would hold that Jesus in some way fulfils the covenant with Israel or is the culmination of Israel's history, and inaugurates a new creation in which all people are saved.

So to broadly summarise:

Judaism: Israel is the community of the covenant, a people that God has chosen and reserved to himself out of all the world. We are those people and we must follow his commandments.

Christianity: Israel was a theologically important nation, the product of a covenant which led up to and was completed in Jesus, God's only Son. In Jesus all divisions between peoples and nations have been abolished. We are born to new life in Jesus and must carry this gospel to the nations.

Islam: Israel was a historically important nation, and one whose prophets are known particularly well to us and are especially dear to us. However, all nations received prophets, for God neglected none of his people. All revelations to all nations have been collected up and completed in the revelation to the final prophet, however, and it is this revelation that all people must now follow. We are the people of this final revelation and must issue this call to all people.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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