Читать книгу Blaming the Jews - Bernard Harrison - Страница 15
ОглавлениеNowadays virtually everyone is opposed to anti-Semitism although no-one agrees about what it means to be anti-Semitic.
—Kenneth L. Marcus, The Definition of Anti-Semitism
A BASIC DEFINITION
Within limits, it is possible to say or to show what one means by a term merely by indicating the sort of thing it applies to: “That is a trombone,” “These animals are what we call monkeys.” Up to this point in the book, so far as I can be said to have explained the meaning of the term antisemitism, I have done so in roughly that way. I have offered examples—in chapter 1, an extract from the 1988 Hamas charter; in chapter 2, a modern resurrection of the ancient canard that Jews cherish their sufferings as a means of defrauding others—chosen in the expectation that they will seem to the reader as patently antisemitic as they do to me. And I have suggested that both represent, in different ways, a late-twentieth-century recrudescence of a type of antisemitism—antisemitism as a political fantasy, in the form of a pseudo-explanatory theory of the real force controlling world events—widely supposed to have died with the Third Reich.
It is now time to attempt to give that claim more substance by moving from mere exemplification to analysis and the exact definition of terms. Explaining the meanings of words by appeal to examples doubtless has its uses. Yet as Plato strove to show us, it also has its limits. Sooner or later, we must face the question Socrates never tires of posing to overconfident young Athenians: “No doubt this is an N, maybe that is, too; but what makes them both Ns? What, that is to say, does ‘N,’ in general terms, mean?” Nor are these Socratic questions mere toys of philosophical or lexicographical debate. If rational discussion of a topic is to proceed without needless, purely verbal misunderstandings—if sound legal or political responses to a given pattern of abuse are to be devised—then formal definitions of terms are indispensable. In this chapter, we shall see what can be done to provide one for the term antisemitism.
On the simplest, most basic level, a formal definition is easy to provide:
Definition 1. Antisemitism is prejudice against Jews.
If we supplement this with Gordon Allport’s shrewd definition of prejudice as “thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant”1 and give due regard also to the evident power of prejudice to express itself equally in thought, word, and act, we get
Definition 2. Antisemitism is thinking, speaking, or acting injuriously toward Jews without sufficient warrant.
It might seem possible to object to this definition on the grounds that it makes a mistake in logic. The objection would be that since it treats lack of cognitive warrant as conceptually built into the notion of antisemitism, it must entail, absurdly, that if a statement is antisemitic, it is not merely false but necessarily false.2 But the objection is itself logically mistaken. All that Allport’s definition says is that a true statement can’t be a prejudiced one. It certainly follows from that as a matter of conceptual necessity, that a statement expressing prejudice must be false; but it in no way follows that the statement in question must be necessarily or conceptually false. Any kind of falsehood will do, including simple contingent falsehood. It is also the case, of course, that many statements manifesting prejudice fail of truth because they are too confused for it to be possible to form any clear idea of what, in concrete terms, their truth would involve. But that is another matter.
PROBLEMS OF INTENTION
There is, in a sense, nothing wrong with definition 2. It does much of what we ask a definition in a good dictionary to do. That is, it tells us clearly, simply, and correctly what the term antisemitism means in English. Over and above that, it explains why at least some things deserve to be so regarded. The contention of the authors of the Hamas charter, for instance, that “the Jews,” in the service of sinister ends, secretly control the media, publishing, business clubs, and so on, around the world, is antisemitic by the terms of definition 2: on the one hand because the accusation it levels is defamatory, and on the other hand because the absurdity of the idea that such a conspiracy could be operated by the Jews, or for that matter anybody else, not merely affords the accusation insufficient warrant but deprives it of any conceivable foothold in reality. It is equally clear by the terms of definition 2 that the central claim of Stannard’s essay—that a handful of Jewish scholars and writers have bamboozled the world into the delusion that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust outranks all other human suffering since the beginning of time—also qualifies as antisemitic. On the one hand, it is injurious, amounting to the claim that Jews purposefully exaggerate their sufferings in order to defraud others of the sympathy that should by rights be theirs. On the other hand, it fails of sufficient warrant by virtue, first, of its mendacity and second, of its absurdity. No Jewish—or non-Jewish—scholar of the Holocaust has ever, in sober fact, claimed that the suffering endured by Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their sympathizers outweighs all other human suffering for the simple reason that the claim itself, given the unquantifiable nature of suffering, is empty of meaning.
Nevertheless, definition 2 will not do as it stands. One of the things we demand of a definition of a term N is that it resolve disputes in cases where people disagree about whether some particular thing is or is not an N. In this respect, the examples of Stannard and the Hamas convention might seem to show definition 2 in a favorable light (this is one of the reasons why I chose them, rather than others, to open the discussion). Unfortunately, there are a great many other disputed cases in which it fails that challenge—or fails it, at least, in the absence of further, supplementary clauses and/or explications of kinds yet to be determined. An extended discussion of cases of this kind, and of the problems of definition to which they bear witness, is to be found in Kenneth L. Marcus’s indispensable The Definition of Anti-Semitism.3
One important category of cases throws into relief the weaknesses of the opening clause of definition 2: the clause, that is to say, that identifies antisemitism as “thinking, speaking, or acting injuriously toward Jews.” Hostility toward Jews need not be antisemitic in character. For instance, it may in no way reflect antisemitism if people living in a quiet suburb object to the opening of a synagogue on the grounds that they fear a resulting increase in cars vying for scarce parking places at certain busy times of the weekend. It may be, for instance, that they object with equal vigor, and for the same reasons, to the opening of an already existing Catholic school for parent/pupil activities on a Saturday morning. In such a case, one is not closing one’s eyes to Jew hatred if one concludes that residents don’t, after all, want the area to be judenfrei. They just want it to be free of the kinds of social activity that they see as disrupting the peace of the neighborhood on Saturday mornings.
To exclude such cases, Marcus notes, Charles Glock and Rodney Stark4 suggest defining antisemitism “not [as] the hatred of persons who happen to be Jews, but rather the hatred of persons because they are Jews.”5 In effect this yields
Definition 3. Antisemitism is thinking, speaking, or acting injuriously toward Jews without sufficient warrant, because they are Jews.
If we wish to screen out cases like that of the tranquility-loving neighborhood, it is hard to see how we can avoid adopting this or some equivalent reformulation of definition 2. But to take that route is, as Kenneth Marcus shows, to risk arriving at a definition that can serve to disguise rather than expose the true incidence of antisemitism.
A specific case will serve to display both the nature and the extent of the problem. Now famous in France, it is that of the murder of Ilan Halimi. In January 2006, a French Muslim gang calling itself Les Barbares (The Barbarians) kidnapped a young French Jew, Halimi, torturing him over a three-week period before abandoning him in a wood near a train station to which he crawled before dying of his wounds. The French police, along with public officials at levels up to and including that of the office of the Minister of the Interior, were at some pains to deny any suggestion that the attack was antisemitic in character, in effect justifying this stand by appeal to what one might term the Glock/Stark Amendment. They accepted, that is to say, assurances by the leader of Les Barbares, Youssuf Fofana, that Halimi had not been targeted because he was a Jew but merely because the gang believed Jews in general to be rich. Halimi’s injuries were certainly savage enough to suggest far greater interest on the part of the gang in torturing their victim than in making money from him. Despite this, however, the French public authorities, including the then interior minister and subsequent president Nicolas Sarkozy, continued for a considerable time to insist that Halimi had been the victim not of an antisemitic attack but merely of a kidnapping gone wrong. They revised this stance only when another member of the Barbares confessed that the gang had burned Halimi on the forehead with a cigarette because he was a Jew.
