In his classic “Anti-Semite and Jew,” Jean-Paul Sartre argued that antisemitism “is something quite other than an idea. It is first of all a passion.” The emphasis is Sartre’s.
He then relates the story of a young woman who told Sartre of her unpleasant experiences with furriers. She had been robbed by them, she said, and they had damaged the furs which she had entrusted to their care. And they were all Jews, she added.
“But why did she choose to hate Jews rather than furriers?” Sartre asked rhetorically. “Because she had in her a predisposition toward anti-Semitism.”
A few pages later, Sartre expands on this. Antisemitism is unlike most other forms of emotionally-grounded hatred, which are normally provoked by a certain experience. You may hate your landlord for raising the rent, or your cellphone company for providing lousy service, or a particular airline for giving you a middle seat when you were promised the aisle. But antisemitism functions differently. “It precedes the facts that are supposed to call it forth; it seeks them out to nourish itself upon them; it must even interpret them in a special way so that they may become truly offensive,” writes Sartre.
That is why the young woman of Sartre’s acquaintance did not hate furriers. And it is why, in these past weeks, there has been a discernible chorus of voices urging us to pin our financial woes not on the Fed, or the investment banks, or the hedge funds, or the inability of Europe’s central banks to act in concert, or the patently daft idea that the value of property can only go upwards, but on the Jews.
Ahmadinejad is one of those voices, preaching “Zionist” culpability from the podium of the UN General Assembly. So too is Hamas, whose spokesman, Fawzi Barhum, blamed the “Jewish Lobby” for “bad administrative and financial management and a bad banking system.” There are others, albeit with far less global reach. Two radio hosts in New Zealand. The execrable “Israel Shamir.” Shamir’s faithful disciple, Counterpunch contributor Gilad Atzmon. Commentators on Yahoo message boards, posters of pixelated, crackly videos on youtube, bloggers whose unfamiliar URLs sail into your in-box via a Google “Zionism” alert…all of them are blaming “the Jews” for the financial crisis.
Let us, however, maintain some perspective. The antisemitic explanation for the crisis has hardly entered the mainstream. Why, therefore, are we troubled by it? Simply, because our understanding of the present is filtered through the past. Let’s go back to Sartre: “I would call anti-Semitism a poor man’s snobbery…It is propagated mainly among the middle classes, because they possess neither land nor house nor castle, having only some ready cash and a few securities in the bank. It was not by chance that the petty bourgeoisie of Germany was anti-Semitic in 1925.”
Yet historical patterns aren’t faithfully repeated. We would like to think and, indeed, have good reason to think that the democratic societies in which most Jews live have greater immunity to antisemitic rabble-rousing. That this time around, antisemitism will not breach the walls of reason. So while the current screech of antisemitism is something we should monitor vigilantly, it is, for the moment at least, less of a harbinger of what lies ahead and more of a reminder - when it comes to those innumerable academics and writers who would deny it - that antisemitism still exists.
Nice post, Ben.
Ben I agree, solid post. One question, which is more of a plea for being comforted during these times. You say:
“We would like to think and, indeed, have good reason to think that the democratic societies in which most Jews live have greater immunity to antisemitic rabble-rousing.”
What good reasons do we have to think that there is any greater immunity now than there was in pre-world War II Germany?
Please send words of comfort . . .
Thanks
Zach
Zach, thanks for your comment. I will respond momentarily, but first a message to those who have tried to leave antisemitic comments on this blog.
The comments on this blog are moderated. Some of you - those among our readers who think Jews control Wall Street and have got up to page 15 of Mein Kampf three years after you started reading it - might not understand what this means. It means your comments do not appear automatically. They have to be approved. So there is no point in leaving antisemitic or racist comments, because these will not be approved. They will be deleted and their authors banned from posting future comments.
Back to Zach. I think there are several reasons to believe that the current situation is radically different to the 1930s. In most of Europe, extremist parties remain marginal. Governments are committed to social, educational and public order policies which explicitly counter racism and antisemitism. Societies are more cosmopolitan and more tolerant of difference. Hate crimes remain at levels that are, of course, unacceptable (see this excellent report - http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/disc/2008/alert/342/index.htm), but we are not witnessing scenes of regular mob violence.
None of this means we should be complacent. There are worrying signs in many places - Austria, for example, or Belgium, where there has been a resurgence of extreme Flemish nationalism. But the basic context is, in my view, very different from totalitarian age of the mid-20th Century.
Ben - just as an aside: In would not dignify “Israel Shamir”, Atzmon and the like by linking directly to their websites, articles etc. It gives them traffic, higher google-ranking etc. It’s always possible to link to critical articles / sites about them instead.
