Jealousy and the Jews

I am the cleaning lady at church. I have good relations with everybody in the place. Know why? Because I’m the cleaning lady. No one has ever been jealous of the cleaning lady. We greet those white-aproned servants warmly when emerging from our hotel rooms, and we mean it.

When my husband was on his deathbed in 1999, during the lull in a revolving door of visitors he said to me privately: “Do you know why even people who didn’t like me are being so nice?” Somehow I guessed the answer: “Because they’re not jealous of you.” “That’s right,” he said.

Self-styled intellectuals should ask themselves why the entire globe salivates with bloodlust toward the children of the Hebrews. To be sure, there are other despised groups in the world—Yazidis, Uyghurs, and Armenians—but I know of no one personally who wants the Yazidis annihilated.

The student of Scripture is not surprised. Jew derangement syndrome dates from Genesis and the first Jew. One etiology is jealousy. The Jews prosper in everything they put their hand to, and are annoyingly unextinguishable, to boot. Everyone in their proximity soon comes to see that God is with them.

When Abimelech pays a visit to Abraham, he says, “God is with you in all that you do” (Genesis 21:22). It is not a compliment. The King of Gerar comes begrudgingly to extract a covenant from Abraham for his own self-protection. Simultaneously his servants are stealing Abraham’s wells, which Abimelech brazenly lies about even as the two signatories are forging the treaty (verses 22-32).

Then it is son Isaac’s turn. God blesses all that Isaac touches (Genesis 26:12), and it drives the Philistines mad. They sabotage his wells and say, “Go away from us, for you are much mightier than we” (26:16). Isaac obligingly moves his tent to Gerar. He digs new wells. The herdsmen of Gerar sit by watching the dig till the wells are finished, then proclaim, “The water is ours” (26:20). Isaac relocates again—and God prospers him again (26:22).

Later, Abimelech comes calling on Isaac, who asks, “Why have you come to me, since you hate me and have sent me away from you?” (26:27). The Philistine replies, “We have certainly seen that the Lord is with you.” They want a treaty. So Isaac agrees to terms (26:30-31), and the Philistines go their way in peace—for the moment.

Then it is Abraham’s grandson’s turn, and the newly minted villain is Laban the Aramaean, who says, seeing in Jacob a cash cow, “Please stay if I have found favor in your eyes, for I have learned by experience that the Lord has blessed me for your sake” (Genesis 30:27). It doesn’t end well.

A generation later, the prosperity of Abraham’s great-grandson Joseph will capture the attention of the Pharaoh of Egypt: “His master saw that the Lord was with him, and that the Lord made all he did to prosper in his hand” (Genesis 39:2-3). Fine for now, but jealousy is looming.

Skip ahead 400 years and a new Pharaoh “who knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8) is driven mad by the miraculous favor of God on the Semites in his land—and decides the only thing for it is to kill every Jewish male child (Exodus 1). Skip another few hundred years and Haman’s envy results in attempted genocide (Esther).

Having said all this, I will now seem to undercut my thesis and argue that jealousy is an inadequate theory to explain the phenomenon. Jew hatred is a singularity.

Jealousy falls short of accounting for Jewish persecutions under Titus (a.d. 70) and Severus (a.d. 132-136); Middle Ages anti-Semitism; raids by Mohammed; the Crusade of 1096; the Crusade of 1147; the Shepherds’ Crusade of 1320; expulsions of Jews from France in 1396, and from Austria in 1421; scapegoating of Jews for the Black Death epidemics in the mid-1300s; expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492; pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia.

When the best that our intelligent pundits can do is to ascribe historical Jew hatred to jealousy over Jewish accomplishments, this is an object lesson to me: there are things in this world that can only be perceived spiritually, that is, according to the Word of God and Holy Spirit.

Of all people on earth, the Christian alone is equipped to discern the true dimensions of the present anti-Semitism. Only we of the Book know that beyond natural causes such as jealousy there rages a battle not of human origins. The Jews, a tribe anciently tapped by God to figure in a marvelous salvation plan, find themselves the bewildered participants in an invisible cosmic contest between two Kingdoms, whose final chapter is yet to play out.

And this is why, from time to time, when “wise and learned” men reach limitations in analysis, a cleaning lady may see deeper.