This case neatly displays the main problem with definition 3, that its terminal clause makes the question of whether an act is or is not antisemitic appear to depend on the motives, goals, or intentions of its perpetrator. It makes an act’s status as antisemitic or non-antisemitic depend on issues regarding which the perpetrator himself is generally supposed to enjoy the determining voice. If the perpetrators are prepared, like Fofana’s unreliable colleague, to vaunt their antisemitism, then well and good. If, on the other hand (in tune with the majority of Western antisemites at the moment), they wish to disguise it, they need only equip their conduct with some plausible motive allowing them to admit freely to hostility toward Jews while absolving themselves of hostility to Jews because they are Jews.
IS ANTISEMITISM A GENUINE CONCEPT?
The successive difficulties encountered by the above three opening stabs at a definition might prompt one to wonder whether the enterprise itself is misconceived. Does the term antisemitism, when it comes down to it, express any clear notion susceptible of definition in the first place? There is a strain of reputable opinion in the social sciences that thinks not. I am thinking in particular here of the late Gavin Langmuir (1924–2005), a distinguished and influential Stanford medieval historian widely celebrated for his work on the history of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. In his Towards a Definition of Antisemitism, Langmuir (1990) makes the sound point that the very term antisemitism is of very recent vintage and is inseparably bound up with a body of nineteenth-century German theorizing, quasi-anthropological in character, that can now, many think, be regarded as effectively defunct. “‘Antisemitism’ was invented about 1873 by Wilhelm Marr to describe the policy towards Jews based on ‘racism’ that he and others advocated. … As elaborated in the Aryan myth, it maintained that Jews were a race and that, not only were they, like other races, inferior to the Aryan race, but also that Jews were the most dangerous of those inferior races.”6
If Rassentheorie of that type is for us nowadays, as Langmuir hopes, merely another forgotten essay in pseudoscience, and if the original meaning of antisemitism—as, roughly speaking, “hostility to Jews considered as an inferior and dangerous race”—was so bound up with “Aryan myth” as to be reasonably supposed to have died with it, then what residual meaning, if any, can we nowadays suppose to attach to the term?
There is an answer to this question, not infrequently canvassed by Jewish commentators (in chap. 4 we shall find Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin offering a version of it) from which Langmuir strongly dissents.7 “Although [various] adjectives [are often used to] distinguish different rationalisations for the hostility, the noun ‘antisemitism’ still implies a constancy in the basic cause and quality of hostility against Jews at any one time. … Like the Aryan myth, this conception of ‘antisemitism’ depends, I would argue, on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or illicit reification, in this case on the unproven assumption that for centuries, and despite innumerable changes on both sides, there has been a distinctive kind of reaction of non-Jews directed only at Jews that corresponds to the concept evoked by the word ‘antisemitism.’”8
In effect, Langmuir argues that in Jewish hands this story frequently becomes little more than an inversion of the Aryan myth. “What makes that fallacy attractive to many people, I would suggest, is their prior assumption that, whether by divine choice or otherwise, there has always been something uniquely valuable in Jewishness, because Jews have always incorporated and preserved uniquely superior values. They then assume that the resolute and enduring expression of those unique values by Jews has aroused a correspondingly unique type of hostility against them as bearers of that unique quality throughout their existence.”9
Langmuir’s objection to this way of looking at things is, on the one hand, that it is in principle as viciously “ethnocentric” as the Aryan myth itself, and on the other hand, more interestingly to my mind, that it has served, unhelpfully, to focus the attention of many theorists of antisemitism on Jews and Jewish culture instead of, more usefully, on non-Jews and non-Jewish culture.
Such a perspective might fairly be called ethnocentric; and, not surprisingly, those who accept it have not felt any need to examine non-Jews carefully to see whether the quality of their hostility to Jews has in fact been unique and unchanging. Yet the quality of hostility against Jews cannot be determined by premises about Jews, for it is a characteristic of the mentality of non-Jews, not of Jews, and it is determined, not by the objective reality of Jews, but by what the symbol “Jews” has signified to non-Jews. Moreover, the kind of hostility evoked has not been directed only against Jews.10
Three claims are being advanced in the brief passage to which these two citations belong. They are (1) that the idea that there is something “uniquely valuable in Jewishness” is both false and ethnocentric (that is, presumably, as racially condescending as the Aryan myth itself); (2) that for an understanding of antisemitism we must look not to the nature of “Jewishness” but to the mentality and culture of non-Jews; (3) that, when so examined, hostility to Jews turns out to possess no feature unique to it; no feature, that is to say, that is not equally manifested by hostility directed against other groups.
Of these three claims, (2), I shall argue, is in the main true; (1) and (3) false. So far as (2) goes, I am in entire agreement with Langmuir. That antisemitism is a fundamentally non-Jewish phenomenon and that its nature and incidence are determined not by objective reality, Jewish or otherwise, but by a system of political fantasies internal to non-Jewish culture, are among the more central conclusions argued for in the present work.
By contrast, (1) seems to me not only unhappily expressed but factually mistaken. To anyone with an ear for antisemitic discourse, some of Langmuir’s more dismissive phrases—“whether by divine choice or otherwise,” “uniquely superior values,” “ethnocentric”—must seem themselves dismally redolent of “what the symbol ‘Jews’ has signified to non-Jews.” Any persistent and fair-minded student of Judaism and Jewish culture will find that both embody a multitude of insights and styles of conduct both valuable in themselves and unique to those traditions. The difficulty with envisaging antisemitism as a response to what is “uniquely valuable in Jewishness” is merely that the aspects of Jewishness that a dispassionate observer might wish to regard as falling under that rubric are for the most part unknown and invisible to non-Jews.
The only argument that Langmuir offers for claim (3)—that there is no such thing as the “distinctive kind of reaction of non-Jews directed only at Jews” that supposedly “corresponds to the concept evoked by the word ‘antisemitism’”—is, unless I misread him, that antisemitism is not “determined by the objective reality of Jews” but by “what the symbol ‘Jews’ has signified to non-Jews,” and hence cannot be a reaction by non-Jews to the “uniquely superior values” supposedly manifested by and within Judaism.
From a logical point of view, unfortunately, this is a non sequitur. Given the massive ignorance of Judaism and Jewishness prevalent among non-Jews, it is indeed unlikely that any non-Jew ever became an antisemite out of chagrin at the perceived “superiority” of Jewish “values.” However, it is scarcely more plausible that the meaning, for non-Jews, of “the symbol ‘Jews’” could have developed in a manner entirely unaffected by “the objective reality of Jews.” In chapters 4 and 5, I shall suggest some ways in which certain objective features of Jewish conduct—features deriving ultimately, moreover, if not from non-Jewish hatred of, then at least from Jewish attachment to, “Jewish values”—may, pace Langmuir, have played a rather decisive role in the development of the myth of “the Jews.”
Nevertheless, weak as the argument is, Langmuir considers himself licensed by it to conclude that the hostility directed against Jews by non-Jews is overwhelmingly of a kind that “has not been directed only against Jews.” It follows, for Langmuir, that we stand in no need of a definition of antisemitism, because the term is used, confusedly, to describe kinds of hatred by no means uniquely experienced by Jews for which perfectly good and well-defined terms are already in use among social scientists, namely, xenophobia and ethnic prejudice, both of which invoke “the idea of an instinctive hostility towards strange—little-known and differently constituted—outgroups.”11
In summary, Langmuir thinks that whereas talk of antisemitism postulates a special form of hatred solely directed toward and solely experienced by Jews, there exist in fact no empirical grounds for supposing that anything of the sort actually exists.
