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Home > Vol 25, No 1 (2019) > Harrison

Why the Jews?

 

Bernard Harrison [1]

. . .  the Second Commandment is . . . expressive of one of the essential ideals of Judaism, and like most of the essential ideals of Judaism --- consider in this light the institution of the Sabbath --- it is uniquely antithetical to the practices and premises of the pre-Judaic and non-Judaic world. In short, it is the Jewish idiom that is, in its deepest strain dissenting, contradictory, frequently irreconcilable. What is antithetical goes against the grain of the world at large.

                        --- Cynthia Ozick, "Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom"

J'ai toujours pensé que les goyes chaussent de trop gros sabots pour comprendre les juifs. Leur antisémitisme même est maladroit.

                        ---Patrick Modiano, La place de l'étoile

Abstract Media discussion of antisemitism often fails to distinguish between antisemitism considered as ordinary ethnic prejudice that happens to be directed against Jews, and the very much stranger phenomenon of antisemitic animus against The Jews. Animus of the latter kind targets not individual Jews as such, but the Jewish  community, considered as an organised collectivity operating a world conspiracy aimed at taking over and controlling non-Jewish society and institutions in the interests of Jewish world domination. Jews are the only diasporic group concerning which this collection of beliefs has ever been held (no-one has ever believed in, or spoken of, an Irish, or an Armenian, or Korean "World Conspiracy", that is to say). The question thus arises why this curious collection of delusive beliefs has come to form itself uniquely around Jews. This paper addresses a specific conflict, in recent discussion of this issue, between writers (e.g. Prager and Telushkin) who demand an explanation relating antisemitism to "specifically Jewish factors", and others, such as David Nirenberg, whose work demonstrates the restriction of the content of antisemitic discourse to essentially non-Jewish concerns and obsessions, and its lack of reference to "real Jews". The paper proposes a resolution of these differences in terms of new accounts, both of the ideological transactions through which antisemitism comes to serve the political interests of antisemites, and of the specific "Jewish factor" which has made the image of "the Jews", in preference to other diasporic groups, so uniquely and perennially convenient in mediating such transactions and their political uses. 

Keywords and phrases functions of antisemitism in non-Jewish politics, Jewish survival, David Nirenberg, Prager and Telushkin

A range of accusations, no doubt delusive, but also profoundly political in character, are levelled uniquely against the Jews. Supposedly, they are an absolutely depraved people, consumed by hatred of humanity, conspiratorially organised in the pursuit of world domination, and occupied in exercising secret control over the political and cultural life of non-Jews in an extraordinary variety of sectors, ranging from world finance to American foreign policy and from Hollywood to revolutionary politics. These dreamlike terrors neither have historically been, nor are, evoked by any of the other alien diasporas  -- Gypsies, Cathars, Huguenots, more recently the Irish, the Armenians, the Turks, the Chinese, the Sikhs, that have occurred over the centuries in one or another European country.

That naturally raises the question "Why the Jews?" But what sort of a question is that, and what sort of an answer does it demand? Recent discussion offers suggestions that appear on the face of it incompatible. Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin [2] , for instance,  argue that what is required is an answer which is both universal and "Judaising." On the one hand it should root antisemitism, that is to say, in causal factors operating alike in different ages and places. On the other, the explanation it offers should be compatible with, as they put it. "the traditional Jewish view that the Jews were hated because of Jewish factors" [3]

These seem to me not unreasonable demands. Why should "the Jews" always be blamed if there is not some reason for that which always operates, and if it is not a reason that specifically attaches to some real characteristic that actual Jews exhibit, or some actual conduct in which real Jews engage?

In terms of recent debate, however, two problems - no doubt there are others - obstruct this reasonable conclusion. The first is that the most famous, or notorious "Judaising" explanation, that of Hannah Arendt in terms of Jewish involvement in economic life, not only relies expressly on the work of 1930s German economists in sympathy with Nazism, but is also inextricably coupled with Arendt's well-known distaste for what she called "Eternal Anti-Semitism", and thus inherently anti-universalising.

