Is anti-Semitism inevitable?

[Mouthwash]

The causes of secular anti-Semitism of the early and late-modern West are not as self-evident as they were in the Christian Middle Ages, and this leaves the door wide open for charlatans to step in. So, let me make a conjecture here.

In order to make every single member of a political (or cultural/linguistic) entity compatriots, a core ethos or mythology is necessary; this was taken to its final extreme with the rise of twentieth-century fascist regimes. The position that Jews occupy in such a system must be one of complete estrangement. It isn't possible for them to join the movement because they possess an intricate mythology of their own. Therefore, most Jewish political activity was both anti-nationalist (in whatever form that took) and secular.

Extreme nationalists not only perceived the Jewish genealogy as alien, but also could not stomach the fact that they held their values in contempt. Racialist mythology may have played a part in anti-Semitism, but it was only a component- you did not, for instance, see blacks being sent to the gas chambers, though they were of course treated as subhuman. There is a deep and insecure rage in the ostensible crazy Nazi attitude towards Jews, as though their very success threatened to refute the national solidarity of Germans. In a sense, it did, much like a tribe which believes itself to rule the world encountering an advanced empire and drifting apart.

This is something of a pessimistic view. While there is no unique "anti-Semitism virus," the nonassimilation of Jews puts them at perpetual risk, even in places that for 995 years in a millennium are tolerant and for 5 years are not.

 

[Kyriakos]

Maybe for some countries/cultures. Although i see no reason to assume that the current anti-Israel state stance most regular europeans seem to have is down to anything having to do with anti-semitism.

You would find more disliking hardcore stuff like religion- and not just jewish one), or (even more common) criminals in the state and army. But jewish people as a whole? Doubt it is widespread currently.

 

[Lexicus]

Anti-semitism is a manifestation of tribalism, which is probably inevitable when dealing with humans. Whether any specific manifestation of tribalism is inevitable is a harder question to answer.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

A simple way to change that would be to make the Jewish faith as open for new members as for instance the Christian faith is. It is quit the oddball to have a religion be not merely historically but theologically that ethnically tied. In a way, Judaism is very racist. I suppose that feature right there is at the heart of a lot of the Jewish phenomena and its associated problems. This itself establishes Jews not only as a fringe group - as there are many - but as a distinct people. This makes being a Jew not only an idea or a label or a culture, but something intrinsic. And this intrinsic nature in turn is a splendid breeding ground for being singled-out.

So there in deed appears to be a lot of natural fuel for anti-Semitism. If you define yourself as an exclusive distinct people, others will, too. And where there is such a divide, there is a lot of space for adversities.

"inevitable" is of course an awfully strong word. But yeah, I'd agree that antisemitism is more than an historic accident.

 

[Mouthwash]

Maybe for some countries/cultures. Although i see no reason to assume that the current anti-Israel state stance most regular europeans seem to have is down to anything having to do with anti-semitism.

You would find more disliking hardcore stuff like religion- and not just jewish one), or (even more common) criminals in the state and army. But jewish people as a whole? Doubt it is widespread currently.

Not a single time in the OP did I mention or allude to any modern attitude towards Israel or Israelis, much less compare it to anti-Semitism. Please do not post here anymore if you're going to derail the topic.

A simple way to change that would be to make the Jewish faith as open for new members as for instance the Christian faith is.

That isn't possible. Being a people is a core concept inherent to Judaism, as it is to various other groups in the Mid East (Druze, Zoroastrians, Yazidis, etc). Christianity really is the universalist Jewish faith.

It is quit the oddball to have a religion be not merely historically but theologically that ethnically tied. In a way, Judaism is very racist. I suppose that feature right there is at the heart of a lot of the Jewish phenomena and its associated problems.

Er... you're going to have to forgive me if I take offense to this, and choose not to respond?

 

[Agent327]

The causes of secular anti-Semitism of the early and late-modern West are not as self-evident as they were in the Christian Middle Ages, and this leaves the door wide open for charlatans to step in. So, let me make a conjecture here.

In order to make every single member of a political (or cultural/linguistic) entity compatriots, a core ethos or mythology is necessary; this was taken to its final extreme with the rise of twentieth-century fascist regimes. The position that Jews occupy in such a system must be one of complete estrangement. It isn't possible for them to join the movement because they possess an intricate mythology of their own. Therefore, most Jewish political activity was both anti-nationalist (in whatever form that took) and secular.

Two problems here: Fascism in Italy didn't have any anti-Semite connotation until late in WW II. Zionism was, if anything, nationalist. One might argue convincingly that, in fact, it was in reaction to nationalism that it evolved in the first place.