Despite this sobering conclusion, Langmuir remains prepared to grant that xenophobia toward Jews, although no different in its essential nature from xenophobia toward blacks, Muslims, Roma, or other groups, does display one unusual feature specific to it. Langmuir considers, and here I agree with him, that for the most part xenophobic hatred is “realistic hostility,” meaning by that “that well-nigh universal xenophobic hostility which uses the real conduct of some members of an outgroup to symbolize a social menace.”12
Resentments of this kind, he thinks, often share “a kernel of truth.” Langmuir also allows, however, for “a new kind of stereotype, which I shall call chimerical [having] no kernel of truth [but depicting] imaginary monsters.”13 And he suggests that what is unusual about xenophobic hostility toward Jews is that it involves, to a greater degree than other forms of xenophobia, “socially significant chimerical hostility.”14 Here, perhaps, and only here, he thinks, is there a legitimate role for the term antisemitism to play. Social scientists, he concludes, should
free “antisemitism” from its racist, ethnocentric or religious implications and use it only for what can be distinguished empirically as an unusual kind of human hostility directed at Jews. If we do so, we may then be able to distinguish more accurately between two very different kinds of threats to Jews. On the one hand there are situations in which Jews, like any other major group, are confronted with realistic hostility, or with that well-nigh universal xenophobic hostility which uses the real conduct of some members of an outgroup to symbolize a social menace. On the other hand, there may still be situations in which Jewish existence is much more seriously endangered because real Jews have been irrationally converted in the minds of many into a symbol, “the Jews,” a symbol whose meaning does not depend on the empirical characteristics of Jews yet justifies their total elimination from the earth.15
Fully chimerical hatred of Jews, however, Langmuir takes to be a late and aberrant development, commencing in the twelfth century with “the first European accusation of Jewish ritual murder … created in Norwich about 1150 by the cumulative irrationality of a superstitious insignificant priest and his wife, a mendacious Jewish apostate, and an unimportant monk who sought to overcome his sense of inferiority.”16
For this reason, Langmuir considers that the term antisemitism is misused to describe earlier hostility to Jews. In view of the turn that my own argument will take later in this chapter, however, it is worth recording in passing that Langmuir’s sense of chimerical accusation as a late and relatively marginal ingredient in xenophobia directed against Jews is contested by other scholars, who note many earlier examples of chimerical beliefs concerning Jews going back as far as the first-century Greek rhetorician Apollonius Molon and including ninth-century beliefs to the effect that Jewish men menstruate and pray to Satan.17
IDEOLOGY VERSUS INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY
Suppose for the sake of argument that we were simply to disregard Langmuir’s arguments for the conclusion there is no distinctive type of non-Jewish hostility experienced only by Jews and side instead with the many Jews and others who have always believed that the term antisemitism does mark a distinctive form of hostility encountered only by Jews. Would that get us any further toward a definition of the term?
No, because either choice commits us to thinking of antisemitism as a form of hostility. Hostility, after all, is a psychological state. And if that is what antisemitism is, then its site, its habitation, as it were, is the individual mind: the mind of the antisemite. And here, a further problem confronts us. Ideologies are not inhabitants of the individual mind. Marxism or liberalism, for instance, is not simply the sum of what happens to be believed about politics by individual Marxists or liberals. An ideology comes to more than is contained in the mind of any of its individual adherents. It has an internal structure, a logic of its own that none of its adherents at a given point in history may fully comprehend. An ideology is a cultural, not a psychological, entity in roughly the sense in which history, or physics, or the romantic movement are cultural rather than psychological entities.
The problem confronting us now is that there are many reasons for regarding antisemitism both as a form of animosity and as an ideology. By purporting to offer, among other things, a systematic account of how the world is secretly governed, antisemitism takes on a significance for believers far transcending any merely personal ground of animosity or contempt. As Kenneth Marcus puts it, “As an ideology, it [antisemitism] provides a way to make sense of the entire world and all of history, not just the relatively small territory occupied by the descendants of Jacob.”18
At the same time Marcus, as I read him, continues throughout his book to share the founding assumption of Langmuir (and indeed of most other writers on the topic) that what we are trying to clarify in seeking a definition of the term antisemitism is the nature of a state of mind: an enduring psychological disposition, that is to say, characteristic of a certain class of individuals, namely, antisemites. Unless I badly misread him, that seems certainly to be the underlying premise of the following passage, which sets the tone for his opening chapter, “Attitude, Behavior and Ideology”: “The bewildering array of definitions of anti-Semitism—and the resulting difficulty in understanding cases like Ilan Halimi’s—arises because people are trying to define different phenomena. To some, anti-Semitism is an attitude, to others a form of conduct, and to still others an ideology or pathology. The differences reflect the varying qualities that people find most important or troublesome about anti-Semitism: the way that anti-Semites feel about Jews, the things they do to Jews, or the mindset that makes them think and act as they do.”19
The word that I find most troubling in this passage, for reasons that I have just explained, is of course mindset. A mindset is, at least to my conceptual ear, a complex state of some individual mind. An ideology, on the other hand, is not a constituent of any individual mind but rather a constituent of a culture. The prospects for a unitary definition seem at this point even worse than Marcus suggests. It is not just that the mind of the individual antisemite is a bafflingly complex place but that antisemitism, in at least one major mode in which it manifests itself, as ideology, altogether transcends the mind of the individual antisemite.
The great merit of Marcus’s book, as I see it, consists not so much in providing a definition of antisemitism as in providing an invaluable conspectus, on which I have leaned heavily in the foregoing, of the difficulties attending the attempt to formulate one. He does, it is true, contend that “the chief lessons of the preceding chapters can in fact be reduced to a single general definition”20 as follows: “Anti-Semitism is a set of negative attitudes, ideologies and practices directed at Jews as Jews, individually or collectively, based upon and sustained by a repetitive and potentially self-fulfilling latent structure of hostile erroneous beliefs and assumptions that flow from the application of double standards towards Jews as a collectivity, manifested culturally in myth, ideology, folklore, and imagery, and urging various forms of restriction, exclusion, and suppression.”21
But he readily concedes that this may be less a definition than a handy summary of the results of prior discussion: “The precise terms of the definition may be less important than the thinking that went into it. In this sense the broader definition consists of this entire volume and not just the one sentence in which its message is encapsulated.”22
We might reasonably be challenged to show whether we can do any better. This challenge I shall now—cautiously and with a sense of the attendant difficulties sharpened, I hope, by the discussion up to this point—attempt to meet. Before getting on with the business of this chapter, though, there is one last question to be raised concerning the nature of definition itself.
ARE DEFINITIONS INVENTED OR DISCOVERED?
“Some readers,” Marcus notes, “may be inclined to dismiss definitional questions as a matter of arbitrary linguistic conventions that may be selected, revised, or replaced at will and with little consequence.”23 And indeed they may. It is not uncommon, particularly among the more hardheaded media commentators, to think that there can be no objective standard of correctness for definitions and that therefore all definition, per se, is tendentious.
