Nine Camouflaged Causes of Anti-Semitism
Pernicious causes of anti semitism which elude detection and continually fester in the body politic
Nine Camouflaged Causes of Anti-Semitism
Pernicious causes of anti semitism which elude detection and continually fester in the body politic
By
David Gottfried
In this digital age of instantaneous news, nirvana or nihilistic melodrama, that which transpired twenty years ago feels like something fifty years old. Likewise, the Nazi Holocaust against world Jewry seems, to some people, centuries old. As the crematoria and death camps recede into the past, people feel comfortable about revivifying antisemitism all over the world: In Poland, which passed a statute criminalizing speech critical of Polish responses to the Holocaust; in France and Austria, where fascist parties have enjoyed considerable electoral success; in Hungary, in which a quasi-fascist, Victor Orbin, leads the country; in the person of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her psychotic fellow Trumpers, who claim that Jews are burning the American South West with lasers operated from outer space; and throughout the Arab world, percolating with murderous rage salivating for slaughter.
Some people may greet my essay with a dismissive yawn, contending, “Here we have yet another Jew wailing about Anti-Semitism, prattling on with predictable and boring platitudes about the cruelty of Anti Semitism and pleading for brotherhood.” Perhaps I should advise those people that it isn’t we Jews who started the conversation about Anti Semitism; indeed, we never even invented the term.
The term “Anti Semitism” was first coined by one Wilhelm Marr who complained that “Germandom” was being overrun by Jews. He founded “The league of Anti-Semites,” and his essay, “Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums uber das Judenthum. (“The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism”), was published in 1862. 1
Since Anti Semitism is so misunderstood that people even think we Jews started the conversation when in fact the argument was initiated by the aforesaid German, Wilhelm Marr, I thought I would take the liberty of explicating some of the causes of anti Semitism that most people seem oblivious to.
Alleged Jewish Duplicity in Business is not the cause of Anti Semitism
Many people will tell us that Jews employ dubious and immoral methods to make money or are simply too stingy and cheap. However, this can’t be true because being a bastard with money seems to be a universal feature of the human condition. Let’s survey a few other tribes:
A) For centuries, the Catholic Church was extraordinarily wealthy because it told the flock that for x amount of gold their priests would grant one an “indulgence” and guarantee entry to heaven. All over Europe, people bought indulgences from the Church. Barbara Tuchman, in “The March of Folly,” recounts that one Cardinal used to throw all of his silverware and plates into the Mediterranean Sea after one of his frequent dinner parties to demonstrate that he could easily buy a whole new set of cutlery because he was so fabulously wealthy.
B) Plenty of people are in the cosa nostra, aka the mafia, and they will threaten to put someone in cement shoes and deposit them at the bottom of the East River if they don’t pay exorbitant interest rates on their loans, but many of these people are Italian. (And some people say the Jews are the most vicious bankers.)
C) The British have managed to develop a reputation of unimpeachable propriety and good taste, and those gonifs (Yiddish for thieves) made a mint by selling opium to Chinese peasants. (The Chinese protested, fought a war to be freed of British drug pushers, but China lost, was compelled to allow the Brits to continue to ruin Chinese lives with opium and Britain made China pay sanctions for fighting the war.)
D) Also, the Jews were hated when they were penniless: The great majority of Jews in Tzarist Russia and its dominions, in the 50 years preceding World War One, were poverty-stricken and they were still despised, victimized and butchered in pogroms and condemned for allegedly killing gentile children and using their blood to make matzah.
The Salient Causes of Anti Semitism
1) We ask too many questions and slaughter too many sacred cows for polite company:
Jean Paul Sartre, in “Anti-Semite and Jew,” said that the Jewish propensity to ask lots of questions, to doubt and to explore was disconcerting and sometimes immensely disagreeable. Our predilection to inquisitiveness is clear at the outset of our faith. The first Jew, Abraham, had a father who made idols. Abraham mocked the idols of his Father, sarcastically insisting that inert and inanimate stone and clay cannot move or influence anything on earth. Also, the Jewish drive to question is evident in the study of Talmud, in which religious ideas are continually examined, interpreted and reexamined.
By modern times, Jews had propounded a welter of interrogatories which called into question the pedestals of European civilization as Marx said that religion was nothing but the opiate of the people and Freud held that love between a son and a mother had a sexual feature. (However, Freud arguably was defining libido, in this context, very broadly and referred to simply a strong attraction. Indeed, I think it was Bruno Bettleheim who argued that Americans don’t truly understand Freud because translations, from German to English, were inadequate. )
2) Circumcision, the medieval delusion that Jewish men menstruate and discrimination against Jews which made Jews sedentary arouse castration fear.
