Then a new king came to power in Egypt, who did not know Joseph. “Look,” he said to his people, “the nation of the Children of Israel has become too numerous and powerful for us. Come, we must outsmart him or he will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will be added to our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.” —Exodus 1:8-10
The Bible describes the Egyptian Pharaoh’s overwhelming fear of the Jewish minority in his land. While Pharaoh was neither the first nor last xenophobe, suspicious of a growing population of foreigners in his country, his fears of the Jewish community in particular were not merely overblown, but preposterous.
The first thing we learn about the new king is that he “did not know Joseph.” Joseph, of course, had saved the country from starvation, by foreseeing the future from the previous Pharaoh’s own prophetic dreams, and then implementing a program of taxation during the years of plenty and disbursement during famine—a strategy that both fed the populace and enriched the state coffers. Because of his close relationship with Joseph and in acknowledgement for all that Joseph had done for Egypt, that Pharaoh had rolled out the red carpet for Jacob and his family: “The land of Egypt is before you, in the best of the land you shall dwell.” This occurred even though Joseph’s brothers admitted that they only intended to live there temporarily.
All of this was “forgotten” by the new Pharaoh in true Orwellian fashion: who the Jews were, where they came from, how they arrived in Egypt, and the incredible, positive contribution of the Jews to Egyptian society overall. The erasure of objective history was a necessary component of Pharaoh’s effort to characterize the Jews as not merely a drain and a burden, but a parasitic danger.
The original Hebrew text of the Torah reveals a key element of Pharaoh’s antisemitic outlook: in the passage cited above, although he is referring to the all the Children of Israel, he refers to them in the singular: let us outsmart him, lest he multiply, and in a war he add to our enemies. Pharaoh regarded all of Israel as a single, hostile unit conspiring to harm others. And, of course, he adopted the same strategy as Laban: genocide, via the slaughter of every Jewish boy.
The beliefs of Pharoah also exemplify the “Big Lie” technique, that which Hitler later accused the Jews of doing while employing himself. The stack of fantastic lies which Pharaoh foisted upon his credulous nation are describied in the commentary of Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Wasser (1809-1879), known as the Malbim. He was a warrior for preservation of traditional Judaism and also a prolific commentator, who wrote detailed explanatory notes to most of the Hebrew Bible.
First, merely seventy Jews came down to Egypt, so the notion that they could have become “too numerous and powerful” for the entire country of Egypt in the span of a few generations is nonsense, even if their community was growing rapidly. Second, there was no grounds upon which to accuse the Jews of disloyalty, which was utterly contrary to how they had lived as loyal citizens. Third, his fear rested upon the improbable notion of a future attack from a hostile army, at a time when the Egyptians lived securely, with no threats on the horizon. And finally, he did not even fear that the Jews would do anything wrong, simply that they might leave—when the Egyptians had accepted them to live there on a temporary basis, and even then freedom of movement was understood as a basic right. All of this amounts to what we would call an irrational obsession. Due only to his own baseless fantasies, Pharoah launched a genocidal effort to eliminate the Jews.
Today, we see the same antisemitism reflected around us. There is no greater proof of the uniqueness of the Jewish people that we are hated by obsessed, evil people like these!
Photo Credit: Carved wood mask of Pharoah Tutankhamun by Leo Reynolds, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license, available on Flickr.
