The False Messiah to Come

Among some Jews in the Diaspora, there is a real hesitation to speak too harshly about Israel. Those who do not live here, whose children are not serving in the army, who do not wake up each day under the weight of war, often feel they should be careful before passing judgment on a society whose burdens they do not fully bear. There is something honorable in that restraint, especially given how easily Jewish self-criticism can be weaponized by virulently anti-Zionist, and sometimes plainly antisemitic, voices. Every Israeli failure can be ripped from its context and folded into a discourse that denies Israel’s legitimacy, and at times Jewish legitimacy itself. We also know that many who denounce Israeli violence have had little to say about Jewish vulnerability, even as it has become painfully visible again in Europe.

But there is a point at which restraint becomes silence — and silence becomes dangerous. I write from Israel, and I am addressing Jews in the Diaspora precisely because the old divide between Israel and the Diaspora no longer explains what is happening. Today, the real divide cuts across both Israel and the Diaspora. It separates those for whom galut — a word poorly translated as “exile,” and even worse as “diasporism”— still shapes Jewish consciousness, even after the return of political sovereignty, from those who long for a post-exilic Judaism: a Judaism freed from rabbinic caution, from the fear of desecrating God’s name, and from the Jewish suspicion of messianic excess. This is the divide I want to examine, because the question is not only Israeli. It also concerns the future shape of Judaism.

What I want to address is often softened into a discussion of the Israeli far right’s “excesses.” But that language understates the problem and narrows it too much. What is taking place is not simply political extremism, nor a series of marginal acts of brutality. It is an effort to recast the very paradigm on which Judaism has rested since the Talmudic period. And this effort does not stop at Israel’s borders. It has fervent supporters in parts of the Diaspora, even as many Israelis oppose it precisely in the name of the Jewish tradition it claims to complete.

I will take one specific example: verbal and physical attacks on Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem. Most violence by Israeli Jews is, of course, directed at Palestinians, most of them Muslim, within a broader context of occupation and dispossession. But anti-Christian violence has a grim analytical clarity: it appears without the security rationale so often invoked to excuse violence against Palestinians. With Christians, that rationale is much harder to sustain. No one can seriously claim that spitting on a priest, striking a nun, desecrating a place of worship, or destroying a statue of Jesus is a matter of military necessity. These acts protect no one. They respond to no threat.

The available figures no longer allow us to speak of isolated incidents. The Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, an Israeli organization based in Jerusalem, documented 89 incidents targeting Christians in 2023. In 2024, that number rose to 111, including 46 physical assaults, 35 attacks on church property, and 13 cases of harassment. For 2025, depending on the method of counting, the available data points to between 155 and 181 documented incidents. In the first three months of 2026 alone, the Religious Freedom Data Center had already recorded 31 new cases of harassment, mostly spitting and vandalism against church property.

Violence against “the goyim” — especially Christians cast as representatives of the persecuting West, and Muslims cast as the political enemy of the moment — becomes a way of breaking free from the “exilic mentality” it despises.

To be clear, these figures remain far lower, both in absolute terms and relative to the size of the communities concerned, than the levels of antisemitism in France. But that comparison should bring no comfort. Is that really where we are: taking comfort in the fact that Jews have not yet directed at other religious minorities the kind of hatred European Jews know so well? The fact remains: the incidents are increasing, and their normalization should alarm us.

Alongside these figures, two recent cases have drawn particular attention. In April 2026, an Israeli soldier filmed himself in the Christian village of Debel, in southern Lebanon, smashing a statue of Jesus with a sledgehammer. The IDF condemned the act, saying it violated its orders and values, and two soldiers were sentenced to thirty days in military prison. This was obviously not an order from the Israeli army. Still, one soldier felt entitled to do it, another to film it, and the video first circulated in parts of the religious right, where it was celebrated. A few days later, in Jerusalem, a nun walking peacefully near Mount Zion was violently pushed to the ground and then beaten. Israeli police arrested a 36-year-old Jewish man. The real issue is not only the official response, but the climate these acts expose, and the climate that allows them to happen.

The Exilic Paradigm

To understand what is now coming apart, we first need to name the paradigm within which Jewishness was shaped for so long. That paradigm had two poles: an ethics of the Name, and a politics of deferral.

