#496 — The Oldest Lie

Sam Harris (0:20)

I'm here with Dara Horn. Dara, thanks for joining me.

Dara Horn (0:23)

Thank you so much for having me.

Sam Harris (0:25)

Well, you have written a truly masterful book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, A Love Story for the Living.

This is your second provocative title that I'm aware of. The last book was People Love Dead Jews. So you have not been shy about your titles. But this book is, there's no way we will exhaust the points you make in this book. I mean, it's just, it's really a comprehensive look at the problem of the moment, at least for many of us. So thank you for writing it, and thank you for doing what you're doing, and taking the time to talk to me today.

Dara Horn (0:59)

Well, thank you for having me, and for all the work you're doing.

Sam Harris (1:02)

So let's start where I guess the confusion tends to start. How should we think about Jews as a people? I mean, how is it that the variables of nationalism or a religion don't map on to the territory in a way that makes it immediately understandable what we're talking about?

Dara Horn (1:25)

Well, the reason it doesn't immediately map on to the categories we know is frankly because of the success of empires. What often when people ask me this question of are Jews a nationality or Jews a religion or Jews a race or Jews an ethnicity? The answer actually isn't complicated, it's just old.

Jews predate all of those categories. Jews predate obviously the modern concept of race, Jews predate concept of nationality, Jews even predate the concept of religion. When Hebrew linguists were reviving Hebrew as a spoken language, they had to dig through the Hebrew Bible to find a word that meant religion because Hebrew actually didn't have one. So there's actually an answer to who Jews are. Jews are a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture. That was a sentence in English. In Hebrew, it's one word, it's two letters long.

So this is who Jews have always been. The reason that this is so incomprehensible to most people in the modern world is because most groups like this were eliminated by the success of empires. So this is a very familiar kind of category in the ancient world. But if you think about it, Christianity conquered all of Europe and the Americas and beyond. Islam conquered the Middle East and North Africa and Central Asia and beyond. Think about all of the various groups that were living in those places whose cultures and civilizations are basically erased. What's unusual about Jews is that Jews are still here. There are very few of these ancient groups. Maybe Zoroastrians, you could find some groups like this, but there are very few. That's why even the category is unfamiliar to people certainly in the modern West, but really frankly in a lot of places because of the success of empires, and Jews are unusual and this is one of the few ancient groups that did not succumb to empires, did not assimilate into empires and are still here.

That's why to me this brings us to the challenge that we face now, which is that this is a group of people who because of this have become essentially an acid test for the success or failure of a pluralistic society.

Sam Harris (3:30)

One point you make in the book is that security for Jews can't be a matter of making the case that they're just like everyone else because they've spent 3,000 years telling the world that they're not just like everyone else, and their coherence as a people is in many ways predicated on that conception of themselves, and there are theological pieces here which you don't really emphasize in the book, which perhaps we'll talk about. But this poses a problem because in some sense, Jews have been collaborating, I mean, in a very real sense, Jews have been collaborating with the people who see them as irretrievably different and hate them on that basis by seeing themselves as irretrievably different. Right, so see if you, I mean, that sounds like a kind of paradox that is somewhat indigestible in a pluralistic society. But how do you think about the Jewish self-concept and how it's working here?

Dara Horn (4:30)

Well, the way I think about this, and I describe it this way in the book, is that if you think about the actual content of Jewish civilization, what you ultimately emerge with, and I don't claim this is the only way to understand Jewish civilization, obviously there are many ways, but one strain of it, you find is essentially an anti-tyrannical movement since ancient times. So a lot of the ideas that we now think of as religious or theological like monotheism.