As this year’s J Street conference begins, I’ve obtained a speech from last year’s—from a conference panel called “Working with Christian Communities Towards a Room Two-State Solution.” The speaker in question is Serge Duss, Director of the New Century Evangelicals Project, and the theory at issue is that modern Jews are not descended from Biblical Jews:
The misconception that most Evangelicals have, particularly conservative Evangelicals – I consider myself a progressive Evangelical – is what we learned in Sunday school. And what we learned in Sunday school about the Old Testament and particularly King David, we have carried forward three, four, five thousands years, where there is a belief that the modern state of Israel and modern Israelis are the extension of the Children of Israel of the Old Testament. You, only you – I can’t, but only you can disabuse Evangelicals of that mythology. How many rabbis I’ve heard say in settings, ‘We are not the Hebrews, the Children of Israel of the Old Testament’? And unless conservative Evangelicals particularly hear that message from Jews in America today and Israelis in Israel, minds will not be changed.
Under the most innocent reading Duss was merely calling for J Street’s Jewish attendees to use their Jewish identity to undermine support for Israel. That would be a telling advocacy, and here it’s worth noting that J Street organizers appreciated Duss so much that they brought him back this year. Instead of trying to expand the pro-Israel tent to include more people, J Street seems committed to isolating Israel and Israelis by undermining existing their support from American Jews and Christians.
But there’s very little innocent here. Denying the connection between ancient and modern Jews is, according to conspiracy theory expert Bob Blaskiewicz, “a precursor to the type of rationalization of Christian Identity theology, that the ‘Jews’ are imposters claiming the Chosen People status properly owned by the white American Christian male.” It’s a scientifically disproven canard that anti-Semites have used for centuries to disinherit Jews theologically and politically.
At its most explicit, the theory holds that contemporary Jews are descendents of non-Semitic Khazars who converted to Judaism. The Anti-Defamation League has an extended backgrounder on how the claim has played out in modern anti-Semitic movements. You can find it in the wild on Holocaust-denying WWII revisionist sites, in the forums of Protocols-obsessed David Icke, and on one of the Internet’s most notorious conspiracy theory cesspools. Note how quickly the writers transition from the theory itself into how it undermines the legitimacy of the Jewish State.
Duss’s notion that “modern Israelis are [not] the extension of the Children of Israel of the Old Testament” has entered the leftwing anti-Israel evangelical world via at least two routes. Among Christian Palestinians the Khazar theory has long been promoted by Mazin Qumsiyeh, who is heavily tied to the anti-Israel Arab Christian circuit. In the United States it was picked up by the Israel-Palestine Mission Network, a particularly nasty organ of the Presbyterian Church USA, and inserted into booklets based on a 2008 book by Israeli professor Shlomo Sand. From Sand it hopped elsewhere in the evangelical world, until by 2010 you had Palestinian Lutheran minister Mitri Raheb declaring at an evangelical conference that he’s descended from King David while Netanyahu has no Jewish blood and “comes from an East European tribe who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages.”
Duss was a little ambiguous in his J Street speech, so no one knows whether he was specifically gesturing toward the Khazar theory and its political implications. It’s not impossible that Duss was just being metaphorical. Instead of intentionally using an anti-Semitic dog whistle to undermine American evangelical support for Israel, he would have been vaguely invoking a classically anti-Semitic trope to undermine American evangelical support of Israel.
Either way, by the standard J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami set when he condemned the imagery in Netanyahu’s AIPAC speech, even metaphorical anti-Semitism would still leave J Street deeply complicit.
I believe that I am a direct decendent of Abraham, Issac and Jacob – I don't believe that there is any serious reason to not think that I am, and many good reasons to think that in fact I am.
Again, it's time: kick JStreet out! Tell the ultrawealthy donors to stuff it. n nIt's incredible that a fringe organization that has spent a decade trying to become respectable is getting more, not less, entangled with open anti-semites and conspiracy theorists. n nAt the risk of sounding like Cato the Elder: Out, now!
