Atheist Jew isn’t an oxymoron

There’s no such thing as a good ideology, as far as I’m concerned. All ideologies are wrong practically by definition.

They are all political constructs built out of such materials as rancour, powerlust, sentimentality, envy and other deadly sins – never out of high intelligence, common sense and morality as laid down in Exodus and Matthew.

Ideologies are secular religions that, on false pretences, demand the kind of obedience and worship that real religions command as of right. This creates an incongruity that offends any developed aesthetic sense. All ideologies are in bad taste, which is even worse than being downright subversive.

That’s true even when they are preached and practised by good people full of good intentions. For example, I know and like quite a few people who support Trump. However, whenever they talk or write about their hero, I wince as if touching a slug by accident.

They all have good reasons for supporting Trump, and they can discuss them quite rationally and persuasively. Alas, one can detect another layer either above or beneath their reason, that of ideological, messianic devotion. They worship Trump as if he were Moses guided by God to lead them into the promised land of right-wing rectitude.

Hence they treat any criticism of Trump not as disagreement but as heresy or even apostasy. Trump, like Caesar’s wife, is above suspicion. He is the messiah embodying God’s will, someone who can only be worshipped, not decorticated.

Whenever any politician – and I do mean any, throughout history – is talked about in those terms, I smell a rat, the kind that died in one’s basement at the beginning of a hot summer. An ideology raised to the level of cult is at play there, and that cancels out in my eyes any sound policies Trump has in mind – and many of them are indeed sound.

Let’s not lose track of the historical fact that Moses wasn’t a candidate for the presidency of Judaea, nor was Jesus an MP for Galilee South. Both of them signposted their territory way above politics, and any politician claiming or receiving similar devotion is a trespasser. This, no matter how attractive his policies or sterling his record.

Now we are on the subject of Moses and his people, the Jews suffered a tragedy in the 20^th century for which one struggles to find any close parallels in history. About half of the world’s Jews were murdered by satanic ghouls in the name of a satanic ideology.

It’s testimony to the fortitude of the Jewish people that they have risen Phoenix-like yet again, having recovered from the worst wounds few nations have ever suffered. Yet wounds leave scars. These may become paler and less achy with time, but they never disappear.

In this case, the scars are mental. Just imagine 35 million Britons murdered within a few years (the same proportion as the Jews murdered by Hitler and his henchmen), and you’ll know that such scars demand treatment, for otherwise the wounds will fester for ever.

The Nazis, those from Germany and occupied countries, especially but not exclusively in Eastern Europe, defined Jews by their ethnicity. A Christian or an atheist Jew was still a Jew to them, and as such slated for extermination as a member of the lowliest race.

Such a descending scale of racial ranking was a purely ideological construct, abhorrent not only to Jews and other putative Untermenschen, but also to Christians and any decent people whose moral compass hadn’t gone haywire.

Unfortunately, Jews and other decent people reacted to that ideological savagery with an ideology of their own. Their ideology isn’t savage and, in fact, it’s perfectly understandable. Yet it’s an ideology nonetheless, and therefore impervious to facts, common sense and in fact to the evidence before our very eyes.

The essence of that ideology is that Jewishness has no ethnic or racial component whatsoever. The logic is, as I said, understandable, but it’s still shabby.

Since Hitler treated Jewishness as ethnicity or race, and Hitler was a murderous monster, Western Jews and, in due course, Westerners in general decreed that thenceforth any such characteristics no longer applied. A Jew is a synonym of a Judaist. If he isn’t a Judaist, he isn’t a Jew. And anyone who insists on an ethnic component to Jewishness is a Nazi sympathiser.

This gets me back to the title above. If we follow this logic to its natural conclusion, then an atheist Jew, or one espousing any other religion, is a contradiction in terms. Yet anyone with eyes to see knows that’s not so. One doesn’t have to be a Nazi to observe that, say, the late Dr Ruth Westheimer looked Jewish and, say, the late Grace Kelly didn’t.

Yet it’s meaningless to say that Joe Biden looks Catholic or Donald Trump Presbyterian. Religion lives in the mind and soul only and doesn’t produce any physical characteristics.

If, however, many members of a large group do share such characteristics, they have some genetic commonality. This observation doesn’t exonerate Hitler or other anti-Semites, whose name is legion, and a rapidly growing one at the moment. It’s just a statement of fact free of any ideological overtones.

Israel is a religious state in ways that in the West are things of the past (one is tempted to say unfortunately). Hence it has a state religion, and more power to it. But, unlike the state religion of England, Israel’s is interlaid with ideological strands, and this is evident in its Law of Return.

According to it, any Jew living in any part of the world is automatically entitled to settle in Israel and receive Israeli citizenship. This noble law was a direct response to the Holocaust. Jews of the world had to be told that they could always find a safe haven in Israel, no matter how persecuted they were in their native lands.

All that remained was defining a Jew, and that’s where ideology crept in. The Law of Return applies to any person who has a Jewish mother, and also to the children and grandchildren of Jews, as well as their spouses and the spouses of their children and grandchildren.

Any atheists within that group are welcome, which suggests that the criterion at work there is purely ethnic. However, the Law doesn’t cover any Jew who espouses any religion other than Judaism. This is illogical on many levels.

Historically, the Nazis treated Jewish Christians the way they treated all Jews – with murderous hatred. Today’s anti-Semites also ignore religious nuances (as the Russians say, it’s not your passport but your mug that gets punched), meaning that, push come to shove, Jewish Christians would be as much in need of a refuge as Jewish atheists.

Moreover, the former are religiously, philosophically and typologically closer to Judaists than atheists are – after all, the Old Testament is part of the Christian canon. An atheist Jew isn’t an oxymoron, but then neither is a Christian Jew.

This is what happens when ideology barges in: logic goes right out of the window, as does factual evidence. When queried on this subject, Israelis simply walk away from an obvious infidel.

By the same token, Trump’s right-wing admirers refuse to discuss some demonstrably left-wing policies he favours, such as protectionism. Ideology has a way of cauterising one’s brain, at least the part of it where capacity for dispassionate analysis resides.

So no, an atheist Jew isn’t an oxymoron. But a good ideology is.