J’accuse! What the world owes Jewish people - opinion

On January 13, 1898, French-Jewish journalist Émile Zola published a long open letter in the French daily L’Aurore. The title was “J’accuse!” Zola scathingly exposed the French injustice and antisemitism that convicted Alfred Dreyfus, a senior Jewish army officer, without evidence, and sent him to Devil’s Island.

“This is the simple truth, and it is appalling,” Zola wrote. “…but the truth marches on, and nothing will stop it. …When one locks up the truth underground…the day when it bursts out, it makes everything leap out with it!”

Zola himself was prosecuted for libel and found guilty on February 23, 1898. He fled to England.

My wife and I recently returned from a brief family visit to the US and Canada. At a synagogue near Boston, there was a small incident. A car parked in the synagogue lot drew suspicion. Police came. They questioned the driver at length. It was harmless.

But it aroused fear. Jews in the US and abroad no longer feel secure as waves of antisemitism wash across the globe. Even a parked car can arouse fear.

The world owes us, the Jews, not hatred but respect, if not affection. Jews gave the world two major spin-off religions: Christianity and Islam, with followers comprising nearly half the world. The world has repaid us with growing virulent hatred.

Here is my own “j’accuse” to those young and old antisemites who are clearly ignorant about Jews and Judaism and the light we have brought to the world through the ages.

J’accuse: We gave you a priceless ethical system

There are 2.4 billion Christians in the world, and 2 billion Muslims. This comprises more than half the world’s population. Jews, in contrast, comprise 0.2% of the world’s population – not even the rounding error of the two religions to which Judaism gave birth.

Both Islam and Christianity derive from Judaism. Yet both religions have fiercely persecuted Jews when they refused to convert. For centuries, Christians maintained the falsehood that Jews killed Jesus. Mobs of French and German Christians in the 1096 People’s Crusade massacred Jews; Jews were blamed for the Black Death in 1348; Spanish Jews were massacred in 1391 and expelled from Spain in 1492; and Cossacks massacred Jews in Ukraine between 1648 and 1657 and henceforth (my father recounted their rampages firsthand). And the list goes on…and on, culminating in the Holocaust. With Islam, the Koran denigrates Jews as inferior and as heathens. The Shia is particularly virulently anti-Jewish.

To my knowledge, no country that has persecuted and expelled Jews has thrived. When will they ever learn?

J’accuse: We gave you creative innovations that enhanced your lives

Tiny Israel has won 13 Nobel Prizes and ranks 11th in the world in Nobel Prizes per capita, even though we got a late start.

Jewish people have won 22% of all Nobels awarded since 1901 – 214, out of a total of 965 individual recipients, even though Jews comprise 0.2% of the world’s population. In science, Jews punch 100 times above their weight. And for Nobel awards in economics, 41% of the winners are Jewish! Why?

I have studied creativity for decades and scanned the research, yet I have no idea. 

Perhaps the answer lies deep in Jewish culture as embodied in the Babylonian Talmud – 2,711 double pages of fierce debate among scholars.

Jews are stubborn and argumentative, and critical thinking is strongly encouraged (except perhaps in modern times among extreme ultra-Orthodox sects).

In contrast, critical thinking seems to be largely a lost art these days, as young people swallow whatever TikTok spews.

My Technion colleague Prof. Dan Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for discovering quasicrystals – a form of matter that, according to existing theory, could not exist. 

He was initially vilified, humiliated, called a quasi-scholar by the top experts – and stuck to his guns, eventually prevailing. 

Writing in the business magazine Forbes, Stuart Anderson observes that “immigrants have been awarded 40% of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics since 2000.”

Immigrants try harder. And Jews have been throughout history a nation of forced immigrants. 

Anderson recounts how a Hungarian immigrant to the US, Dr. Katalin Kariko, “spent the 1990s collecting rejections.” She persisted. At the University of Pennsylvania, she collaborated with Drew Weissman and discovered a hybrid mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) that could sneak its way into cells without alerting the body’s defenses.

Scientists who founded Moderna and BioNTech created COVID vaccines based on mRNA that essentially saved the world. 