But is that necessarily so? Who or what determines the meaning of terms? Is it merely human stipulation? Or is it, to put it grandly, the nature of things? Philosophers have frequently tended to opt for one or the other of these stories to the exclusion of the other. There is a case to be made, however, for regarding the fabrication of meaning as a joint enterprise in which both play a part. Consider, for example, the biological term of art species. A species is a group of individual organisms capable of mating to produce fertile offspring. So much is stipulation: the term species means that because that is what biologists have collectively decreed that it should mean. Knowing the meaning of species in that sense is, in effect, a matter of knowing what language game (Sprachspiel: Wittgenstein’s term) we human beings have chosen to play with the word: in this case, the game of sorting organisms into groups satisfying that (stipulative) requirement. However, knowing the meaning of a term can also mean knowing how to single out instances of the kinds of thing to which the term applies. And at this point, nature enters the picture. We can’t, in other words, just stipulate that this or that arbitrary collection of individual organisms shall be held to constitute a species. It only constitutes a species if all its members are capable of interacting sexually to produce fertile offspring. And whether a particular group of organisms meets that specification is clearly a factual question: something to be determined not by arbitrary stipulation but by empirical inquiry.
TWO TYPES OF PREJUDICE
Is something of the sort also true of that other abstract term antisemitism? I think that it is. But to see what precisely, we need to go back a step and consider a more fundamental term: prejudice. Let us avail ourselves, as we did earlier, of Gordon Allport’s shrewd definition:
D0. Prejudice is thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant.
So far, everything is indeed “just a matter of arbitrary stipulation.” D0 just records how we English speakers have decided to use (or better, fallen into the habit of using) the term prejudice. But now, by analogy with the question “Which collections of organisms as a matter of fact satisfy the definition of a species?” we can ask, “Which human phenomena turn out as a matter of fact to satisfy D0?” At this point, just as in the other case, we pass abruptly from stipulation to empirical inquiry. And very little reflection on the passing scene is enough to dislodge the thought that there are two general kinds of phenomena (no doubt among others) that do so. I shall label them, respectively, social prejudice and political prejudice.24
By “social prejudice” I have in mind roughly the sort of thing that Langmuir labels “xenophobia” or “ethnic prejudice”: that is to say, prejudice on the part of members of a dominant social group in society against people they consider to be foreigners, aliens, interlopers, upstarts, lower-class vulgarians, or in some other way inferior. Emotionally speaking, it is driven by contempt, and its goal is social exclusion. Its object, that is, is to prevent members of the despised out-group as far as possible from participating in the life of decent society: the society, that is to say, of which members of the dominant in-group consider themselves to be the representatives and guardians.
Social prejudice is characteristically directed not against collective entities but against individuals. It operates, as logicians like to say, distributively. The contempt of the Englishman who despises West Indians, for instance, tends to be focused on West Indians taken, as it were, one by one as individuals; it is not, or not primarily, focused on the West Indian community. Indeed, he may not even grasp that there is such a thing. He does not, that is, find the individual West Indian contemptible because the latter is a member of a despicable community but because of what he is as an individual. On the contrary, if he is in any way allergic to the West Indian community, it will be because it appears to him merely as a rabble of independently despicable individuals.
A further feature of social prejudice is that fear, except very occasionally, in the context of special concerns over matters such as competition over employment, property values, or some immediate threat of physical violence, plays very little part in it. Contempt, after all, tends to drive out fear. We kick into the gutter with confidence those we despise on social grounds because our very contempt for them persuades us that these miserable persons, inferior as they are, are far from possessing either the means or the temerity to fight back.
Social prejudice is apt to justify itself by appeal to what social scientists call stereotypes: disagreeable or contemptible features supposedly shared by all members of the despised group or class. According to such stereotypes, Scots are sanctimonious and incorrigibly mean, Englishmen arrogant and inscrutable, women (as Virginia Woolf makes the socially uneasy and resentfully misogynist young Cambridge don Charles Tansley say in To the Lighthouse) “can’t write, can’t paint.” According to others, money has a way of sticking to Jewish fingers and Jews themselves a habit of becoming dominant, to a degree out of keeping with their numbers in society, in such professions as law, medicine, and academia, while West Indians are equally widely perceived as leading ganja-soaked, noisy, and disorganized lives, and so on.
It is important to notice that contrary to common opinion but in line with Langmuir’s account of xenophobia, what is wrong with such stereotypes is not that they are false, or at least false in the sense of having not the slightest grain of truth in them. There has to be more than a grain of truth in all of them for the simple reason that one cannot intelligibly despise an individual for qualities that he or she simply does not possess. Contempt, to give itself something on which to brood resentfully, has to fasten on something with at least some tenuous connection with reality. Hence, for social prejudice against these groups to get off the ground, there have to be at least some ludicrously bad women writers and painters; at least some self-righteous, penny-pinching Scots; at least some noticeable Jewish presence in the professions over and above what might be accounted for by strict statistical parity in terms of population numbers; at least some Jews with a remarkable capacity for money making; at least some West Indians with a marked love of marijuana and wild parties; and so on.
What is wrong with the stereotypes on which social prejudice feeds is not that they fail of—at least partial—truth but rather that they lack the generality that they claim for themselves. On the one hand, there are plenty of West Indians, Jews, women, Scots, and Englishmen who fail utterly to conform to the usual stereotypes. On the other hand, there are always, equally, plenty of people around who conform exactly to one or other of them but who happen, unfortunately, not to be Jews, West Indians, Scots, Englishmen, or women as the case may be. Sober, productively employed West Indians are in fact as common as marijuana-puffing white party animals. Writers as good as Virginia Woolf or Cynthia Ozick happen to be female; ones as bad as Jeffrey Archer happen to be male. Curiously enough, the two least financially astute persons I have encountered in my life happened both to be Jews, while on the other hand, the impressive houses of gentile pop stars, footballers, television celebrities, industrial magnates, and bankers to whose stalwartly non-Jewish fingers, unsullied by the least contact with a tallit or a siddur, money has displayed a truly remarkable capacity to stick, can be found all over what the British call the home counties. And while the presence of Jews in the liberal professions may indeed be out of proportion to the relative size of their community, so is that of a number of other groups, including beneficiaries of a private education, Londoners, British Hindus, and children of the professional class. No doubt there are cultural reasons for these disparities, but rather than disparaging them, discontent might be better devoted to inquiring into them with a view to reproducing them in communities—such as that of beneficiaries of a British state education—at present comparatively disadvantaged in these respects.
I turn now to the second type of phenomenon that satisfies D0: political prejudice. Political prejudice differs from social prejudice in a number of respects, three of which seem to me more fundamental than the rest. The first is that it is directed—in the first instance at least—not against individuals but against collective entities, real or imaginary. Second, it is driven emotionally not by contempt but by fear of the collectivity in question. Third, this fear is both supported and inculcated by a complex, theory-laden narrative that purports to explain why the collectivity in question is to be feared.
The difference between social and political prejudice can readily be exemplified in common life. One example is to be found in the differing forms taken by the anti-Catholic prejudice that used to be not uncommon in England. Social prejudice against Catholics involves dislike of individual Catholics as superstitious, idol worshipping, Jesuitical, and priest-ridden hypocrites incapable of thinking for themselves—and for all these reasons, not at all the sort of person one finds it pleasant to be forced into contact with in daily life or to have brought home to the house by one’s less fastidious children.25 Someone politically prejudiced against Catholics, on the other hand, may find individual Catholics amusing, enjoy playing chess with a Jesuit friend, and so forth but entertain a holy fear of the hidden power of the Catholic Church and of such organizations as Opus Dei, concerning whose sinister machinations he or she will be prepared to inform in some detail anyone prepared to listen.
