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This particular concept, in this particular phrasing, has come up twice in my feed recently, so I want to discuss it. This thing - the essentializing of "Y*****" as a *jealous* God above all else, is Christian supremacist antisemitic propaganda, and everyone should stop using it.
Initial side note - I asterisked out the way God is named in this phrase. For me (I know not for every Jew) adding vowels to the English cognate of the tetragrammaton is offensive in a way the English word "God" is not. It's an attempt to speak the name we don't speak.
That is not a coincidence. The use of the pseudo-Hebrew naming ties this concept of God as quintessentially jealous specifically to the *Jewish* God. It's part of the supersessionist assertion that OT God is angry and violent and bad and NT God is loving and kind and good.
God is described as lots of things in the Torah - loving, forgiving, loyal, protective, powerful - the choice to fixate on "jealous" is an intentional one, designed to erase how Jews *actually* conceive of God and replace it with a caricature that rationalizes Christian supremacy
To that end, it relies on a slanted translation to make that case. A jealous God is not something that is unequivocally in the text and we just deal with it differently. It's a specific translation of the Hebrew word קנא to add negative connotation.
It could also be translated as 'passionate' or 'impassioned'. It's the same word as 'zealous' - and in fact, both 'jealous' and 'zealous' have the same Greek root, 'zelos', which had a generally *positive* connotation of desire and eagerness.
The split into two words, one of which has a negative connotation, is unique to English, and the choice to translate a word that had a generally positive connotation to one with a generally negative connotation is deliberate and malicious.
Do I think the person using it in the quote-tweeted comment is maliciously antisemitic? No, I really don't. But I think it's important to know when the things that we absorb and don't question have malicious roots, so we can start questioning them.
