There is nothing so sad as a stupid Jew

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I'm having a crisis in faith.

Not, Heaven forbid, a crisis in faith in the Lord. My crisis is that I no longer have faith in humaniny.

Worse, I'm losing faith in some of my brethren.

There's a quote I heard years ago: "There is nothing so sad as a stupid Jew." It presumes a common belief that Jews are smarter than other people. If that's true, why have so many members of the tribe turned against their own brothers and sisters?

I'm not talking about Milton Himmelfarb's observation in 1968 that Jews live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.

Compassion for others is built into our DNA. And that's something I'm proud of. The problem is when that empathy spills over into compassion for enemies and, worse yet, blame for their victims.

I avoided quoting Dwight Macdonald's analysis in an article I wrote about Webster's Third International Dictionary, because of an allergy to Macdonald's antisemitism. But I doubt that Leon Trotsky had the same reason for saying, "Every man has a right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege."

I am more troubled when Jews abuse that privilege. When the novelist Saul Bellow was a student, he was drawn to socialist ideals. For him and his intellectual friends, "The Revolution" was a lofty ideal. They would often meet at his aunt's apartment and talk about their utopian dreams. His aunt commented, "Your friends, they are so smart, so smart. But stupid!"

Trotsky was a prime example of that stupidity.

The chief rabbi of Moscow told Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein), "The Trotskys make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay the bills."

All I really need to know about assimilation, I learned in kindergarten.

When I was a kid, my yeshivah had no bus service for a few weeks. So, in the interim, I went to kindergarten in the school on our block — P.S. 189.

One day, during a fire drill, the principal saw me in the hall and told me to take off my cap.

I said, "I can't; I'm Jewish."

The principal — who was not Jewish — smiled and said, "Next time, wear a skullcap."

My teacher — who was Jewish — made me stand in the corner the rest of the day for talking back to the principal.

That day, I learned a life lesson. I had a choice: I could be an assimilationist or a maverick.

I chose the latter.

I don't know where the Jewish leftists who shed tears over poor Hamas went to kindergarten. But I know which choice they made.

It has happened before. Uzi Landau, former chairman of the Israeli Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, wrote about Herbert Samuel, the first British High Commissioner for Palestine from 1920 to 1925.

Since Samuel was Jewish and sympathetic to Zionism, there was hope he would be compassionate to fellow Jews.

"But when Arab rioting against Jews erupted the following year, Samuel changed his tune, blaming the victim and appeasing the aggressor."

Samuel went so far as to pardon Arab terrorists and appointed Haj Amin el-Husseini to the post of Grand Mufti, confident that Husseini would be reasonable and moderate once he had to deal with the responsibilities of office.

How reasonable and moderate was he?

Husseini fled to Germany in 1941 and met with Adolf Hitler, proposing that the Nazis export their anti-Jewish campaign to the Middle East. Assimilationist turncoats go back well before Herbert Samuel. The syndrome goes back to the Court Jews of the Austrian emperors and the German princes in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. These Jews rose to positions of influence because of their wealth and education.

But — however hard they tried to fit in, they were parvenus — nouveau powerful — at best. They were never fully accepted.

It goes back to the Hellenists. And it goes back even further — to the Israelites who didn't want to leave Egypt … and died in the Plague of Darkness.

The Phrophet (Isaiah 49:17) says of the Geulah (ultimat Rdemption), "Your destroyers and those who lay you waste shall go forth from you." Interestingly, the Sages have interpreted this verse very differently from its literal meaning. The traditional interpretation is, "Your ruiners and destroyers will come from among you."

And we have produced many of our own destroyers — from Dasan and Aviram to Jewish protesters promoting the blatant lie of genocide of Palestinians.

Why are Jews so quick to defend their aggressors? A few thoughts come to mind.

One is the Stockholm syndrome, in which victims come to identify with their captors or abusers. That might have been part of the motivation of those Jews who became Capos — trustees in the concentration camps. More likely, their motivation was more base — hope of privileges, or at least survival.

Both point to a national inferiority complex and the need to be accepted and loved by the gentiles.

There's an old sad joke about a woman who asks some guy,

"Are you Jewish?"

"No, I'm not."

"Are you sure? You look Jewish."

"Listen, lady. For the last time, I'm not Jewish. My father wasn't Jewish. And my grandfather, alav hashalom, wasn't Jewish."

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Mordechai Schiller is an award-winning columnist and headline writer at Hamodia, the Daily Newspaper of Torah Jewry, where this first appeared. His column has won two awards -- so far -- from the American Jewish Press Association.

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• Asking For It