Phrossack
Armored Fish and Armored Men
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2008
- Messages
- 6,045
Let me get this straight:
You think that me criticizing a country for its government's policies indicates that I'm mentally ill?
Are you serious?
Is anti-Semitism inevitable?
- Thread starter Mouthwash
- Start date
Let me get this straight:
You think that me criticizing a country for its government's policies indicates that I'm mentally ill?
Are you serious?
trader/warrior
Deity
If you posit it as "the Jew" conceptual figure, that is in fact just an invention, that makes anti-semitism inevitable, I agree in a way. It seems political movements will almost always inevitably find an "other" to fight against, but I would say that today in Europe "the Muslim" is the new "Jew", "the Catholic" used to be in Britain, "the Irish", "the Mexicans", "the blacks" through US history and so on.
Putting it in that way, I don't think anti-semitism is inevitable, you just have to find someone else (non-semitic I suppose) to be "the Jew". Unfortunately.
One approach to that would be to look at what 'the Jew', 'the Catholic', 'the Hun' and so on have in common, or what defines them versus real-life Jews, Catholics and Germans. That wouldn't be a bad way of working out what the people throwing them around wanted to be themselves - the opposite of whatever they imagined the 'other lot' to be.
Why not? Fifty years from now I can imagine a large Jewish diaspora, but what about a hundred? Two hundred, assuming we haven't all been uploaded into Omega by then? Jews have always had good lives in America, but all it takes is a few bad years to get them to emigrate and they're gone for good; just look at what happened to Soviet Jewry. In that distant a time-scale, I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that 'Jew' might once again become synonymous with a nationality, like Judean.
Not even close. First, I don't think you would apply the same standard to anything else; most people (ethnonationalists excepting) don't criticize 'countries,' they criticize governments. Second, having an obsession with something, even an unhealthy one, doesn't make you sick. I think it's a very human thing to do.
This reads more like wishful thinking than a well-founded prediction.
It kind of is... but I think it's within the realm of possibility, at least. The minority rule is at work: Jewish attachment to Israel can overcome attachments to other countries if they are set against each other, and Israel is guaranteed to be free of persecution.
I asked this last time it came up: how does the minority rule work with two conflicting beliefs? If 10% are stubbornly attached to New York, and 10% are stubbornly attached to Tel Aviv, who wins?
Israel has ethnic/religious significance to Jews, and it is the only place where they aren't a minority. Some Jews may indeed be attached to their place of origin, but there is no guarantee that they or the next generation will stay that way, while the reverse isn't true.
You can run that the other way, though. For Jews born in North London, that's home. Their area has a Jewish majority, speaks their language and has a climate they're used to. It's also got a much more familiar and generally attractive political climate. People will always be attached to their homes: Israel might have attracted their grandparents, but there's no guarantee that the next generation will feel that way.
By the same logic as you've set out, there will inevitably not be any British, Irish or Indian people living abroad after a while. I wouldn't hold my breath for that.
I mean, it sounds great, but there doesn't actually seem to be much to rest it on, other than the sort of thing I was talking about upthread - the idea that Jews have some natural affinity with Israel or 'international Jewry' that self-evidently trumps any other affiliation that they might have.
By the same logic as you've set out, there will inevitably not be any British, Irish or Indian people living abroad after a while. I wouldn't hold my breath for that.
I mean, it sounds great, but there doesn't actually seem to be much to rest it on, other than the sort of thing I was talking about upthread - the idea that Jews have some natural affinity with Israel or 'international Jewry' that self-evidently trumps any other affiliation that they might have.
Phrossack
Armored Fish and Armored Men
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2008
- Messages
- 6,045
I don't think you know what an unhealthy obsession is.
First off, I don't actually post or think about Israel much at all. You've just remembered when I do because you take personal offense to my criticisms of Israeli policy for some reason; you seem to think and write about Israel a lot and feel very strongly about it, unhealthily so, I'd say. Ethnonationalism has been one of the main causes of so much misery and death in this world that I'd argue that it is generally unhealthy, even potentially dangerous.
Second, I criticize a lot of countries' government policies from Japan to France to Russia to the US most of all. Does that make me "obsessed" with them? What's your definition of "obsession," just making more than one negative post about something, or is it only obsession when it's your favorite country that's being criticized?
But those things are incidental, while the attachment to Israel is a constant. Which is my point.
An ethnic group is defined to have a belief in its members' common origins, history, and destiny. Your examples presumably all have a belief in their common origins and history, but certainly not destiny.
Also, there is nothing stopping any Briton, Irishman, or Indian from completely abandoning their identity in favor of their host country's, while Judaism ensures continuity.
