Thou Art The Man

Christianity and Antisemitism, Hermeneutics and Method

The Prophet Nathan Rebukes King David, by Palma Il Giovane, Jacopo, the Younger (1544-1628)

While attending a recent conference on antisemitism, one of the attendees—an excellent conventional historian by all accounts—made a remark to another that if we wish to actually understand antisemitism, we must read the Gospel, that eternal fountain of anti-Jewish hatred. This is, of course, a common idea among many secular moderns. The idea is rather simple and has much compelling power, much explanatory force, as well as historical support behind it. Modern antisemitism, on this reading, can be explained as the persistence of irrationalist and theological modes of thinking that refuse to die, that remain embedded in the Western psyche like an ancient curse that no amount of Enlightenment can lift.

It is, however, an idea with which I slightly agree but mostly deeply disagree. In most of its versions, it is often not the explanation of modern antisemitic logic but rather a continuation of that logic itself, dressed up in the respectable garb of historical criticism. Some readers complained that I always object to the idea but never explain why—an objection for which I thank them. Out of respect to them (for anything not relational, personal, and concrete is useless), I set aside the exhaustion of someone who has been thinking too long about this in the company of bad explanations, and I write this essay and leave it open access to all.

As usual, I can never go straight into a matter. I must digress, take detours, survey lands, and go in circles in the Sinai before—I hope—I deliver my reader to where the milk and honey are waiting. There is no straight path to anything meaningful, or rather, the straight path reveals itself only after the wandering. What appears at first as procrastination or circuitousness is in fact the only honest way I know forward when dealing with matters that touch the nerve of both history and theology, of ancient text and our lives.

A Necessary Warning to the Reader Who Seeks Usefulness

My first point, and I must make it clear before we venture further, is that in what follows I have absolutely nothing useful to say. I am not making the usual protestation that I will work as hard as possible to offer truthful and good things—no, I mean something more radical and more honest. I mean there will be nothing use-ful here, nothing that can be used as an instrument to obtain other things, to win arguments, to defeat enemies, to advance causes. The reader who comes seeking useful ammunition will find only empty cartridges, and I wish to save such a reader the arduous journey through this arid desert in search of that which I do not possess. We are leaving Elim and heading to the heart of the brutal Sinai desert, to the wilderness of Sin. Those who do not wish to follow, those who are already murmuring about the water and the flesh pots, may head instead to the Red Sea coast, which offers many delightful and enjoyable sea resorts in the best traditions of Egyptian hospitality—packaged tours, excursions, and beautiful beaches where one never strays far from the hotel and its many flesh pots and non-halal—I assure you—bar.

This has been a great pain in my life and the source of much anxiety. It took me a long time to understand it fully myself. People come to me, it seems, expecting to find a gladiator on whom they can place their bets and send into their fights. At least that is the impression I have gathered over time. But gradually it became clear—at least to me, if to no one else—that I actually know nothing of the gladiating business. I am not a gladiator. There are many gladiators on behalf of every cause today. These are men much stronger, much more capable than I am, men with the constitution for combat. (Many other non-gladiators just seek to sit in the management booth, to help manage the spectacle, to make sure it is sustainable and profitable, and runs according to proper procedures. I’m not that either.) I am simply too weak, too frail, too unhardened to be a gladiator, even though I keep showing up in the arena. The truth is, I came out of curiosity like everyone else, since the entire town is empty and everyone has crowded into the colosseum. Some people, thankfully, innocently and mistakenly, have bet on me. I do not know how I will earn my living the day everyone discovers I am not actually on the roster.

To put it another way: my problem is that I worked so hard all my life to enter the marketplace of ideas, only to discover upon arrival that I have nothing useful to sell. I have only an empty stall from which I heckle all the other vendors who actually have stock, telling passersby that they are being robbed.

To illuminate my point, I was recently invited to an exclusive conference about antisemitism. The organizers expected me to give an enlightening presentation on the challenges we face with the rise of neo-Islamism in the West. Instead, to their evident horror, I gave a presentation on post-Enlightenment moral thinking. Another time, an Arab statesman asked me for a recommendation on how to counter Islamism in his country. I handed him a short paper on Aristotle.

In summary, I have nothing useful to offer but perhaps to edify you with occasional exquisite writing and felicitous turns of phrase, and to lead you through a landscape of thought that has no immediate application to the crises of our day. The readers who are fine with this—who perhaps suspect that the useless is precisely what we most need—are encouraged to continue.

Fair warning: what is to come will necessarily be an impossible task. We must talk about history, theology, philosophy, society, culture, politics, and many other things all together, all at once, without the luxury of separating them. This is going to be difficult—difficult for me to write, difficult for you to read, and difficult for both of us to hold in our minds simultaneously. Antisemitism, if it is anything, is precisely the point where all domains collapse into one another, where the theological becomes political, where the philosophical shapes the cultural, where history refuses to stay in the past. Separation is a delusion! Despite being falsehood itself, it is a mirror that strips naked all our conceits and falsehoods.

So I must ask for your patience and perhaps your forgiveness in advance. What follows will not stay in its lane.

Now, to turn to the issue at hand—at least before we turn away from it again—a quick word must be said about David Nirenberg’s much-celebrated work, Anti-Judaism. The book is well written, well organized, and the reader will undoubtedly find in it many good and true things, all characteristics that guarantee good reception and wide readership in our present age. In the book, one finds the most liberal version—in the sense of being tamed, defanged, inoffensive, and made safe for polite company—of the gospel-equals-Jew-hatred idea. It is explained in a thoroughly non-accusatory way that essentially blames the issue on the uncontrollable chaos of history with its unintended consequences and developments, as if antisemitism were merely an unfortunate accident of intellectual evolution, a regrettable side effect of the otherwise reasonable structure of history.

Thus, I find the book utterly uninteresting, with perhaps the sole exception of his positing of anti-Judaism as a way of thinking—a category error, one might say, that became a habit of mind. But this insight could have been said in an email. The idea of Christianity being the culprit is not new and has only been made boring by making it liberal and safe, by stripping it of the scandal it ought to provoke. As a matter of fact, the book is nothing if not the poor man’s Edward Said, a liberal Jewish riff on Orientalism, yet it lacks the audacity, the uncompromising cruelty, and the genuine novelty of the original. Said, a true gladiator, at least had the courage to accuse, to name names, to refuse the comfort of historical inevitability. The man was a good and exciting performer. Nirenberg gives us antisemitism as a regrettable misunderstanding rather than a crime, as an intellectual tradition rather than a betrayal of humanity.