Extreme nationalists not only perceived the Jewish genealogy as alien, but also could not stomach the fact that they held their values in contempt. Racialist mythology may have played a part in anti-Semitism, but it was only a component- you did not, for instance, see blacks being sent to the gas chambers, though they were of course treated as subhuman. There is a deep and insecure rage in the ostensible crazy Nazi attitude towards Jews, as though their very success threatened to refute the national solidarity of Germans. In a sense, it did, much like a tribe which believes itself to rule the world encountering an advanced empire and drifting apart.

This is something of a pessimistic view. While there is no unique "anti-Semitism virus," the nonassimilation of Jews puts them at perpetual risk, even in places that for 995 years in a millennium are tolerant and for 5 years are not.

I'm not sure why you would mention blacks. There was no sizable black minority in Germany to persecute, let alone to send to gas chambers. Gypsies, homosexuals and other undesirables there were though.

Antisemitism does not discern between assimilated or non-assimilated Jews. After all, Jews are 'a race'. Ultimately such ideas lead to the nonsensical UN-resolution that 'Zionism is racism'. Since neither Zionism or any other nationalism can in any meaningful way be termed racist - except in extreme right wing views -, antisemitism is not inevitable. (One has to keep in mind though, that prior to WW II race also meant people - as in 'the English race' being the people inhabiting England. So if an Englishman spoke of 'the English race' he might have something else in mind than a Nazi speaking of 'the German race'.)

 

[Kyriakos]

Not a single time in the OP did I mention or allude to any modern attitude towards Israel or Israelis, much less compare it to anti-Semitism. Please do not post here anymore if you're going to derail the topic.

Hm, did you look at your own title? If you meant 'WAS inevitable in the past?' then why did you have the current title? Anti-semitism is not inevitable, much like anti-lithuanianism or anti-[insert any of current cultures on earth] is not.

 

[Flying Pig]

The causes of secular anti-Semitism of the early and late-modern West are not as self-evident as they were in the Christian Middle Ages, and this leaves the door wide open for charlatans to step in. So, let me make a conjecture here.

In order to make every single member of a political (or cultural/linguistic) entity compatriots, a core ethos or mythology is necessary; this was taken to its final extreme with the rise of twentieth-century fascist regimes. The position that Jews occupy in such a system must be one of complete estrangement. It isn't possible for them to join the movement because they possess an intricate mythology of their own. Therefore, most Jewish political activity was both anti-nationalist (in whatever form that took) and secular.

Extreme nationalists not only perceived the Jewish genealogy as alien, but also could not stomach the fact that they held their values in contempt. Racialist mythology may have played a part in anti-Semitism, but it was only a component- you did not, for instance, see blacks being sent to the gas chambers, though they were of course treated as subhuman. There is a deep and insecure rage in the ostensible crazy Nazi attitude towards Jews, as though their very success threatened to refute the national solidarity of Germans. In a sense, it did, much like a tribe which believes itself to rule the world encountering an advanced empire and drifting apart.

This is something of a pessimistic view. While there is no unique "anti-Semitism virus," the nonassimilation of Jews puts them at perpetual risk, even in places that for 995 years in a millennium are tolerant and for 5 years are not.

This whole idea of the 'nonassimilation of Jews' is itself a bit of an anti-Semitic trope. I mean, there are a sizeable number of Jewish people in the British parliament, a good few of whom have been knocking around the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet (both Milibands, Oliver Letwin, Nigel Lawson, Michael Howard) for many years. There's three on the United States Supreme Court. In entertainment, you've got Stephen Fry, Bob Dylan, and Scarlet Johansson. The point is that you can make as long a list of these as you want, or point out that the vast majority of Jewish people do not live in little enclaves of their own, and none of it will be good enough for an anti-Semite - just as you'll never convince somebody like Donald Trump to ease off on Mexican people by showing him examples of the huge number of ordinary, decent, productive people in and from Mexico. They're convinced that these people are isolationist and evil because they hate them; what should be the cause follows what should be the effect. That's why you can't reason with them. Hatred and racism are not about reason.

