What Is a Jew doing here?

Itzhak David Goldberg is a Professor Emeritus at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine

At 103, Walter has begun to recognize the future in photographs of his past. In a bomb shelter near Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate, he stood before an audience, projecting images of the Germany he had known as a Jewish teenager in the 1930s. There were familiar streets, ordinary faces, and a world that had once seemed secure. Then he looked away from the screen and said quietly, “What is happening in Europe today reminds me of Germany in 1937."

Yet Walter is not a man imprisoned by memory. He is planning to jump from an airplane with a parachute to raise money for Israel’s lone soldiers-young men and women serving in the Israel Defense Forces without the immediate support of family in Israel. Nearly a century separates his childhood in Germany from their lives in Israel, but his gesture bridges those generations. The boy who once watched Europe turn against its Jews now intends to leap from the sky to help those who defend their homeland.

Walter knows that hatred seldom announces its destination. It begins with words, gathers legitimacy in public discourse, and gradually transforms neighbors into strangers. He was not predicting that history would repeat itself. He was warning that he recognized its language.

His words recalled a question that has haunted Jewish existence for centuries, one that lurks beneath S. Y. Agnon’s disturbing story of a lonely house deep in a forest: “What is a Jew doing here?"

Agnon’s parable shows why a welcome granted by others is never enough. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik points to what can take its place.

The House in the Forest

In Agnon’s The Lady and the Peddler (האדונית והרוכל), Joseph, a wandering Jewish peddler, arrives at the isolated home of Helen, a Christian woman who reluctantly purchases a hunting knife from him. Lost in the forest, he returns to her door and is offered shelter. Hospitality gradually becomes intimacy, and Joseph exchanges the uncertainty of the road for the warmth of her house.

He begins to forget the world from which he came. His religious practices fade, his identity grows indistinct, and the stranger comes to imagine himself at home. Yet Helen’s affection conceals a terrible secret: she has devoured her previous husbands and intends to make Joseph her next victim. Joseph’s danger lies not only in Helen’s concealed appetite but also in his own willingness to exchange memory for comfort, until the warmth of her house becomes indistinguishable from belonging.

One night, while Joseph is absent, she plunges the knife into his empty bed, believing him asleep beneath the covers. In her frenzy, she wounds herself fatally. Joseph returns, finds her dying, and eventually places her body upon the frozen roof, where birds descend upon her remains. Then he gathers his merchandise and returns to the road.

Agnon’s nightmare is also a parable of exile and spiritual estrangement. Joseph believed that love could dissolve the boundary between guest and host, that belonging might be purchased through accommodation. He imagined himself the exception to Helen’s appetite. Yet his own gradual abandonment of Jewish practice is part of the tragedy. In Agnon’s deliberately nightmarish world, a guest’s place in another’s house lasts only as long as the host allows, and beneath the warmth lay a question more powerful than intimacy: What right did he have to be there?

The house offered shelter, but never a home.

The European Illusion

The same question echoed through the Dreyfus Affair. Alfred Dreyfus was a patriotic French officer, thoroughly assimilated into the culture and institutions of the Republic. Yet when he was falsely convicted of treason in 1894, on flimsy and forged evidence in a climate thick with prejudice, his Jewishness made the accusation easy to believe. Émile Zola’s J’Accuse…!, published in 1898, exposed not merely a judicial injustice but the moral failure of a society that proclaimed equality while allowing prejudice to determine who truly belonged.

Dreyfus had given France his loyalty; Joseph had given Helen his trust. Neither offering could guarantee acceptance.

Antisemitism has always possessed this disturbing flexibility. The Jew is accused of remaining separate and then condemned for assimilating, despised for his weakness and feared for his power. The accusations contradict one another because their purpose is not explanation but exclusion.

A Third Guest: Agnon in 2026

Imagine Agnon’s story rewritten in 2026. Helen’s house now shelters a third inhabitant, a newcomer from a distant land, carrying wounds of his own. Like Joseph, he has sought refuge beneath a foreign roof. Yet shared vulnerability does not produce solidarity. The newcomer regards Joseph with suspicion and repeats accusations he has carried from elsewhere; the Jew, he believes, has no rightful place in the house. Helen, meanwhile, grows resentful of the changing world taking shape within her home. Three people share a roof, but not a sense of belonging.

One night, the newcomer sees Helen enter Joseph’s bedroom and plunge her hunting knife into the mattress, believing Joseph lies asleep beneath it. He does not warn Joseph. He watches as Helen, in her frenzy, wounds herself fatally. The man who sought shelter has learned to treat another guest as an intruder.

Joseph returns, places Helen’s body upon the frozen roof, and departs, returning to his wandering. The newcomer remains in the house. Helen is gone, but the suspicion directed at Joseph survives her.

Europe today has more than one source of antisemitism. Hostility toward Jews comes from the far right, from parts of the far left, and from Islamist currents. These movements have different histories and motives, and no community of immigrants can be reduced to any one of them. Yet Jews can find themselves targeted by mutually hostile groups, each asking, in its own language: What is a Jew doing here?

The Geography of Hatred

History has given that question a cruel new geography. For generations, European Jews were told to leave, to return to the land of their ancestors. Today, some Palestinian Arab extremists demand that Israeli Jews abandon their homeland and return to Europe-the continent that persecuted and ultimately murdered millions of them.

The Jew who was once told to go to Palestine is now told to go back to Europe. The sentence never changes, only the destination: go somewhere else. For many Israelis whose families came from the Middle East and North Africa, even that imagined destination has no historical meaning.

The biblical Joseph had known this paradox. He saved Egypt from famine and rose to the heights of power, yet generations later, “A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph" (Exodus 1:8). The descendants of Egypt’s savior became its slaves. Egypt is where the Jewish people first learned that welcome can expire.

Rav Soloveitchik: The Covenant of Destiny

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik understood that persecution could bind Jews together, but he refused to let their enemies define their identity. In Kol Dodi Dofek, he distinguished between ברית גורל, the covenant of fate, and ברית ייעוד, the covenant of destiny. He tied the first to Egypt and the second to Sinai.

Fate unites Jews because their enemies see no distinction between them. Destiny unites them because they choose to recognize one another as responsible partners in a shared future.

The Rav called for a unity born of commitment, not merely of shared memories but of shared purpose. Such unity does not require Jews to think alike. It requires them to recognize that disagreement cannot dissolve their responsibility for one another.

For Israel, that challenge is especially urgent. The Jewish people have recovered their sovereignty, yet remain divided by political, religious, and ideological conflicts. The walls of a homeland may protect its inhabitants from enemies outside, but only mutual responsibility can preserve the home within.

The House That Remains

Walter, at 103, remembers a Europe that taught its Jews how quickly a familiar street could become foreign territory. Yet he is preparing to leap from an airplane for young soldiers defending a country in which Jewish belonging no longer depends upon the permission of a host. His leap bridges the distance between the Jewish vulnerability of 1937 and the responsibilities of Jewish sovereignty.

Agnon’s Joseph escapes the murderous house only to return to the forest, condemned to resume his wandering. Our Joseph need not return to the forest. He can return to Jerusalem. But sovereignty alone does not complete the journey. The covenant of destiny demands that Jews, divided by conviction yet bound by responsibility, learn to preserve together the home they have recovered.

In Helen’s house, the Jew survived by escaping. In Jerusalem, the Jewish people must learn to survive by remaining together.