All of these things make it uninteresting to me, though I will likely have to write an extensive review out of respect for the many people who like it and who have recommended it to me with genuine enthusiasm. But for now, let us say only this: a thesis that makes everyone comfortable is probably not telling us anything we truly need to hear. That is why liberalism taken seriously, not just instrumentally as it should be, is the death of heart, soul, and mind.

I want to start by putting forth my diagnosis before I deconstruct and reconstruct my thoughts about such a grave issue: this idea itself—that Christianity is the origin and cause of antisemitism, that we are dealing with 2000 years of unbroken hatred flowing from a poisoned source—is itself a product of the very modern logic that produces antisemitism to begin with.

Let me be more precise. The way we read for antisemitism in Christian texts is the application of the same antisemitic method of reading itself. The diagnostic lens itself is infected. It is a reading of the Gospels as a crime scene in precisely the way the antisemite reads the Talmud as a dark basement where conspiracies are hatched. Both approaches share the same modern hermeneutic of pathological humanistic suspicion (The reader is strongly encouraged to read my earlier essay on the issue of modern suspicion), the same conviction that the text before us is fundamentally poisonous, that its authors were animated by tribal hatred, that its continued existence poses a danger to humanity. (Reading for power, for interest, for pathology.) The complete irreverence of this humanistic reading, its casual attitude toward the fact that we are discussing the most important issues, is nothing but the hallmark of our modern irony and flippancy, our ability to treat the sacred as mere historical asset to be used, to reduce all to ideology.

And here I must be more precise, perhaps at the risk of seeming tautological. I am not merely saying that when a historian reads the Gospel as the founding ideological document of antisemitism, he employs an antisemitic logic. I mean something deeper, that when the Christian antisemite himself turns to the Gospel to justify his hatred, he too reads antisemitically. He subjects the text to the same hermeneutic he applies to Judaism, the reduction of revelation to ideology, of divine word to tribal interest, of biblical anthropology to the pathology of a group. Antisemitism reads Christianity—and Islam, for that matter—antisemitically.

Modern antisemitism depends on this mode of reading, the flattening of the theological into the sociological, the translation of vertical relation into horizontal conflict. It is not simply hatred of Jews but a habit of interpretation, a grammar of suspicion, a way of making all meaning tribal and all transcendence political. In this sense, antisemitism is not only a hatred but an epistemology—a way of reading the world that ensures its own necessity. Jew hatred, and by virtue of being the hatred of the people of the Book, is fundamentally a very particular, critical way to read texts. It is a modern way, and it is fundamentally and categorically different, yet not unrelated, from Christian anti-Judaism, which developed a certain anti-Jewish mode of reading.

But I am not merely describing a “way of thinking” or an intellectual tradition that can be traced and analyzed as such—this would put me at too close a distance to Said and surrogate Nairnberg than I would like. (I still find it astonishing that one could write an entire book about books without differentiating between the different ways different texts are read.) I am pointing to something more fundamental: a theological transformation, or rather an anti- and post-theological condition, in which the mediating structures of texts have collapsed entirely. What emerges in their place is not simply a new discourse about Jews, but a world in which all reading becomes horizontal, all judgment becomes comparative, all identity becomes oppositional. The question is not how we learned to read this way, as if it were merely an intellectual habit we could unlearn. The question is: what world makes this the only way we can read?

This presents us with two intertwined tasks. First, we must understand how our framework for understanding antisemitism, our critical way of reading, is itself born from the same modern logic that produces antisemitism. Second, we must then turn to antisemitism itself—to ask what it actually is, where it comes from, how it operates, which will necessitate us understanding and differentiating traditional religious anti-Jewish hatred. These are codependent problems. We cannot understand what antisemitism is without first understanding the framework through which we ask the question. And we cannot escape that framework without understanding how antisemitism functions within it. The diagnosis is a mere extension of the disease. This is why a long journey in the desert is necessary. We cannot simply argue our way out; we must lose ourselves to stumble our way out.

Moreover, this complicates my task immensely, for I must address minds—including my own—that are entirely engulfed by a self-enforcing, self-perpetuating, self-pleasuring, and self-inseminating modern logic. The logic of identity politics runs through and through here, in which the identity of Christianity is understood to be negative Judaism and Judaism as negative Christianity. Pure difference with no content, each defined only by what it opposes, locked in an eternal dance of mutual negation. Escaping this logic requires not just new arguments but a different mode of reading entirely.

None of this is to deny the reality of Christian hatred, persecution, and theological hostility toward Jews across centuries. These are facts that must not be denied. The grotesque episodic violence of medieval Europe was real; blood libel and forced disputation were real; the long history of degradation and expulsion was real. I am not here to minimize or excuse any of it. But acknowledging these historical realities does not settle the questions before us.

Two questions remain, both essential: First, are these theological attitudes foundational to Christian theology itself? Is anti-Judaism structurally necessary to Christianity as such? Second, are these attitudes the origins of modern antisemitism? Is there a direct line of causation, or are we dealing with something more complex—perhaps even a rupture disguised as continuity?

To answer the first question, we must turn to the texts—Christian texts, yes, but also other texts, Jewish texts, prophetic texts—and I must try to force the reader (and myself) to leave the straitjacket that is the modern mind in order to understand religion for what it is rather than what our age has made of it. This is a task at which, if the Lutherans are right about the bondage of the will, I am inevitably bound to fail.

For the second question, we must look carefully at the nature of Christian hostility toward Jews and Judaism, then at modern antisemitism, and determine the precise nature of their relationship. Are we dealing with continuity or rupture? Cause and effect, or two different species of hatred that merely share a name and some surface features?

Other questions must also be acknowledged, even if I do not plan to dwell on it at length: Did Christianity produce theological structures that have contributed to the rise of antisemitism—structures such as replacement theology, supersessionism, and the various doctrines of Jewish reprobation? The answer is obviously yes, and there are Christians constructing such systems anew as we speak. But here we must be careful about what we mean by “produce.” Producing a theological system is not the same as generating one from texts through logical necessity, as if the conclusions flowed inevitably from scriptural premises. Rather, it is most often the organization of texts to justify and elaborate a theological system one has already decided upon, based on needs and inclinations that have been predetermined by extra-textual factors—by political circumstance, immediate theological context, social struggle, economic competition, the requirements of institutional power. The texts are made to speak what the system requires them to say. This is not unique to Christianity or to antisemitism; it is how theological systems generally work, which is why the same scriptures can generate radically different theologies depending on who is reading them and what they need them to do.