The ethical pole can be stated simply: a Jew never represents only himself. His speech, his business dealings, his relationship to his neighbor and to the non-Jew, all carry something larger than the individual. For religious Jews, what is at stake is the divine Name, since every act can either sanctify or desecrate the God of Israel in the world. Among many secular Jews, something of that structure remains. One might recall here, though not without some distance, Jean-Claude Milner’s notion of the “Jewish Name”: not an identity one possesses sovereignly, but a received and transmitted name, irreducible to ordinary forms of belonging. In the perspective developed here, that Name also places an obligation on the one who bears it, and no individual is free to stain it as though it belonged to him alone.

Rabbinic Judaism, from which we come, was built on this consciousness. To be a Jew is not only to belong to a history or a people. It is to carry a Name that precedes us and exceeds us, a Name for which our actions answer before more than ourselves. A famous story from the Jerusalem Talmud, attributed to Rabbi Shimon ben Shetaḥ, gives this idea particular force. It is worth noting that ben Shetaḥ, one of the pillars of early rabbinic Judaism, did not live in a powerless Diaspora, but in the Land of Israel, under Hasmonean sovereignty. And yet the story is marked by a distinctly exilic consciousness.

His students, hoping to ease his burden, bought him a donkey from an Arab merchant. They discovered that a precious stone was attached to it and returned joyfully to their master: now, they told him, he would no longer have to work so hard. The sage asked whether the seller knew about the stone. When they said he did not, he ordered them to return it. The text knows the obvious legal objection: while theft is always forbidden, had it not been taught that one may benefit from a lost object belonging to a non-Jew? Rabbi Shimon ben Shetaḥ answered: “Am I a barbarian, looking to enrich myself? My greatest treasure is to hear a non-Jew say: Blessed be the God of the Jews.”¹

Like all great human traditions, rabbinic Judaism recognized differentiated circles of obligation. But Rabbi Shimon ben Shetaḥ’s gesture is precisely to refuse making the legal minimum the highest measure of Jewish life. The standard he embraces depends on the gaze of another — more precisely, of a non-Jew, the only one who can say here: “Blessed be the God of the Jews.” In his Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre famously argued that it is the antisemite who “makes” the Jew, that Jewish identity, in the modern world, is imposed from the outside by the hostile gaze that names and excludes him. Sartre, then, did grasp something real about the power of the non-Jewish gaze. But contrary to what his formulation suggests, the Talmud does not say that the non-Jew makes the Jew. It is not his gaze that grounds the master’s Jewishness. Rather, that gaze becomes one of the places where what the Jew does with the divine Name is measured. If the antisemitic gaze assigns the Jew to his Jewishness and imprisons him from the outside, the gaze imagined by rabbinic Judaism makes him responsible. It prevents Jewishness from closing in on itself, as though it had no one before whom to answer.

A Jew never represents only himself. In the perspective developed here, that Name also places an obligation on the one who bears it, and no individual is free to stain it as though it belonged to him alone.

Today, parts of the Jewish world — especially in certain religious-nationalist circles — increasingly recast this entire paradigm as a diasporic sickness. To care about how one is seen by the non-Jew is treated as submission. By contrast, to despise the non-Jew, to brutalize him, to show that one no longer feels bound by restraint in his presence, becomes a kind of emancipation. Here one hears a disturbing echo of Frantz Fanon’s defense of the colonized subject’s “therapeutic” violence: violence, he argued, “detoxifies” the individual, freeing him from his inferiority complex and from habits of passivity and despair. Something similar is at work in the most nationalist fringe of Israeli Jewish society. Violence against “the goyim” — especially Christians cast as representatives of the persecuting West, and Muslims cast as the political enemy of the moment — becomes a way of breaking free from the “exilic mentality” it despises.

On Messianic Impatience

The second pole of the exilic paradigm might be called a politics of messianic deferral. Its founding figure is Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai, the sage who, according to rabbinic tradition, left besieged Jerusalem and asked Vespasian: “Give me Yavneh and its sages.” That gesture has often been read as the founding act of rabbinic Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem. It was not a surrender to history, but a different way of living within it — a refusal to let messianic urgency mistake itself for redemption, and to let the longing for salvation become another path to catastrophe.