The second is that the most impressive recent "universalising" account, that of David Nirenberg, in Anti-Judaism, makes a powerful case for regarding political anxieties concerning the Jews, not as a response to any actual characteristic or conduct exhibited by real Jews, but rather to the role played by pernicious and culturally-embedded images of Jews and Judaism in understanding and dealing with a range of fundamentally non-Jewish anxieties and obsessions.

Nirenberg assembles persuasive descriptions of such episodes in an impressive and richly documented historic sequence. He tends at the same time to avoid questions of motivation, which I suspect he regards as incapable of documentary grounding and so outside the province of the historian. His book thus leaves opaque the question of why talk of Jews and Judaism should have so dominated controversies to which the activities of actual Jews can be shown by his own arguments to have been wholly irrelevant.

Speculation being as we all know second nature to the philosopher, I shall try to go a little further. The bulk of Nirenberg's examples embody and flesh out, it seems to me, a certain specific pattern of argument recurrent in Western theological, political and cultural debate throughout its history. The object of the type of argument in question has been to neutralise threats to entrenched ideological positions arising from unwelcome facts internal to non-Jewish society, by representing the facts in question either as facts about, or as facts brought into being by, "the Jews." Such arguments no doubt involve delusion and self-delusion on an heroic scale. But to the extent that they persuade, they offer the persuaded access to the inviting conclusion that non-Jewish society is, despite appearances, sane and healthy at the core in ways agreeable to the prospects of whatever entrenched ideology is at stake.

A single example of reasoning of the type I have in mind will have to suffice here. It concerns a well-known passage, italicised below, in After Strange Gods, a book that the poet T.S Eliot published in 1934, but, unsurprisingly, refused to republish, at least as a whole, after the Second World War. The book discusses the prospects for a society based upon the Christian and Catholic orthodoxy that Eliot had long embraced.

   The population should be homogenous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious backgrounds; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable . There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated [my italics]. [4]

Much ink has been expended over the question whether Eliot was an antisemite [5] . That question, for better or worse, I propose to leave undecided. The question that interests me here is a different one, namely: what could have induced a man of Eliot's intellectual capacity to imagine for a moment that the words underlined above could constitute a remotely sensible addendum to the sentence that contains them?

A number of references in Eliot's poetry of the period - "Sweeney among the Nightingales", "Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar", "Gerontion" and "The Waste Land" among them, combine to create the impression that, for Eliot at the time, images of "the Jew" functioned as a powerful poetic image of the destructive forces, of materialism and religious and cultural confusion, that that poetry locates at the heart of Western civilization. An obvious way of exonerating Eliot from the charge of antisemitism would be, indeed, to point out that we are dealing here merely with poetic imagery, and hence only with culturally embedded images of "the Jew", not with real Jews. Poems, that is to say, being poems and not manifestos, cannot be read straightforwardly as expressions of beliefs or attitudes held by their authors.

On the other hand, After Strange Gods is precisely that: a manifesto. Here Eliot is talking about actual Jews and their impact upon society as he conceives it. We are here, then, entitled to read him quite straightforwardly as contending that the activities of "free-thinking Jews" are inimical to the life of the kind of conservative Christian commonwealth that Eliot wishes to see restored. The reason for that, according to Eliot, is that the presence of "any large number of free-thinking Jews" is inconsistent with the (non-Jewish) cultural and religious homogeneity that must be preserved if there is to be any return to a society soundly based upon conservative Christian values. To which, I suppose, a natural scepticism must in all honesty return the answer. "What homogeneity?" The passage echoes, that is to say, with the hollow clap of stable doors closing a century and a half too late, long after the horses of cultural and religious homogeneity in the non-Jewish Western world have definitively fled. The opponents Eliot's ideas have actually to confront, that is to say, are not "free-thinking Jews", whose numbers in proportion were, even in the 1930's, very far from "large", but the inconceivably greater numbers of free-thinking ex-Christians who, following Hume and Voltaire, will accept neither Eliot's politics nor his Christianity, and whom it is far too late to cow into silence, let alone submission, merely by the avoidance of "excessive tolerance."