I commit here to try to answer these questions sincerely without offering an apology for Christianity, for Christianity is a human institution and therefore filled with all that Genesis said of human work: “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Man’s evil needs no defender.

Critique From Below or Above? The Religious Error

Now, before I begin—and the reader must have noticed by now how often I must begin before I begin, how many times I announce a start only to delay it further—I want to assure the dear reader who has indeed persevered with me thus far that I do not intend to address all the questions above in full. That would require methodical and systematic treatment well beyond the scope of a Substack essay, even one as long as mine tends to become. I intend instead to make my point quickly and easily, which is to say: I intend to make it in the only way I know how, which is neither quickly nor easily, but through a series of observations and detours that I hope will converge on something like clarity. The systematic treatment will have to wait for someone with more patience and discipline than I possess. What I offer here is more modest: a way of seeing the problem that might make the usual answers seem less satisfying, and the usual questions seem less well-formed, less informed, and indeed misinformed. Moreover, the problem is almost impossible to exhaust or analyze satisfactorily because it is the continuous accumulation of errors folded into one another.

First, I must commend those who insist on the religious question for actually insisting on the right thing. The centrality of the Jews, both for ill and for good, in the culture and history of primarily post-Christian and post-Muslim nations is indeed the consequence of the centrality of the Jews to our religious history. Anyone who does not start with this point is wasting your time. This is the reason that the Jews and their questions are often issues of utmost importance, touching directly our theology, philosophy, high culture, intellectual development, and politics—not small things. Insofar as the world has been shaped to a great degree by the monumental legacies of Christianity and Islam, our world is Jewish, and this is a point that, no matter how much both the antisemite and the exhausted Jew might wish otherwise, cannot be escaped. The attempt to secularize the Jewish question, to make it merely political or economic or sociological, is always a failure because it misses the essential thing: that the question of the Jews is inseparable from the fundamental question of meaning. To crystallize the formula of our most consequential modern thinkers, from Hegel to Edward Said, it is either Judaism or humanism.

When turning to the founding texts of the Christian relationship to Jews, we would do well to understand that this inquiry should not be restricted to the New Testament. As a matter of fact, we must start from the Hebrew Bible itself, which is one of the most anti-Jewish documents in history (not exactly, but you will see what I mean) and the ur-text of all later critiques of Jews and Judaism. Much of what is polemical and devastating against Jews, both in the New Testament and the Quran, is essentially reproduced. Tanakh themes, motifs, and formulas.

According to the Tanakh, the Jews are “a foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but see not, who have ears but hear not” (Jeremiah 5:21). They “hear but do not understand” and though they see, they “do not perceive” (Isaiah 6:9-10). They are a “stiff-necked people” (Exodus 32:9), “impudent and stubborn” (Ezekiel 2:4), a “rebellious house” that refuses to listen (Ezekiel 2:5-8). They are so “laden with iniquity,” so persistently unfaithful—playing the whore, acting as a prostitute with every passing stranger (Ezekiel 16, Hosea)—that God Himself declares “you are not my people” (Hosea 1:9). He says “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21). They are children who have rebelled against Him (Isaiah 1:2), a people who “honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me” (Isaiah 29:13). They have killed the prophets and stoned those sent to them (1 Kings 19:10, Nehemiah 9:26, 2 Chronicles 36:15-16). Their prophets are false, their priests teach for hire, their leaders judge for a bribe (Micah 3:11). They trust in “deceptive words” while standing in the temple crying “This is the temple of the Lord!” even as they commit abominations (Jeremiah 7:4-10). They have broken the covenant, again and again, and so God promises to scatter them among the nations, to make them a horror and a curse (Ezekiel 36:20, Deuteronomy 28:64).

Now, I do not know of any other text from antiquity that produced such a penetrating, sustained, unsparing, and devastating critique of any nation, friend or foe, let alone one’s own nation. Not only is the condemnation comprehensive, touching every aspect of national life from rabbis to commerce to kingship, but it is done with unparalleled insight into human psychology, desire, rationality, and social constitution. It spares nothing and leaves nothing unjudged. The prophets understand the human heart with a precision that makes modern psychology look like amateur hour. They see through every self-justification, every pious pretense, every claim to righteousness. They know how Israel lies to themselves, how they perform devotion while their hearts pursue other lovers, how they can stand in the temple and commit murder in the same breath. The New Testament and the Quran, as a matter of fact, are mild texts in comparison; however harsh they may seem to modern ears, they are essentially recapitulating, echoing, and applying what has already been said with far greater force in the Hebrew prophets.

Let us see some examples of this recapitulation. When Jesus calls the Pharisees “blind guides” (Matthew 23:16), when he accuses them of being “whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matthew 23:27), he is not inventing new insults—he is repeating Ezekiel’s condemnation of Israel’s false prophets and leaders. When he says “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:8), he is directly quoting Isaiah 29:13. When he weeps over Jerusalem, crying “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” (Matthew 23:37), he is summarizing the entire prophetic tradition. When he tells the parable of the tenants who kill the son (Matthew 21:33-41), he is retelling Isaiah’s parable of the vineyard (Isaiah 5:1-7) with only slight modification.

Paul does the same. When he writes that Israel has a “spirit of stupor, eyes that do not see and ears that do not hear” (Romans 11:8), he is quoting directly from Deuteronomy 29:4 and Isaiah 29:10. When he speaks of Israel’s hardening (Romans 11:25), of their stumbling (Romans 9:32-33), of their pursuing righteousness through law rather than faith (Romans 9:31-32), he is working entirely within the prophetic vocabulary of Israel’s own self-critique. His harshest statements about Jews—and they are harsh—are all echoes, citations, applications of what the prophets already said.

The Quran continues this same tradition. When it accuses the Jews of killing the prophets (Quran 2:61, 2:87, 3:21, 3:112, 3:181), of breaking their covenant (5:13), of having hearts that are hardened (2:74, 5:13), of saying “our hearts are wrapped” or “uncircumcised” (2:88, 4:155), of corrupting scripture (2:75, 4:46, 5:13, 5:41), it is not manufacturing new charges but repeating what the Hebrew Bible itself declares. The Quran’s critique of the Jews is, in this sense, a Muslim commentary on the Jewish prophetic tradition.