Apart fom that: Good work!
Sartre’s example is a keen insight. More recently we have seen the conflation between “neocon” and “Jew’ as the new codeword for closet and not-so-closeted antisemites.
According to Wikipaedia, “some claim that just as antisemites did with big business moguls in the nineteenth century and Communist leaders in the twentieth, the term is used to take all those involved in some aspect of public life and single out those who are Jewish, implying that this is a Jewish-led movement conducted not in the interests of all the, in this case, American people, but to the benefit of Jews, and in this case Israel.”
The conflation of neo-con and Jew is a repetition of classical patterns of enmity and alienation in the history of the Jews.
Conversos, in the Seventeenth century, were invariably referred to as “Jews”, even though 150 years had elapsed since their ancestors has converted. An entire sub-class of the successful upper middle-class in Europe was thus criminalized, marginalized and persecuted.
In a recently published essay about Hannah Arendt’s relationship with her coreligionists, the author Gabriel Piterberg describes the exact moment in which, according to Arendt, modern antisemitism emerged:
“Arendt distinguished sharply between the medieval ‘hatred of Jews’ and the emergence of modern antisemitism: the former ‘was about Jews, and not much more than that’, whereas the history of antisemitism ‘conceals many other tendencies’, in which Jews do not necessarily play a central role..
[To claim that]… the bourgeois man is in truth no different from the Jew… one needed only to declare that earning a living by profit and interest was the same as usury: the bourgeois citizen was nothing but a Jew and a usurer…”
She sums up:
”What proved dangerous to the Jews was …. that arguments and characteristics trimmed and tailored for totally different people ended up attached to them .
… Prussian aristocracy succeeded in drilling these categories and value judgements into the head of the German bourgeois citizen until he was ashamed to be one—that is the real and, as it were, ‘ideological’ misfortune of German Jewry. “
This observation is worth repeating, since its shrewdness easily leaps over the temporal and geographical gap, to apply today as accurately as it did two centuries ago:
”For in the end the liberals’ truly destructive self-hatred gave rise to hatred of the Jews, that being the only means liberals had of distancing themselves from themselves, of shifting slander to others who, though they did not think of themselves as the ‘bourgeoisie’, were forced to be its 100 per cent embodiment.”
http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2696
Great article. I would however challenge the comment: “We…have good reason to think that the democratic societies in which most Jews live have greater immunity to antisemitic rabble-rousing. That this time around, antisemitism will not breach the walls of reason.”
This time around, we are faced with a “kinder, gentler” antisemitism as yet unrecognized by the Jewish community. In short, it is a spiritualized racism that claims the moral high ground because it promotes rejection of the Jews without hating them.
This brand of antisemitism states that the Jews are holding back humanity from spiritual development. They are not to be blamed for it - indeed they can’t help being what they are, but this “world problem” must be solved for the good of humanity. The Jews need to be “sent to another dimension” as a group, where they can do no harm, and every trace of their religion must be removed from humanity. Only then can the New Age begin.
This worldview was articulated by the occultist Alice A. Bailey, whose doctrine is embraced by the UN and many global leaders of today.
Readers who are tempted to dismiss all this as a rave from the “lunatic fringe” need to know 3 things:
1- Bailey’s doctrine is the basis of the UN-sponsored World Core Curriculum. The WCC Manual sxplicitly states:
“The underlying philosophy upon which the Robert Muller School is based will be found in the teaching set forth in the books of Alice A. Bailey by the Tibetan teacher, Djwhal Khul.”
[”Djwhal Khul”, for the uninitiated, is not a human being; Bailey received her teaching by dictation from this spirit guide.]
2- The WCC’s author was former UN Assistant Secretary for 40 years, Robert Muller, who received the UN Peace Prize for Education in 1989 for this work.
3- The WCC has been disseminated by Robert Muller Schools across the world since the 1980s, including the US.
As a result, those taught from childhood to revere the cosmic antisemitism of Bailey/Kuhl are now the political leaders and educators. This is the unrecognized source of the “new” antisemitism among liberals and globalists.
This kind of antisemitism will not NEED to “breach the walls of reason”. Those walls were destroyed by the teaching of Bailey, namely that “reason” itself is outmoded thinking which hinders spiritual advancement.
For more background on this mindset that has taken over global thinking, I humbly offer my research on New Age antisemitism (google “The Rainbow Swastika” available on-line).
all the best from Israel,
Hannah Newman
Good site I “Stumbledupon” it today and gave it a stumble for you.. looking forward to seeing what else you have..later