The General Theory of Antisemitism

Identifying the essence of an irrational hatred. And renaming it.

[Image: German. Jew. Nomad. And he's “smarter than us”.]

Antisemitism: The impossible to define concept

I don’t like antisemitism. Not just the concept, but the word. It was a latecomer to the English lexicon only making an appearance in the late 19th Century and it was predated by 3 millenia of irrational loathing. It is notoriously difficult to define, to identify and above all to understand. And as we shall see, it may not even apply merely to the Jews. Replacing the term with “anti-Jewish hatred” seems inappropriate as the most famous example of antisemitism - that propagated by the Church - wasn’t motivated by hatred. At least on an official level, it was motivated by the “loving” desire to “save” the Jews by getting them to accept Jesus as their Messiah and a frustration when they failed to do so. 

Calling antisemitism “racism” also fails the smell test. In the first place Jews, like many other nations, come from a variety of “races”, at least on the skin-deep, superficial level (we’ll leave aside for the moment the argument about race being an invented construct). But more importantly while racism is motivated by the idea that “we are superior to them”, modern anti-Jewish feeling is more driven by the feeling of inferiority: “Why are they richer/cleverer/more powerful/more influential than us?” Whether or not the Jews are really richer, cleverer or more powerful, that is the trope used; and inferiority and vulnerability are the feelings which generate it.

Now true enough some examples of anti-Jewish feeling appear to be motivated by racism. The Nazi terror being one and the Spanish concept of Pureza de Sangre being another. But was race really the motivating factor in either case?  As Haviv Rettig Gur highlights in his Shalem College lecture, the Nazis were racist to Jews…and everyone else. They felt superior to Jews…and to everyone else. Sure the Jews were untermenschen. But so were the Slavs. So were the Africans. So were the Chinese. Ad infinitum. So why was it that Jews were singled out not just for extra-judicial executions, brutality and slavery, but for total annihilation? Why is it that Russians were sent to work as dogs, but the Jews were mercilessly murdered like sheep? The answer is in Mein Kampf. And when we find it, we will begin to understand what antisemitism is; and what a better name for it would be. More on this later.

The Pureza de Sangre (blood purity) concept was applied by the Spanish of the day to those Jews that had converted to Christianity (“New Christians”), but were nonetheless excluded from many parts of society by dint of just having Jewish ancestors. On the face of it, this appears to be racism, not least because of the terminology used to describe it. After all, now that these Jews had converted to Christianity should they not have been welcomed into the open arms of Spanish society as per Church doctrine? Wasn’t this simply pure discrimination based on having a “different blood”? 

In my submission, the racism motivation is a little difficult to accept here. For I would postulate that the far greater - if not exclusive - motivation was class and competition for jobs in a limited economy. Think of it. Until the Jews converted on mass after the riots of 1391, there was a class of positions in high society that could only be accessed by the original Christian population. Following the mass conversion, where swathes of former Jews joined mainstream society, every position was open to these new citizens. Including in high society, government and the Church. Jews could now become Bishops! And they did. Imagine the jealousy. Imagine the classic “Immigrants are taking taking our jobs” mentality that would have instantly surfaced. And given the high levels of education among Jews, who would have won the competition for high status positions in this new Spain? You guessed it. It wasn’t the Old Catholics. And although they had preached conversion to the Jews for centuries, they weren’t prepared for the new reality that came in its wake. These nouveau riche were a threat to the comfortable status quo. Is this racism? No. It was the economy, stupid. And now again we get closer to the nature of the antisemitic beast.

Is antisemitism pure irrationality?

[Image: Richard Harris as Abraham. The story of antisemitism begins.]

Anti Semitism is a concept that seems utterly bizarre from a rational standpoint. Jews are accused of being both greedy bankers and Russian communists; wealthy money-grabbers and dirty, poverty-stricken peasants; liberal elites and religiously-backwards luddites. It is easy to dismiss the perpetrators of such oxymoronic thinking as irrational. But I am unwilling to dismiss such a pervasive attitude without analysis. For what is it that links the wealth of Jewish New York-based millionaires and the abject poverty of formerly ghettoized Russian refugees? What links the hatred towards both the wealthy Sassoons of Baghdad and the superstitious, slum dwellers of Yemen? What links the “loving” antisemitism of the Church and the no-holds barred hate-filled massacres of the Nazis? And what links the European antisemitism of upmarket Berlin and the Arab antisemitism of downmarket Hebron?

Let me tell you a story. A story from the dawn of antisemitism. And a story which gives us the General Theory of Antisemitism. It is the story of Abraham from Genesis Chapter 12. Or as I shall refer to it henceforth, the story of nomadism:

“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.,,,,So Abram went, as the Lord had told him….. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.…..they set out to go to the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land……From there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. …. And Abram journeyed on, still going toward the Negev….Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land. ….And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him, and they sent him away with his wife and all that he had.”

I have abbreviated the text, but the point is well made. Abraham was born in Ur, in what is now modern day Iraq; but he couldn’t accept the morality of that society. So he left. But where to leave to? First Haran, then Canaan. In Canaan, first Shechem (Nablus), then East of Bethel, then onwards towards the Negev. Then a famine came; so onwards to Egypt. End of the story? No; he had to leave Egypt. And so on and so forth. Leaving your country, your kindred and your father’s house to start a new and decent society is one thing. But there is always a problem with this approach. The first settlers to America encountered it as did the British in Australia. There is always another people there first. You are left with an unenviable choice. Continue to live in unmorality and unfreedom at “home”. Or be unwelcomed abroad. You may have multiple languages, a greater perspective, a vision for a better world. But the natives aren’t going to like it.