I don't think an ethnic group is defined as a group of people who believe that they have a destiny. In fact, claiming that your ethnic group has a special destiny is one of the defining features of fascism. I also really don't see how attachment to Israel is a constant, or any more constant than an attachment to the place people grow up, again without going into the sort of anti-Semitism that this thread is supposed to be about.
OK, then, not an 'obsession.' An unhealthy attitude.
Have you ever had anything neutral, much less positive, to say about Israel ever? If I condemned the formation of the French kingdom under the Karlings, then modern French foreign policy, then eighteenth-century France all in the same thread, it might be reasonable to conclude that I simply dislike France, regardless of the context. Most people would understand this to be bigotry.
Pretty much always in response to criticism. I don't make threads for the purposes of exposing the Palestinians as ruthless barbarians, or their government as fascist.
You declared that Israel was not a true ally because they bombed the USS Liberty about fifty years ago (the same time America was razing villages in Vietnam, but that's all in the past I guess).
Since you claim to criticize Russia, why not also criticize their destruction of an airliner from New York in 1983?
Last edited:
Well, that's a definition held by scholars, as far as I know.
I mean it in the sense that while not every Jew will be attached to Israel, Judaism will inevitably produce this belief under the right circumstances (not necessarily under persecution). Do you think that all Zionists come from countries where Jews were hated?
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I agree, but I think there's a couple of things that make anti-Semitism different.
The first is that the figure of "the Jew" is something more than just the Other. Most Others are imagined as having bad culture: primitive, simplistic, decadent. But it's at least a culture, and the barbarian form of the Other is at least part of a Nation, however contemptible his nation is. "The Jew", on the other hand, is imagined to be defined by his lack of culture: the "rootless cosmopolitanism" which allows him to move between nations, taking up and slewing off languages and nationalities like a cloak. "The barbarian" is only as much of a menace as his numbers allow him to be, and is no fundamental threat to the nation so long as he is kept firmly Over There. But "the Jew", by his nature, is a permanent and ever-present threat to the Nation. "The Jew" is almost unique as a racial caricature in their consistent portrayal as powerful and sophisticated. And in that sense, I think the figure of "the Jew" supplies something crucial to the European political imagination that sets him apart from "the barbarian", which requires "the Jew" to remain a figure distinct from the Irishman, the Mexican or the Muslim.
The second point is that the Jews themselves have, by historical accident, provided an incomparable vehicle on which to project "the Jew". There's no other ethnic group which is so widely spread as to be recognised across Europe, so thinly spread as to be vulnerable, yet also so well-established as to be a credible as a shadowy menace eating at the heart of society. The only comparable diaspora are the Roma, and they're too obviously impoverished and marginal to bear that kind of scape-goating. If the figure of "the Jew" has to be identified with a particular ethnic group, it's almost natural that it should fall on Jews.
The question there, I suppose, is whether it does have to fall on a particular ethnic group. Most contemporary hostility to "the Jew" doesn't invoke his ethnicity explicitly: it's enough that he's cosmopolitan and educated and un-nation-like. But is that really enough for the latent anti-Semite? It's hard to convince people out of convinced nationalist circle that, for example, Jeremy Corbyn is "not really English" just because he doesn't share their particular chauvinism. He speaks English, he looks English, he's of English descent: even casual racists are just going to see him as "an Englishman I don't like". And if all of England's woes can be traced to Bad Englishman, what does that say about England? It's much more convenient for the source of the contagion to be identified outside of the national body. And, historically, the obvious scapegoat has been Jews. Perhaps in future it won't be: perhaps there'll be a large enough population of mixed descendant and language and identity in enough positions of power to provide the newscape. For the "rootless cosmopolitanism" to become an actual describe and not just a crude euphemism for "Jew". That remains to be seen.
So I suppose I think that anti-Semitism is and is not inevitable. Conceptual anti-Semitsm, hostility towards "the Jew" as an abstract figure, is inevitable so long as European political thought does not undergo some drastic shift away from its ethnic and quasi-ethnic preoccupations. Actual anti-Semitism, hostility towards Jews and those of Jewish descendant, is not inevitable, because it's not necessary to identify "the Jew" with actual Jews- but I still think it's hugely probable that the identification will be made, and even where it isn't made explicitly, it will still float under the surface. Taking another Labour Party figure, it was even easier for the right to portray Ed Miliband as "the Jew": cosmopolitan, urban, educated, the son of immigrants, and not at all coincidentally, an actual Jew.
Now, I'm not as pessimistic as Mouthwash: I don't expect his five unhappy years which will see the last of the diaspora driven to the Homeland. And, if I'm quite honest, my wariness of anti-Semitism is as much because it's a disease which eats political cultures from within, as because I'm concerned about any imminent threat to Jewish people. But I think the basic ingredients of European anti-Semitism remain, that most of them are still active, and that it's not a huge leap of imagination see its resurgence.
