When Jewishness is a crime of origin

There is a single people upon whom the world insists on this doctrine: have you forsworn the ground from which you came? Invitations to speak, to compose, to perform often carry this unspoken clause. Worth is measured not by the merit of one’s work but by the readiness to amputate part of one’s inheritance before entering the room.

Others may cradle their homelands without suspicion. The Irishman brooding over Dublin is a romantic. The Armenian invoking Ararat is a conservator of civilisation. The Kurd murmuring of his mountains is indulged as a poet. The Jew who pronounces “Jerusalem” with feeling becomes at once a geopolitical complication. For him, the ordinary human impulse of belonging is transmuted into ideology, and ideology into culpability.

History shows the lineage of this obsession. The Middle Ages demanded conversion as the price of breath itself. The Enlightenment, with its powdered reason, required that Jewish faith be confined to the private sphere and Jewish lineage denied in the public one. The Soviet Union, ever bureaucratic in its hatreds, branded even a wistful poem about Zion as treason beneath the rubric of “anti-Zionism.”

The twenty-first century merely resuscitates this same choreography. Since October 7, 2023, the insistence has grown feverish. Jews are summoned not simply to censure or defend a government’s acts but to abjure the very idea of Jewish nationhood, to sign away the only homeland their history affords them. The demand falls upon novelists, historians, violinists, columnists; the work itself is incidental. What matters is the public purification ritual.

No other people endures this test. The Armenian may defend Armenia without reproach. The Kurd may speak for Kurdistan without exile. Only the Jew must be the exception. The ancient conceit persists: that Jewishness is permissible only when reduced to folklore, when stripped of sovereignty, when domesticated into something picturesque and powerless.

Apologists flatter themselves that this is not prejudice but principle. That to interrogate Jewish loyalty is the height of intellectual rigour. This is sophistry. What we are watching is the oldest of exclusions dressed in new tailoring. It is the perennial bargain: “Be less of yourself, and we will permit you to stay.”

Belonging is not sedition, and origin is not contraband. A society unable to grasp this will not stop with Jews. The habit of erasure, once learned, will turn outward with equal fervour until no one, anywhere, is left with a past they are permitted to keep. And when the hour strikes, when the purists confront the stillness they have summoned, they will find no laughter, no remembrance, no trace of what was human, only the antiseptic perfection of a world perfectly clean. And perfectly dead.