To conclude, the defining contrasts between social and political prejudice can be briefly summarized as follows:
C1.Social prejudice targets individuals; political prejudice targets collectivities.
C2.Social prejudice is driven emotionally by contempt, political prejudice by fear.
C3.Social prejudice justifies itself merely by appeal to a range of contemptuous stereotypes to which individuals of the despised group are held to conform. Political prejudice, by contrast, embodies some complex, theoretically elaborated narrative explaining why the targeted group, considered as an organized whole, is to be feared.
SOCIAL VERSUS POLITICAL ANTISEMITISM
Prejudice against Jews can also come in either or both of these two forms. Social prejudice against Jews—social antisemitism—sees individual Jews as, inter alia, greasy, hook nosed, money grubbing, noisy, overfamiliar, and overemotional alien vulgarians, too clever, moreover, for their own good: as thoroughly disgusting types, that is to say, with whom no English gentleman, however sadly short of the money that sticks so miraculously to Jewish fingers, would wish to associate either himself or his family. Such an evocation of the mind of the social antisemite is, like my earlier evocation of anti-Catholic animus, to some extent parodic; yet it does to a degree serve to capture both the content and the essential silliness of the thing. English literature and letters offer plenty of actual examples no less startling in their inanity.26
Political antisemitism on the other hand can in principle cohabit easily with friendship toward and even a high moral regard for individual Jews (the cant phrase, “Some of my best friends are Jews,” uttered by a political antisemite, may at times express no more than the truth, that is to say). This is the case because political antisemitism is driven not by contempt for Jews as individuals but by fear concerning the supposed “threat” posed by the Jewish people considered as an organized community.
Like other forms of political prejudice, political antisemitism disposes of a complex, theoretically elaborated explanatory account of what is to be feared from “the Jews” and why it is to be feared. The character of the beliefs that give it substance and direction are, however, as we have already seen in chapters 1 and 2, far stranger and far less in accord with any remotely plausible reading of reality than those that direct any other form of political prejudice.
I have in mind here generalized forms of the beliefs that in chapter 1, we found openly exposed in article 22 of the 1988 Hamas covenant and in chapter 2 covertly active in the debate over the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In neither case are the various indictments of the Jews we encountered in those chapters original, either to Hamas or to the American academics to be found on one wing of the uniqueness debate. On the contrary, versions of its main clauses can be found directing antisemitic discourse at most periods over the entire twenty centuries of the Common Era. The bulk of these variants can be assimilated to the following five claims:
PA1.The obsessive concern of Jews with their own interests and their indifference or contempt for the interests of non-Jews make them directly and solely responsible for human suffering on a scale far exceeding anything that can be alleged against any other human group, and in particular for whatever specific evil or evils (SEs) most concern this or that concrete version of political antisemitism.
PA2.The Jewish community is conspiratorially organized in the pursuit of its self-seeking and heinous goals to an extent that gives it demonic powers not to be suspected from the weak and harmless appearance of its individual members.
PA3.Through the efficacy of its conspiratorial organization and through its quasi-miraculous ability to acquire and manage money, the Jewish community has been able to acquire secret control over most of the main social, commercial, political, and governmental institutions of non-Jewish society.
PA4.Given the secret control exercised by world Jewry over (only apparently) non-Jewish institutions and given the obsessive concern of the Jewish community with its own interests to the exclusion of those of non-Jews, it is simply not feasible to remedy the evils occasioned by the presence of the Jews in non-Jewish society (and in particular SE) by any means short of the total elimination of the Jews.
PA5.Since the evils that the Jews do in the world (and in particular SE) owe their existence solely to Jewish wickedness, the elimination of the Jews will cause those evils to cease without the need for any further action on the part of non-Jews, whose world will, in the nature of things, return forthwith to the perfect state of order natural to it, from which it would never have lapsed had it not been for the mischievous interventions of the Jews.
It is to be noticed that these five beliefs are not logically independent but mutually entail and confirm one another, composing a hermetically self-enclosed and internally defended vision of reality. PA4, for instance, follows necessarily from the conjunction of PA1 with PA3, as does PA5 from PA1. Any doubts that the convert to political antisemitism may entertain concerning the difficulty of finding evidence of Jewish wickedness outside specifically antisemitic websites or newspapers of the type of the Nazi Der Stürmer can be countered by appeal to PA2 and PA3. In Kenneth Marcus’s words noted earlier, “As an ideology it [antisemitism] provides a way to make sense of the entire world and all of history, not just the relatively small territory occupied by the descendants of Jacob.”27
Political antisemitism thus, while it shares the fundamental characteristics of political prejudice mentioned earlier, adds several further characteristics of its own. The first is that unlike the stereotypes that masquerade as knowledge for the socially prejudiced and the heightened allegations of plot and conspiracy that direct some types of political prejudice (anti-Catholic prejudice in sixteenth-century England offers a good example of the latter), the above five founding claims of political antisemitism have in them not even the grain of truth that such stereotypes possess. The Jewish community, as anybody at all closely acquainted with it knows perfectly well, is far too small and far too divided in historical, cultural, political, and religious terms to be remotely capable of marshalling the darkly secret and demonic power in the service of evil attributed to it by claims (1)–(5). All five claims are, not to put too fine a point on it, wholly delusive. In terms of Langmuir’s vocabulary as noted earlier, they are chimerical.
Nevertheless, versions of (1)–(5) differing only in the specific nature of the concrete evils assigned to collective Jewish agency in one period or another, from well poisoning or religiously sanctioned child murder, to organizing the Russian Revolution or determining the outcome of World War I in favor of the Allies, have commanded unwavering belief from large numbers of otherwise sane people over many centuries. The Jews, moreover, would appear to be the only minority or diasporic group of which this extraordinary combination of claims has ever been asserted.
A second characteristic in terms of which political antisemitism differs sharply both from social prejudice and other forms of political prejudice is that the goal that it pursues is neither merely the exclusion of individual Jews from “decent” society nor merely the political defeat or neutralization of a feared collective entity sought for the most part by other forms of political prejudice. Political antisemitism, given its belief in the demonic power of world Jewry to preserve the Jewish conspiracy from outside scrutiny, cannot, short of doubting its own principles, avoid the conclusion that the only way to deal with the Jews is to remove them wholesale from the scene. Political antisemitism, that is to say, unlike other forms of political prejudice, is essentially eliminative in character.
A third feature to be noted is that it is political antisemitism—antisemitism masquerading as a universally explanatory worldview—and not social antisemitism, that is the potentially lethal form of Judeophobia. Social antisemitism is not eliminative. Consisting as it does merely in contempt for Jews as individuals nourished by more or less feeble stereotypes, it tends to present the Jewish collectivity less as a source of threat than as a source of indulgent comedy: a little world populated by Jewish mothers, gefilte fish, klezmer music, and demented dietary restrictions. In itself, it can no more provide a motive for eliminating the Jews than blackface minstrel shows could have provided a motive for eliminating the harmlessly brainless, banjo-strumming blacks who populated such entertainments. Genocide has fear as its necessary precondition. Contempt, as we noted earlier, tends to drive out fear. For genocide to become a possibility, we need a wide diffusion of the outlook noted by Sartre in the French writer and antisemite Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961):
Anti-Semitism is … a form of Manichaeism. It explains the course of the world by the struggle of the principle of Good and the principle of Evil. Between these two principles no reconciliation is conceivable; one of them must triumph and the other be annihilated. Look at Céline: his vision of the universe is catastrophic. The Jew is everywhere, the earth is lost, it is up to the Aryan not to compromise … the anti-Semite does not have recourse to Manichaeism as a secondary principle of explanation. It is the original choice he makes of Manichaeism which explains and conditions anti-Semitism.28
Political antisemitism, now, both articulates and encourages exactly that type of Manichaean panic.