I return to my questions. What links the rich banker, the poor immigrant and the story of Abraham? By now it must be clear. Internationalism. Globalisation.  What links the international movements of communism and the global markets of capitalism? Working across borders. Why was it that Hitler wanted to kill the Jews, but just enslave the Slavs? The Jews were foreigners that mixed with the “Germans”. Sure the Slavs and the Japanese were inferior foreigners too. But they were there and the Jews were here. The Jews were everywhere at once. A Slav was always a Slav, but a Jew could be an award winning German scientist by day and a Jewish man at prayer by night. To paraphrase Haviv Rettig Gur, at a time when the concept of nationhood was forming and there was a need for a new national identity, the Jews were seen as two national identities at once, hiding in plain sight at the heart of the German nation.  It wasn’t Jewish race per se, but the mixing of the Jewish and German nationalities with the master race thereby being diluted. To the perverted mind, it was existential.

Nomads, foreigners and immigrants

Hitler’s theories of the nation were utterly barmy. Too much even for antisemites. But nonetheless his views were the unvarnished, most extreme version of what antisemitism is. The inability and the unwillingness to co-exist with nomads. A nomad may dwell separately from you; he will be an unwanted, “unintegrating” blot on the landscape. A nomad may try to integrate with you; he’ll be a burden on the treasury. A nomad may try to convert to your religion; their success will threaten you. A nomad may bring immense wealth to the nation due to their hard work and success; then they are “stealing” from you. A nomad may try to be more German than the Germans and then they are destroying you. Nomadism gives you vast advantages: resilience against challenges, the bravery to move across borders, the can-do attitude to succeed against the odds, the character to have left a morality-bankrupt society in the first place and the world perspective to bring innovation to bear on “intractable” problems. The settled understand the intellectual advantages of being a nomad. Hence the inferiority complex, the feeling of vulnerability and the xenophobia.  The nomads - of which the Jews are one of the most emblematic - are not “more clever” because of genes. To the extent that the nomadic class succeed more, it is because they have greater horizons. That’s what travel - wanted or unwanted - does for you.

Nomads rarely live in tents anymore. Or move with their cattle. They usually live in homes of bricks and mortar, have mortgages, attend the local school and speak your language. But they are obvious and identifiable. In the international school where I teach, the nomads and the settled Spanish naturally group together in separate friendship circles. We have THREE year olds in our pre-school class - from the UK, America, Iran and Russia - who just naturally group together as friends. They don’t even know what being foreign means. Neither do the rival Spanish clique. But everyone, even the youngest, can feel nomadism. Being Jewish is like being any immigrant, but the difference is that we are nomads everywhere. Just like Abraham. Even in Israel, we are the stranger around the Middle Eastern table.

Arab antisemitism is no different to that in Europe. They don’t like “foreigners”. They don’t like “immigrants”. They believe in the moral virtue of their self-declared indigenous status over that of the nomad. Now whether Arabs are indigenous to the Levant is highly disputable. But it doesn’t matter. There are lots of them. And there is safety in the ignorance of numbers, The problem the Arabs and the European antisemites face is precisely the same. How can you get rid of the nomads - “send them back where they came from” - when they have no home; when they are nomadic? The Slavs can be sent back to Russia and the Africans repatriated to Africa. But for the nomads par excellence, there is no “final solution”.  

The self-declared indigenous peoples of the world like international institutions precisely because they dislike internationalism. They liked the Roman Empire, the medieval Roman Catholic Church, the Islamic Ummah and now the United Nations. Why? Because membership was and is strict. To be a Roman you had to accept specific, unchallengeable values. To be a “universal”, medieval Catholic you had to accept the Christian faith (and the philosophy and science of Aristotle). And now; for accession to the United Nations; you need to be in a large, “indigenous”, densely-grouped together people, generally Christian or Muslim, who occupy large swathes of the Earth in defined territories.  Jews and other nomads had/have to convert or at minimum submit, in order to fit into a world which wasn’t/isn’t willing to allow nomads to create their own way. Membership isn’t for the barbarians.

But there is hope. The United States. The nation created to take in the nomad and to accept difference. How sad it is that the foundations of America are being put into doubt because of the inevitable, tragic conflict between the nomadic and the indigenous. But how hopeful it is that America is the world’s leading power and its most successful. All, I venture to suggest, because it was built on nomad ingenuity. 

A new name for antisemitism 

So how to rename antisemtism? Anti-Jewish hatred? No. Racism? No.

Nomadism. That is the correct term. Nomadism can be anti-Jewish and can encompass other groups and individuals too. The nomad understands what it means to have no home, no safety and no agency. The nomad understands what it means to roam and to have the settled in constant competition with you. And that my friends is why the State of Israel exists. To give the un-homed shelter; the refugees repite; and the pursued a fig tree to live safely under. As the Hebrew Bible says near to 40 times: “Thou shalt love the stranger”. It is easy to love the neighbour. That’s what the indigenous do well. But the stranger is detested and that is the essence of antisemitism.

Or should I say: nomadism.

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