Published: 8 July 2024
Last updated: 14 July 2024
About ten years ago a pair of young Korean missionaries buttonholed me at a train station in suburban Melbourne. It was just before Easter, so I told them I was Jewish, and that Jesus’ Last Supper was probably a Passover seder. They were fresh to their mission and I’m certain that they had never met a Jew before. The missionaries angrily told me I was wrong, and that I wasn’t a Jew, and stormed off.
I have been thinking about this encounter a lot over the past eight months.
When the reality of a living Jew did not match their worldview, the missionaries chose to deny my identity rather than reconsider their position.
Jews are just 0.2% of the global population, still fewer Jews than prior to the Holocaust, and many people don’t think the remnant is the authentic article.
This is why they are so quick to tell us that our faith is obsolete, our history fake, and our attachment to land imaginary.
There have been many attempts to erase Jewish history and invalidate Jewish identity. The discredited Khazar myth claimed that Ashkenazi Jews were actually descended from a nomadic Turkic people, who converted to Judaism. A more recent phenomenon is the Radical Hebrew Israelites—a Christian extremist group who claim modern Jews stole the religious identity of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people and that White Jews are fake. Until recently mainstream Christianity accepted Jewish history but argued Jewish religion was no longer valid because it had been superseded.
The denial of Jewish indigeneity in Israel is yet another attempt to deny Jewish authenticity.