Finally, it is to be noted that if social antisemitism is the antisemitism of unthinking bigots, then political antisemitism, by contrast, is very much the thinking person’s version of Judeophobia. One can become a social antisemite without doing anything as demanding as reading or thinking—become one, perhaps, as the result of no more than a bad personal experience at the hands of a real Jew. Political antisemitism, on the other hand, given its rich and specific conceptual and doctrinal content, cannot simply materialize out of the thin air of that sort of bad experience. One can become a political antisemite only through a process of intellectual conversion, of reading, of listening to speeches, of thinking things out until it comes to seem to one, in the burst of enlightenment characteristic of conversion experiences, whether by having been talked into it or by having talked oneself into it, that the Jews are at the root of everything evil in the world. It is no doubt for this reason that as we shall see in chapters 5 and 10, while social antisemitism is the antisemitism of the common man, political antisemitism—the lethal, the eliminative kind, in other words—is and has always been peculiarly a disease of intellectuals.
SOME PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION REVISITED
It is time to ask ourselves whether the distinction between social and political antisemitism, as we have here developed it, can help to resolve some of the problems of definition we encountered in above sections of the present chapter.
In the light of the above arguments, it might seem tempting to agree with Kenneth Marcus that “the bewildering array of definitions of anti-Semitism … arises because people are trying to define different phenomena.” But in fact that way of putting it misdescribes the problem. The problem is not that we are dealing with a single concept, “antisemitism,” which happens, for some mysterious reason, to be exemplified by a range of “phenomena” too diverse and mutually incompatible to permit a single definition. Rather, it is that the word “antisemitism,” as we use it in discourse, covers a family of distinct though closely related concepts. In the most general terms, the word antisemitism picks out the concept of hostility lacking in cognitive warrant toward Jews. In virtue of that definition, however, the word ranges in addition over (at least) the two subordinate concepts we have distinguished as those of social antisemitism and political antisemitism. It is in the nature of concepts to rank themselves into hierarchies of this kind, and definition must proceed accordingly. In legal terms, one would hardly expect the definition of tort to include within itself the definitions of terms for individual torts. In scientific terms, it would be equally futile to expect the definition of the term element to include the content of the definitions of terms such as hydrogen, strontium, and so on, naming specific elements.
In much the same way, once we have a grip on the idea that the term antisemitism might correspond not to a single concept but to a hierarchically organized family of concepts, it becomes possible to envisage the possibility that the apparent incompatibility of phenomena associated with the term might disappear as a result of partitioning them between different members of the family of concepts it covers. Might there not be, for instance, phenomena closely associated with social antisemitism but not at all with political antisemitism, and vice versa?
A natural place to begin exploring this suggestion might be Gavin Langmuir’s distinction between kinds of xenophobic hostility whose stated grounds share a “kernel of truth” and those he calls “chimerical hostility” whose grounds are entirely delusive. If we have argued correctly, then both of these types of hostility are characteristic of antisemitism—but of entirely different types of antisemitism. What Langmuir calls, following a consensus among social scientists, xenophobia or ethnic prejudice on the one hand is characteristic of what we have here distinguished as social or racist antisemitism. What Langmuir calls “chimerical hatred” of Jews on the other hand is characteristic of what we have here distinguished as political antisemitism.
However, because Langmuir treats antisemitism as a name for a single concept requiring a single definition, rather than as a name for a family of differently definable concepts, he is led to treat chimerical hatred as a sort of odd, not easily explicable adjunct to what is for the most part a standard type of xenophobia: in effect, an unusually factually baseless variety of stereotype. This not only leads him to fail to grasp the full oddity, the extraordinary strangeness, of antisemitism in its political, ideological version. It also leads him to reject as “fallacious” the idea that there has ever existed such a thing as “a distinctive kind of reaction of non-Jews directed only at Jews that corresponds to the concept evoked by the word ‘antisemitism.’” It now appears, if we have argued correctly, that political antisemitism constitutes exactly that: a distinctive type of hostile reaction by non-Jews to Jews and to no other group. Moreover, it is one that has been central in organizing lethal hatred of Jews across a period far longer than the one Langmuir assigns to “chimerical hostility.” As we shall see in later chapters, while the specific accusations offered in support of those fundamental beliefs—in the absolute commitment to evil of the Jewish community, in the community’s quasi-demonic power, in its conspiratorial character, and so on—have displayed a bewildering and protean power to reinvent themselves in new forms as the centuries pass, the fundamental beliefs themselves have remained effectively unchanged in Europe since late antiquity. Their persistence offers an explanation for the curious proneness of Jew hatred, relative to hatred of other groups, to express itself in the terms that Langmuir labels “chimerical”: the blood libel, the supposed capacity of Jewish males to menstruate, the alleged Jewish control not only of major branches of the United States government but also of the Lions or Kiwanis, and so on. If one has already accepted that the Jewish people is collectively committed to demonic goals and that it is conspiratorially organized in systematically impenetrable ways, then there is no reason why anything alleged of these abominable people should not be true and no reason to demand evidence for any of it, since in any case the quasi-supernatural efficiency of the Jewish conspiracy can be relied on to have ensured that any evidence that might have been available has been ruthlessly suppressed.
Dropping the idea that antisemitism names a single, unified kind, rather than a small number of distinct (though hierarchically related) kinds, may equally shed light on the issue, one that bulks large in Kenneth Marcus’s discussion, of whether antisemitism is to be understood as a type of personal animosity or as a species of ideology. The answer suggested by the present analysis is that neither understanding is false but that each applies to a quite different version of antisemitism. Social antisemitism is indeed a form of personal animosity applied to individual Jews and grounded in hostile or derisive stereotypes. Political antisemitism, by contrast, is an ideology—one offering a comprehensive explanation of any of a wide range of non-Jewish discontents in terms of the malignity, not so much of individual Jews, as of the Jewish collectivity conceived as vested, in virtue of its conspiratorial organization, with quasi-demonic powers.
If this is correct, then we have to regard ourselves as dealing under the label antisemitism not merely with more than one kind of phenomenon but with more than one kind of antisemite and hence with more than one kind of “antisemitic mentality.” Certainly, those antisemites whom I have encountered personally and listened to over the past sixty years or so have fallen fairly consistently into two quite sharply distinguished types that correspond with the categories of social versus political prejudice distinguished earlier. In one group, there is the barroom blowhard with an antipathy to any Jew he encounters based on the usual stereotypes. He finds Jews, that is, vulgar, pushy, money grubbing, prone to “get above themselves,” given to insinuating themselves into social milieus that should by rights have rejected them, and to using their undoubted cleverness to obtain positions of influence that should by rights belong to “our sort.” And that is not all that is wrong with Jews, he is very willing to tell you sotto voce. They are also constantly on the lookout for any advantage to be gained by complaining about the supposed injustices under which they suffer.
In the other group, one finds people obsessed not with despised traits of individual Jews but with the alarming nature of the threats posed by “the Jews”—the imagined Jewish collectivity—to whatever causes or values the speaker happens to hold dear. The two sets of concerns may overlap in the minds of some antisemitic individuals, but equally, they may not. In the thinking of the first group, emotional dispositions—animosity, resentment, contempt—dominate, and ideology plays very little part. In the thinking of the second group, ideology is the main factor, the nerve of the obsession. Hence, members of this group, unlike members of the first, tend to be anxious to assure one that they nourish no personal antipathy toward individual Jews, and indeed that “some of their best friends are Jews.”
