Judaism as Civilizational Blockchain

The existence of Jews is a scandal, and therefore their existence is an unmistakable sign of immeasurable and monstrous Jewish power. “The Jews as scandal” is preferable to “antisemitism,” because “antisemitism” always tends to approximate “racism,” and to entail a series of officially approved definitions, criteria, etc.; whereas a brief conversation will always surface those who want to mobilize all their fellow victims of the Jews to bring violent measures towards the erasure of Jews. Erasing the scandal of the Jews requires operating extra-juridically, even extra-systemically, precisely because the Jews control all that and make it impossible to obtain “justice,” with the proof of that being, tautologically, their existence. It’s necessary, then, to cut through the juridical and target the Jew directly, and if you listen closely to such discourses, whether on the right or left, there is always a point at which the need for identifiable markers useful for direct action kicks in: anyone who is not perpetually on guard against the Jew either is a Jew or is controlled by them, and this provides a clear path toward targeting the enemy. (The arc of antisemitism is long but bends towards accusing everyone else of being Jews.) There is thus a kind of transcendence to the project of Jew erasure, and “Palestine” has made it easier to see how fundamental this is to warring against the Jews by dropping any pretense of Jews and Palestinians sharing the land in some more equitable way (and bothering less and less with fastidious distinctions between “antizionism” and “antisemitism”) and moving directly on to demands the land be cleansed of Jews—and, further, taking the next step of tagging all insufficiently anti-Zionist Jews as targets as well. The fact that Jews exist proves the system corrupt, therefore, to get at the Jew systemic norms and guardrails must be disregarded, even torn down.

This is why all the anti-Jew stuff is really just collective fantasy, even if it can inspire violence—the destruction of Israel would have nothing to do with “Palestine” but, rather, with significant changes in imperial and regional power structures or priorities, even if laundered through something like “Free Palestine.” If the Jews really control everything, there’s nothing you can do; if you can do something, they don’t really control everything but, rather, represent one of many power centers, with which the Jews, however you configure that agency (if you were to bring a class action lawsuit against “the Jews” on behalf of their victims, to whom would you deliver the subpoena? Who would be part of the “class” bringing the suit?), has various relations of collaboration and antagonism. Then the power of the Jews is measurable, if in no other way than through those forces opposing them, at least to some degree effectively. Ask the victim of/warrior against the Jews to map this out for you—I suspect he will very much wish to avoid doing so, because that would leave open the possibility that not only is Jewish power less than 100%, but maybe it is even less than 50%, even much less, depending on how you identify collective action on the part of “the Jews” (which, upon entering such a discussion, you’d be obliged to do). Then they’d be left saying something like, “well, but even if it’s only 5%, they use that power to cause a lot of harm and I want to stop that,” but the problems with this are obvious—you could identify those harms and try to counter them using normal means available within the system. This double bind could be avoided in 1930s Europe because there were deep rooted traditions of excluding Jews from the polity and society, and in the 1930s and 40s these merely needed to be reinstalled, but nothing similar exists or could exist in the US without a complete breakdown of social order (in which the case the warriors against the Jews would have to first make their bid for power against other entrants into the field, like Mexican cartels).

So, while anti-Jew warfare can never involve anything more than low-level violence and occasional social hostility and the question of Israel is much higher up on the stack than those fuming against the Jews can reach, that the war against the Jews implies a comprehensive vendetta does suggest a kind of vocation for the Jews themselves: maintaining all the institutional means of deferring vendetta. There’s always a place for revenge and tit-for-tat—sometimes the neighborhood kids from different groups need to be allowed to sort things out for themselves, etc., and, I myself, in a previous post, drew attention to the way controlled vengeance keeps Israel grounded in reality, but in such cases responsible actors within the community are expected to keep a cap on it, so it doesn’t rise to the threshold at which the state (or threatened regional and imperial actors) would have to take an interest. All this is part of the thinking of the juridical, which Jews have a very long and broad tradition of. While I’m certainly no Jewish “leader,” I’d like to contribute answers to the question of Jewish survival, vocation and continuity, which has become much more urgent post-October 7. I mentioned in a previous post that I think the normative Jew is the observant Zionist living in Israel—I distill that model by considering what mode of being Jewish is most likely to survive, grow, and maintain traditions and it seems to me irrefutable. Other Jews interested in Jewish continuity and community should at least respect and “inflect” toward that model, approximating at least some features of it, while maybe also providing those who conform more closely to the model with information they might not have access to or means to fully interpret, especially regarding the broader field of interplay between Jews and non-Jews. What it seems to me the normative Jew I’m proposing may not see is that the Jews have no choice but to represent something. There’s too much attention coming our way, always has been and we can assume always will be, and just asking to be left alone and treated like anyone else is a refusal of reality. We might as well represent something that serves to regulate internal Jewish relations as well as relations between Jews and other communities and Jews and the state—and something, of course, that must be recognizable in terms of Jewish traditions, Torah, Talmud, etc.