Norman Podhoretz noted that in medieval times European Christians believed that Jewish men, as well as Jewish women, menstruated.
Obviously, a man who menstruates is not much of a man. The delusion that Jewish men menstruated may have made gentiles consider Jews less than manly, and gentiles may have therefore hated Jews as people will hate anything that seems dreadful and potentially transmissible. (This is way we segregate, ostracize and fortify ourselves against that which we find revolting.) The idea that Jews were castrated may have been further underscored by the practice of circumcision; the idea of taking a knife to the penis of an eight-day old boy can easily be seen as chilling and even ghoulish. (I am Jewish, and neither I nor anyone I know were harmed by circumcision, but the rite still strikes me as barbaric)
In addition to circumcision and the medieval fantasy that Jewish men menstruated, a certain Jewish aversion to violence and a de physicalized lifestyle may have made Jewish virility questionable. Jewish hostility toward violence is evident in a) a ruling by the Sanhedrin, promulgated shortly after the death of Jesus, requiring that the death penalty could not be employed unless there were two (or it may have been three) eyewitnesses to the commission of murder, b) dovishness, on the part of German Jews, during World War One, and c)dovishness on the part of American Jews during the Vietnam War. Also, in medieval Europe, Jews were enjoined from farming (they could pollute the land) and serving in the military (their loyalty could not be trusted) and compelled to be peddlers or craftsmen. Their more sedentary occupations, in conjunction with the aforementioned sentiments, created a portrait with a distinctly feminized hue.
3) Jews may be hated for their academic and financial success, which may be the inexorable consequence of Jewish intellectual superiority.
As I have discussed in another article, Jews may be substantially brighter than white Christians. The causes for prodigious Jewish intellectual strength include a) certain genetic aberrations, more common among Jews, which increase neuro connectivity, b) the evisceration of Christian intelligence because bright Catholics often went into the clergy and the clergy did not reproduce, c) the special effects of reading Hebrew from right to left, and a tongue in the Latin alphabet from left to right, and d) several other factors regarding the circumstances of Jewish persecution. 2
Most Jews, like most people, are not Saints. Most Jews like most people try to maximize their wealth. Jewish intellectual leads have augmented Jewish wealth. This quite naturally arouses envy, and envy very quickly can metastasize into full-throated hate.
4) The alleged Deicide
According to the New Testament, the Jews are in part culpable for the death of Jesus. Of course, the Romans actually put Jesus to death, but according to the New Testament, the Romans had asked Jews whether Barabas or Jesus should be killed, and the Jews held that Jesus must die.
For obvious reasons, this exacerbated anti Semitism. If one is taught that Jesus was the finest human being who had ever lived, and was in fact divine, and that the Jews are responsible for his demise, one will be predisposed toward being an anti semite.
5) The Jews may be hated because they are successful even though they killed Christ, which supposedly warrants their eternal suffering and damnation.
When Jews flourish, Christian dogmas might seem problematic and Christianity itself might be mocked. To eradicate a feeling of humiliation, the Anti-Semite must strike out at the Jew. By attacking the Jew, and making him suffer, the antisemite can contentedly say, “The Jews is now suffering and that proves the validity of Christian dogmas that the Jew will suffer for killing Jesus.”
A related concept might inspire Islamic hatred of the West: Their religion teaches them that they possess wisdom and goodness, that the heathen west is evil and merits eternal damnation, but the West is infinitely richer and stronger than the Levant. This disconnect, between the prophesies of faith, and the relative standings of Westerners and Muslims today, is unbearably infuriating to the Muslim. By hurting a Westerner, a Muslim can say, “the heathen is suffering and that proves the validity of Islam.”
The Jewish Attraction Toward the Left
The Jews were in the vanguard of the Left in the beginning of the 20th Century, and they were in the vanguard of the left, in the United States, in the 1960’s. In the beginning of the 20th Century large numbers of Jews were on the left, both the socialist and merely liberal left. The first third of the last century gave us Trotsky, Zinoviev, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Blum, Henry Laski (Right Wing Joe Kennedy wanted his children to be subjected to a variety of perspectives, and President John F Kennedy was tutored by Laski) and other bold Jewish Leftists.
In the 1940’s, the masses of Europe rewarded the Jews, for caring about their poverty and misery, by sending them to their deaths. And it wasn’t simply a German affair. It is not fair to blame the holocaust entirely on Germans. The Ukrainians, Poles, and Lithuanians were exceptionally anti-Semitic. (Poland even had pogroms after the holocaust. In 1945, when some Polish Jewish survivors of the camps tried to go back to their homes, 50 Polish Jews were killed in one town alone) Also, even France, who we thought was a staunch lover of liberty, which gave us the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and which wanted to reconvene the ancient Sanhedrin in the time of Napolean, succumbed to racist barbarism. (Thousands of Jewish children in Paris were brought to a sports stadium, and locked up, prior to deportation to concentration camps.)
