This essay by John Murray Cuddihy, published in Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America (eds. Robert N. Bellah & Frederick E. Greenspahn, Crossroad, 1987), is a provocative sociological and theological critique of what Cuddihy calls “Jewish theodicy”, the way Jewish discourse handles the problem of evil, specifically anti-Semitism, and argues that this discourse carries an irritating presumption of total moral innocence .
The Core Argument
Cuddihy’s central claim is that Jewish theodicy, shaped especially by the post-Enlightenment shift from self-blame to external blame, has evolved into an ideology of moral exemption: the belief that Jews bear no causal responsibility for anti-Semitism whatsoever .
He traces a historical shift from “intrapunitive” theodicy (traditional religious Judaism blamed Jewish suffering on Israel’s own covenant violations) to “exteropunitive” theodicy (modern secular Judaism places all blame on the Gentile persecutor) . This shift, he argues, leaves Jews rhetorically outside of history, what he calls, borrowing from Maritain, “angelism” .
The Irrationality Critique
Cuddihy targets the logical paradox in writers like Cynthia Ozick and Barbara Tuchman, who hold that any attempt to explain anti-Semitism by reference to Jewish behavior is itself anti-Semitism . He calls this a reductio ad absurdum: it removes Jews entirely from causal history, rendering them “unconditioned spirits” rather than historical actors interacting with other groups .
The author further notes the double standard this creates, Jewish theodicy condemns blaming victims when Jews are the victims, but comfortably blames Palestinians (also stateless victims) when Israeli actions are the cause .
“Jewish Angelism” in Culture and Politics
Cuddihy illustrates his argument with wide-ranging examples of what he terms “moral smugness”:
- Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose is cited for depicting Jews as morally superior while Italians are portrayed as “outright slobs”
- Elie Wiesel is quoted asserting the world “envies” Jewish military victory, and that when Jews are angry, “we sing”, even as Israel fielded a powerful army
- PM Menachem Begin declared the Israeli army “the most humane army in the world” on the same day the Washington Post reported indiscriminate Israeli shelling of civilian Beirut for 20 hours
- Eugene Gold, a Brooklyn D.A. emigrating to Israel, identifies America with mere materialism while equating Israel with “the morals, the justice”, a contrast Cuddihy finds ideologically loaded and condescending
The Beirut Press Censorship Case
One of the essay’s most striking sections concerns the 1982 siege of Beirut . New York Times bureau chief Thomas Friedman filed a dispatch describing Israeli bombing as “indiscriminate,” but his editors removed the word without informing him.
Friedman sent an impassioned telex calling the omission “thoroughly unprofessional” . Cuddihy interprets this editorial act not merely as institutional bias toward Jewish readers or organizations, but as a deeper fear of destroying a theodicy, the long-held communal “social construction of reality” that Jews are always the victims, never the perpetrators, of bad things .
The Sociology of “Chosenness”
Cuddihy grounds this ideology in the secularization of Jewish election, the doctrine of being the chosen people, which once stripped of its religious content, becomes a secular claim of moral and intellectual superiority.
He cites sociologist Marshall Sklare noting that Jews “still possess a feeling of superiority” in moral and intellectual realms, a feeling that operates practically to retard assimilation .
Philip Roth is quoted candidly summarizing this as a childhood inheritance: “Jews are better” — not as a fact, but as a deeply instilled psychology .
The “Begin Problem” and Ahistorical Anti-Semitism
The essay closes with a telling example: after a 1978 terrorist attack, PM Begin declared the victims were killed “only because they were Jews” . Cuddihy, drawing on scholar Robert Segal and Hannah Arendt, argues this is a tautological, ahistorical explanation.
To prove the point, he offers a thought experiment: if Irish settlers had occupied Palestine in 1948 and their children were killed, no one would say they died “only for being Irish”, everyone would understand it was about what was done, not what they were . This, Cuddihy argues, is the heart of the secular Jewish theodicy: replacing historical causation with existential victimhood as a source of consolation and moral self-affirmation.
Critical Takeaway
The essay is deliberately uncomfortable, Cuddihy is careful to say the discourse he critiques is “not necessarily wrong, or inaccurate, or immoral or illegal, but just simply annoying” because it violates reciprocity .
His argument is less a polemic against Jews than a sociological dissection of how any group’s theodicy can function ideologically to enhance group cohesion and legitimacy while insulating it from historical accountability.
The piece sits within Cuddihy’s broader project (see his earlier The Ordeal of Civility) of examining the tension between Jewish particularity and modern civil society .
Dr Bob, Brain Mechanic 