That being a Jew means witnessing to injustice is as longstanding a proposition on the meaning of being Jewish as anything. Being targeted unjustly, even outrageously so, over such a long period of time, interpreting that persecution as punishment from God while at the same time refusing self-sacrifice and the forgiveness of enemies is a kind of paradoxical position, but a fairly textured one for the detection of injustice. I would want to sharply curtail the leftist Jewish interpretation which applies this mandate to “social injustices,” limiting it strictly to the operation of the juridical within the terms of the nomos, which is to say perversions and travesties of justice within the strict sense of a court case with opposing sides, governed by ever refined canons of evidence, relevance, etc. I would take this a step further and ban Jews who promote the killing of their fellow Jews, which would place all the pro-Palestinian Jews outside of Judaism—but I think that would require a bit of a legal revolution. A strict interpretation of “witnessing” would also oppose activities likely to arouse the hostility of the larger world within which we live—which has always been a consideration in Jewish legal reasoning. We Jews don’t have the power to prevent much injustice, but we can witness to it, even if first of all towards us but then to others within the only kind of order within which we could live as well—one with clear power lines and accountability running through it. In contemporary terms, this would mean that Jews should try to become a civilizational blockchain—recording social exchanges and disputes as objectively and permanently as we can. This seems to me an easy to understand and noble aspiration for Jews, one applicable to Israel as a nation and state and Jews across the professions in which we are so disproportionately represented: the fields of law, knowledge-making, media, finance and governance.

The blockchain is where covenants can be recorded in a permanent, inalterable manner, and the primary point of pride for Jews who bear some relation to Jewish traditions is the preservation of a once in history covenant with the creator of the universe, which is to say the founder of the original nomos. The covenant is a very detailed one, covering all of life, so that we are continuing the creation of the universe with every deed. I have my own reading of the formation of that covenant, one I have explained on a few occasions, derived from Bernard Lamborelle’s theory that the covenant of Abraham described in Genesis was with a Mesopotamian king, allocating to Abraham a plot of land in exchange for services. That the memory of that covenant was preserved and revised through centuries of tribal conglomeration, national consolidation, vassalage, several exiles, and so on makes me, at least, more committed to its continuance than if I took it literally. Other Jews need not accept this account, but its value, in my view, is that it unites service to earthly governance with commitment to eternity and always mediated through the juridical, the space of judgment—but there are other ways of cutting a path there than through this particular account. Jews are better thought of as a nation of scribes than a nation of priests, and a nation of scribes is mostly concerned with keeping the records clear, sorting out the provenance of variants of sacred writings, and there’s no better preparation for being a civilizational blockchain. Even if Jews as a whole will not maintain this standard (there has never been a version of Judaism that all Jews adhered to or maintained) it can serve as an idiom uniting the more and less observant, diaspora and Israeli, while ordering more properly relations to Gentiles, not one of either separation or assimilation, but something like: we will mark your treatment of us on the scale of justice while marking as deviant anyone claiming adherence to Judaism who seeks to undermine covenants, or contracts or agreements. This path must also provide a way for Israel to deal with those Arabs currently called Palestinian who will eventually come under Israeli sovereignty, and provides a frame for contributing to global order, currently fraying a bit, as also operating, more minimally, potentially and provisionally, in terms of justice, which we can also try to bring into closer approximation with order.

I don’t address current blood libels against Jews, in particular the accusation of genocide, since there are plenty of others doing that effectively, even if without much effect on public opinion, and I’ll just note my agreement with people like Natasha Hausdorff and John Spencer. But the need to make such charges symmetrical with the most notorious crimes against Jews is precisely the kind of thing to record on the civilizational blockchain, and somehow incorporate into Jewish praxis. Being a civilizational blockchain, though, involves exercising power, and exercising power involves being involved in power struggles, and there is no doubt that Jews have always had some relation to power and now more than ever. That Israel, through the Mossad and AIPAC, controls some “portion” of American politics is undeniable, but how much in relation to MI5 (and the “five eyes” generally), the Qataris and other oil producing states or the hundreds of other lobbying groups representing everyone from ethnic interests to NGOs to corporate cartels? I have never seen anyone try to quantify any of this, which means everyone gesturing toward Mossad/AIPAC is content to leave open the possibility of turning Israel into the US’s enemy at some point—I suppose this is a “Schelling Point.” Israeli control or power, in such discourses, is also invariably represented in unilateral terms, rather than as exchanges—of intelligence, military technology, goods, etc. (In most “power” discourse the possibility that exercising power might entail being good at something—other than endlessly tormenting and killing people—is rigorously excluded, which means that ways of exercising power oneself can never pass a certain low level. Calls to “wake up” do the heavy lifting.) And I do mean invariably, with the exception only of unequivocally pro-Israel positions (which in turn tend to ignore power possessed by Jews). The implication is that Jewish existence is conditional, granted on sufferance, which is in a sense the case since, obviously, if a large enough coalition of world powers decided to target Jews, that could kill every last one of us. Israel is contentious because the Jews of Israel conquered the country (implementing a UN resolution) with some hastily cobbled together diplomatic support and the Arab-Israel conflict has since then been framed in terms of the implicit, but now very explicit, legitimacy of an Arab re-conquest. The Christian, post-Christian and Muslim worlds have never quite signed on to the unconditionality of Jewish life, which also means that Jews must always seek out some reserves of power, some buffers against eventual annihilation, “more” than they seem to need, which calls into question the legitimacy of Jewish existence, etc. But the Jews could never be targeted at a high enough level to constitute a real threat without bringing down the entire juridical order and converting it into a global order of hostage taking—the logic of both the Nazi genocide and Muslim terrorism, the logic of you must hunt the Jews or be hunted yourself as a Jew. “Evidence” is reduced to ever fluctuating metrics of loyalty. Measurements of this ever present “penumbra” of another possibility against the terms of juridical order is what is to be measured on the civilizational blockchain.