Even this is getting away from the broader point - that it's based on an idea of (say) Britishness or Germanness that includes not-being-Jewish as part of it. We don't talk about Christians or Yorkshiremen 'refusing to integrate', because nobody sees a contradiction between being Christian, or from Yorkshire, and being British. It's only when you define being British as eating pork, being clean-shaven and not knowing how to pronounce tzitzit. Again, this is entirely a choice, and you'll find the vast majority of Jewish people who feel entirely British or American, and see no contradiction between that and being Jewish. When people like Hitler or Oswald Moseley tried to make us see Jews as being entirely loyal to some idea of 'international Jewry', that was exactly the same as any number of Joe Chamberlains and Know-Nothings trying to convince us that Catholics were all looking out for each other and loyal to the Church rather than to their countries. Again, they're building up their standards for inclusion specifically in order to exclude the people they hate. Again, you can rationalise that - as racists and anti-Semites down the ages have done - but all of these rationalisations only really rest on what they're supposedly trying to 'prove'.

Why do they do that? You're right that it's about creating a community, I think. British people, American people and German people are complicated - we come from different places, do different things, speak in different ways, have different beliefs, social backgrounds, favourite foods and you name it. There's not a lot that you can honestly say that everyone within a supposed 'nation' has in common. So the usual thing to do is to define who we are by who we are not. It goes back to ancient Greece - there's a great book by the Greek geographer/historian Herodotus, who apparently travelled to Egypt and saw them do everything exactly opposite to how Greeks do it, and did much the same with the 'barbarians' in Scythia. He had exactly the same problem - 'Greeks' had different dialects, different political systems, different gods, different customs, and so on, and he was trying to find a way of making them feel like a community, to make 'Greek' mean something. The solution - being Greek means not being like the barbarians. So too with Hitler, Moseley and Trump - being a good German, a good Englishman or a good American means not being like our image of these other people, and any other differences between 'us' don't matter.

 

[Mouthwash]

Hm, did you look at your own title? If you meant 'WAS inevitable in the past?' then why did you have the current title?

I did not mean it was inevitable in the past only. There's still a huge difference between that and saying criticism, even disgusting blood libels against Israelis, are anti-Semitism. You made the association yourself.

Anti-semitism is not inevitable, much like anti-lithuanianism or anti-[insert any of current cultures on earth] is not.

Being Jewish isn't a simple 'culture.'

This whole idea of the 'nonassimilation of Jews' is itself a bit of an anti-Semitic trope. I mean, there are a sizeable number of Jewish people in the British parliament, a good few of whom have been knocking around the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet (both Milibands, Oliver Letwin, Nigel Lawson, Michael Howard) for many years. There's three on the United States Supreme Court. In entertainment, you've got Stephen Fry, Bob Dylan, and Scarlet Johansson.

I'm not saying that Jews never assimilate, but in Europe they typically did not. The religious lived in shtetls, and the Jewish upper classes, the secular liberals, did not integrate into the country's politics because that country wasn't liberal. English-speaking or Scandinavian countries were.

I agree strongly with the rest of your post.

 

[Flying Pig]

What's your time frame on that? Britain had a Jewish Prime Minister under Victoria; France had a Jewish Prime Minister at the same time as Germany had Hitler and Italy had Mussolini. You also have the Dreyfus Affair in France - where the whole point is that a Jewish man who wanted to serve his country and be part of the most 'national' institution of all had people try to stop him from doing so, because they hated these Jews who apparently never wanted to be French. You can see that there's something backwards there.

EDIT: Reading again, I think you've (perhaps unwittingly) captured a bit of that backwardness in your post, when you say that Jews didn't integrate into politics in illiberal countries. They didn't integrate because they were actively excluded - in Britain, even into the middle of the 19th century, most public offices, including that of Member of Parliament, had an explicit or implicit (for example, requiring the oaths of an MP to be sworn 'on my true faith as a Christian') ban on Jews taking them. Jews weren't hated because they weren't involved in public life: they weren't involved in public life because they were hated. You might be able to point to a sort of feedback loop, but you still need to account for the basic hatred, which came first and was always under the surface: hence the defeats of several attempts to have these bans removed, for decades after similar bans were lifted for Catholics.

 

[Mouthwash]

EDIT: Reading again, I think you've (perhaps unwittingly) captured a bit of that backwardness in your post, when you say that Jews didn't integrate into politics in illiberal countries. They didn't integrate because they were actively excluded - in Britain, even into the middle of the 19th century, most public offices, including that of Member of Parliament, had an explicit or implicit (for example, requiring the oaths of an MP to be sworn 'on my true faith as a Christian') ban on Jews taking them. Jews weren't hated because they weren't involved in public life: they weren't involved in public life because they were hated.

It's just impossible for a Jew to join a political party that has the Christianness or ethnic heritage of the country as its platform, unless they renounced their Jewishness entirely, and sometimes (in the case of the Nazis) not even then. They may have wanted to be part of the political life of the country in a secular sense, but not in a spiritual one.

