Harvard historian Berl Septimus coined the lovely phrase “philosophically informed anti-rationalism” to describe the position of Rabbi Meir Abulafia (the Ramah) in his Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: The Career and Controversies of Ramah. The Ramah was a moderate opponent of Maimonidean rationalism in the debates that divided some of the greatest of the Rishonim during the Rambam’s lifetime and for a period thereafter.

I wish I could find an equally lovely phrase to describe my own position but I cannot do better than “elite-trained anti-elitism.” While grateful for the education I received and the friendships I made — some of which persist to this day — despite the strains of my double migration to Torah Judaism and political conservatism I have come to view the widely held beliefs of most of my old friends as dangerous to national (any nation’s) survival.

The children of Enlightenment rationalism have a tendency to see the world and its inhabitants as abstractions rather than in all their complexity and difference. They imagine that everything would be neat and tidy if only the best and brightest were left free to work things out among themselves without being bothered by the hoi polloi.

The EU with its impotent parliament and rule by 28 commissioners is an expression of that progressive impulse — “a classical utopian project a monument to the vanity of intellectuals” in the formulation of the late Margaret Thatcher.

Two devastating world wars that began on the European continent gave birth to the European Union. If nationalism had given rise to such death and destruction the thought went then let us get rid of the nation-state and create something that supersedes all the old national divisions. “Imagine no more countries” John Lennon might have sung. And indeed for the cosmopolitan class from whom the massive European bureaucracy is drawn that act of imagination is easy. They have far more in common with one another than with many of those born in the same country who speak the same mother tongue.

The idea that modern Europe was born in the ashes of Auschwitz the French Jewish thinker Alain Finkielkraut points out is however a dangerous one. It leads to forgetting that Europe is a civilization with a rich history and unique culture. The concept of a “war of civilizations” — indeed of civilizations themselves — is anathema to those who created the EU. Such wars in their view are an atavistic holdover from less enlightened times.

ISIS knows that it is waging war on an enemy civilization. Only the objects of its attacks deny it. The modern European intellectual refuses to acknowledge that an alien civilization is breeding in Europe’s midst or to take steps to defend his civilization from attack because to do so would be to acknowledge that the whole world is not comprised of human beings motivated by the same goal of gaining a slightly larger slice of the pie.

It is instructive that after all the insults — racist xenophobe “lizard-brain” — the only positive argument advanced by the Remain camp in the recent debate over Britain’s continued membership in the EU was this: Brexit will be economically disastrous for British citizens. The desire for greater material goods is for supporters of the European Union the universal constant that makes all men alike.

And that is why they are incapable of understanding the goals of political Islam or of confronting its proponents. They cannot comprehend must less take seriously that the goal of ISIS or the Iranian mullahs could really be to impose Sharia around the globe.

Penitents for the old nationalism that wracked their continent the architects of the EU view everything that distinguishes one man from another as bad. Borders are bad fences are bad. Internet is good. The European cosmopolitans show a “passion for sameness” argues Finkielkraut.

Against this universalism supporters of Brexit asserted — in the words of Daniel Hannan — citizens of a country are not one random set of individuals born to another set of individuals. Rather they are each the product of a particular culture and related to other citizens by ties of kinship history and language. Acknowledgment of that fact should not be a cause of embarrassment.

The debate over Brexit tracks that of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine described with great clarity by Yuval Levin in The Great Debate. Burke rightly saw that the abstract principles of the French Revolution and the confidence in the power of reason alone would lead to the Terror.

Human beings are not abstractions in the Burkean view. Their actions are not guided by pure reason nor are there precise formulas of rational governance by which they can be organized. Rather each human being is the product of a particular culture that has evolved organically and whose historical origins cannot be derived by some rational thought experiment. Each of us is a partner with those who have preceded us and with those yet unborn. Or to paraphrase Avos we are part of a chain that it is not given to us to complete but which we must not let be broken.

Where that sense of being rooted in a particular people becomes lost so too does all national strength. That is manifested in two ways across Europe today most notably among the elites. The first is in the unwillingness to defend one’s particular culture from destruction. What could have possessed Angela Merkel to think it a good idea to fling open the gates of Europe to millions of refugees from foreign lands and alien cultures?

