Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison

       QUESTIONS OF DEFINITION

      Nowadays virtually everyone is opposed to anti-Semitism although no-one agrees about what it means to be anti-Semitic.

      —Kenneth L. Marcus, The Definition of Anti-Semitism

      A BASIC DEFINITION

      Within limits, it is possible to say or to show what one means by a term merely by indicating the sort of thing it applies to: “That is a trombone,” “These animals are what we call monkeys.” Up to this point in the book, so far as I can be said to have explained the meaning of the term antisemitism, I have done so in roughly that way. I have offered examples—in chapter 1, an extract from the 1988 Hamas charter; in chapter 2, a modern resurrection of the ancient canard that Jews cherish their sufferings as a means of defrauding others—chosen in the expectation that they will seem to the reader as patently antisemitic as they do to me. And I have suggested that both represent, in different ways, a late-twentieth-century recrudescence of a type of antisemitism—antisemitism as a political fantasy, in the form of a pseudo-explanatory theory of the real force controlling world events—widely supposed to have died with the Third Reich.

      It is now time to attempt to give that claim more substance by moving from mere exemplification to analysis and the exact definition of terms. Explaining the meanings of words by appeal to examples doubtless has its uses. Yet as Plato strove to show us, it also has its limits. Sooner or later, we must face the question Socrates never tires of posing to overconfident young Athenians: “No doubt this is an N, maybe that is, too; but what makes them both Ns? What, that is to say, does ‘N,’ in general terms, mean?” Nor are these Socratic questions mere toys of philosophical or lexicographical debate. If rational discussion of a topic is to proceed without needless, purely verbal misunderstandings—if sound legal or political responses to a given pattern of abuse are to be devised—then formal definitions of terms are indispensable. In this chapter, we shall see what can be done to provide one for the term antisemitism.

      On the simplest, most basic level, a formal definition is easy to provide:

      Definition 1. Antisemitism is prejudice against Jews.

      If we supplement this with Gordon Allport’s shrewd definition of prejudice as “thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant”¹ and give due regard also to the evident power of prejudice to express itself equally in thought, word, and act, we get

      Definition 2. Antisemitism is thinking, speaking, or acting injuriously toward Jews without sufficient warrant.

      It might seem possible to object to this definition on the grounds that it makes a mistake in logic. The objection would be that since it treats lack of cognitive warrant as conceptually built into the notion of antisemitism, it must entail, absurdly, that if a statement is antisemitic, it is not merely false but necessarily false.² But the objection is itself logically mistaken. All that Allport’s definition says is that a true statement can’t be a prejudiced one. It certainly follows from that as a matter of conceptual necessity, that a statement expressing prejudice must be false; but it in no way follows that the statement in question must be necessarily or conceptually false. Any kind of falsehood will do, including simple contingent falsehood. It is also the case, of course, that many statements manifesting prejudice fail of truth because they are too confused for it to be possible to form any clear idea of what, in concrete terms, their truth would involve. But that is another matter.

      PROBLEMS OF INTENTION

      There is, in a sense, nothing wrong with definition 2. It does much of what we ask a definition in a good dictionary to do. That is, it tells us clearly, simply, and correctly what the term antisemitism means in English. Over and above that, it explains why at least some things deserve to be so regarded. The contention of the authors of the Hamas charter, for instance, that “the Jews,” in the service of sinister ends, secretly control the media, publishing, business clubs, and so on, around the world, is antisemitic by the terms of definition 2: on the one hand because the accusation it levels is defamatory, and on the other hand because the absurdity of the idea that such a conspiracy could be operated by the Jews, or for that matter anybody else, not merely affords the accusation insufficient warrant but deprives it of any conceivable foothold in reality. It is equally clear by the terms of definition 2 that the central claim of Stannard’s essay—that a handful of Jewish scholars and writers have bamboozled the world into the delusion that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust outranks all other human suffering since the beginning of time—also qualifies as antisemitic. On the one hand, it is injurious, amounting to the claim that Jews purposefully exaggerate their sufferings in order to defraud others of the sympathy that should by rights be theirs. On the other hand, it fails of sufficient warrant by virtue, first, of its mendacity and second, of its absurdity. No Jewish—or non-Jewish—scholar of the Holocaust has ever, in sober fact, claimed that the suffering endured by Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their sympathizers outweighs all other human suffering for the simple reason that the claim itself, given the unquantifiable nature of suffering, is empty of meaning.

      Nevertheless, definition 2 will not do as it stands. One of the things we demand of a definition of a term N is that it resolve disputes in cases where people disagree about whether some particular thing is or is not an N. In this respect, the examples of Stannard and the Hamas convention might seem to show definition 2 in a favorable light (this is one of the reasons why I chose them, rather than others, to open the discussion). Unfortunately, there are a great many other disputed cases in which it fails that challenge—or fails it, at least, in the absence of further, supplementary clauses and/or explications of kinds yet to be determined. An extended discussion of cases of this kind, and of the problems of definition to which they bear witness, is to be found in Kenneth L. Marcus’s indispensable The Definition of Anti-Semitism.³

      One important category of cases throws into relief the weaknesses of the opening clause of definition 2: the clause, that is to say, that identifies antisemitism as “thinking, speaking, or acting injuriously toward Jews.” Hostility toward Jews need not be antisemitic in character. For instance, it may in no way reflect antisemitism if people living in a quiet suburb object to the opening of a synagogue on the grounds that they fear a resulting increase in cars vying for scarce parking places at certain busy times of the weekend. It may be, for instance, that they object with equal vigor, and for the same reasons, to the opening of an already existing Catholic school for parent/pupil activities on a Saturday morning. In such a case, one is not closing one’s eyes to Jew hatred if one concludes that residents don’t, after all, want the area to be judenfrei. They just want it to be free of the kinds of social activity that they see as disrupting the peace of the neighborhood on Saturday mornings.

      To exclude such cases, Marcus notes, Charles Glock and Rodney Stark⁴ suggest defining antisemitism “not [as] the hatred of persons who happen to be Jews, but rather the hatred of persons because they are Jews.”⁵