Yeah, Mitri Raheb, you descended from King David. n nWhen he took a dump. n nWe are descended from King David and we piss on the lot of you. The Palestinians also invented the ever popular GUI stolen by the Jews behind Jobs and Gates. Reversible casual smokeware? Palestinian. The midget unicycle? Palestinian. The left-handed fork? Palestinian. Mr. Peepers X-Ray Glasses? You got it. All the way. The hulu hoop, the watusi….
All you need do is drive home the point and the fact that J-Street is creation of the Saudis and the Iranian lobby in the US. Just make that point over and over and over. They exist because they were created by the Saudis and the Iranian lobby in the US.
JStreet is in business to give jobs to JStreet bigwigs and to soothe the American Jews still enamored of Obama by giving the President's anti Israel and anti Semitic policies a veneer of acceptability
This article really reaches the most extreme conclusions based upon outlandish speculation. If the writer doubts Duss's intentions, why not just contact the man and ask him? n nThe truth is that modern Judaism in all of its forms — from Ultra-Orthodox to Reconstructionism — and its practitioners (Jews) do not practice Biblical religion. You would have to look to the Karaites, or perhaps Ethiopian or Indian sects to find Jews who live and practice Biblical Judaism. n nAs far as I can tell, Duss never made any claims about genetics. He directly addressed the mistaken belief that many Christians, particularly Evangelicals, have that modern Jews embrace the religion of the "Old Testament", rather than the Rabbinic Judaism based upon the Talmud. n nFor generations, Jews have engaged in dialog with Christian communities to educated them to this fact. Evangelicals have historically had the most difficulty in understanding modern Judaism, and Duss has underscored the issue. n nBut don't let silly things like facts and history get in the way of attacking J Street, and anyone associated with the organization.
Mr. Ellis, you are not reading what Duss wrote as quoted above. Of course, contemporary Jews do not practice biblical Israelite religion. But indeed we do see ourselves as the "extension" (Doss's word) of the biblical "children of Israel/bnei yisrael." It is integral to Judaism! n nHow ignorant is this guy? In the daily prayers, we address "our God, and God of our ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." In the Kaddish, we ask that God reign over His kingdom, "in the life of all the House of Israel, quickly and soon." What does he think we mean by the "House of Israel" — which we claim still lives? And to sing the Israeli national anthem, "our hope has not perished (a paraphrase of Ezekiel), the hope of two thousand years, to live as a free people in our land," is to affirm that the Jews of modern Israel are the same people as the Jews of ancient Israel/Judah/Judea. n nJews see themselves as an extended family, a tribe created and defined by religious tradition. Even if you consider the "founding fathers," Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to be mythical, we are nevertheless a millennia-old, continuously-existing people no less than, say, the Japanese are. Uniquely, we have been scattered all over the world, and our tribe-defining tradition has let us "adopt" converts of all races. But although today we are very diverse in language and appearance, we remain a tribe, a continuation of the tribe that lived in Eretz Yisrael, wrote the Bible — and produced Jesus, Peter and Paul. It is absurd of Doss to think that any rabbi, or any educated Jew, would come forward to deny that.
Modern Jews *are* descendents of the ancient Israelites, the one non-priestly tribe that was left, Judah. That's why they're called "Jews," or any number of cognate words in other languages, starting with Persian and Greek. Modern Jews don't practice the Judaism of the Bible, but embedded in a larger tradition that includes the Oral Law and so on. It's not "based on the Talmud." The Talmud is a late collection that records what was already being practiced. n nDuss and others life him are, at best, purveyors of dogmatic ignorance. There's zero cultural, linguistic, or genetic evidence for their views — especially that wacky perennial, the repeatedly discredited Khazar theory, now more discredited than ever. n nIt's an age of quasi-literacy, of credentialed ignorance, as a (non-Jewish) friend put it to me.