The Jews had spent decades bewailing the poverty of the masses, and struggling to effectuate a redistribution of wealth, and the people of Europe made it perfectly clear that they did not want our help. They wanted us dead.
In the 1960’s, Jews figured prominently in the civil rights and antiwar movements. Although Jews were about two or three percent of the American population, Jews made up one third of the freedom riders who journeyed to the South to try to desegregate buses. Many of them were beaten. Schwerner and Goodman were killed trying to help blacks to register to vote. However, soon enough, blacks turned against their Jewish supporters. SNCC exiled its white supporters, a huge proportion of whom were Jewish. In 1968, blacks in NYC wanted Jewish teachers fired from the public schools, complaining that the Jews prevented their children from learning how to read, and WBAI, the local radical radio station, aired a radical poet’s recitation of her rant against Jews: “Oh you Jewboy with that Yamalka on your head oh how I wish you would drop dead.”
Why do they hate Jewish leftists:
6) Leftist condescension
It is condescending when Jewish liberals, some of whom come from affluent and comfortable backgrounds, purport to be able to solve your problems. Implicit in A’s notion that he can help B, is the idea that A is more intelligent or competent than B.
7) Robbing the poor of their indispensable rage
A poor man can best overcome his disadvantages by using his anger: “Goddamn it, they oppressed me, I will get back at them by succeeding.” When a rich man helps you -- and many Jewish liberals have been wealthy -- your anger toward the rich man is assuaged and you have less energy to succeed. The oppressed need their anger; nothing will make them angrier than a rich philanthropic man saying, “I shall help you.”
Indeed, Bernard Lewis of Princeton said that American hostages were taken in Iran, in 1979, because of Carter’s efforts to mollify Iranian discontent. Supposedly, the Iranians were furious at the belief that they could be pacified by trite concessions at a late date. Supposedly, the very idea of being pacified was revolting.
It might seem peculiar for a student of history to consider rock and roll lyrics, but the lyrics of an old David Bowie Song seem apt: “The bitter comes out better with a stolen guitar.” People who feel victimized don’t want compromises. They often don’t want equality and certainly not integration. They want revenge. Of course, we don’t want their revenge, and paradoxically, the more we try to help them the more we might stimulate violent revenge.
8) The belief that Jews are Lying when they maintain that we are all equal
The Jewish leftist will obediently parrot the dogma of the Left. The Jewish leftist says that he believes that we are all equal, yada, yada, yada.
However, I don’t think that many Jews believe it, and I don’t think that many non-Jews believe it. We are far, far less than one percent of the world’s population and yet the most influential thinkers of the world have all been Jews: Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Marx, Jesus.
We are hugely represented among Nobel Prize recipients, the student body of elite American universities and industrial and scientific innovators.
The Jewish people have survived all the empires that sought to destroy the Jews. In 1948, the State of Israel was attacked by six Arab armies on the day Israel declared Independence. The Jews were outnumbered by about one hundred to one. Although President Truman was sympathetic to the Jewish State, America would not send any arms to the Jews. By contrast, the British trained and aided the Jordanian army and when the Jews scored a series victories at the expense of the Egyptians, the British army bombed the Jewish soldiers. The Jews numbered 600,000, and half of them were the half-starved remnants of Europe’s concentration and death camps, but the Jews won. Put it this way: To arrive at the conclusion that the Jews have a special affinity and connection to the Divine is, for me, emotionally irresistible and intellectually perfectly plausible.
Of course, most liberal Jews would deny that Jews have any special rendezvous with destiny. However, some liberal Jews may be consciously lying when they deny this, and many Jews may subconsciously or unconsciously admit that Jews have a special place in history.
I think that gentiles can perceive that Jewish odes to equality are just standard operating leftist rhetoric and that Jewish leftists are insincere. Sometimes it seems as if Jewish leftists feel guilty for having crafted an Old Testament which is so chauvinistic about Judaism and have over-reacted by devising an almost rabid egalitarianism.
However, I will have to concede that on this point, point 8, I may be projecting my own sentiments onto other Jews and non Jews.
9) Gentiles hate us for our atheistic inclinations:
Sometimes, I think that anti Semites are “saying” this: Just because you can’t believe in G-d doesn’t mean I have to become a bitter Marxian atheist like you. Our religion oppressed you, and in the guise of helping us you are trying to kill our religion by converting us to Marxism. You really don’t want to help us; you want to kill our religion which sustained us.