In short, our real problem starts with Jewish scripture. If Christianity and Islam are to be blamed, then they can be blamed insofar as they universalized these texts beyond Jews, but not for inventing them, which even gets more complicated if we consider the fact that Christian texts started as intra-Jewish documents, internal disputations. The critique was already in Tanakh, devastating and complete, before the first Christian or Muslim opened his mouth. What to do with this? Where to go from here?

The obvious move, which I expect from any intelligent and smooth modern reader, is to say that these Hebrew Bible texts constituted self-critique and not texts of external domination by others. Self-authored and thus legitimate. When they become external texts, as they became external documents in Christian and Muslim appropriation, they become illegitimate. It is a very intelligent objection and has important truths in it, but I am afraid it is false. If we are to take serious things seriously, then we must stop playing games, tricks, and sleights of hand. If we are to understand these texts, we must not treat them as objects of our will to dominate them but enter into a respectful relationship with them, taking them on their own terms. (The reader is encouraged to read my thoughts here on knowledge and reading.)

What the texts of the Torah and the Hebrew Bible claimed for themselves, and what they were claimed to be by the overwhelming majority of Jews across generations, is that they were, in fact, external texts, transcendental, written from the outside—which is the only thing that makes them legitimate. (This is the origin of our postmodern sanctification of outsiderness, marginality, and externality.)

The external source, however—the source that transcends the Jewish position itself—was not understood to be immanent but transcendent. The texts were legitimate because they had a divine source. They were not a self-critique, which is a distortion produced by our own blindness living in the narcissistic age of the self, but divine critique. The Jews were indeed being judged from the outside, but from God, not from critical intellectuals or neighboring peoples or imperial powers. This changes everything.

Divine Critique Between The Vertical and the Horizontal

To understand what divine critique is—and why it matters that these texts claimed divine authorship rather than human self-reflection—we must understand the difference between vertical and horizontal judgment, between transcendent critique and immanent critique.

Horizontal critique is the critique of equals, or at least the critique that operates on the same plane. It is one nation judging another, one group condemning another group, one tradition criticizing a rival tradition. It operates through comparison: we are better than them, more moral than them, more enlightened than them. It is necessarily competitive, necessarily oppositional. For me to judge you horizontally, I must position myself as your superior, or at least as standing outside your failures. The critic and the criticized face each other across a divide, and the very act of criticism creates and reinforces that divide. This is the logic of identity politics, of us versus them, of pure difference with no content. Each side is defined by what it opposes.

Vertical critique is something entirely different. It is the critique that comes from above, from a position that transcends both critic and criticized. In the biblical framework, this means divine judgment—God’s word spoken through the prophets to His people. But here is the crucial point: vertical critique does not create division between peoples; it creates division within each person. It does not say “you are worse than us” but “you are worse than you ought to be,” and more devastatingly, “you are worse than you know yourself to be.” The vertical cuts through all horizontal distinctions. Before God’s judgment, there is no “us and them”—there is only “we who stand accused.”

This is why the prophetic critique of Israel in the Hebrew Bible is so psychologically penetrating, so total in its condemnation, and yet so different from ethnic hatred. The prophets are not comparing Israel to other nations and finding Israel wanting. They are holding Israel to the standard of the covenant, to what God has revealed, to what Israel itself claims to be. When Amos thunders against Israel’s injustice, when Isaiah condemns their empty worship, when Jeremiah weeps over their idolatry, they are not speaking as outsiders looking in. They are speaking as those who stand within the covenant, under the same judgment, subject to the same God. The prophet himself is implicated. Jeremiah does not escape judgment by pronouncing it; Isaiah sees his own unclean lips when he encounters the Holy One; Ezekiel is commanded to bear the sins of Israel on his own body.

And here is what makes vertical critique so dangerous, so impossible to domesticate: it always circles back. It cannot be safely externalized. Yet this is exactly what every one of our three religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—insists on doing. As a matter of fact, I would say that domesticating and externalizing the critique is not an occasional failure of religion but one of its fundamental tasks. Religion exists, in large part, to make divine judgment bearable.

Every revelation that enters history is immediately surrounded by interpretation, ritual, and institution. These are necessary—there is no transmission without institutions, no continuity without structure. The word must be preserved, taught, and passed down. But these very necessities become the means by which the word of judgment is rendered bearable, which is to say, defanged. Religion is humanity’s way of surviving proximity to God. Yet survival breeds distance, and distance breeds illusion. The prophetic word, which was meant to cut through every pretense and expose the heart, is gradually domesticated into a mark of belonging, a badge of identity. What began as “Thou art the man” becomes “We are the people”—and the unspoken corollary follows inevitably: “We are the people to whom judgment does not apply.” (Ironically, the Quran reproduces this criticism of Jews almost verbatim, and Muslims loved it so much they ended up producing an infinitely more radical version of the feeling of exemption.)

Thus, the very structures that once mediated grace become the means of insulating oneself from it. The temple, the ritual, the correct doctrine, the proper genealogy—all of these were meant to point beyond themselves, to create the conditions for encounter with the living God. But they become, almost inevitably, substitutes for that encounter. They become the proof that we are already right with God, that we have already arrived, that the judgment pronounced in scripture is meant for others. The vertical collapses into the horizontal.

This is not an error unique to Christianity and Islam, as if they corrupted an originally pure Judaism. It is, ironically, precisely what the prophets condemned in Israel itself. The temple itself became an idol; the covenant itself became an excuse for complacency. Sacrifice became a disguise for injustice and infidelity. “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Isaiah 29:13). The prophet’s entire work consists in showing that having the right forms, the right lineage, the right words, means nothing if the heart is far. And yet this is the one lesson that cannot be learned permanently. It must be relearned in every generation because the capacity for perverting revelation into privilege is the perpetual shadow of election. It is not an accident; it is the structure of the thing itself.

Most of religion, we might say, is religious self-deception. This is why the prophets keep having to say the same thing over and over. This is why Jesus must tell the Pharisees what Isaiah already told Israel. Not because the previous revelation was unclear, but because we have perfected the art of not hearing. Religion gives us the tools to not hear with great sophistication, to be deaf with impeccable credentials.

Though Art The Man

But this original text itself, the Hebrew Bible, did not leave us with catastrophic critique and no way forward. It gave us the solution. It gave us the hermeneutic key to how to read it without creating religious disasters, without turning divine judgment into tribal weapon. The key is found in one of the most devastating moments in all of scripture: the story of Nathan and David.

