Why anti-Semitism?

(Note: Further down in this thread, reader Hunter W. comes up with an explanation for pathological anti-Semitism that I’ve never heard before, and I reply.)

The common thread of anti-Semitism, wrote Michael Medved at FrontPage Magazine last August, is the belief that Jews see themselves as a superior people and seek world domination. Medved looks at the three ideas that feed this view of Jews, “the ‘Chosen People’ concept, Jewish prosperity in the Diaspora, and Israel’s success (so far) in nation-building and self-defense,” and he concludes that none of them “demonstrates in any way a push for world conquest or superior standing for the children of Abraham. How, then, can we understand the imperishable belief that Jews function as an arrogant, imperious, overbearing people?”

Medved continues:

In a few words, that resentment stems in truth from the age-old Jewish refusal to abandon our separate identity, our irreducible distinctiveness through the millennia. My friends Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin provide the most compelling exposition on this dynamic in their invaluable book, Why the Jews?, recently reissued.

In any event, the logic becomes most accessible when considered in personal, intimate terms. If a small group among your neighbors refuses invitations to worship in your churches and mosques, to eat the food you prepare in your homes, to marry your daughters, to embrace your nationalisms, or to share your enthusiasm for the ultimate, universally applicable perfection of your Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Catholic, Islamic, Nazi or Communist worldview, then it’s all but certain you will resent the members of that stubborn group—and assume that they exclude themselves from elements of your society due to an innate, obnoxious sense of superiority.

For Jews who try to remain faithful to the old covenant, there’s no choice about the unyielding refusal to assimilate and disappear—and no surprise at the angry reaction in much of the world. After all, the Bible repeatedly predicts that response. This realization doesn’t make it any easier to cope with anti-Semitism, but it does make the eternal hatred comprehensible. No matter how inconvenient or unpopular, we get our marching orders from the commandments—including the crucial and celebrated injunction to choose life, for ourselves and our people.

An obvious problem with Medved’s explanation is that most Jews are not religious, but secular. Yet even non-believing, liberal Jews claim they have a special dispensation and mission to be liberal, to be critics of their society, holding the society up to what the Jews see as a higher standard. Jews thus have a modified, secularized, version of the Covenant. Further, even Jews who are neither religious nor especially political tend to maintain a distinctiveness as Jews. In conclusion, while I would say that the Jews’ distinctiveness does not arise, at least directly, from God’s covenant with the Jews, I agree with Medved that, whatever its source, there is an irreducible distinctiveness about the Jews, and that this distinctiveness—combined with Jews’ abilities and energy and their tendency to rise to the top in whatever society in which they live—is the ultimate cause of anti-Semitism.

Yet I am still not satisfied with this explanation. The factors I have just mentioned could explain dislike, resentment, even hatred of Jews. These factors do not explain the utter insanity and obsessivenss of anti-Semitism, the belief that the Jews are the cause of everything that is wrong with the world, satanic monsters out to destroy humanity. The factors do not explain how anti-Semitism, once a person starts to subscribe to it, takes over his entire thought process. Thus, while anti-Semitism can be explained rationally up to a point, it remains, at its core, a mystery. At bottom there is “something” about the Jews that sets off some primal, primitive reactiveness. As to what this something is, the fact that the Jews were the people to whom God first revealed himself would seem to be as good a candidate as any.

- end of initial entry -

John D. writes:

One could easily equate a majority of the possible reasons you’ve stated for anti-Semitic tendencies to that of the anti-Americanism around much of the Muslim world, and elsewhere. We as Americans are mainly seen as a fairly distinctive white Christian, successful society, although many of our countrymen are secular, non-believing arrogant elite liberals with the special dispensation to promote democracy around the world. No matter our individualities, we are nevertheless Americans. And we are hated for each and every one of these characteristics.

But I’ll grant you, we are not hated as vehemently as are the Jews. The question is a valid one.

Matthew Hoot writes:

First, As scripture tells us, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

I believe anti-Semitism is almost entirely attributable to the observable tendency of many humans to want to stick it to, if not smash a rock into the head of, someone cleverer than themselves. The average IQ of Jews is commonly estimated to be around 130, significantly higher than any other group. Hence they get the lion’s share of this sort of attention.

Other groups at various times and places will also get the treatment, witness the Korean merchants during the LA riots or the Chinese experience in any number of southeast Asian countries where they are in the minority.

