I see antisemitism, at its core, as an attempt to divert the Jew from his original calling: the study of Torah.
The hatred of the antisemite, whether examined as an archetype, an intellectual structure, or a historical phenomenon, interests me less than the question of the Jewish response. For the future of civilization, that response is the more consequential matter.
Will the Jew abandon his calling, or will he continue to study and contemplate Torah day and night?
In the encounter between antisemitism and the Jewish people, the decisive variable is neither the force that seeks to harm nor the force that seeks to protect. It is the human being standing between them, the Jew whose response ultimately determines what the encounter will produce.
Antisemitism becomes spiritually successful when it compels the Jew to define himself entirely through persecution: to make survival, resistance, or political power the center of Jewish existence. It fails when the Jew refuses to surrender his deeper purpose.
From this perspective, the post-Holocaust Zionist response should be understood primarily as a historically conditioned national reaction, not as an authentic philosophical movement arising from the inner essence of Judaism.
The essential Jewish question is therefore not simply how to defeat antisemitism. It is whether, in confronting it, the Jew remains faithful to the purpose from which antisemitism seeks to distract him.
