Georg Immanuel Nagel rejects the claim of Israeli nationalist Yoram Hazony that European culture is based on Judaism.
Yoram Hazony is an Israeli citizen, a modern Orthodox Jew, President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, and is considered a fanatical Zionist. His book The Virtue of Nationalism was controversially discussed by the mainstream. Particularly in the United States, his often very peculiar theses seem to find an audience. Hazony’s excessive Jewish nationalism has led him to make some statements that are as absurd as they are revealing.
Europe Is Said to Descend from “Israel and the Bible”
“There was always a problem with the academic study of ‘classical antiquity,’ which was built around the assumption that the West was descended from Greece and Rome—but not from Israel and the Bible,” Hazony wrote on Twitter. He considers this thesis to be “anti-Semitic.” Wow! Hazony is pulling out the heavy artillery of contemporary moralism.
I find Hazony’s claim that European civilization should be based on the Jews and their Bible to be incredibly presumptuous, chauvinistic, and a delusion that can only happen to someone who has escalated so extremely in his nationalism that he has lost all touch with reality.
The only connection ancient Israel has with Western civilization, i.e., with Rome and Hellenism, is that the province of Judea was part of the oriental empire of Rome. This did not magically make the Jews Europeans. In antiquity, the Jews were by no means a significant people. The Romans did not see them as much more than the numerous other small tribes that were part of their vast empire. The fact that Jews later migrated to Europe does not change these facts.