Perhaps this resentment is especially pronounced in situations where the differential is not so great, but still enough to be noticeable, as in Germany.

Smarter groups also tend to be quieter, more focused and more industrious (traits not unrelated to intelligence) than their neighbors. If there is anything stupid people hate it is someone who will not “join in” with whatever mass idiocy a particular majority group may be engaged in, whether it is Nazism, Islam or ghetto/”gangsta” culture.

James W. writes:

Seeking what is true is not necessarily seeking what is desirable or satisfying, and in the issue of the role of Jews in civilization some factors may not be resolvable—even those absent anti-Semitism.

I believe there are two broad factors in this conundrum, and only in the second do the Jews have responsibility for better and for worse, since only in the second did they have choice and influence.

In the first, being expelled by Rome, they sought life in alien lands as they always had in previous diasporas, but these lands were farther afield and without prospect of linkage to the old country, which did not exist anymore.

Their experience in most of these cultures was that the Jews were civilized and the hosts were not. In the unlikely event that they would be permitted to join the culture by citizenship or marriage in the first place, it would only mark two steps down. Sometimes walls were created, literally, by mutual consent. In between pogroms of envy, this arrangement benefited all. It was the opinion of John Adams that “the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind fate eternal, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential ingredient for civilizing the nations.”

Yet if it is true that adversity has the effect of eliciting talents that in other circumstances would remain dormant, the Jews, enduring constant adversity, tended also to stay ahead of the cultures they were improving. And envy is the most facile human emotion.

Were the Jews ever to have assimilated, the era of civilizing influence would have ended at whatever point that happened. .

I have no answer to this. It is what it is. But I believe times have changed.

For in the second factor, Jews have responsibility, because they have exerted pointed and external influence on cultures for the first time.

The roots of this are imbedded in the essential Hebraic belief of charity. Not war by other means, not malice, not hatred. Careful rules of charity were laid out in ancient Israel, and carried to the Diaspora. At some times a quarter of a smallish local Jewish population, whether in Egypt or France, might be on Jewish welfare. Those that had were assessed specific amounts of clothing and food for those who did not.

Regrettably, this grew into the monster we see today. Absent the nineteenth century explosion of leftist Jewish intellectuals and their anti-Semitic hero Marx we may have gotten there in time, but if they wish to take credit, it is not for us to deny it to them.

AESOP- Self deceit may lead to self destruction.

It did recently for the Jews, and probably presently as well. I see no distinction from this mindset observing the Left currently. Next stop submission—to the Islamist or to the State.

Thucydides writes:

You wrote:

“there is an irreducible distinctiveness about the Jews, and … this distinctiveness—combined with Jews’ abilities and energy and their tendency to rise to the top in whatever society in which they live—is the ultimate cause of anti-Semitism.

“Yet I am still not satisfied with this explanation. The factors I have just mentioned could explain dislike, resentment, even hatred of Jews. These factors do not explain the utter insanity and obsessions of anti-Semitism, the belief that the Jews are the cause of everything that is wrong with the world, satanic monsters out to destroy humanity. The factors do not explain how anti-Semitism, once a person starts to subscribe to it, takes over his entire thought process. Thus, while anti-Semitism can be explained rationally up to a point, it remains, at its core, a mystery.”

I wonder whether you are not trying to analyze this matter in the context of ascribing too much rationality to human beings. Envy and resentment play a very large role in the mental lives of most men and the influence of those vices is crucial in society. Many practices of a culture are designed to ward off or dilute their deleterious consequences. As a result, the negative consequences tend to fall heavily on those who are near yet are seen to be not a part of the culture. Such parties may almost be defined as those to whom it is permissible to show such hostility. Some members of the culture, particularly unhappy or distressed, will be especially prone to adopt such attitudes as a sort of consolatory or compensatory fantasy of a paranoid nature. Sometimes such attitudes take over a whole culture, as is seen with the Arabs. These attitudes are “utterly insane and obsessive” because they serve important psychological needs. They are too important for mere reality to be allowed to impinge.

Why the Jews? What other minority with a strong sense of cultural self identification, and with superior average intelligence and economic success (they are highly correlated notwithstanding jokes about inept intellectuals) is found in so many places in so many times? They are not only other, they are seen as a superior other. That superiority has to be explained away as being due to nefarious causes. Hence the special intensity of anti-Semitism. Interesting comparables might be the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, or the South Asian merchant class in Africa, which have often been the target of great violence. We don’t know enough about those places to say how intense the hatred is compared to anti-Semitism, but these are minorities carrying an apparent superiority.

