The irrational ideology called anti-Semitism

In the middle of the 20th century in the middle of Central Europe, as the great traditional empires of the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs were yielding to the new imperial designs of the German fascists under Hitler and the Russian communists under Stalin, the most important ideology shaping events in Europe at the time was not any of the usual political/economic suspects (liberalism, fascism, communism) but rather the irrational ideology called anti-Semitism. 

In general, while power behind empires is shifting and thus the military and political power is weak and diffuse, the ideologies that become dominant are those that speak loudest when power is vague – the ideologies of distraction. The Jewish people need a strategy for survival not when power is held clearly but when power is in flux and not settled, for it is then that the Jewish people become the instruments (victims) of the ideologies of distraction. When power is unstable the challenge is not to seize power so much as to coagulate it and to form it into some sort of coherent whole. When power is stable, the strategy of the court Jew works just fine; but when power is unsettled, the strategy of the court Jew backfires and becomes the excuse the rabble rousers use to coagulate their own power base. 

The issue for the Jewish people is not to have might, it is to have resilience. 

When the dominant powers in the world are illegitimate the ethereal ideologies of extraction distraction become more important than materialist ideologies of legitimate governance; and the Jewish people get it in the teeth. The Jewish people are the canaries in the coal mine of threats to legitimate power and settled authority. As such, the Jewish people recapitulate in Diaspora the role the ancient state of Israel played in the homeland, which homeland was wedged between the great regional empires of early civilization and so Israel needed, in order to stay alive and to remain autonomous, to manage with dexterity her relations with those contending imperial super-powers. That is why the Jewish people need to promote the rule of YHWH – certainly internally, and ultimately as a light unto the nations – because the rule of YHWH is the rule of legitimate authority. That is also why the Jewish people need to be cleverer than they presently are about the crucial role public relations plays in the conduct of international relations.