To recount the background quickly: King David, God’s anointed messiah, the pious king of Israel, the man after God’s own heart, lusted after a woman married to one of his most loyal soldiers. He slept with her while the man was away at war. When she became pregnant, David arranged to have the husband killed in battle to cover his crime. Lust, conspiracy, adultery, betrayal, murder—how low can the men of God fall? How treacherous can the heart of Israel be? God did not take this well. He sent the prophet Nathan to confront the king.

The passage is worth quoting in full:

And the Lord sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man’s lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him. And David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die: And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity. And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. (2 Samuel 12:1-7)

Thou art the man.

Three words that turn the world inside out. David had just pronounced judgment—righteous judgment, harsh judgment, judgment filled with moral clarity and fury. He knew exactly what should be done with such a villain. He saw the crime clearly, named it accurately, demanded justice proportionate to the offense. And then: Thou art the man. The judge is the judged. The one who sees clearly is the one who is blind. The one pronouncing sentence stands condemned by his own words.

This is the hermeneutic key. This is how divine critique is meant to work. Nathan does not begin by accusing David directly. He does not say “You have sinned, you have murdered, you have committed adultery.” If he had, David’s defenses would have risen immediately—rationalizations, justifications, the powerful man’s ability to rewrite his own story. Instead, Nathan provides David with a text—a story, a parable—and asks him to read it. He asks him to judge it. And David does read it. He reads it well, in fact. His moral sense is aroused; his sense of justice burns. He sees the evil clearly, names it rightly, pronounces fitting judgment. He is a good reader when the text is about someone else.

But it turns out that the text he was reading was God’s word that was reading him. The story he thought he was judging from a position of safety and distance was actually a story judging him. He thought he was the reader; he was the one being read. He thought he was the judge; he was standing trial. The parable that seemed to be about other people, about a case he could decide from his throne, was a mirror held up to his own face. This is the structure of all true reading of scripture: we think we are reading about them—those Jews, those Pharisees, those sinners, those stiff-necked people—and then comes the prophetic word: Thou art the man.

The prophetic word, then, must do two things simultaneously: it must awaken our moral sense by showing us evil clearly, and then it must turn that awakened sense back upon ourselves. It must make us judge ourselves by our own standards. This is “Thou art the man”—not God pronouncing an arbitrary judgment from outside, but our own judgment circling back to strike us. We condemn ourselves out of our own mouths. (It really is magic how it works.)

This is why the harshest critiques in the Hebrew Bible are not antisemitic, why they cannot be read as establishing Jewish evil as an ontological category. They are not descriptions of a people observed from outside. They are prophetic words meant to produce self-recognition, to break through the defenses that keep us from seeing ourselves as we are. When Isaiah pronounces woe upon the nation, when Jeremiah weeps over their faithlessness, when Ezekiel catalogues their abominations, the purpose is not to establish that “those people are wicked” but to make the hearer say “I am the man.” I am the stiff-necked one. I am the one with eyes that do not see. I am the one who honors God with lips while my heart is far from him.

And here is the crucial point, the one on which everything turns: this structure only works within a framework of covenant, of relationship, of shared standing before God. Nathan can say “Thou art the man” to David because they stand together under divine judgment. The prophet is not exempt; he too is a sinner. David is not Other; he is brother, king, fellow member of the covenant people. The prophetic word cuts both ways because prophet and king both stand on the same ground—under God’s judgment, under God’s mercy, under God’s unbreakable promise.

Here we come to what is likely the most unsettling and disturbing prospect of all of this. How realistic is “Thou art the man” if at all? Let us continue the story of David:

Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul; And I gave thee thy master’s house, and thy master’s wives into thy bosom, and gave thee the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would moreover have given unto thee such and such things. Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house; because thou hast despised me, and hast taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife. Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun. For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun. And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said unto David, The Lord also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die. (2 Samuel 12:7-13)

“I have sinned against the Lord.” Five words. David hears “Thou art the man” and responds with immediate recognition, immediate confession. He could have identified against the man, but he identified with him. No excuses, no justifications, no elaborate self-defense. The king who commanded armies, who could have killed the prophet where he stood, who had already demonstrated his willingness to murder to protect his reputation—this king simply says: I have sinned.

This is the miracle. I am the man. I have sinned. The recognition is immediate, the confession complete. And immediately, grace: “The Lord also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die.”

So uncommon, so impossible, so miraculous is such a confession that the cornerstone belief of Martin Luther—the belief around which he staged his entire Reformation against the Catholic Church—was exactly the dogma that this kind of recognition is virtually impossible, that it cannot be anything but a miracle. He elaborated this conviction in his most important theological work, The Bondage of the Will. The human will, Luther argued, is so bound, so curved in upon itself, so incapable of seeing its own evil, that genuine self-recognition before God requires divine intervention. (That, metaphorically speaking, God raids your own heart like the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago) We cannot say “I am the man” on our own. We cannot turn the judgment upon ourselves. We need grace even to confess. (Ironically, Luther himself then went on to produce texts about “the man over there”—demonstrating that even the great theologian of human bondage could not escape the very bondage he diagnosed.)

If this is so—if it takes a miracle to utter the five words “I have sinned,” if “Thou art the man” almost never produces the response it should—should we even let people read these texts? That is indeed a sober, modest question, one that is much more fruitful and much more realistic than most of the misinformed discussions about the antisemitism of texts. If even David—God’s anointed—needed the parable’s mirror to see himself, what hope for the rest of us without divine raid? If the proper reading of these texts requires grace, if without that grace they become weapons rather than mirrors, if history shows us that they are almost always weaponized, then perhaps the texts themselves are dangerous. Perhaps they should be handled with extreme care, read only within certain contexts, hedged about with warnings and interpretive controls.

And more fundamentally, the question itself contains a deep irony: Who would decide who gets to read them? Who has the standing to say “You may read this, but you may not”? The moment we appoint ourselves gatekeepers of the text, we have already failed to hear “Thou art the man.” We have already positioned ourselves outside the judgment, as those who can safely handle what others cannot, as those who have achieved the recognition that enables us to prevent others from misreading. We have become the Pharisee, thanking God we are not like other readers.

From Divine Critique to Domination

The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is another devastating example of this very structure. Jesus tells of a Pharisee who stands in the temple thanking God that he is not like other corrupt people, and a tax collector who can only beat his breast and ask for mercy: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Jesus makes clear it is the sinning tax collector who goes home justified, who inherits the grace of David’s confession. Yet this parable, read by Christians across generations, has produced Christians and churches who cannot take a breath without thanking God they are not like the Pharisee, “we are not those proud Pharisees; we are the humble tax collectors,” and his ilk of sinners, which most certainly includes those other churches, those other denominations, those sister communions that are surely going to hell. The parable about the danger of thanking God you are not like others becomes the occasion for thanking God you are not like those who thank God they are not like others. The spiral of human corruption is infinite.