Of course, some Jews don’t help matters much with their predilection for setting themselves up as utopian left critics of the host society, often extremely insulting critics, and sometimes even outright revolutionaries. You would think that a group that wanted to maintain a strong separate cultural identity within a much larger society would be more circumspect.

There is probably also among U.S. Jews a certain amount of paranoia, particularly anti-Christian paranoia, understandable given history, but not warranted in current circumstances.

LA writes:

I don’t feel any of the above comments have come close to a plausible explanation for the more virulent type of anti-Semitism, which is not like other forms of ethnic hatred, but is an all-consuming pathology. As I said before, much of the dislike of Jews is readily understandable, but there is also something “extra” about anti-Semitism, something that cannot be readily explained.

Hunter W. writes:

The anti-Semitism of American racialists is a rather novel phenomenon. It is worth noting that Jews never experienced the sort of discrimination in the Jim Crow South that Negroes endured. Jews were generally seen in a positive light and were accepted within Southern society.

This began to change during the 1960s/1970s. In my view, there is a simple explanation for this: the drastic overrepresentation of Jews in the Civil Rights Movement. Although this was downplayed by segregationists like Wallace at the time, it did not go unnoticed. Carleton Putnam, George Lincoln Rockwell, and others traced the roots of Brown back to Boasian anthropology. It was but a step from there to the conclusion “maybe Hitler had a point.” After 1965, American racialism took an anti-Semitic turn. Call this the “rational explanation.”

You ask: why does anti-Semitism then become an all-consuming pathology? In my experience, having interacted for years with the “Judeo-obsessives,” I’m convinced they pick this meme up from the Jews themselves. They become so obsessed with the Jews that they start to think and behave like them.

The all-consuming paranoia of anti-Semitic White Nationalists has analogues in the paranoia of Jews like Abe Foxman who are constantly trying to sniff out anti-Semitism in otherwise innocent Gentile activity. There seems to be this all-consuming fear in the Jewish community that it is only a matter of time before Gentiles rise up and strike them down. This often translates into individual Jews pathologizing and relentlessly criticizing Gentile culture. The anti-Semites pick this up from the Jews and invert it against them.

The poster above mentions market dominant minorities. That doesn’t explain why anti-Semites haven’t become equally obsessed with the “Yellow Peril.” Asian-Americans on average have higher incomes.

LA replies:

That is a novel, and clever, explanation. But it doesn’t work. How do you get from Foxman to, for example, Mel Gibson blurting out that all the wars in the world have been started by Jews? How do you get from Foxman to Islam’s total demonization of the Jews starting in the Koran in the 7th century? How do you get from Foxman to the 40 foot long banners in Nuremberg in the 1930s screaming in huge letters:

“Germans! The Jews are your misfortune! Young German women! The Jews are your misfortune!”

For all the excessive anti-anti-Semitism of the American Jewish community, there is absolutely no equivalent between it and the anti-Semitic dehumanization of the Jews which treats Jews, all Jews collectively and individually, as simply The Enemy. There is no equivalent between anything the Jews say about gentiles and the anti-Semitic belief that behind every disaster there is a cabal of superhuman Jewish masterminds pulling the strings. There is no equivalent between anything the Jews say about gentiles and the belief, widespread among both Muslims and white anti-Semites, that Israel was the real perpetrator of the 9/11 attack.

For you to blame this pathological anti-Semitism with its off-the-planet conspiracy theories on the Jews creates a rebuttable presumption that you are an anti-Semite. That’s not a word I throw around lightly.

Hunter W. replies:

I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m not a “judeo-obessive” either, but I know many people who are, and they recognize the distinction that exists between our views. I have argued with them in the past until my fingers were raw. Personally, from what I gather, I don’t think my own views re the Jews are all that different from your own.

1.) I don’t blame the Jews for all the evil in the world.

2.) I don’t try to reduce everything that is wrong with America to the Jews.

3.) I don’t obsess over the Jews.

4.) I recognize that all Jews are not plugged into some collective hive mind.

5.) If the American Jewish community would call off its hundred year jihad against racialism, I would be pleased to work with them.