EDIT: When did you become a mod?

 

[Tahuti]

Maybe for some countries/cultures. Although i see no reason to assume that the current anti-Israel state stance most regular europeans seem to have is down to anything having to do with anti-semitism.

Distuinguishing the actions of the Jewish state to that of Jewish people at large from an abstract point of view is a difficult feat for most people on both sides of the debate. Those who are critical of Israel because of genuine concern for the victims of Israeli policies are a rare breed indeed.

 

[Flying Pig]

It's just impossible for a Jew to join a political party that has the Christianness or ethnic heritage of the country as its platform, unless they renounced their Jewishness entirely, and sometimes (in the case of the Nazis) not even then. They may have wanted to be part of the political life of the country in a secular sense, but not in a spiritual one.

You're right, but you're still working a step ahead - from an idea of what it means to be French/German/English based around being not-Jewish. You've got to ask how and why that came about in the first place: neither of those countries had a particular problem, for example, accepting various Christian groups within the 'national' framework, or (in the case of Britain) uniting people from places like Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and even Ireland, all with vastly different 'heritages' that they could draw upon. There were two main ways of giving out citizenship in Europe - you either, as in the French model of jus soli, had to be born in the country, or, as in the German model of jus sanguinis, had to have a parent who was a citizen. Beyond that, where you draw the line of your community is arbitrary. When people say 'Christianity is fundamentally important to German heritage' (but being a Lutheran is not), or 'French heritage is based on biological descent from gentiles' (but never mind what sort of gentiles), that's a conscious decision to include some people and exclude other people.

If you fall into the trap of thinking that there's some objective idea of 'Frenchness', 'Englishness', 'Germanness' (or 'Jewishness', to be honest), and that the Jews simply didn't measure up to that, so people were being entirely fair when they treated them as a species apart, you're falling into the very propaganda that anti-Semites try to put out. What's really happening is that people are constructing what they want 'French', 'German' and 'English' to mean specifically in order to exclude these people, and then rationalising it backwards.

EDIT: When did you become a mod?

At the start of last month. I help look after WH and the slightly rowdier place next door.

 

[Namor]

I think it should be noted that Jews have diverse opinions on Israeli military policy and the existence of second-class citizens. Jewish families can get into very heated arguments about it like everyone else does. It is often a generational thing for obvious reasons.

Until an equitable two state solution happens and terrorism is no longer a tool used in political desperation/religious martyrdom, I don't expect those arguments to slow down anytime soon.

 

[Phrossack]

Distuinguishing the actions of the Jewish state to that of Jewish people at large from an abstract point of view is a difficult feat for most people on both sides of the debate. Those who are critical of Israel because of genuine concern for the victims of Israeli policies are a rare breed indeed.

I don't think we are--I know a number of people, myself included, who criticize Israeli policies while not being anti-Semites. It's perverse when most people who dare criticize a country's controversial policies are smeared as bigots.

 

[Mouthwash]

I don't think we are--I know a number of people, myself included, who criticize Israeli policies while not being anti-Semites. It's perverse when most people who dare criticize a country's controversial policies are smeared as bigots.

I think there's a large area between being an anti-Semite and actually criticizing Israel to protect the welfare of the Palestinians. Israel provides a showcase of the purported "Jewish fundamentalism," which leftists can equivocate with Muslim fundamentalism, to show that All Religions Can Be Extreme. There's also post-colonial guilt at work, so any real problems the Palestinians have (sectarian violence, corruption, lack of free speech) are ignored in favor the Great Crime of settling Israelis on Palestinian land.

Also, when you've devoted time and energy to criticize Israel from its early settlements (just like the conquest of the Native Americans) to its actions in the Six-Day War (USS Liberty was blown up, must have been conspiracy) to its current control over the West Bank (Palestinians are so persecuted they are driven to suicide!) than I'd say you have a teensy bit of an obsession there.

 

[Namor]

Being stuck in what amounts to an open air prison limbo (despite leftists using that term, it is accurate) is a pretty real problem the Palestinians have. Which understandably, creating a framework to solve that takes precedent for people over internal conflict, some of which probably manifests from the lack of resources. Simplifying the whole issue to "Israel has land that the Palestinians want" is bordering on disingenuous. I would also say that being against religious tests for full inclusion within a society is not the best example of anti-semite behavior, if one is generally consistent about it.

Of course, you are right people do sometimes focus far too much on the origins of the situation, who was the most wrong in the past is pretty pointless to dwell over unless you are an amateur historian on a history forum. No one is ever going to agree there.