These two branches of antisemitism, it seems to me, require very different treatment if we are either to understand or to deal with them. With the first, we are dealing with very familiar kinds of xenophobia based on dislike and exclusion and supported in the individual mind by appeal to stereotypes whose irrationality consists, as we have already argued (in partial conformity with Langmuir) not in lacking a kernel of truth but rather in lacking the generality claimed for them. Although it may be common in this or that social group, we are dealing here with a type of antisemitism essentially rooted in the individual mind in the sense that what this kind of antisemite has against Jews is to be explained in terms of the individual’s own tastes, self-image, and group allegiances. For such an antisemite, his dislike of Jews plays no particular explanatory function in his larger worldview and connects with no large concerns of public or political morality. While this kind of casual, stereotype-buttressed animosity may lead the antisemite to wish to exclude Jews from groups or clubs to which he and his friends belong, there is nothing about it that could give him a reason for wishing to eliminate Jews from society or from the world.
With the second branch, political antisemitism, matters are very different. Here, we are dealing not with merely personal prejudices, seated in the individual mind, but with a cultural formation: a body of wholly delusive but supposedly explanatory beliefs, claiming, in Marcus’s telling phrase, to “make sense of the entire world and all its history,” not just the tiny part of it actually occupied by the Jews. Like many other cultural formations, it is equipped with a public presence, a complex internal logic, a long history, and a substantial body of literature. These, as with other cultural formations, give it the power to transmit itself to new believers by standard processes of gradually increasing familiarity leading eventually to conversion. Its internal logic commits its converts to demanding not merely the exclusion or disadvantaging of Jews but the outright elimination of Jewish influence, whether by the literal destruction of the Jewish people or by the destruction of Jewish institutions such as the State of Israel.
The influences exerted by political antisemitism over minds susceptible to it are thus very different from those exerted by antisemitism entertained as a merely social prejudice. Political antisemitism affords a potent means of constructing “the Jew” as the enemy of whatever values the political antisemite happens to regard as central to national or human progress. It is thus very easy for a mind so influenced to give anti-Jewish hostility a mask of seeming moral virtue, and thus to justify as moral demands, actions and emotions that under any other circumstances it would recognize as prejudice and persecution.
To reach an understanding of a phenomenon of this kind, it is plainly not enough to confine our attention to the psychology of individual minds or even to individual minds viewed as expressive of group loyalties and hostilities. What requires explanation is the strange permanence of political antisemitism as an element in European culture. It has displayed, after all, a remarkable power to reinvent itself in the radically different conditions presented by successive periods of European history and to attach itself as a strange kind of bolt-on addition, somewhat in the manner of a virus attaching itself to the biochemical systems of a living cell, to systems of belief as radically diverse as medieval Christianity, British imperialism, nineteenth-century German nationalism, and Soviet communism. This power of attraction and renewal can only be explained if political antisemitism offers to its supporters and disseminators some political or cultural advantage sufficiently important to offset its essential absurdity. We need at the very least to ask ourselves, as we shall do in chapters 4 and 5, what that role might be: to attempt at least, that is, to understand political antisemitism in terms of what one might term its cultural functions. We need also to ask why such an extraordinary and grandiose tissue of delusions should have attached itself in the first place to, of all people, the Jews: a small, immensely useful but demonstrably disorganized and largely powerless tribe. In the same vein, we need to ask ourselves why and how a system of manifestly delusive beliefs should have come to influence over many centuries the minds of a long list of major European intellectuals, from Voltaire to George Bernard Shaw, and from Luther to T. S. Eliot. That last question is really too vast for a book of this nature. Preliminary sketches toward an answer will be found, however, in chapters 4, 5, 10, and 11–13.
In conclusion, several further consequences of distinguishing clearly between social and political antisemitism deserve our attention.
Earlier in the chapter, in “Problems of Intention,” we noted that to define antisemitism reasonably enough as unwarranted hostility to Jews because they are Jews creates problems when it comes to identifying acts or discourse as antisemitic. It does so because, as we observed there, it seems to make the issue of whether what someone says or does is antisemitic dependent on that person’s intentions or motives in saying or doing it: that is, upon questions concerning whose truth or falsity the speaker or actor himself may be said to have the determining voice. What we need to note at this point is that while this remains true of social antisemitism, where what is ultimately at stake is the existence of personal feelings of animosity, it is not true of political antisemitism. In the latter case, what makes someone an antisemite is not his or her feelings or private inward disposition toward Jews but public participation in a cultural formation involving the originating or diffusing of material in the form of slogans, pamphlets, posters, demonstrations, newspaper articles, and so on, the antisemitic character of which is readily discernible from its content. What made Julius Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer antisemitic and its editor an antisemite, that is to say, is not the character of Streicher’s consciousness or his feelings toward Jews but the evident manner in which the content of the paper served to recapitulate, embroider, and reinforce the familiar tropes and doctrines of political antisemitism.
This means in turn, as we shall see in the chapters 6–9, that drawing a clear distinction between social and political antisemitism becomes crucial when it comes to determining whether opposition to Israel is to be construed as legitimate political criticism or antisemitic defamation. In dealing with the forest of vexed questions that arise at that point, the best guide available to date is perhaps Natan Sharansky’s 3-D Test29 for distinguishing between mere criticism of Israel and antisemitism. This was originally floated by Sharansky in a short piece in the Jerusalem Post30 but has since become extremely influential. According to Sharansky, antisemitic hostility toward Israel is distinguished by the employment of three techniques: demonization, double standards, and delegitimization.
The increasing frequency of occurrence of all three techniques, since the late 1960s, in public debate concerning Israel in the West, is undeniable. The reasons why this should be so are unclear, given their relative absence from critical debate concerning other nations—China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, say—whose political condition might, on the face of it, be expected to provoke, if anything, more stringent kinds of political critique from a left-wing standpoint than Israel.
I suggest that both the relative absence of Sharansky’s three Ds from other debates and their relative frequency in debate concerning Israel are explicable as a consequence of the gradual penetration of that debate by a revived version of political antisemitism. “Demonization”—the attribution to Israel of a level of political savagery, contempt for human rights, and so forth, in excess of that of which any other nation on earth can supposedly be accused—revives in a new but still wholly chimerical form the ancient belief in the Jewish community’s absolute commitment to evil. Double standards are a necessary accessory to any attempt to advance the vision of Israel as a “demonic” nation, because that claim cannot, as we shall see in chapters 6–9, rationally survive any serious comparison between Israel’s record with regard to respect for human rights, the rule of law, the rules of war, and so forth, and that of a multitude of other nations. “Delegitimization,” finally, is merely a new manifestation of the conviction, built into the quasi-logical internal structure of political antisemitism in the ways we have examined, that the only way to get rid of the putative threat constituted by the Jewish collectivity is altogether to remove that collectivity’s capacity to interfere in human affairs, either by the destruction of its members or, failing that, by the destruction of any organized polity it may have succeeded in establishing.
THE HALIMI CASE: A SECOND LOOK
As Kenneth Marcus notes, the French legal and political authorities, when they found themselves confronted with the torture and death of Ilan Halimi, went to considerable lengths to deny that Halimi had been the victim of an antisemitic attack. Instead, they preferred the theory that he had simply been the victim of an attempted kidnapping that went wrong. It was only when one of the attackers confessed that Halimi had been treated in a certain way “because he was a Jew” that the latter interpretation was widely held to have collapsed.
