The Atheist Roots of Modern Antisemitism
The rejection of biblical religion has seized the unbelieving minds of both cultural elites and populist agitators.
In a telling yet overlooked passage in Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — released in the revolutionary year of 1776 — we may discern the roots of antisemitism in the modern era.
Before explaining the rise of Christianity in the West, Gibbon, a British essayist and historian, traces the “intolerant zeal” of the Christian church to the Jews. Unlike the polytheistic faiths that accommodated themselves to Roman rule, he writes, the Jews insulted the “religious harmony” of the empire through their “jealous prejudices.” By this he means everything from Jewish dietary laws to their refusal to worship Caesar as a god.
In Gibbon’s reckoning, the “moderation” of Roman rule — allowing the Jews to practice their faith — should have produced a spirit of reciprocity. The children of Abraham “should have paid the same homage to the Jupiter of the Capitol” as to the God of the Hebrew Bible. Instead, Gibbon complains, “a single people refused to join in the common intercourse of mankind.”
Yet his complaint goes deeper still. The “inflexible perseverance” of the Jews in holding fast to the teachings of Moses, including a belief in God’s miraculous interventions on their behalf, made them appear both “odious” and “ridiculous” to the ancient world.
In this, Gibbon reveals his own “jealous prejudices.” The self-styled “objective” historian dismisses the supernatural elements of Jewish belief as a “contradiction to every known principle of the human mind.” Here, on naked display, is the emotional outlook of the 18th-century European Enlightenment: Reason has displaced Revelation as the organizing principle of human life.
There are many causes for the outbreak of antisemitism in the United States, but the most important reason has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with religion: the rejection of biblical religion that has seized the unbelieving minds of both cultural elites and populist agitators.
Like Gibbon, many of today’s antisemites are animated by a militant secularism. Like Gibbon, their materialism blinds them to the fact that it was the Jewish people who introduced into the ancient world the ideas that made possible the most humane and prosperous civilization in world history.
The Hebrew belief in one God — a Creator who fashioned men and women in his image — has provided the strongest foundation for human dignity ever devised. The universal moral laws embedded in the Ten Commandments formed the basis for the entire Western legal tradition. The concept of the Hebraic covenant with God demolished the determinism of the pagan world and insisted on the reality and significance of individual human agency.
When he wrote Decline and Fall, Gibbon had effectively abandoned any attachment to religious belief. Despite his wide reading in history and philosophy, his knowledge of the Bible was decidedly murky.
Colonial Americans, by contrast, were overwhelmingly Protestant: Regardless of their denomination, they knew their Bible. Jew hatred could be a problem in the Protestant nations of Europe, and it was a deep stain on the Catholic Church through most of its history. But the uniquely Protestant culture of colonial America — with its maturing concept of religious freedom — helped to inoculate the early republic against the disease of antisemitism.
The earliest Puritan settlers established a “covenant” with one another modeled on the covenantal theology of the Hebrew Bible. Explains Gabriel Sivan in The Bible and Civilization: “No Christian community in history identified more with the People of the Book than did the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed their own lives to be a literal reenactment of the Biblical drama of the Hebrew nation.”
Colonial ministers during the Revolution routinely compared the struggle for independence with the biblical story of Exodus, in which the Jews escaped the slavery of an Egyptian tyrant and found freedom in the Promised Land. The inscription on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, of course, is taken from Leviticus 25:10: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
Thus, by the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the idea of Jewish Americans as equal citizens in the new republic was firmly established.
In Philadelphia’s July 4, 1788, parade — the first to celebrate the ratification of the Constitution — Jews were an integral part of the procession. “The Rabbi of the Jews locked in the arms of two ministers of the gospel was a most delightful sight,” recalled Benjamin Rush, a chief surgeon in the Continental Army. Here, Rush observed, was the civic expression of the Constitution’s commitment to religious liberty, “which opens all its power and offices alike not only to . . . Christians but to worthy men of every religion.”
In no other political regime in the world would Jews have encountered such a display of spiritual solidarity and political equality.
The reason for this, of course, is that educated Americans — with the Bible as their primary textbook — understood their debt to the Hebrew nation. It is expressed repeatedly in the political documents and sermons of the era. John Adams described the gift of the Jews to Western civilization in eloquent terms:
I will insist that the Hebrews have contributed more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.
Adams had read and absorbed Gibbon’s work, exchanging letters with Thomas Jefferson about its strengths and weaknesses. In measuring the achievements of the Jews alongside those of ancient Rome, he delivered the definitive slap-down to Gibbon. “They [the Jews] are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this earth. The Romans and their empire were but a bubble in comparison to the Jews.”
In Gibbon’s dreary account, the Jews made no contribution to the history of Western civilization. His Enlightenment cynicism — his practical atheism — led him into darkness. The “sullen obstinancy” of the Jews in attempting to preserve their religious identity, he writes, “seemed to mark them out as a distinct species of men, who boldly professed, or who faintly disguised their implacable hatred to the rest of mankind.”
The Jews as the haters of all mankind? Here, in the 18th century — the age of “enlightenment” — is antisemitism undisguised. We’ll encounter it again in the 20th century, when the idolization of reason — severed from biblical religion — unleashes unspeakable horrors. The Jew is “the evil enemy of mankind,” declares Adolf Hitler, who “drags everything that is truly great into the gutter.”
The appalling surge in high-profile attacks against Jews has no precedent in American history. For the first time in their existence, synagogues and Jewish community centers cannot operate without armed guards and high-level security measures. One of the most successful and thoroughly integrated immigrant populations now lives in a climate of anxiety, fear, and racial hatred.
Here is the logical endpoint of the atheist delusion: that human dignity and morality can be sustained without any reference to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For nearly 4,000 years, the Jews have insisted otherwise, and history — the history of the 20th century — has vindicated that belief. Herein lies the source of Jewish exceptionalism: By standing up for transcendent truth, they stand in the way of the racists, the relativists, the advocates of the will to power.
“Jews owe an immense debt to America, which has been for them an incomparably generous and welcoming land,” writes Stuart Halpern in Jewish Roots of American Liberty. “But it is equally true that America owes a profound and incalculable debt to the Jews . . . Without God’s election of the Jews, the Biblical understanding of human life would never have come into being.”
Hatred of the Jews is a symptom of a civilization in crisis. If there is a path out of this crisis, it will be led by people who know their Bible.
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Joseph Loconte, PhD, is director of the Rivendell Center in New York City and serves as a presidential scholar at New College of Florida and as the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. His most recent book is The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945.
