The world knows not Joseph
What’s wrong with the nations of Europe and the world?
Whatever they find to say about Israel and the Jews, it’s almost always negative. They outdo each other in their sickening anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rhetoric.
Where once the Christian world constantly found ever more lurid language to accuse the Jews of killing Jesus, now the nations vie with each other in accusing us of not just poisoning the wells of medieval Europe but poisoning the very air that we all breathe.
Where once the Muslims accused us of falsifying the Scriptures, now the nations, even the most civilised of them, accuse us of spreading false ideas, subverting ethics and wreaking on others what once was done to us.
Forget that there is not an area of human knowledge which we did not fructify, a dimension of culture that we did not enrich, a field of science and medicine which we did not enhance – we deserve only to be degraded, delegitimised and destroyed.
What they blithely peddle is the idea that what the ancient Egyptians did to us wasn’t good enough. They add the obscene comment: Even the Nazis were at fault for not completely annihilating us. So-called academic assessors rely on Jewish books but pass anti-Israel and anti-Jewish resolutions.
Truly, as the sidra says, that culture is king that “knows not Joseph” (Ex. 1:8).
We know it’s all a lie, and so in their hearts do all the beneficiaries of the Jewish contribution to civilisation. But the problem is that they can’t bring themselves to speak up and speak out.
Is it because the ethical commandment against bearing false witness is in itself a Jewish teaching?
