1.
Over at Engage David Hirsh writes,
I believe that there is a problem of institutional antisemitism in the UCU. By this I do not mean that significant numbers of people in the union hate Jews. But I do believe that ways of thinking, norms and practices have developed which allow the union to behave in an antisemitic way and to normalize antisemitic expression.
I’m sure that he’s right about there being an insignificant number of people in the union who hate Jews. I imagine that, like members of most unions, UCU members pay their dues and don’t think too much about what their union gets up to unless they themselves are directly affected by it. I’m also pretty sure that most of the activists responsible for the repeated attempts to boycott Israeli academics and the posting of antisemitic material on the UCU list don’t hate Jews either, if we take the word “hate” to mean something like that they would tolerate or favour physical violence against Jews in the UK or the imposition of legal discrimination against them.
2.
But if there are no antisemites, where does the antisemitism come from? As “Bill” says in the comments on Hirsh’s article
One problem is that misplaced (and unreciprocated) collegiality on this demands that we acknowledge antisemitism without the existence of antisemites. I have a big problem with that. Racism isn’t carried and spread in the water or by mosquito bites. It’s carried and spread by racists.
3.
In an earlier post about the new, cool, carbon neutral antisemitism, Hirsh says
Interestingly, it is also an antisemitism which opposes antisemitism and which is not aware of itself. There is no antisemitic intent.
And later on,
So we’re looking at an antisemitism which is not explicit, and which allows for exceptional Jews; it is not recognizable by intent and the people who spread it are not aware of what they are doing.
I’d say it was an antisemitism that opposed the traditional skin-headed, jack-booted antisemitism, nothing more. What’s said with regard to intent and awareness is doubtless true in many or some cases but how can we know that it’s so in all? And might not the principle of charity be invoked so as to credit people with understanding the meaning - usually the pretty obvious meaning, which you have to strain hard not to see - of their words and actions?
4.
He also asks, in the comments to this article,
Are we judging what people say and do or are we making a more essentialist claim about what people “are”?
A perfectly fair point but one that is rather contradicted by the essentialism of the definitions quoted in 3. If difficulties arise in being sure that someone really “is” an antisemite, do not very similar ones arise concerning absolving people of antisemitic intent and awareness?
5.
In the same comment he asks how calling someone an antisemite would change what people who oppose antisemitism do. I think that there is value in calling things and people by their real names, it clarfies matters. If a person promotes policies that are uniquely prejudicial to Jews then that person is an antisemite. Failing to call them by that name risks letting them hang on to respectability and does them something of an injustice in not crediting them with a proper understanding of what they are doing.
6.
It’s obvious that care has to be taken about calling someone an antisemite as it’s possible that some people promote policies uniquely prejudicial to Jews without having thought matters through fully. There must plenty of explaining, pointing out and arguing with such a person or institution before describing them as antisemitic.
7.
It’s also possible that there are people who knowingly promote policies uniquely prejudicial to Jews because they believe that this is a regrettable step that has to be taken in the pursuit of some greater good. This greater good may be a perfectly valid goal in itself but if people are knowingly promoting antisemitic policies to achieve it then such people are still antisemites.
8.
All the previous points notwithstanding, there may sometimes be occasions when there are valid tactical reasons for refraining from calling an antisemite by that name. That’s for each individual to decide in the situation in which they find themselves. It doesn’t alter the central argument set out here; it’s hard to conceive of antisemitism, institutional or otherwise, without antisemites and refraining from describing antisemitic people and institutions as such helps neither us nor them.
Eamonn,
I would question your definition of ‘traditional antisemitism’ as ‘the jack-booted variety’.
There were many varieties of post-Christian or Islamic racial or collective hostility to Jews, that in turn that arose from Christian or Islamic anti-Judaism (or antisemitism).
It has ‘evolved’ even as the situation of Jews has changed. In 1900 over 80% of the world Jewry lived in European Christendom or post-Christendom, less than 0.02% in Palestine. Today 41% live in Israel, which vies with the US for the largest Jewish community in the world.
Today’s allegedly anti-racist anti-antisemitism tolerates the few Jews who are near but hates the many in Palestine-Israel, and not a few in the US, who are far off.
The Jewish state of Israel exists because, in the 19th and 20th centuries, most European, Asian, North African Jews were regardes as more ‘Palestinian’ than European or Arab, and either murdered or driven out, before 1914 mostly to America, after mostly to Palestine or what became Israel.
‘Traditional’ antisemitism is irrelevant because there is no ‘traditional’ Jew to speak of.
For 2000 years, Christianity, for 1500 years, Islam, have defined Jews as a people dispossessed of temple, city and land as a punishment for their rejection of Jesus and the prophets. Which is why, even in the 19th and 20th centuries, European and Arab Jews came to be essentialised as ‘Palestinian’.
The new antisemite is hostile to the memory of this, or seeks to mitigate its relevance. But in that act of ‘forgetting’, or erasure, or wilful ignorance of the past, he or she replicates the same prejudice: the proper place of Jews is outside the land of Israel, not inside it, because their sins are so terrible. Among the greatest in the world, even, in their ‘crucifixion’ of the Palestinian Christian and Islamic people-Christ.
Those who advocate the imposition, by force or boycott, of one state i.e. the dissolution of the Jewish state, by return of millions of refugees, or otherwise, are in effect replicating the same prejudice, as such a course of action will inevitably entail the removal of many if not most Israeli Jews.
The is why anti-Zionism, in its gospel like fervour, the zealousness of its adherents, is what ‘traditional’ antisemitism has evolved into, in fact replicates many of the characteristics of Christian and Islamic anti-Judaism as well as antisemitism.
‘Traditional’ antisemitism was never merely, if mostly, ‘the jack-booted’ variety. It was religious, it was intellectual (in the Church Fathers, it was both), it was popular, it was elist.
Eamonn: both you and Zhkarya are onto something. To simplify, if i may, i think part of the problem is that both the recipients of anti-semitism (ie jews) and anti-semites confuse and/or are spooked by its equation with Nazism. As Zkharya says, Nazism was just one form of anti-semitism, albeit the most vicious one to date. There were anti-semites in Canada, England and pretty much everywhere who didn’t like Jews, excluded them from clubs etc, but had no desire to see them exterminated like so much vermin. That was what the Nazis added to the mix. however, to admit to anti-semitism when it is equated with nazism is too much for all but most ardent anti-semites.
As for jews, they too should clarify that when they say something or someone is anti-semitic they don’t mean it, he or she is a Nazi. Admittedly, this is hard to do when the anti-zionists feel perfectly happy calling Israel a Nazi state, but that’s just stupid and, dare i say it, anti-semitic hyperbole, and shouldn’t enter into the equation.
looking back on this argument, maybe it wasn’t so simple after all. have a nice weekend
I think Anthony Julius, in an article posted on “Z” Word, outlined the distinction between diffrent kinds (degrees) of antisemites and what he called their fellow-travellers. I’m less charitable than Julius and I refer to these fellow-travellers as “antisemites by proxy”.
http://contentious-centrist.blogspot.com/2008/07/creepy-norm-finkelstein-makes-joke-norm.html
Interestingly, the notion of antisemitism without antisemites has also been brought up by the (not uncontroversial) German writer Henryk Broder; the English version of a related testimony he recently gave before a hearing of a German Parliamentary Commission is here:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/anti-semitism-without-anti-semites/