This parable was a necessary digression to establish four consecutive points that must be kept clearly in view:

First, the critique of Jews and Judaism in the Gospels and in Paul’s epistles was done entirely within the Jewish prophetic tradition and spirit itself, whether that critique is accepted or rejected by Jews today. When Jesus denounces the Pharisees, when Paul wrestles with Israel’s unbelief, they are operating with the vocabulary, the accusations, the devastating psychological insight of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. They are not inventing a new discourse of hatred but continuing an old discourse of divine judgment. This does not settle whether their specific claims are true—whether Jesus is indeed the Messiah, whether the covenant has been fulfilled or transformed—but it does establish that the form of critique is internal, prophetic, Jewish. It is tragic that these very texts that some think mean the Christian is defined against the Jew were written to identify with, not against, the Jew. If this is an apology, it is a limited apology for intra-Israel critique, not for its institutionalization in theological and legal systems.

Second, there are major and by no means inconsequential differences between Jewish and Christian beliefs that cannot and should not be minimized or dismissed in the interest of interfaith harmony. Jews do not accept Jesus’s identity as established by Christian dogmatics. Christians do accept these claims and consider them essential. This is not a minor disagreement or a matter of emphasis. It is a fundamental theological divide. But—and this is crucial—this does not at all mean that such disagreement is an automatic or even sufficient cause for hatred. Theological difference is not the same as enmity. One can believe the other is wrong, deeply and consequentially wrong, without believing the other is evil or deserving of persecution.

Third, the fact remains that these Christian texts were often indeed read without a shred of “Thou art the man” and were used to generate entire theological systems and social complexes of domination that were hostile and anti-Jewish. A text is different from the history of the text. The critique itself became a will to dominate. The texts that were meant to produce self-recognition were instead used to establish guilt and exploitation. How I think the texts should be read—how they were meant to function within the prophetic tradition—is a different question from how they have indeed been read across centuries. The proper reading does not erase the history of improper reading and its consequences.

Fourth, these misreadings and their consequences—especially insofar as they were universalized beyond Jews themselves, insofar as they became ways of establishing Christian identity over against Jewish identity, insofar as they constructed “the Jew” as a permanent theological problem—have a consequential relationship with the development of modern antisemitism. They are not identical to modern antisemitism, but neither are they unrelated. The question is: what is the nature of that relationship? Is it direct causation, or is something more complex happening? This is where we must turn next.

The great counter-Enlightenment thinker Johann Georg Hamann understood this. Writing in the 18th century, he saw what we have now forgotten:

“The Jews still always remain a mirror in which we see God’s mysteries in the redemption of the human race as a riddle. In 1 Kings 8:50-51, Solomon still continues to pray for them. David still always lives, who at that time prayed for God’s tolerance when they should become old and their strength would fail them (Ps 71:9; 59:11). For our sake they were struck, so that we would marvel at the wealth of His patience and the riches of divine forbearance in their preservation and would thereby be led to repentance. Is it not the same unbelief that reigns in us, and should we not learn from its penalties for this nation to fear for ourselves? Have we not crucified God’s Son as they have? Do we not build the tombs of the prophets that they have put to death? Can we Christians read Obadiah without dismay? Are not the Gentiles threatened with just the same end, we Gentiles who have been in the same olive tree whose branches were discarded and chopped off by God through our hands? This was what He threatened to do to the Edomites and what He did to the Romans. Has Jesus ceased to be a king of the Jews? Has the inscription on His cross been changed? Do we not therefore persecute Him in His people? Is not our faith just as much a table as their law, which has become a snare? —— If Abraham’s children were so punished, who did not do as he did —— What kind of judgments await us who name God our Father and His only begotten Son and slander His teaching and His works through our unbelief and obstinacy?”

Hamann grasps what the modern reader cannot: the Jews remain a mirror. When we read about their judgment, we are meant to see ourselves, not an other. When we observe their punishment, we are meant to “fear for ourselves.” The vertical dimension is maintained—the critique of Israel becomes the occasion for Christian self-examination, not Christian self-congratulation. “Is it not the same unbelief that reigns in us?” This is “Thou art the man” operating as it should.

But Hamann presses further, and here his question becomes unavoidable: “Has Jesus ceased to be a king of the Jews? Has the inscription on His cross been changed?” The question is not rhetorical piety but theological demand. If, as Jesus himself said, “salvation comes from the Jews” (John 4:22)—if they remain God’s instrument for the redemption of all nations, an election for which they have paid and continue to pay—then what ought we to feel toward them? Not pity, which condescends. Not guilt, which centers ourselves. But solidarity, something closer to what Scripture itself commands when it speaks of those through whom blessing comes: a sober recognition that their suffering is bound up with the world’s salvation in ways we can barely comprehend, and that to persecute them is to persecute the very means of grace.

This is not sentimentality. It is the logical consequence of taking Christian theology seriously on its own terms. If the covenant with Israel is irrevocable, if the gifts and calling of God do not change, if the Messiah came as a Jew and will return as a Jew, then the question of our posture toward Jews is not a matter of interfaith diplomacy but of theological coherence. Hamann saw this at the threshold of modernity. Within a generation, it would become impossible to see. Within a generation, the mirror would be shattered, and the Jew would no longer reflect our judgment nor even confirm our righteousness, but be destroyed so that all possibility of judgment is foreclosed.

The Modern Elimination of “Thou Art the Man”

One way to understand modern antisemitism as a technique of reading texts is to see it as the complete radicalization of “he is the man over there” and the total elimination of even the possibility of “Thou art the man.”

The pre-modern error—the error of the religious age—proceeded like this: The Christian reads “woe to you Pharisees” and thinks “thank God I’m not like those Pharisees.” He reads the prophetic judgment on Israel and thinks “those Jews deserved it.” He externalizes the critique, projects it onto the Other, fails to see himself in the mirror. This is sin, this is bad faith, this is the perennial human escape from self-recognition. But—and this is crucial—this happens within a theological framework where divine judgment is still operative. The possibility of “Thou art the man” remains structurally present, even if constantly evaded. The reader still understands himself as standing before God’s judgment, still inhabits a world where the prophetic word could, in principle, circle back to strike him. He may spend his whole life dodging that word, may construct elaborate defenses against hearing it, but he knows—at some level he cannot fully suppress—that the judgment applies to him too. The escape is psychological, moral. He is trying not to hear what could still be heard. He is fleeing from a word that is still being spoken. Yes, religion domesticates, but the domestication is never total; liturgy, sacrament, penitential practice, and eschatology conserved a live grammar of self-accusation even as institutions blunted it.

