Antisemitism is a difficult matter for me. I have been the target of antisemitic rhetoric, and even violence, in my life, and I am well-aware of how violent it can be, from the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre to the pogroms of Europe, to the “Hep-Hep” riots and the Crusades… To the Shoah itself. The history of my people since 70 CE, and indeed even before, has been one of almost constant, unremitting antisemitism.
Historically, we have been a tiny minority almost everywhere, the internal “other” sometimes tolerated, but rarely welcomed, let alone trusted; antisemitism has always been simply a fact of life. This, especially where mistrust and hatred of the Jews is deeply rooted in the culture. Even when that culture has become secularized, liberalized, and universalized, the antisemitic ink invariably soaks to the topmost layer of the palimpsest. The suspicions are whispered, though perhaps no longer bellowed, and the imagined meetings of the cabal of Elders of Zion continue to haunt nightmares of “the Rothschilds,” the Davos Clique, and illegitimate “Jewish influence.”
It is everywhere and, as anyone who has followed my writing knows, it is not something that I am inclined to just let pass. If I encounter an antisemitic comment, trope, or narrative, I will invariably respond accordingly. I am sure that it is one more thing that makes me unpleasant and annoying, but I that doesn’t really bother me. Most people mistrust, dislike, or simply hate Jews for being Jews, and I can’t really be surprised that they don’t hate me any less for pointing that out.
Antisemitism has become more visible, though perhaps not really more prevalent (how can something that has always been there, pretty much everywhere, be more prevalent, I have to wonder) since 7 October 2023, not because supporting Palestinian rights and autonomy and speaking out for peace are particularly antisemitic, but because the State of Israel has cynically appropriated antisemitism as a way to deflect legitimate criticism of its policies and violations of human rights and international law. Israeli officials, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have leveraged the shame that leaders in the Global North have about their own, rarely interrogated, antisemitism, in a scorched-earth effort to ensure support. Leaders like US President Joe Biden are loathe to be accused of being antisemites in the new, Zionist formulation of antisemitism, so they bend over backwards to support the State of Israel.
Significantly, the State of Israel is perfectly willing to throw Jews (at least those who are not Israelis – “un-Jews” in maximalist Zionist terms) under the bus. Benjamin Netanyahu’s enthusiastic endorsement of Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement Nationale in the recent French election is a manifestation of that. Netanyahu said that Le Pen and the RN were the best option for Israeli interests, explicitly putting those interests in opposition with the interests of French and other Diaspora Jews. And Netanyahu’s willingness to embrace antisemitic Christian nationalists in the US, and European antisemites like Viktor Orban, to the detriment of Diaspora Jews is well known.
At the same time, the State pf Israel’s appropriation of the accusation of antisemitism, and the Zionist equation of the State of Israel with the Jewish people – and this anti-Zionism with antisemitism – has gained traction in the pro-Palestinian left. Antisemitism is a pervasive and constant feature of Euro-American culture, and its myths and tropes, like Jewish wealth (which is always somehow illegitimate), Jewish “clannishness,” and the “international Jewish banking conspiracy,” remain almost universally uninterrogated. One need only mention the name “Rothschild” (something like the 150th-largest investment bank in the world, whose assets are about 1/300th JP Morgan Chase’s) to conjure up imaginings of the Elders of Zion pulling the world’s strings.
There was, after all, that a meme going around last week, showing a ghostly hand superimposed with the Israeli flag, pulling the puppet strings of a ghostly hand superimposed with the US flag, pulling the puppet strings of a number of soldiers, each superimposed with the flags of countries of the global north. Given the un-interrogated, often unconscious antisemitism that is so pervasive in Euro-American culture, it is a fairly simple step, it seems, for many of my pro-Palestinian friends to just take the Zionists at their word and accept the Israel=Jews equation. And many of them do, often as a kind of unconscious reflex.
Antisemitism is no more pervasive now than it was five years ago, but it is more visible, more public, and more acceptable. You see this in the oft-repeated formula “this is antisemitic, but…” The “but” signifies a rationalization and an apologia: “I don’t personally hate Jews, but I understand why people might, and I’m okay with it.”
And this is part of what make antisemitism a difficult matter for me. Antisemitism is pervasive even in the left and has become a common part of pro-Palestinian rhetoric, thanks to the best efforts of the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies, so I find myself in the position of being in solidarity with antisemites. And the future doubtless portends a new golden age for antisemitism. It all makes me feel like an “Uncle Chaim.”
But the cause of peace is more important than anything else right now, and the struggle for Palestinian autonomy and human rights is not about me. I refuse to accept antisemitism anywhere, at any time, but that cannot be a justification for abandoning the cause of justice and peace. That won’t stop me from smacking down on antisemites, though. I will have it both ways.
7 July 2024
***
Antisemitism has a long and dark history, dating back to antiquity, when the Greeks denounced the Jews’ separateness as a lack of generosity, and the Roman historian Tacitus complained about our manners.
Much of Jewish culture and tradition is meant to maintain that separateness in a sea of Gentiles. Circumcision is – and always was – meant as an explicit mark of belonging that, on one hand, discouraged intermarriage by revealing our cultural identities in intimate situations, and deterred outsiders from casually joining our community. The Sabbath, a day of rest unknown to the ancient world – and consequently commented upon at length by non-Jews – undermined and frustrated the rhythms of Gentile life.