And the second is in the refusal to produce future generations. The entirety of Europe is in demographic self-destruct mode. The less one feels pride in one’s particular culture and civilization the less need one feels to preserve it through future generations. The yet unborn remain unborn.

No people has ever insisted on its particularity — indeed its chosen status — to such an extent as the Jewish People. Not by accident did the great early theorists of national sovereignty draw heavily on Tractate Sanhedrin. And no people is so threatened by universalizing sameness as the Jewish People. The Baal HaTanya presciently saw that Napoleon’s conquering armies spreading the Enlightenment’s rational administration across Europe by force of arms posed a mortal threat to Torah Jewry. “To Jews as individuals — everything; as a nation — nothing” was the ideal of the French Revolution carried by Napolean’s armies.

Professor Jeremy Rabkin one of the leading modern scholars of national sovereignty once pointed out to me that Jews have always been the great barrier to universalism: We rejected paganism’s easy tolerance of all gods and we have been the great naysayers to the universal monotheistic creeds that seek to unite all mankind under the banner of one religion.

Many Jews in Britain and Europe no doubt feared that a pro-Brexit vote would unleash xenophobic forces around the continent — not that Europe’s governing class has proven such great defenders of Jews or Israel — and that may happen. But my impression is that most Torah Jews voted for Brexit. Perhaps they intuitively understood like the Ba’al HaTanya that as a community they have more to fear from the universalists for whom religion is just an embarrassing remnant of a less enlightened past.

One of the small but distinct delights of the British Brexit debate was the opportunity to savor British political oratory. Quite simply there is nothing to match it in America. Indeed the contrast is embarrassing. To listen to either of the likely presidential candidates deliver a speech is sheer torture. Neither shows any capacity for anything beyond a series of platitudes or childish insults.

Marco Rubio proved capable of some stirring riffs — perhaps too capable as Chris Christie showed in the New Hampshire debate — and one can understand how Ted Cruz was a national collegiate debate champion and highly effective oral advocate. But neither showed much talent for the sophisticated witty repartee that characterizes British parliamentary debate.

That wit was on full display in a recent pro-Brexit speech in the Oxford Union by Daniel Hannan a member of the European parliament who urged the audience to fire him. I’ve watched that speech three times awed by the cadences the emotional range the crystal-clear logic and the wit — all delivered extemporaneously without benefit of a note or teleprompter.

In Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is certainly an eloquent speaker. But he has only one tone — doom and gloom.

The resignation speech of an obviously crestfallen British Prime Minister David Cameron was not intended to be the rhetorical delight of Hannan’s debate in the Oxford Union. Cameron had only himself to blame for the pro-Brexit vote that he never contemplated. He pledged in the last election campaign to bring Britain’s continued membership in the European Union to a referendum vote and made good on his promise at the cost of his political career.

Yet I was moved by the generosity and simple patriotism of Cameron’s resignation speech. Not a word of recrimination or of bitterness. Rather he celebrated the fact that over 30 million citizens had voted in the referendum and that the people had been entrusted with such a momentous decision. Repeatedly he insisted that the people’s decision must be respected and that those on the losing side of the debate himself first among them must do everything to make that decision succeed.

But having taken the losing side Cameron acknowledged that he could not be “the captain to steer the ship of state to its next destination.” Having made a very clear decision to take a fresh path the British people deserved new leadership as well.

I could not help contrast that willing abdication of power to Israel where every prime minister clings to office like — l’havdil — a murderer to the mizbeiach and only leaves office kicking and screaming when decisively rejected by the voters.

Nor could I help but contrast Cameron’s closing — “I love this country and I feel honored to have served it as prime minister and will do everything in my power to help it succeed” — to the current presidential candidates in America. On the one side a candidate so thoroughly venal self-seeking and duplicitous that she has never been able to articulate a reason for her candidacy beyond her own sense of entitlement and on the other a bellowing carnival barker yelling “Make America great” but who means nothing more than “Make me great.” "