6.) My interests are race, immigration, history—things of that nature.

At the same time, I recognize several things:

1.) That Jews really were disproportionately involved in the Civil Rights Movement.

2.) That Jews really are overrepresented in the news and entertainment media, government, and the academic world—and this has a definite distorting effect upon American culture.

3.) That Jews are significantly more liberal than other American populations.

4.) That a pro-Israel Lobby does exist and that it does attempt to manipulate American foreign policy.

5.) That Jews really have been in the vanguard of the movement to destroy racialism and pathologize white racial consciousness in the United States.

Does acknowledging my second list, 1-5 make me an anti-Semite? I don’t think it does. I don’t think any honest, intelligent, informed person would deny any of those propositions. Would a true-blue judeo-obsessive, anti-semite agree with my first list, 1-6? I don’t think they would.

You ask: “How do you get from Foxman to, for example, Mel Gibson blurting out that all the wars in the world have been started by Jews? How do you get from Foxman to Islam’s total demonization of the Jews starting in the Koran in the 7th century? How do you get from Foxman to the 40 foot long banners in Nuremberg in the 1930s screaming in huge letters…”

I would like to make clear that my original post dealt specifically with the anti-Semitism of American racialists. I don’t know enough about Islam or the Third Reich to comment about those matters. I wasn’t proposing a universal grand unified theory of anti-Semitism. I was speaking only about what I know.

You say: “For all the excessive anti-anti-Semitism of the American Jewish community, there is absolutely no equivalent between it and the anti-Semitic dehumanization of the Jews which treats Jews, all Jews collectively and individually, as simply The Enemy. There is no equivalent between anything the Jews say about gentiles and the anti-Semitic belief that behind every disaster there is a cabal of superhuman Jewish masterminds pulling the strings. There is no equivalent between anything the Jews say about gentiles and the belief, widespread among both Muslims and white anti-Semites, that Israel was the real perpetrator of the 9/11 attack.”

I disagree. In fact, there are parallels. Specifically, I point to the hysterical de-humanization of the segregationists as “racists” by the organized Jewish community—people morally beyond the pale—deranged victims of an “authoritarian personality” with whom no civilized person would associate. In the aftermath of the Second World War, when Hitler was dead and his Thousand Year Reich was reduced to ruins, the American Jewish community (or at least its Northern contingent) decided to turn its guns on the Jim Crow South and carry on the great crusade against racism. Do you think it may have been a bit of an exaggeration for Susan Sontag to deem the entire white race to be “the cancer of history”?

Southerners became The Enemy to the anti-anti-Semites. Behind every segregationist in Mississippi and Georgia lurked a budding Nazi—-a hick out of Deliverance—just waiting to come after the Jews. The analogy was drawn over and over again. Of course this comparison was utterly absurd, as the U.S. and Germany were enemies in WW2, but that’s the point: even though Jews had for centuries been accepted as equals in the American South, and Southern racialism wasn’t remotely anti-Semitic, Northern Jews descended on the region by the busloads as the “Freedom Riders” to “fight racism” hand in hand with MLK and Bob Moses.

As I said in my previous response, this did not go unnoticed at the time, and after the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement the remnants of American racialism became virulently anti-Semitic. Previously, there had been no great obsession with the Jews. While anti-Semitic groups in the U.S. did exist, anti-Semitism did not generally go hand in hand with racialism, but after the Civil Rights Movement prominent American racialists like Carleton Putnam traced Brown back to Boas and the NAACP back to Springarn. Was it really that difficult to see a cabal of Jews lurking behind all of America’s racial problems given the sheer prominence of Jews in the NAACP, in the Legal Defense Fund, amongst the Freedom Riders, SNCC, SDS, amongst the financiers of MLK his SCLC, his closest associates, not to mention the journalists who covered the Civil Rights Movement? If you would like, I can send you a photo of MLK himself literally marching arm-in-arm with Rabbi Heschel from Selma to Montgomery.

That is the “rational explanation.” As to the irrational element of it, I would attribute it to a “ghetto mentality.” It is not uncommon for marginalized populations to develop conspiracy theories and pathological paranoia of this sort. Case in point, the widespread belief amongst blacks that the U.S. federal government created the AIDS virus to kill them, or that American society is still rife with “institutional racism” that prevents them from succeeding in life. During their long history in the ghetto, Jews seem to have developed similar theories about Gentile culture suffering from all sorts of pathological neuroses. Hitler found anti-Semitism in the ghettos of Vienna. Ever since the 1960s, racialists have been similarly marginalized, and in their obsession with the Jews have borrowed some of their more unsavory characteristics.