This way of reevaluating the crime presupposes, as Marcus points out, that antisemitism consists of the antisemite’s possession of a certain kind of inward mental disposition toward Jews: consists of something, that is to say, very easy for the antisemite to disguise and ascribable with anything approaching certainty only on the basis of an avowal by the antisemite himself. But as we have seen, this is only true for social antisemitism. Political antisemitism is an ideology with a cultural and therefore collective presence. It is a group phenomenon rather than an individual one.
It is relevant to the Halimi murder, therefore, that the attack was carried out by a group. The perpetrators pretended at first to have been interested in money, rather than in the fact that Halimi was a Jew. In the case of a mugging by an individual mugger, where what was clearly at stake was the victim’s watch or wallet or iPhone, the fact that the victim happened to be wearing a kippah would not necessarily make the attack an antisemitic one. One would need to have become familiar, over an extended period, with the character and conversation of that particular mugger before one could say with any certainty whether the presence of the kippah had played any part in leading the mugger to choose that victim rather than another.
The fact that we are dealing, in the case of Les Barbares, with a concerted group action, blocks the transfer of that reasoning. There must, in their case, have been some motive to which the whole of the group subscribed and that must have been discussed among them. By employing the usual methods of comparing the independent stories of different group members with one another and with what actually took place, the truth of matters of this kind is rather easier to come at than the truth about what took place in the mind of an individual mugger in the split second of choosing a victim (was it, say, the kippah or the Rolex that weighed heaviest in the scale of that momentary decision?).
Fofana, the group’s leader, admitted from the outset that Halimi had been targeted because he was Jewish. He claimed, however, that the object had been to demand ransom for him “from his synagogue.” But if money had been the object, was that object not defeated by the torture and still more by the eventual abandonment of Halimi? If the motive of money is discounted for that reason, what possible motives are we left with? Sadism is one possible answer; extreme resentment is another. If pure sadism had been the motive, it would have been equally well served by choosing a non-Jew. What about resentment? If that had been social resentment, the supposed resentment of the poor, despised Maghrebin immigrant against the wealth and indifference of white French society, then the same argument applies. Why not choose just any white Frenchman to torture? Why choose a Jew particularly?
The only remaining option for the inquiry, it seems to me, is that the motive was antisemitic resentment. Political antisemitism of the classical European variety is now no longer a solely European delusion but is also very widespread in the present-day Muslim world. And in the peculiar demonology of political antisemitism, “the Jew” figures as the fons et origo of everything that is to be resented in this world. Therefore, for people in the grip of antisemitic delusion, to torture and kill a Jew, any Jew, is to direct one’s anger at the real thing, as it were, the ultimate fount of all that is not working, all that is poor, miserable, and contemptible in the lives of the killers.
At the time of writing (early 2018), following the massive attacks of 2015–16 on French and Christian targets in Paris, Nice, and Sainte-Étienne-du-Rouvray, it seems less likely that if a case like Halimi’s were to occur today, the French authorities would attempt to pass it off as a kidnapping gone wrong. But there is doubtless still some way to go before people finally grasp that in order to understand such things from the inside, we need to recognize, as the French authorities in 2006 clearly did not, the sad fact that political antisemitism, antisemitism of exactly the type formerly disseminated by the Nazi magazine Der Stürmer, is once more becoming as widespread in the world as it was in prewar Central Europe. Moreover, we are still far from a widespread understanding that this is a far more dangerous phenomenon in its power to provoke and to its devotees to justify senseless extreme violence than its milder and far less lethal congener, social or racist antisemitism.
CONCLUSION: THE DEFINITION OF ANTISEMITISM
In conclusion, it may be useful to summarize the foregoing arguments in a formal definition of the term antisemitism as follows:
Antisemitism is thinking, speaking, or acting injuriously toward Jews, without sufficient warrant, because they are Jews. It has two main variants; social or racist antisemitism, and political antisemitism.
Social antisemitism is a form of xenophobia or racism. It targets individual Jews, whom it represents, as in the case of racism directed against other groups, in terms of stereotypes lacking widespread applicability but possessing a kernel of truth. It aims at the exclusion of Jews from the society of those prejudiced against them.
Political antisemitism is a cultural formation in the form of a delusive system of beliefs claiming the power to explain a wide variety of human social and political phenomena. It targets Jews (or “the Jews”) considered as a collectivity. Against the Jewish collectivity, it asserts (in their most general form consistently over the past two millennia) a range of entirely delusive accusations, among them an absolute commitment to evil, conspiratorial organization of an essentially impenetrable kind, and vast power to harm any non-Jewish society that harbors Jews. These beliefs necessarily commit devotees of political antisemitism—as the only means, as they see it, of saving the world from Jewish iniquity—to pursuing the goal, not merely of excluding Jews from non-Jewish society but of altogether eliminating from the world either the entire Jewish community or at the very least any organized political entity that it may succeed in setting up.
In the next two chapters, we shall look into two obvious issues raised by this definition. We shall first ask what functions political antisemitism serves in non-Jewish culture and politics, and second, why the Jews, of all people, should have become the subject of the extraordinary collection of delusive beliefs that together make up the content of political antisemitism.
NOTES
1. Allport 1954.
2. I am grateful to my friend David Conway for pointing out the possibility of this objection. I am not sure that it is one that would occur to many readers, but it still seems worthwhile putting it out of court early in the argument.
3. Marcus 2015. One of the virtues of this book is its author’s wide practical knowledge of the legal and constitutional difficulties obstructing the defense of American Jews against antisemitism in the new forms that it began to assume toward the end of the twentieth century. Marcus is an eminent lawyer and academic, who has served as staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights and who is at present president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which he founded.
4. Glock and Stark 1966, 102.
5. Marcus 2015, 120.
6. Langmuir 1990, 311.
7. Prager and Telushkin 2003.
8. Langmuir 1990, 314–15.
9. Langmuir 1990, 315.
10. Langmuir 1990, 315.
11. Langmuir 1990, 321.
12. Langmuir 1990, 352.
13. Langmuir 1990, 306.
14. This and the preceding two citations, Langmuir 1990, 351.
15. Langmuir 1990, 351–52.
16. Langmuir 1990, 307.
17. Marcus 2015, 98. The works Marcus cites in this connection are Georg Christoph Berger Waldenegg, Antisemitismus: “Eine gefa..hrliche Vokabel”? Diagnose eines Wortes (Vienna: Bôhlau, 2001), and Léon Poliakov, The History of Antisemitism, vol. 1, From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vanguard, 1974).
18. Marcus 2015, 192.
19. Marcus 2015, 35.
20. Marcus 2015, 193.
21. Marcus 2015, 193–94.
22. Marcus 2015, 193.
23. Marcus 2015, 6.
24. Earlier, less developed versions of this distinction are to be found in Harrison 2006 and 2013 (see especially pp. 14–17).
25. I should explain, perhaps, for the benefit of the nervous reader who may feel his or her “safe space” to be infringed by these words, that I was baptized and brought up a Catholic.
26. Many of them collected in Cheyette 1993.
27. Marcus 2015, 193.
28. Sartre 1948, 41.
29. Marcus 2015, 155–59.
30. Natan Sharansky, “Anti-Semitism in 3D,” Jerusalem Post, February 23, 2004. Retrieved from: https://www.swuconnect.com/insys/npoflow.v.2/_assets/pdfs/flyers/sharanskyAntisemitism.pdf.
