Jew-Optional Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism is usually discussed as religious intolerance or racial prejudice. Jews, by virtue of their beliefs and historical relationship to Christianity, pose a convenient target for religious fanatics, a fact made clear earlier this year when Mel Gibson demonstrated enduring popularity of the “Christ-killer” libel. In the 19th century, when the pseudo-science of eugenics was all the rage, Jews were considered a distinct racial group whose undesirable characteristics were ascribed to genetics. This assumption led directly to the activities of the Nazis, who figured there was nothing to do with an “inferior” race except wipe it off the face of the Earth.
Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment took the form of Anti-Zionism – that is, opposition to the existence of Israel as a political position. This was a step forward of sorts: theoretically, Jews could be exempted from anti-Zionist sentiment if they shared this opposition, although this rarely bought them much in practice. There is a legitimate case to be made against Zionism, of course, but this is very often not what motivates self-described Anti-Zionists, especially in Europe, the Arab Middle East, and elsewhere in the Islamic world.
As a Jew myself, I was made aware from an early age about all of these different forms of anti-Semitism – rarely, thank god, from personal experience, but through the teachings of family and the Jewish community. What was rarely discussed or even mentioned, though, was the hidden fourth factor: the one which, in my opinion, best explains the historic patterns of Anti-Semitism particularly in Europe and the United States. That factor is, for want of a better term, sociological. It has to do with the historic behavior of Jews in their own community, but it manifests most conspicuously when Jews are allowed to participate as members of heterogeneous societies.
This behavior is often described with terms of approbation: inquisitive, intellectual, sophisticated, perceptive, at times comedic. This has its roots in religion, but has implications far broader than religious practice. The process of coming to understanding through dispute and discussion has its roots in the practices of Rabbinic Judaism following the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century AD, when religious authority became decentralized and Jewish doctrine evolved through learned disputation, codified in the Talmud and other exegetical works. Despite the often esoteric and obscure nature of the theological disputes, Talmudic study and debate created distinctly dialectic habits of mind among many Jews, including the tendency to question and dispute, with an underlying presumption of social equality among intellectual equals. Authority derived from learning. Learning was expressed through argument, rhetoric and wit, grounded in a mastery of a body of text.
This was compounded by the historical fact that in most places, Jews were not permitted to own land or bear arms. Therefore, Jews became by necessity urban creatures, separated from the concerns that informed the sensibility and authority structure of a mostly rural and highly militaristic social and political order in Medieval Europe. While a piously Christian rural peasantry was broken to the strict authority of the Church, the Crown and nobility and taught the virtues of obedience and military discipline, urban Jews cultivated habits of discussion and debate. Laws which restricted Jews to craft trades, law, medicine and commerce redounded to their advantage as these occupations grew in importance relative to land ownership and agricultural production. The habits of mind imposed by centuries of disputatious religious practice served Jews well as the Christian world began to open to the spirit of scientific and philosophical inquiry.
By the 19th century, it was clear that the balance in the modern world had clearly tipped toward the values of science and commerce. The economic yields and social status of rural communities and the authority systems that governed them fell, outpaced and outproduced by the more vibrant and open environments of cities, coastal towns and new communities not bound to ancient traditions. By historical accident, no one was better prepared for this seismic power shift than the lowly, despised Jews. Not coincidentally, it was around this time that the traditional religious and xenophobic Anti-Semitism of Western Europe began to evolve into a broader, more ideological form as the increasingly marginalized rural population sought ways to explain their diminishing wealth, power and influence. Naturally, the Jews presented an easy target. The habits of anti-Jewish violence were close at hand, and Jews served as a convenient and apt symbol of the pestilence of modernity and urbanization which threatened traditional rural lifestyles, values and authority.
Ironically, the historical legacy of Anti-Semitism blinded the frustrated haters from the real cause of their hatred. For over 200 years, resentment of Jews focused on unique and innate characteristics of their Jewishness – their religion, their ethnicity, their ideology, their “race” – when in fact, what they found most offensive and intolerable was their social values and behavior. Jewish urbanity, sophistication, willingness (even eagerness) to pose nettlesome questions and demand that authority justify its actions with reference to reason or precedent, even the irreverence of Jewish humor all deeply offended those who were raised to give unquestioning respect to authority, behave with restraint and discipline, and prefer the austerity of country life to the luxuries of the city. What was most intolerable is that the new system of the world seemed to prefer and reward the values of the Jews to those of the good country folk. Faced with an unfavorable verdict in the court of history, the unsuccessful plaintiffs appealed to the one avenue of action still available to them: violence and intimidation.
After a disgraceful record of ignorance and atrocity in the 19th and 20th centuries, today’s most sophisticated Anti-Semites have finally succeeded in separating their hatred of Jewish (read: urban, modern, liberal) values from the crude and uncouth hatred of Jewish people or even the Jewish religion. They realized that the object of their hatred is not Jewishness per se but those annoying behaviors typical of all sophisticated urban folk, of which Jews were only a notable example. This is, I suppose, a step forward. A clash of values, ideologies and behaviors is in some ways more civilized than hatreds based on physical appearance, national origin or religious belief, although in practice, it may be no less irrational and violent.
Today’s Anti-Semites don’t need to talk about Jews to mobilize the same set of politically-convenient emotions in the populace at large. They talk around that point, while railing against an “overeducated ruling class that is contemptuous of the beliefs and practices of the mass of ordinary people. Those who run America are despicable, self-important show-offs. They are effete… arrogant… snobs.” (from What’s the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank). Those non-Jews who share these values are perhaps even more contemptible, for they have chosen to side with the enemy of their own free will. But still, the picture of the historical Jew from Mein Kampf and Stalin’s chilling characterization “rootless cosmopolitans” shines through.
Interestingly, many in America who share this virulent hatred of Jewish values are among the staunchest supporters of Israel. This is often ascribed to their belief in Biblical prophesy (a precondition of the Second Coming is that Jews must regather in Israel). Personally, I think it is best explained by their desire to see the Jews take their act elsewhere so that they are not around to corrupt the politics and values of Christian America. In a gesture of decency, they are happy to see us go to a country that is prosperous, modern, comfortable and secure against its enemies. Certainly the Nazis were not so generous. But the urge to exclude, eliminate and purify remains the same.
This is not to suggest that all “traditional values” conservatives or rural people with resentment toward city folk are crypto-Anti-Semites. However, there is an indisputable commonality in the rhetoric, the location of the resentment, and the habits of mind. Nazism as practiced in the 20th century required a whole superstructure of racist pseudo-science to undergird its program of political violence. In a sense, Nazi Anti-Semitism was the lever by which a clique of cultural traditionalists, military expansionists, ultra-nationalists and repressive authoritarians gained control of the German state, and the realization of Nazi dreams of racial purity – the Holocaust – is what discredited all fascism as a legitimate political ideology for the remainder of the century.
Today’s far right shares many of the dreams of the fascists but has learned, whether out of humanity or simple expedience, to avoid the discredited tactics of previous generations. They have learned to activate primordial rural hatreds without using the word “Jew.” They have even managed to recruit some Jews to their cause, primarily through the sense of militant Zionism that they share, though for dramatically different reasons. Unlike the crude racism and religious fanaticism of times past, 21st century Anti-Semitism is Jew-optional. That, I suppose, is progress.
10:50:31 AM 
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