Why Let Anti-Semites Define Jewishness? Hanukkah reminds us how important it is to maintain our cultural and religious vitality. By Daniella Greenbaum Davis
“The Maccabees first made this case more than two millennia ago. When their physical war was over, they fought and won on the battlefield of ideas, re-educating their fellow Jews about what it means to be Jewish. Their success brought about a resurgence of Jewish national, religious and cultural strength. Their example can light our path today.”
For Hallmark consumers, Hanukkah is a familiar and uplifting story: A subjugated people (the Jews) rise up against their tyrannical oppressors (the Seleucid Greeks) and prevail against all odds with grit and God’s help. It’s a made-for-TV narrative. But it’s also incomplete.
Contrary to popular scripts, the war was primarily one between Jews and other Jews. The conflict saw a small group, the Maccabees, fighting to preserve their heritage and uniquely Jewish way of life against a much larger majority that had assimilated into the Hellenistic culture of the time. Recalling this more complete story offers a valuable lesson for American Jews celebrating Hanukkah next week.
Jews living in Jerusalem during the reign of Antiochus III (241-187 B.C.) led relatively secure lives. While the Greeks doubtless encouraged their Jewish counterparts to conform to their culture, they were also largely tolerant and respectful of Jewish particularism. In “The Antiquities of the Jews,” the Roman-Jewish scholar Flavius Josephus quotes a letter from Antiochus in which he declares that all Jews should be able to “live according to the laws of their own country.”
Yet by the time of the Maccabean Revolt only one generation later, Jews were increasingly embracing Greek culture and eroding their own. Such evolutions demonstrate the challenges that come with being different, even in societies that ostensibly tolerate difference.
We rarely focus on such challenges today. Instead, our attention is understandably directed toward the consequences of anti-Semitism. Consider that the global Jewish population in 1939 was nearly 17 million. The Nazis and their collaborators over the following six years murdered more than one-third of that population. Nearly 80 years later, Jews still haven’t regained their pre-Holocaust numbers.
This year, data from New York paint a grim picture. In November alone, the New York City Police Department reported 45 anti-Semitic crimes—an average of one incident every 16 hours. While Jews represent less than 20% of the city’s population, they accounted for 60% of all hate crimes in the city last month.
On a national scale, anti-Semitism is hard to miss, from synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., to celebrity rants lionizing Hitler. Responding to such hateful acts and intolerance is necessary. Yet in focusing almost exclusively on external threats, we risk rendering ourselves unprepared to embrace our particularism.
According to a May 2021 Pew survey, about a third of married American Jewish parents say they aren’t raising their kids to be Jewish. Fifty-seven percent of surveyed Christian adults rated religion as very important in their lives, compared with only 28% of Jews. Such attrition explains in large part why the Jews, who once made up 10% of the Roman Empire, account for less than 0.5% of all people living today.
Hanukkah provides the framework for how to take this immense darkness and channel it into light. Even the word Hanukkah (also spelled Chanukah)—which shares the same Hebrew root as the word “chinuch,” meaning “education”—offers an insight. The war at the center of its story is a microcosm of a much larger battle of ideas that, more than any political rebellion or physical war, is the true legacy of the Maccabees.
The Hellenist Jews living in the second century B.C. demonstrate what happens to minority communities when they lose their unique identity. While American Jews are rightly concerned with anti-Semitism across every slice of society, to allow anti-Semitism to define Judaism would be to hand the ultimate victory to those who wish Jews harm. If we prioritize finger-wagging at those who have wronged us—or encourage the Anti-Defamation League in grotesquely trading Jewish forgiveness for organizational donations—we shrink Jewish identity down to its most pathetic form: anti-anti-Semitism. In the 1990s, the Israeli academic Ze’ev Maghen, then a student at Columbia, argued that chronicling the sins of the anti-Semite was ineffective. The only way to fight anti-Semitism, he wrote, was to “promote that which the antisemite wants to crush: Jewish vitality.”
Mr. Maghen wrote these words three decades ago, but the idea is far older. The Maccabees first made this case more than two millennia ago. When their physical war was over, they fought and won on the battlefield of ideas, re-educating their fellow Jews about what it means to be Jewish. Their success brought about a resurgence of Jewish national, religious and cultural strength. Their example can light our path today.
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