The function of Jews per se in Eliot's discourse appears to be, in other words, to create a delusive appearance of non-Jewish unity in support of certain ideas by exporting, or in Freudian terms projecting, an internal disunity, distressing to the beleaguered theorist, on to a group capable of being construed as reassuringly external and alien. If - if only - "free-thinking Jews" were the problem, the politics of Eliot, and those of his political mentor Charles Maurras, would be assured of success. That, I submit, is what explains their presence in the passage, otherwise hardly rationally explicable.

In a notebook entry of 1931, Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that Jews in all ages have been perceived by their non-Jewish European contemporaries as "a disease".

Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated so circumstantially as their intervention in European affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, anomaly, & nobody wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life. [& nobody wants to speak of a disease as though it had the same rights as healthy bodily processes (even painful ones)].

We may say: this bump can be regarded as a limb of one's body only if our whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes) Otherwise the best we can do is put up with it.

You may expect an individual to display this sort of tolerance or even to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation since it is only a nation by virtue of not disregarding such things. I.e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone to retain the aesthetic feeling of his body and also to make the swelling welcome. [6]

Once again the question arises why the Jewish diaspora, but not those of the Gypsies, or of the Huguenots, or the Irish in Britain, or of the Algerians or the English (a quarter of a million of them!) in France, or of the Turks in Germany, should be perceived as a "disease". If the suggestion I have just outlined concerning the - or at any rate one -- motivation of antisemitism holds water, then the answer seems obvious. The thought that "the Jews" are, or are like, a disease, is not an empirical observation, but simply a reflection of the role the notion of "the Jews' has come to play in one's thinking about the improvement of society. If one chooses to enjoy the reassuring sense of social solidarity in the service of some favoured theoretical hobby-horse to be gained from adopting the belief that, on the whole, the bulk of one's own people would agree with one's most cherished beliefs if it were not for the malign influence of "the Jews" - "free-thinking" or otherwise -- then that choice necessarily commits one, as a trivial consequence, to thinking of "the Jews" as a force disrupting the normal functioning of the host society; that is, as a disease.

The same considerations may serve to explain another puzzling fact about antisemitism of the political, sloganising, conspiracy-theory-mongering variety; namely, its documented appeal to a dismayingly long list of major intellectual figures, from Chrysostom to Luther, from Voltaire to Kant, Hegel and Marx, from Wagner to Proudhon, from Shaw to Wells and Eliot.  The answer they suggest is that what lays such people open to antisemitism is the intensity of their concern for the future of mankind, and their tendency to construct that future in terms that, in view of their abstraction and complexity, though they may achieve the heady confirmation of a mass following, can never achieve complete unanimity of support. To such people - to would-be Major Prophets, in other words - it is a standing temptation, as many of Nirenberg's examples show, to explain the failure of their ideas to achieve unanimity of support among "people like us" by appeal to the wrecking activity of an alien minority -- in effect, a malign deus ex machina - and to identify that minority with the Jews.

But again (for one last time, I'm happy to say), why the Jews? Even given that the temptation to blame on alien forces the failure of "one's own people" to fall into line behind the brilliant proposals offered them by one's own little group of Advanced Thinkers is a standing one in politics; why do "the Jews" invariably crop up in the role of the required Alien Force? If one is going, on a particular occasion, to project (to employ a Freudian term) on to an out-group one's worries concerning ideological disunity within a larger in-group, there must be some antecedent reason - some reason antecedent to present circumstances, that is to say - for choosing that particular out-group. If I am going to stand a chance of persuading you, for instance, that President George Bush would not have invaded Iraq if it were not for the influence of his Bugaboo advisers, the Bugaboos, whoever they may be, must be some sect or group whose activities you are already disposed to regard with dislike and suspicion. It will not work (unless one is dealing with an interlocutor with some very strange views indeed) to identify the Bugaboos, that is to say, with the Pennsylvania Dutch, or Country and Western singers, or any other group widely deemed to be intrinsically innocuous.