It's indeed possible that there may be a time where Western Jews feel like Israel is the only place they will be safe or accepted. But Israel itself is a small and perpetually-imperiled country in a chronically unstable corner of the globe, kept above the turmoil mostly by its ability retain unusually strong bonds with Western allies. So, in the first place, how many Western Jews are likely to see migration as preferable to combating anti-Semitism at home? What might seem normal to Israelis often strikes Europeans and North Americans as extremely precarious, and unlike the citizens of the former USSR, it's unlikely they'd be facing any sort of major economic or political upheaval that would somehow leave Israel unscathed. And in the second place, if we saw a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the West capable of encouraging large numbers of Jews to abandon ship, would Israel, an emphatically Jewish state, be capable of sustaining the strong bonds which have contributed so heavily to its stability and prosperity? It's possible that popular anti-Semitism might run contrary to official policy, but if anti-Semitism in the West became so prevalent as to make life difficult for Jews, it's hard to see support for Israel- and not even military support, but simply strong economic bonds- remaining a popular position among Western governments, a serious blow to Israel's prosperity that would make it a far a less obvious target for migration than it would have been for a Russian Jew in 1991.
So while I think that Zionism had its historical moment, that's passed, and it would require a number of unusual and unforeseeable changes for those stars to realign.
I think Zionism is a product of its time - the same time, remember, that produced the various forms of European nationalism and saw them reach their greatest intensity - and that it did grow up, overwhelmingly, among persecuted people. I don't think pan-German nationalism is a necessary consequence of having Germans; by the same token, I don't think Zionism is a necessary consequence of having Jews.
You're going to have to find me some of those scholars. None of them work for the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster or Britannica.
EDIT: Cross-posted. I'll have a read and a think about TF's post.
You're going to have to find me some of those scholars. None of them work for the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster or Britannica.
EDIT: Cross-posted. I'll have a read and a think about TF's post.
trader/warrior
Deity
Many good points in that post.
Similar to the old tropes of (sometimes judeo-)Bolshevik and Marxist intelligentsia infiltrating and influencing society in western/central Europe as an enemy. Then turn "marxist" into an inherent quality of people and one can see that it might make things even nastier, both "the Other" and "the lurking Power among us".
The unique history of the Jewish diaspora has certainly made for a particularly nasty and broad mix of hostility against them.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That's certainly true. After all, until the 1930s, Zionism wasn't even the most successful movement for Jewish nationhood: that honour belonged to the Bund, who imagined their Jewishness and the future of European Jews in a very different way. Even if we accept that some sort of "Jewish nationalism" is inevitable, Zionisms is only one of many forms it could take, and it was by no means destined to be the most enduring or successful.
Actually, I don't expect Israel to remain small and imperiled, demographically at least.
I also think that a sudden surge in anti-Semitism is less likely than a simple economic or societal meltdown. I expect that most Jews would choose Israel over a failing state; and the recent surge in Aliyah from Brazil sort of bears this out.
Zionism succeeded. Pretty much all religious Jews identify on some level with Israel (even if some despise the state as secular). While Israel exists, I don't think it can be extricated from Judaism.
Anthony D. Smith is where I got my definition. I think there are others, but can't remember.
How many Jews from Iraq or Ethiopia do you think identified as Bundists? Zionism is the only truly Jewish nationalism.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Israel is still geographically smaller than its neighbours, with a lower population and with no particular advantage in terms of resources, and an aging population in the Arab or Turkish states isn't going to change that. That doesn't spell doom for Israel, by any means- I'm an advocate of Scottish independence, after all, I have to take the viability of small countries as an article of faith- but it does mean that Israel is always going to be in a more precarious situation than the United States, France or the United Kingdom, at least unless relations with its neighbours dramatically improve. (And, I mean, they might. But they might not.)
Brazil or the former Soviet Union are one thing, but the sort of mass-migration you'd be talking about would have to come from developed Western states: the United States first and foremost, and after that from Canada, France, the UK, and so on. Can we really imagine an economic or societal meltdown that engulfs New York, Toronto London and Paris, but leaves Tel Aviv unharmed?
How many Jews from Iraq or Ethiopia identified as Zionists? Before 1945, Jewish nationalism was an exclusively European phenomenon, and until the 1930s, the Bund always outnumbered the Zionists. And what most immediately put and end to the Bund wasn't out-competition by the Zionists, but Soviet repression, which effectively destroyed the Bund as a major European organisation; the remaining Polish branch was destroyed by the Nazis, and the always-small American branch withered in isolation.
I mean, with all due respect to the Zionists, it's easy to be the only game in town when your rivals all perish behind barbed wire. Don't mistake it for Providence.
Similar threads
- Locked