The modern error—the error of the post-theological age—is something else entirely. The modern reader also reads the same texts, encounters the same harsh critiques of Israel and the Pharisees and the hard-hearted, but he reads them now as historical or ideological documents. He is studying them, analyzing them, cataloguing their rhetoric and their social function. The vertical dimension—divine judgment addressed to the human heart—has collapsed entirely. There is no longer a “Thou art the man” that could circle back because there is no longer any “Thou” being addressed. There is only data about “them”—about how they thought, what they believed, what pathologies they exhibited, what social forces shaped their texts and their hatreds. The judgment is now analytical. We are studying their pathology, not hearing a word that addresses us. We are examining the discourse, not standing before the Word.

The escape here is not psychological but structural, epistemological. The very framework in which the text is read makes self-implication impossible. It is not that the modern reader is trying not to hear “Thou art the man” and failing. It is that the mode of reading itself has foreclosed the possibility of that kind of address. He cannot hear it because he is not in the position of one who could be addressed. He is the scholar, the critic, Tucker Carlson, the post-Christian who just read the Bible for the first time. He stands outside, observing. The text is an object of study, not a word spoken to him.

So the difference is this: The pre-modern Christian who reads the Gospel’s critique of the Pharisees and thinks “those Jews” is evading a judgment that is still structurally present. He is sinning, but he is sinning within a world where sin can be named, where repentance is possible, where the prophetic word might yet break through his defenses. He stands in bad faith, but he still possibly stands before God.

The modern reader who reads the Gospel as the founding document of antisemitism, whether as evidence of Jewish corruption or evidence of antisemitic othering and the construction of Jewish guilt, inhabits a framework where that kind of judgment is no longer possible. He has stepped outside the space where “Thou art the man” could be spoken. He is not evading divine judgment; he is operating in a world where divine judgment is no longer a live category. This is the post-Christian condition. And it is in this condition, I want to argue, that modern antisemitism becomes possible—not as a continuation of Christian anti-Judaism, but as something new, something that emerges precisely when the theological structures collapse.

Here we return to the riddle: whether religion’s aim—to expose man before God—is humanly possible at all. Perhaps every revelation tends, by the fact of being received, to become an evasion of itself. The divine critique enters history only to be domesticated by the very creature it condemns. The impossibility is not in God’s word but in man’s hearing. Religion exists, therefore, in the paradox that its highest truth must forever destroy the forms by which it endures.

Now, what I have presented here is merely what I believe is the proper way to see the relationship of modern antisemitism and Jew-hatred to religious texts—a relationship that is real and consequential, but neither simple nor direct. Modern antisemitism as a revolutionary and often nihilistic ideology may employ such readings, may draw upon the residue of theological language, and may mobilize old hatreds for new purposes. Religious contempt for Jews, while not inherent to the faith’s core claims, could be intensified or marginalized depending on context. Modern antisemitism is different: it makes the Jewish question central to its entire totalitarian worldview. The post-Christian condition creates the space for antisemitism, but it does not determine its content. What fills that space—the racial theories, the conspiracy mythologies, the civilizational anxieties, the political theologies of blood and soil, and Fanonian pathology of decolonization—requires separate analysis, which I explore in many of my other writings.

Most importantly, modern humanist antisemitism—of the textual reading kind as it developed in the 19th century—represents a radically different way of reading Jewish texts that never existed before in human history. It is no longer a reading of the Hebrew Bible as divine judgment, whether applied to oneself or projected onto others. It is not even a reading of these texts as evidence of Jewish guilt or Jewish failure. Rather, it is a reading of the texts themselves as evidence of something far more damning: Jewish oppression, Jewish egotism, Jewish will to dominate.

The focus shifts entirely. For the 19th-century German philosopher, for the architects of modern antisemitic ideology, the target is no longer the Jews who failed to live up to God’s standards. The target is the Jewish God himself—the angry, punishing, particularist, legalistic deity who demands obedience, who insists on election, who will not let man be free. This God, they argue, is not a transcendent judge but a projection of the Jewish psyche, the true expression of Jewish character. The harsh critique in the prophets is not divine judgment exposing human sin; it is Jewish domination disguised as revelation. The covenant is tyranny. Their election is supremacy.

This reading inverts everything. Where the prophetic tradition saw God judging Israel, the modern antisemite sees Israel inventing a God who justifies their own will to power. Where the vertical dimension once cut through all human pretensions, the modern reading collapses that vertical into the horizontal entirely—and finds in the very claim to transcendence the evidence of tribal egotism and racism. The very God who says “Thou art the man” is himself accused of being merely man, merely Jewish man, projecting his own domineering character onto the cosmos. The religious conscience itself is the evidence of Jewish evil. This shifts the target from the Jew who sinned (theological) to the Jew who is (anthropological/metaphysical). This distinction between ontological and theological definition is critical.

The outcome is that modern radical humanism didn’t construct itself in the mirror of the Jew, but using the Jew as the photographic negative—the absolute non-human against which the human could finally be constructed. (Mirror shows you YOURSELF (vertical). Negative/outside shows you what you are NOT (horizontal oppositional construction of identity.)

This is why modern antisemitism is post-Christian in the most radical sense. It does not fail to hear “Thou art the man” while still believing in divine judgment. It rejects the very category of divine judgment as a Jewish invention designed to control and dominate. And in this inversion, the entire structure of critique collapses into what it was always meant to prevent: the horizontal annihilation warfare of peoples, now armed with the weapons of psychology, critical theory, philology, and racial science.

A common maneuver in this modern war is the secular scholar’s hunt through Paul’s letters for evidence of Christianity’s drive to supersede Israel—the supposed germ of later genocide. But a crucial distinction is missed. Classical Christian theology, whatever its failures in practice, operated within a theological frame in which both Jew and Christian stood under God’s judgment. Modern antisemitism operates within an anthropological frame in which “the Jew” becomes a human type to be eliminated. If we apply the prophetic measure—“Thou art the man”—we discern that, when this distinction is collapsed, a new supersession occurs: theological judgment is displaced by historical critique; God is superseded by human reason as arbiter of meaning.