Most significantly, the Jewish dietary laws ensured both our separateness and our cultural distinctiveness. Kashrus meant that we could not share our tables with neighbors, whether they were Canaanites, Greeks, or Romans, who did not observe our laws. While it might have been possible to invite a Phoenician or Aramean to dinner in a Jewish home, no Jew could reciprocate the invitation. The Greeks, in particular, with their taste for pork, found this particularly objectionable. I suspect that, after a few centuries of declined invitations, they just assumed that we were annoyingly stand-offish.
That was the point, however: Kashrus (like so many of the mitzvas) was designed to preserve Israelite, and then Jewish, distinctiveness in a sea of pork-eating Gentiles. Today, archeologists invariably know that they have excavated an Israelite or Jewish site when they find no trace of the pork bones so pervasive in the Bronze Age and Iron Age Levant.* It could have been a prohibition on almost anything else, or a requirement to eat something uncommon, but the point was to keep us apart.
Our historical aloofness might well be a significant factor in our survival as a people. If remaining apart was one of the central obligations of Jewish life, if we could not easily pass into the Persian, Greek, or Roman worlds, then we always retained our boundaries.† We might speak Aramaic, Greek, or even Latin and participate in the daily lives of the empires in which we were immersed, but our home lives, and thus our culture and religion, could not easily be assimilated. Our neighbors’ cultural practices – Ammonites, Hittites, Medes, Parthians, Greeks, Romans, alike – indeed, their very communal existence, have mostly disappeared but we, remaining aloof, have survived the millennia in our distinctiveness.
Yet, Jewish “apartness,” and our resistance to assimilation has been the source of so much of the hate directed at us. For the Greeks and Romans, it was not merely a question of our imagined “poor manners,” they took it as an insult that we were not disposed to abandon our beliefs and practices and willingly submit to the process of Hellenization that erased Macedonian, Syrian, and Egyptian distinctiveness. We simply could not recognize their “superiority;” there must be something wrong with us… a sickness to be stamped-out. It is not that they took the time to get to know us, of course, they would not deign to do that. So, they created stories to justify our oppression and, often enough, our bodily eradication.
Around 200 BCE, Mnaseas of Patara reported, with no evidence apart from his imagination, that the Jews worshipped donkeys. Some fifty years later, the Stoic Philosopher Posidonius who, after all, had never traveled to Judea and had never met a Jew, related what must be the first appearance of the Blood Libel. He wrote around 150 BCE that the Jews “would kidnap a Greek foreigner, fatten him up for a year, and then convey him to a wood, where they slew him, sacrificed his body with their customary ritual, partook of his flesh, and, while immolating the Greek, swore an oath of hostility to the Greeks. The remains of their victim were then thrown into a pit.”
It is, perhaps, no surprise that the Blood Libel became such a fixture in the antisemitic conspiracy theories repeated over the next two millennia and more by “superior” cultures who could not tolerate Jewish separateness. To the Christians, we were, and are, a stubborn community of deicides who can’t see the truth of their savior (Acts 7:51–53), a trope repeated in the Quran (2:87). We set ourselves apart because we are, according to the antisemitic narratives of our host cultures, stupid, narrowminded, tribal ingrates who just won’t “join the team.”
By the fourth century CE, the early Church Fathers, now allied with the Roman Empire, were so over us, that they called openly for our persecution, segregation, and even our eradication. The mere fact of a continued Jewish existence was an insult to the claims of the “true Church” and Christian supercessionism. Accusing us of deicide, Saint John Chrysostom compared us to brute beasts and wrote “while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter.”‡ Not surprisingly, the Nazis made much use of his homily Adversus Judaeos to justify the morality of the Shoah 1,500 years later.
And this has been the consistent drumbeat of antisemitism ever since: They keep apart… They can never truly be part of our society… They don’t acknowledge our superiority… They must be up to something… They are fit for slaughter. Even when we embraced Judah Leib Gordon’s dictum of the Haskalah, “be a man in the street and a Jew at home,” it was never enough; only complete assimilation and the elision of all things Jewish into our Gentile host populations’ cultures would do. Who knows, after all, what is happening in those Jewish homes, what is it that they are saying, planning, plotting among themselves in their arcane languages?
To set ourselves apart, to insist on our distinctiveness, to resist assimilation – in short simply to be Jews at all – has made us ever the suspect “other” within the Gentile body politic. That is as true today as it was in 200 BCE.
This is one reason why I bristle so much as the casual antisemitism deployed by pro-Israel right as well as by the anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian left. I have heard it all before – we have heard it for millennia – and it is never going away. The only way to defect antisemitism is to not be “one of those Jews,” or not “too Jewish,” or a “good Jew:” To go along like a good sport and just take it, and to excuse it.
That, I will not do.
5 July 2024
* The myth that the Torah’s prohibition on eating pork was meant as a hygienic measure in a hot climate is disproved by the fact that it was almost universally enjoyed by our Levantine and Greek neighbors. It’s just as hot in Greece, but… souvlaki.
† The Persians do not seem to have cared, one way or another, and allowed us a significant measure of autonomy after the Return from Exile.
‡ Chrysostom is still revered in the Catholic Church and his feast day is still observed in the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran Churches.
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