‘We act like human beings – we are not on a killing spree’
‘Smite Amalek’
Amalek in Judaism is Israel’s arch enemy. The word originally designated a specific tribe, but has come to mean the incarnation of absolute evil.
Esau’s grandson Amalek gave his name to the tribe that ambushed the rear guard of the Jewish people, who were recovering in the Sinai desert after the exodus from Egypt. God ordered the Israelites to wage relentless war against Amalek’s people for this treachery, and to remember the offence until it was expunged by the conquest of the Promised Land (Exodus 17:14; Deuteronomy 25:19).
This commandment translated into an explicit order to Saul: ‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’ (1 Samuel 15:3). Saul obeyed, but spared Agag, the Amalekite king, earning God’s wrath.
In the book of Esther, Agag’s descendant Haman plans to annihilate the Jews of the Persian empire, but Esther intercedes with her husband, the Persian king Ahasuerus. During the festival of Purim, celebrating their salvation, the story of Amalek’s war on Israel is read aloud in the synagogue.
Did Amalek really exist? The Bible is the only text that mentions this enemy of the Jewish people. Yet Amalek has always been significant in Judaism.
Talmudic scholars have freely interpreted the Scriptures to defuse its potential for justifying violence, taking the view that it was impossible to identify this evil adversary among the mix of peoples that resulted from Assyria’s destruction of Israel in the eighth century BCE. Consequently, the mitzvah ‘Remember that which Amalek did to Israel’ can be detached from the now impossible injunction to eradicate it.
Some rabbinical sources saw a manifestation of Amalek in the Roman suppression of Jewish revolts. In the Middle Ages, others, in the Islamic world, identified it with Christianity, which was contested by Talmudic authorities in Christian lands. And in the 20th century, Nazism was denounced as a new Amalek.
From the 19th century, leading Jewish thinkers such as the German rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-88), a major figure in the new orthodoxy, faithful to tradition but open to the Enlightenment, equated Amalek with the cult of force, the ‘glorification of the sword’ that God commanded be eradicated.
But this is not the meaning Netanyahu has given to Amalek. And that brings the risk Emmanuel Bloch warned of in 2015: ‘If, like the generations that preceded us, we want to escape the trap of religious violence, we must insist again and again on the safeguards that our tradition has developed over the centuries.’
Marius Schattner
canisgallicus 