This requires clarification, because “supersessionism” is itself a modern coinage, and used carelessly it obscures more than it reveals. Strictly speaking, there has never been an official Church doctrine called “supersessionism,” nor a conciliar decree proclaiming that “the Church replaces Israel.” The term emerged in the twentieth century—especially after the Holocaust and in the wake of Nostra Aetate (1965)—as an analytic label for patterns in Christian self-understanding vis-à-vis Israel. The Fathers and medievals spoke in other registers: fulfillment, recapitulation, typology, the two covenants, Israel “according to the flesh” and “according to the Spirit.” Even at their most polemical, they understood themselves inside a shared sacred history moving from promise to fulfillment, not from falsehood to truth.

What later critics call “supersessionism,” then, is a retrospective abstraction: a label for a broad interpretive posture rather than a codified teaching. The word is modern; the theological attitude it names—that the Church’s life fulfills Israel’s election—appears early and often in Christian practice, even if never formally systematized as such.

The task is not to rehabilitate any claim that renders Israel obsolete; it is to distinguish a vertical grammar of fulfillment from its horizontal, triumphalist deformation. In the vertical, covenantal sense, Christ fulfills the promises to Israel—recapitulation rather than replacement. Within this frame, fulfillment remains oriented to self-implication: Christ is the measure by which the Church is judged, not a weapon against the Jew. Paul’s wrestling in Romans 9–11 maintains precisely this stance: “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (11:29); Israel’s stumbling serves a providential purpose (11:11–14); and Gentile believers are warned against boasting over the natural branches (11:18–24).

The problem arises when this vertical structure collapses. Claims of fulfillment harden into claims of civilizational superiority; theological difference becomes anthropological hierarchy; Israel becomes a negative anthropological type—backwards, legalistic, tribal—against which Christianity, Europe, or modernity defines itself. This is the horizontalization of theological language into historical and racial categories. One can trace its mechanisms: late-medieval limpieza de sangre transposes covenant into blood; confessional state-building politicizes difference; Enlightenment historicism recasts “fulfillment” as progress (Voltaire, Kant, Hegel); racial antisemitism replaces grace with blood, covenant with species, election with genetics.

After the Holocaust and Nostra Aetate, many Christian theologians sought to disentangle fulfillment from displacement—what is often called “post-supersessionist” theology (e.g., R. Kendall Soulen, Mark Kinzer, Miroslav Volf). Whatever one makes of these projects, their stated aim is to preserve the vertical dimension: Christian faith is measured by fidelity to the God of Israel, not by superiority over Jews. Israel’s election remains structurally indispensable. The Church’s relation to Israel is participation, not displacement.

The question then becomes: Can vertical belief be maintained? Can the Church claim fulfillment without sliding into horizontal superiority? The historical record is not at all encouraging. The domestication of revelation into institution, the transformation of “Thou art the man” into “We are the people,” is what supersessionism is. Religious pride. If even the presupersessist idea was so unstable that it “almost always” collapsed into horizontal supersessionism, then the distinction—while theoretically valid—has limited historical purchase. Which raises the question of why spend so much time making a theoretical distinction that history shows was practically untenable? I don’t know. But I want to. At least it proves what we have been arguing throughout: that the human capacity for self-deception, for externalizing judgment, for thanking God we are not like others, is so powerful that even the structures designed to prevent it become instruments of it.

Modern post-Christian antisemitism thus relates to Christianity as anti-Jewish Christianity once related to Judaism—not as fulfillment but as betrayal: a horizontal parody of what was meant to be vertical participation. Where divine judgment is replaced by human critique, and covenant by the sufficiency of historical analysis, we have already superseded God as judge of meaning. Thou art the man.

Here we must pause to draw a crucial ontological distinction that summarizes everything. Christian anti-Judaism, for all its historical violence and theological hostility, remains fundamentally theological in nature. It is anchored in questions of covenant and revelation within a framework where God exists, where He acts in history, and where His judgment and mercy are real. The Jew, in this framework, is defined by his relationship—however contested, however disputed—to the same God worshipped by Christians.

Modern antisemitism is something else entirely. It is anthropological and metaphysical, anchored in a view of man without God, or rather, in a view where “God” himself becomes a mere projection of human—specifically Jewish—character. The Jew is no longer defined by his covenant status but by his nature, his blood, his psyche, his role in history as a metaphysical principle. He becomes the embodiment of abstraction against the concrete, of finance against production, of cosmopolitanism against rootedness, of critique against tradition, of revolution against order. Or inversely, in Kantian and Saidian formulations, he becomes the embodiment of rigid law against freedom, of particularism against universalism, of tribalism against humanity. The content varies, but the structure remains: the Jew is defined ontologically, as a type of human being, a stage of history, a principle of decay or domination.

This is not a continuity but a rupture. When Christian anti-Judaism becomes modern antisemitism, something fundamental has changed. The vertical dimension has not merely been ignored or evaded—it has been abolished entirely and replaced with a horizontal ontology of human types and historical forces.

What I hope to have shown here is something more modest but perhaps more fundamental: that the way we read for antisemitism in the founding texts is itself infected by the very condition that makes modern antisemitism possible. We have lost the capacity to read vertically, to hear “Thou art the man,” to stand before judgment rather than pronounce it. We have all become moral sadists enjoying with glee Tarantino films of slow, just revenge executed on “the man out there.” And in losing the capacity to read, we have lost the ability to distinguish between the prophetic tradition that implicates all of us and the ideological weaponization that targets some of us.

The way forward, if there is one, is not through better historical scholarship or more sophisticated discourse analysis. It is through recovering—if such recovery is even possible—the vertical dimension that our age has systematically abolished. Whether such recovery can happen without grace, whether it can be achieved through human effort alone, is the question Luther asked and answered in the negative. I am not qualified to say whether he was right. I know only that we cannot continue reading as we have been reading, cannot continue mistaking our analytical distance for moral clarity, cannot continue thanking God we are not like those who wrote these terrible texts. For in that very thanksgiving, we become exactly what we condemn. I’m not abolishing suspicion but re-hierarchizing it: suspicion under judgment, disciplined by a covenantal hermeneutic of self-implication.

But let me be clear about what this means. You cannot research your way to ‘Thou art the man.’ The very act of critical analysis—including this essay—is another flight from the word that addresses. If the door opens, it opens from the outside. Until then, we can only describe the shape of our imprisonment and wait. Which is perhaps just another name for prayer. (This is, perhaps, the ultimate source of my uselessness.)