 

[Phrossack]

I think there's a large area between being an anti-Semite and actually criticizing Israel to protect the welfare of the Palestinians. Israel provides a showcase of the purported "Jewish fundamentalism," which leftists can equivocate with Muslim fundamentalism, to show that All Religions Can Be Extreme. There's also post-colonial guilt at work, so any real problems the Palestinians have (sectarian violence, corruption, lack of free speech) are ignored in favor the Great Crime of settling Israelis on Palestinian land.

Also, when you've devoted time and energy to criticize Israel from its early settlements (just like the conquest of the Native Americans) to its actions in the Six-Day War (USS Liberty was blown up, must have been conspiracy) to its current control over the West Bank (Palestinians are so persecuted they are driven to suicide!) than I'd say you have a teensy bit of an obsession there.

Um, no, not an obsession. At all. A few posts over the course of years on this forum does not constitute an "obsession," and I don't think you know what you're talking about.

 

[Mouthwash]

Simplifying the whole issue to "Israel has land that the Palestinians want" is bordering on disingenuous.

That is pretty much the whole issue; any Palestinian will tell you the same. It's a pretty common thing in the world. Look at China and Taiwan, or Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Ethnonationalists can and do go to war over what they perceive as ancestral territory.

Um, no, not an obsession. At all. A few posts over the course of years on this forum does not constitute an "obsession," and I don't think you know what you're talking about.

I don't think it was over the course of years (you talked about the Yishuv's purported colonialism and the brutality of the occupation in the same thread), but the level of criticism directed at disparate aspects of a single state suggests this is something unhealthy.

Also, I just realized I completely defied my own request to keep this from degenerating into another Israel hate-thread. Still, I think Flying Pig exhausted the OP pretty well.

 

[Traitorfish]

I think I agree with Mouthwash here, at least to some extent. The more I consider it, the more fundamental the figure of "the Jew" seems to the European political imagination- or, at least, to a certain strain of the imagination that seems to be, in this historical moment, very powerful.

What's intriguing and a little baffling is that the figure of "the Jew" has so little to do with actual, flesh-and-blood Jews. I suppose because "the Jew" is defined so heavily by what he's not: not of the nation, not of the blood, not of the soil. "The Jew" is unmanly, unmartial, lacking in honour and loyalty. He has no positive qualities; even cosmopolitanism is not really imagined by the anti-Semite as a positive quality, just a way of describing a lack of nationality in an imperfect language.*

The positive qualities of the Jew as an actual human being- his genealogy, his faith, his language and traditions- seem almost incidental. Where they figure, they're historical conveniences- "oh, the Jews, aren't they the ones that killed Christ?" The Jew becomes a vehicle for "the Jew"- a people just disparate enough, the target of just enough traditional hostility to serve as a ready vehicle for whatever sins the European mind chooses to project on them. After all, who else could bear that load? The Roma are too obviously impoverished, the Sami too distant, the Swiss too boring. The Irish are all of the above. But European Jewry seems to hit just the right balance between diaspora and concentration, power and vulnerability, familiarity and distance to fit the bill. "if the Jews didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent them", you might say. And so as long as "the Jew" remains a powerful concept, the Jew will suffer for it. Little wonder, then, that the two most powerful Jewish movement of the twentieth century, Zionism and the Bund, should both be defined by their attempts to reimagine the Jews as a nation like any other, or at least so close as to make it difficult or impossible to impose the figure of "the Jew" onto their people.

What's the solution? I'm not sure. A formal prohibition on expressions of anti-Semitism since 1945 has only done so much good: it's allowed the figure of "the Jew" to continue in the popular imagination, it just makes it a little harder to connect him to actual Jews- and when it does, the results are just a ugly. Perhaps it's to embrace "the Jew"- to take his cosmopolitanism, his nationlessness, as virtues? But where does that leave actual Jews- without identity, without heritage? Engineering a world without Jews hardly seems an appropriate response to anti-Semitism. Assimilation presents the same problem from a different angle. Bundism is a dead letter, and Zionism- well, whatever it's virtues or merits, it's clear enough in the seventh decade of the State of Israel that it's never going to be a definitive answer.

So I don't know. It's not an easy problem, and there's not an easy answer. But Moutwash is right to highlight it.

edit: *(Perhaps why the "Khazar hypothesis" is so popular among anti-Semites? If the Jews really are the heirs to the great cultures of the ancient Levant, they're the living ancestors of all Western civilisation, and much harder to imagine as the hated "rootless cosmpolitan". But if they're just a bunch of circumcised Tartars, that's no longer an issue. Just a thought.)