We are thus led back to Prager and Telushkin's thought, that any plausible explanation of antisemitism must in the end relate it to some characteristic or activity of real Jews. But a further problem arises here: namely that, as the bulk of Nirenberg's examples make clear, non-Jewish knowledge of, or even acquaintance with, actual Jews has usually been slight, even in places and at times when antisemitic agitation has been most virulent. So what actual characteristic of Jews could it be, that fits them for their role that they have occupied as perennial instantiation of --as one might perhaps put it -- the Concept of the Bugaboo in Western Political Polemic.

Here is a suggestion. Western European civilization has for the past two millennia been characterised by a succession of what one might call culturally unifying ideologies, each of which has allowed the dominant group of the day to define itself in positive terms against a range of hostile or putatively inferior forces either external or internal to the continent. These have included the Hellenistic and then Roman contrast between the Hellene or the Roman citizen and the barbarian, and the mediaeval contrast between orthodox Christendom on the one hand, and on the other, paganism abroad and heresy at home. The rise of what one might loosely term modernity from the mid-seventeenth century onward, involved on the one hand the gradual displacement of Christian uniformity at the hands of science and critical rationality, but also, on the other hand, the rise of a series of more or less messianic ideologies serving the same function of marking a boundary between the civilised on the one hand, and the Outsider or his reprobate domestic representatives on the other. These include more or less coherent systems of thought, such as Marxism or Fascism, or the ideas of the philosophes, from Rousseau onwards, that provided the intellectual and moral basis for the French Revolution; as well as the eclectic mishmash of ideas promoted, for several generations since the Second World War, by a variety of 'hard-left", "progressive" or "anti-capitalist" groups or groupuscules.

All of these various movements without exception have tended to be both profoundly triumphalist and profoundly insecure. All of them have been at least technically universalist, in the sense of imagining themselves as representing the future for all Mankind, or at the very least for all Europeans. All of them could be regarded as articulating this aspiration in terms of an offer: the offer of Roman citizenship, or of salvation and eternal life; or in the case of the various messianic movements sprung out of modernity, of participation in the putatively inevitable march of History towards the golden future of Mankind or the Nation.  The ability of supporters of each to continue believing in the validity of the messianic claims of the movement has thus inevitably been bound up to some extent with the issue of the movement's success, or lack of it, in persuading or forcing individuals or groups to accept that offer. The criterion of success in that enterprise has always been the willingness of new groups of converts to abandon their former views or culture, to throw in their lot unreservedly with the movement - of Roman Civilization, or Christendom, or the Proletarian Revolution, or whatever, and in consequence to cease to exist as a recognisably separate group; to vanish like a drop of water into the larger ocean of the Movement.

I would suggest, now, that what has primarily fitted the Jewish people, in the eyes of non-Jewish antisemites, for their perennial role as the unique presumed locus of Alien Malignancy, has been simply their refusal to accept any of the offers - the poisoned chalices, if you like - extended to them by Western Civilization, or at least by whatever political entity has temporarily borne that title, in any of its successive guises; and their consequent failure to dissolve into the majority community of the day and in so doing to cease to exist as a recognisably distinct group. The perceived bad taste -in the mouths of some non-Jews, at any rate- of this perennial rejection of the most generous offers of dissolution by total assimilation, has been much aggravated, in the same quarters, by the perceived sense -- that the majority of observant Jews cannot, I am afraid, help reinforcing -- that their reason for refusing to become, en masse, Roman citizens, or Christians, or Marxists, or Fascists, or the ideal Individuals subject only to the General Will beloved of such French revolutionary theorists as Clermont-Tonerre, is that Jews feel themselves to possess, as Jews, something better, something more worthwhile, than any of the political goodies on offer at the tables of the mighty, and wish, thank you very much, to hold on to it.

