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Disunity based on Jewish self-hatred is at the center of every adversity we Jews have experienced throughout the generations. The fragmentation within us, the Jewish people, has now reached a level that threatens our daily lives and our very existence, regardless of where we live. Antagonism and negative feelings toward us are on the rise wherever we turn, and it is typical of the pattern we can observe in our history.
In my book, Jewish Self-Hatred: The Enemy Within – An Overview of Jewish Antisemitism, I showed how time and again, we have abused and marginalized our own people despite the evidence that our disconnection is the cause of our ruin. This condition of internal conflict—including all past such states as well as our current one—is the continuation of a rift that began at the time of the destruction of the Temple.
Unfortunately, there are so many examples of self-inflicted harm to the Jewish people that even though I researched and mentioned several of them in my book, it is still only amounted to a few of them. In all cases, though, major events of the highlighted historical periods show that the Jewish people’s downfall resulted from their dwindling social unity. By understanding the nature of this rift, we can acquire a new perspective that will help us overcome our divisions.
Throughout history, everything that happened to the people of Israel reflected the level of connection or separation within it. When the people’s hearts were connected, there was tranquility, but when they lost the connection and love gave way to unfounded hatred, the nation declined into ruin and exile.
The Maccabean Revolt around 160 BCE was primarily directed against the Hellenized Jews rather than against the Seleucid Empire.* Also, the commander of the Roman armies that conquered Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile, Tiberius Julius Alexander, was an Alexandrian Jew whose own father had donated the gold and silver for the Temple gates that Alexander shattered.**
Before the destruction of Jerusalem, Julius Alexander wiped out his own Jewish community in Alexandria, which, according to the Jewish-Roman historian Titus Flavius Josephus, resulted in “all the place was overflowed with blood, and fifty thousand of them lay dead upon heaps.”***
During the Spanish Inquisition, the chief inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada was of Jewish descent, but this did not diminish his zeal for expelling and killing Jews. And as recently as the last century, during the Weimar Republic and the early years of Nazism, the Association of German National Jews supported and voted for Hitler and the Nazi Party.
The common denominator of all these tragedies that befell the Jewish people throughout history was the breakdown of relations between Jews. Two events from ancient times are of the utmost importance to illustrate the phenomenon of Jewish antisemitism to the present day: the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians due to the moral decay and internal struggles of the Jews and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 BCE by the Romans due to Sinat Chinam (unfounded hatred) among the Jews.
On the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, Jews commemorate the destruction of both Temples. The date symbolizes the deep severance between us caused by the revelation of divisive egoism. It is a reminder of the atrocities we had committed on ourselves as a result of our disunity.
I elaborate on each one of the above-mentioned examples in the fifth chapter of my book, Jewish Self-Hatred: The Enemy Within.
References:
* Titus Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston, Book XII, chap. 6.
** Ronald Syme and Tessa Rajak, Iulius Alexander Tiberius, Oxford University Press, 22 December 2015.
*** Titus Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, trans. William Whiston, Book II, chap. 18.
Based on the book, Jewish Self-Hatred: The Enemy Within: An Overview of Jewish Antisemitism by Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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