Another important teaching is attributed to that same figure:

אם היתה נטיעה בתוך ידך ויאמרו לך הרי לך המשיח. בוא ונטע את הנטיעה [ואח”כ צא והקבילו]. אם יאמרו לך הילדים נלך ונבנה בית המקדש אל תשמע להם ואם יאמרו לך הזקנים בוא ונסתור בית המקדש שמע להם. מפני שבנין ילדים סתירה וסתירת זקנים בנין.

If you are holding a sapling in your hand and they tell you, “The Messiah has come,” first plant the sapling, and then go out to greet him.

If children say to you, “Let us go and build the Temple,” do not listen to them. If elders say to you, “Let us go and destroy the Temple,” listen to them. For the building of children is destruction, and the destruction of elders is building.²

The two sayings extend this politics of messianic deferral, too often mistaken for Jewish passivity. Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai’s entire story says the opposite: his escape from Jerusalem under the noses of the Zealots, and his request to Vespasian, show an active intelligence of history. But action also means preventing certain forces from entering the political field too quickly. The sayings themselves do not oppose messianic fervor to inaction, but to concrete gestures. To plant a sapling — to place a real hope in the ground — may come before greeting the Messiah himself. And sometimes it is better to destroy the Temple when those who claim to build it have already undermined its spiritual conditions. Rabbinic deferral does not drain messianism of its power. It prevents that power from being captured by the impatient. It keeps the Messiah within a spiritual tension, while warning against his immediate operativity — that is, against turning him into a political program surrendered to human impatience.

These two stories reveal the Jewish paradigm now under threat: an ethics of the Name and a politics of messianic deferral. The first moves the question beyond the legal minimum, asking what our actions do to the divine Name, or at least to the Jewish Name. The second reminds us that religious impatience can destroy the very conditions of what it claims to bring about. Where the Zealots seek the immediacy of sacred action, the rabbis build mediations. And it is precisely these mediations that part of contemporary nationalist messianism now seeks to abolish.

Judeolatry: Why Humanism Is No Longer Enough

It is precisely this double paradigm that is now collapsing in parts of the Jewish world. What long stood at the heart of rabbinic Judaism is now reread as an “exilic ethics.” For those who denounce it, the phrase means an ethics of weakness, a way of bowing before the nations — almost a “slave morality,” in Nietzsche’s sense. In this imagination, the new Jew must no longer fear desecrating the Name; he must make others fear his own name. Harshness becomes health, and the humiliation of the other presents itself as proof that the Jew has finally been cured of exile. Perhaps this is what we should call Judeolatry: the moment when Jewishness stops answering to what exceeds it and begins to worship itself in its restored power.

The false messiah turns the state, whose first task was to protect Jewish life, into an object of worship; and from there, every internal criticism becomes a heresy.

There are two major Jewish responses to this mutation, and both fall short. The first is to answer it in the language of humanism and human rights. But for many Jews, that language no longer carries much force. They know, in their bones, how little the great humanist promises have sometimes meant when Jewish existence was at stake. It is even less convincing to the Jewish radical right, which has paradoxically absorbed part of the decolonial critique of humanism. In that view, humanism is suspected of being a disguised attempt to impose Western, Christian, or post-Christian values on the world, while delegitimizing peoples who refuse them. In its Jewish version, the argument becomes that universalism mainly serves to keep Jews from defending themselves, winning wars, and exercising sovereignty in full. Appeals to human rights are then heard as indifference to Jewish suffering, or as yet another demand that Jews alone show restraint.

The second response, long associated with parts of the Zionist left, is a return to the “morality of the prophets.” Israel’s Declaration of Independence already promised a state founded on freedom, justice, and peace, as “taught by the Hebrew Prophets.” In its more recent form, this approach tries to derive from a relatively narrow Jewish corpus a broader moral language — one that often ends up sounding like Western liberal ethics translated into Hebrew. This ethics is not wrong, and the prophets obviously belong at the heart of Jewish consciousness. But the appeal to them often remains lyrical and abstract. It speaks of justice, yet struggles to offer the concrete disciplines through which a person learns to work on his anger, his pride, his humiliation, and his desire to dominate.