LA replies:

I still don’t like what Hunter W. has said about the attitudes of serious atni-Semites being a reflection of Jewish attitudes. I think that’s a bad mistake. But overall, based on what he’s said, I do not consider Hunter an anti-Semite. Clearly, he has a beef with Jews for certain things Jews and Jewish organizatonh have done, and if they stopped doing those things, he would not have a problem with them. This is quite different from the anti-Semite, who regards Jews as the fated enemy no matter what they do.

Mark Jaws writes:

This has been a great thread on anti-Semitism, which I have often encountered from under-acheiving minorities and white nationalists. I think Hunter W. is spot on with his attempt to explain why some of us white racialists have problems with Jews.

Mark P. writes:

Actually, I find this a somewhat surprising question given the nature and content of your blog. I can understand Michael Medved being perplexed by anti-Semitism, but it seems a traditionalist conservative should find it pretty obvious.

Both Jewish group-behavior and Anti-Semitism, it seems, are rational.

First, there is the particularity of peoplehood. A people is defined by its culture, history, language, nation and other factors covered ad infinitum in your site. This particularity allows individuals within that people to function, reproduce and spread their civilization to the next generation. No particular culture is going to be welcoming to an outside group because such outside groups are unknown quantities. If they are welcome, then it would be only out of the most minimal requirements of expediency, which seems to be the base condition under which Jews were allowed into foreign nations.

At the same time that the outgroup/ingroup dynamic (and other such aspects of national survival) was applied to the Jews, the Jews applied the same to the outside group in their host nations.

In other words, both Jews and the host nation were behaving as normal nations, but without the beneficial and ameliorative effect of actual, physical borders. Since Jews are the oldest of the diasporan groups and since they are the ones who have existed longest without a nation, they were the one’s whose normal behavior was most likely to come into conflict with the normal behavior of other people.

In fact, there is the slight whiff of modern liberalism creeping into this discussion over anti-Semitism. It is absurd for the anti-Semites to believe that Jews should’ve assimilated with their host countries simply because … well … nobody did that. People did not simply abandon who they were. Simultaneously, it is absurd for Jews to expect to be fully accepted by the larger society. Cultures are demanding and the national government could not satisfy the demanding civilizational needs of two diverse people.

Second, as satisfying as Thomas Sowell’s example of “market-dominant minorities” may be, I don’t really think it explains modern anti-Semitism. It is not the jealousy over the success of these market-dominant minorities that leads to hatred against them. It is the perceived use of that success to privatize benefits in their favor while socializing costs at the expense of everyone else that inspires hatred. It is perfectly conceivable that blacks in Watts hated the Korean store-owners because Koreans would collude with each other to keep prices high by, say, coordinating inventory purchases in ways that avoided direct price competition. It is also plausible that the Malays hated the ethnic Chinese minority because, well, the Malay economy was hardly a paragon of transparency and meritocracy. The Malays may have felt completely locked out.

The disproportionately progressive nature of Jewish politics seems to follow this privatizing benefits/socializing costs model fairly well. Progressive politics disproportionately benefits Jews by creating an environment that allows them to function outside of suspicion. Meanwhile, the costs of progressive politics are born by others. Jews have successfully isolated themselves from everything from black crime to the negative effects of immigration, while simultaneously lecturing the rest of the country, as witnessed by the crap coming out of Mike Bloomberg’s mouth. Even if the benefits to Jews of progressive politics aren’t entirely clear, the isolation from its costs still remain.

The clincher is that all of this behavior from both sides is entirely rational. If an opportunity to collude against a deracinated majority comes up, then why is it not rational to take it? If excluding an incompatible minority is do-able, then why not exclude? This pattern of behavior will change when there is a new realignment of incentives, probably at a point where Jews realize they have nowhere to run and non-Jews realize they have common enemies with the Jews.

LA replies:

The factors Mark is describing would explain various types of ethnic resentment against Jews. They do not explain the pathological anti-Semitism that is very common in today’s world, which was the subject of my question. I am surprised that Mark thinks his comment his responsive to my question.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 11, 2007 08:59 AM | Send