I don't mean of course, that Jews have never in some senses assimilated. In terms of modernity, for instance, the numbers of eminent Jewish intellectuals, scientists and writers, including Nobel Prizewinners, a number quite out of proportion to the size of the total Jewish community, is a measure of the extent to which Jews have responded, since Spinoza, to the purely intellectual advances that begin with the Enlightenment [7] The point I am labouring is a political rather than a purely cultural one. It is that the Jews have since antiquity successfully resisted the total assimilation that has relegated innumerable other minority cultures to the history books, have succeeded in doing so despite enduring repeated and frequently catastrophic persecutions, and have done so for reasons that, although, or perhaps even because, they remain opaque to most non-Jews, have been uneasily perceived in some non-Jewish quarters as implying some cloudy, half-grasped but possibly profound devaluation of, and contempt for, the most cherished illusions of whatever non-Jewish Movement has temporarily held the stage.

For my argument to succeed, of course, there must be some reason why Jews have proved, at least en masse, more resistant - and more successfully resistant - to assimilation than many other groups. The explanation cannot be merely that Jews consider their "beliefs and values" (as a reader of an earlier draft of this essay put it) superior to those of the majority. For after all, every dissident group considers its beliefs and ideals superior to those of the majority; otherwise it would not hold them!

The answer to this query that I would wish to offer is that the exceptional power of Judaism to retain the adherence of those who have once fully grasped what it has to offer is a matter, precisely of its not being a collection of "beliefs and values." What holds the Jewish community together as a community is neither common adherence to certain doctrines, nor common agreement in attaching value to certain abstract notions [8] . Rather, what holds the community together, and gives meaning to the lives of individual members, is common involvement in a vast and richly intelligible system of observances and practices. Judaism, unlike Christianity or most other religions, turns, not on belief, but on agency. People whose sense of the meaningfulness of life is underpinned by a specific system of beliefs can quite easily transfer that function, by conversion, to some different set of beliefs. People whose sense of the meaningfulness of life is sustained, on the contrary, not by belief, but rather by membership of a community committed in common to a vast and coherent system of observances and habits of agency, will be likely to find the loss of membership in that community, and its replacement, in the role of meaning-bestowing substratum, by some collection of more or less arbitrary and implausible beliefs, difficult to bear.

I would need more space than I possess here to explore this answer fully. [9] Here I shall simply assume its general adequacy and return to my main business, which has been to suggest a possible way of arriving at a "universal" explanation of antisemitism capable of reconciling Prager and Telushkin's sense that "the Jews were hated because of Jewish factors" with David Nirenberg's at first sight incompatible demonstration that the concerns and rhetoric of antisemites have had, historically, very little to do with actual Jews. My suggestion is that antisemitism develops, in the ways and with the advantages to the antisemite that I have indicated, simply out of the so-called "obstinacy" of the Jews: their resolute, and to date successful refusal, minor forms of assimilation aside, to altogether immolate themselves as a distinct people, inheritors of a distinct culture, upon any of the ideological altars set before them by Western society over the past two millennia. This is undoubtedly a "Jewish factor", to use Prager and Telushkin's phrase, since it has its roots, doubtless, in the specific character of Judaism as a body of ideas and practices.