The biblical prophets, like many of their contemporary admirers, speak above all at the scale of history, the people, and justice. Rabbinic tradition worked for centuries at another scale: the scale of the individual, of how one stands before insult, restrains the desire for power, and refuses to turn injury into a license to humiliate. This rabbinic ethics has little in common with what some today call “Jewish morality” — a nationalist morality that elevates wounded pride and conquest into signs of spiritual health. From Pirkei Avot to Rabbi Moshe Cordovero’s Tomer Devorah, written in sixteenth-century Safed, rabbinic ethics taught restraint and self-mastery. It did not hesitate to demand that a person repair himself before claiming to repair the world.

The False Messiah to Come

The Jewish concept of galut has never meant only living outside the Land of Israel, deprived of political sovereignty.³ More deeply, it names the awareness that the world is not redeemed, and that this non-redemption makes a claim on the Jew down to the way he lives. From this flow the ethics of the Name and the politics of messianic deferral discussed above. Rabbi Shimon ben Shetaḥ lived in the Land of Israel, under Hasmonean rule, and yet his teaching already carried this galut consciousness, even before political exile.

The Jewish argument now emerging, then, cannot be reduced to a geographic divide between Israel and the Diaspora, or even to a simplistic divide between Zionists and non-Zionists. It turns instead on this exilic consciousness: some seek to preserve it, including within Israel itself, while others seek to break free from it in the name of a Judaism finally made post-exilic, including in the Diaspora.

The divide separates those for whom galut still shapes Jewish consciousness, even after the return of political sovereignty, from those who long for a post-exilic Judaism: a Judaism freed from rabbinic caution, from the fear of desecrating God’s name, and from the Jewish suspicion of messianic excess.

This is how the false messiah to come is being prepared. Unlike Jesus, Shabbatai Zvi, or Jacob Frank, he will not appear in the form of a man. He is already taking shape as a sacralized state and a sovereignty turned into worship. He will not necessarily announce the abolition of the Torah. He will claim, rather, to fulfill it at last — to free it from exilic restraint, from rabbinic slowness, from that “slave morality” said to have kept the Jewish people from becoming fully master of itself. His language will be the language of recovered strength, but his action is already damaging what it claims to protect.

That is why this false messiah is harder to recognize than those of the past. He does not ask Jews to follow an exalted prophet or a heretical master, but to bow before their own power. He turns the state, whose first task was to protect Jewish life, into an object of worship; and from there, every internal criticism becomes a heresy. But by placing the State of Israel beyond criticism, the false prophets of Judeolatry force Jews into a deadly alternative: either an idol-state, sanctified even in its sins, or its destruction — because an idol can only be worshiped or smashed.

As Dimitry Shumsky has recently shown, exilic thought was never foreign to Zionism itself. For a long time, it remained one of Zionism’s internal possibilities, before being overshadowed by the story of a state that had come to abolish galut. To think of a Jewish state in an exilic sense is first of all to refuse to let it become the source of its own legitimacy. Elijah Benamozegh, the nineteenth-century rabbi and kabbalist from Livorno, expressed this intuition with striking clarity when he wrote that, for a state to be founded on Jewish values, it is enough “to admit something higher than human will alone, to reject despotism in all its forms, and to believe in the rule of absolute principles of justice and morality, independent of every whim and every interest, whether individual or even collective.”⁴

This sentence names what Judeolatry can no longer bear: that a liberal democracy, precisely because it places limits on human will, may be more faithful to a Jewish intuition than a regime draped in Jewish symbols but devoted to the worship of its own sovereignty. It also points toward another path: a renewed Jewish political theology, not as the sacralization of Jewish power, but as the art of reminding power that it is never its own end.

1. Jerusalem Talmud, Bava Metzia 2:5. ↩︎
2. Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, Version B, 31. ↩︎
3. One may also refer here to the pioneering work of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin on galut as an analytical category that loses none of its relevance even within renewed Jewish sovereignty. This essay is clearly indebted to that line of thought. ↩︎
4. Elie Benamozegh, Israël et l’Humanité, Paris 1914, p. 649. ↩︎