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, who is Jewish, joined BioNTech in mass producing the key vaccine. Kariko and Weissman shared the 2023 Nobel Prize.

J’accuse: We fought for your rights, while you deny us ours

Jews have been in the forefront for the civil rights of persecuted minorities. Rabbi Abraham Heschel marched side by side with Rev. Martin Luther King in the 1960s to gain the rights of African Americans to vote and to integrate.

In South Africa, many Jewish South Africans, individuals and organizations, helped support the anti-apartheid movement. For this reason, it is particularly galling to see South Africa lead the charge in falsely accusing Israel of genocide in the International Court of Justice.

J’accuse: We asked for a tiny speck of land…and you said no!

The land area of Israel within 1967 borders is 20,000 sq. km. The total land mass of the Earth is 500 million sq. km. This means that the land mass within which Israel sought to live in peace is 1/29,000th of the Earth’s area. That amounts to 0.0034, or three-tenths of one percent! In contrast, the land mass of the 22 Arab nations is 13 million sq. km., or almost 700 times larger.

Arab nations continue to refuse to settle Palestinians in their countries in order to perpetuate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and confine the Palestinians to refugee camps for over three generations, since 1948. In contrast, Jews throughout history have migrated away from persecution and pogroms and became a blessing to their host countries.

My father fled Bessarabia (Moldova today) as a teenager in 1920 after the horrendous 1904 Kishinev pogrom, and in Saskatchewan built affordable housing for working people. Israel welcomed a million immigrants from Russia during 1990-2000, and they helped fuel our hi-tech boom. Since 1948, Israel absorbed more than three million Jews, many displaced from Arab nations.

J’accuse! You hate Jews you never met

A decade ago, the American Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published a sweeping report on global antisemitic attitudes. Some 1.1 billion people worldwide were found to “harbor antisemitic views,” including the old favorite “Jews have too much power in international financial markets” and even “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.”

In the Mideast, three-quarters of respondents agreed with the survey’s 11 antisemitic propositions – with the prevalence of antisemitism among Muslims rising by 20% for those who got their news primarily online (kudos, Al Jazeera!).

But here is the zinger. Some 77% of those who hate Jews have never met one! “The fewer the Jews in a particular country, the more numerous the antisemites,” the report found. If Jews are just two out of every thousand people on Earth, the odds that you will meet one are slim; besides, if you did, how would you know? That doesn’t deter antisemites from deep hatred, born of ignorance.

In his brilliant 1959 book The Biblical Narrative, Zvi Adar wrote: “God chose a people to carry out His plan, cherished its forefathers, passed it through the furnace of exile and servitude, delivered it, made a Covenant with it, lovingly and mercifully led it through the wilderness, and gave it the Promised Land. From now on, the people had to elevate itself and to live a life of truth, so that all the nations of the Earth should be blessed in it.”

God said to Abraham, “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.” Abraham was commanded to live his life in order to be a blessing. He did. And so are we Jews all commanded. Through history, we have indeed brought blessings to the world, far more than in proportion to our tiny numbers. Perhaps one cause of virulent antisemitism may be the very fact that Jews bring blessings – while others appear to fall short.

Despite those who hate us just because we are Jews, behind their veil of ignorance, we Jews will continue to bring blessings to all and to be a light unto the nations, forever. ■

The writer heads the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center at S. Neaman Institute, Technion. He blogs at www.timnovate.wordpress.com.

One day in the life of Auntie Sem Mite

Auntie Sem woke up feeling severe back pain and took a cab to the emergency room. She was quickly scheduled for an emergency MRI, which detected a tumor near her spine. Robotic surgery removed it, with no collateral damage, even though the tumor was millimeters from her spinal cord. While in hospital, her doctors urged her to be vaccinated against COVID. She agreed.

On her way home from the hospital in a taxi, a white Cadillac suddenly cut in front of it.

“Damn Jew,” she muttered.

Auntie was unaware that Isadore Rabi won a Nobel Prize in physics for a discovery that enabled the MRI; Technion Prof. Alon Wolf pioneered robotic back surgery; and Drew Weissman shared a Nobel Prize for discoveries that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines.

By the way, Auntie – all three are Jewish.