But since there is no reason why non-Jews should, and every reason why they should not, be aware of the reasons internal to Judaism underlying the perceived phenomenon of Jewish "obstinacy", we have here a "Jewish factor" entirely consistent with Nirenberg's demonstration both of the diversity, and of the overwhelmingly non-Jewish character, of the concerns and obsessions that have expressed themselves, over the centuries, in antisemitic discourse and action. The mere fact of Jewish "obstinacy", I suggest, together with the failure of the Jews to fade over time, like so many other diasporic groups, into the oblivion of total assimilation, has been more than enough, for many non-Jewish minds, to identify the Jews not merely as disturbingly alien, but, still more disturbingly, mysteriously indifferent to whatever threats or promises of reward might accompany the offer of conversion. That in turn is enough to suggest to impressionable minds the possession by the Jewish community of mysterious, and therefore doubtless malign, powers of its own; powers seemingly of a kind altogether at odds with its small numbers and limited resources, since apparently having the ability to confer capacities, of survival and resistance to persecution, outside the natural order of things. This sense of a profound Jewish Otherness linked to hidden powers; powers to some minds the more threatening for their very intangibility, has of course been accentuated by the more obvious markers of Jewish difference, from the laws ofKashrut and the observance of Shabbat to such things as yarmulkes , or the Payot, Tsitsis or Shtreimlach affected by the Orthodox; all of them opaque to the non-Jewish mind in ways that wrap them in a frequently absurd aura of strangeness and mystery. We need look no further, I suggest, for the foundations upon which some Gentile minds have found it possible to erect the tottering towers of antisemitic rhetoric and delusion; edifices whose content has, as Nirenberg shows, vanishingly little to do with actual Jews, but which rest at bottom, nevertheless, on something identifiable, in Prager and Telushkin's terms, as "Jewish factors."

The value of the traditional tropes of political antisemitism in conserving the credit of entrenched ideologies in the manner suggested above, by permitting believers to re-conceive essentially internal and non-Jewish threats as putatively external and "Jewish" ones, can be seen in operation in much recent discourse concerning Israel; for instance in the widespread belief that Israel is the main threat to peace in the Middle East. In October 2003, a survey carried out for the European Commission in fifteen member states found that almost sixty per cent of European citizens believed Israel to pose the biggest threat to world peace. In the light of the recent collapse of the Middle East into a complex of wars and insurrections rooted in a range of traditional hostilities long antedating the foundation of the State of Israel, such views may now seem, to put it mildly, more hopeful than accurate. But in any case the poll took place a mere fifteen years after the end of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), the 20 ^th century's longest war; a war in which half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers and an equivalent number of civilians are believed to have died; a war, finally, which had everything to do with the regional ambitions of the combatants and practically nothing to do with Israel.

What could explain such a mismatch between apparently seriously held belief and sober factual analysis? The above suggestions may shed a little light. Since the Enlightenment, many people in Europe have in the past cherished, and still cherish, the vague belief that the Kantian ideal of "Perpetual Peace" might prove in some sense achievable [10] . Over the past two centuries, that ideal has become associated in the popular mind with the idea that if certain large-scale putative "causes" of war, among which "nationalism" and "colonialism" bulk large, were to cease to dominate human affairs, war would cease to exist. Europe within the past few generations has, of course, an alarming history on both these fronts. But, at least in the minds of many of its younger citizens, it has now put both these vices behind it. It therefore expects to enjoy the rewards of virtue, including peace both internally and on its borders, along with the respect and affection of the formerly colonised. If these rewards appear not to be forthcoming, as in relationships between Europe and its former possessions and clients in the Near East they certainly do not, there must be some reason for that, one which calls into question neither the goodwill and love of peace of the former colonists, nor those of the formerly colonised.

And a ready explanation, which admirably meets those requirements, is to hand: it is all the fault of the Jews, this time in the shape of the State of Israel, which embodies in a peculiarly extreme and unhelpful form the very vices, of nationalism and colonialism, which Europe has so happily outgrown. Provided one believes that, it becomes possible to conclude that the realities of the non-Jewish world are, contrary to appearances, entirely in agreement with the conclusions of a cherished ideology - and would appear on the face of things to be so, moreover, were it not for the machinations of the Jews, who, as ever, have set the claims of an antiquated and superstitious particularism of their own against those of Reason, Mankind and the Onward March of History - and chosen the former!

This is, of course, nonsense on many levels. It is also manifestly antisemitic, not least because of the way in which it refurbishes for present use the fundamental trope of antisemitism: that everything in the non-Jewish world would be fine if only the Jews did not exist. What I hope to have done, however, in this brief essay, in addition to, and by way of, reconciling the divergent claims of Nirenberg in the one hand and Prager and Telushkin on the other, is to supply at least the beginnings of an explanation of why such nonsense should be capable or exerting the hold it so frequently displays over the minds of apparently otherwise sane people.