Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
at Jews” that supposedly “corresponds to the concept evoked by the word ‘antisemitism’”—is, unless I misread him, that antisemitism is not “determined by the objective reality of Jews” but by “what the symbol ‘Jews’ has signified to non-Jews,” and hence cannot be a reaction by non-Jews to the “uniquely superior values” supposedly manifested by and within Judaism.
From a logical point of view, unfortunately, this is a non sequitur. Given the massive ignorance of Judaism and Jewishness prevalent among non-Jews, it is indeed unlikely that any non-Jew ever became an antisemite out of chagrin at the perceived “superiority” of Jewish “values.” However, it is scarcely more plausible that the meaning, for non-Jews, of “the symbol ‘Jews’” could have developed in a manner entirely unaffected by “the objective reality of Jews.” In chapters 4 and 5, I shall suggest some ways in which certain objective features of Jewish conduct—features deriving ultimately, moreover, if not from non-Jewish hatred of, then at least from Jewish attachment to, “Jewish values”—may, pace Langmuir, have played a rather decisive role in the development of the myth of “the Jews.”
Nevertheless, weak as the argument is, Langmuir considers himself licensed by it to conclude that the hostility directed against Jews by non-Jews is overwhelmingly of a kind that “has not been directed only against Jews.” It follows, for Langmuir, that we stand in no need of a definition of antisemitism, because the term is used, confusedly, to describe kinds of hatred by no means uniquely experienced by Jews for which perfectly good and well-defined terms are already in use among social scientists, namely, xenophobia and ethnic prejudice, both of which invoke “the idea of an instinctive hostility towards strange—little-known and differently constituted—outgroups.”11
In summary, Langmuir thinks that whereas talk of antisemitism postulates a special form of hatred solely directed toward and solely experienced by Jews, there exist in fact no empirical grounds for supposing that anything of the sort actually exists.
Despite this sobering conclusion, Langmuir remains prepared to grant that xenophobia toward Jews, although no different in its essential nature from xenophobia toward blacks, Muslims, Roma, or other groups, does display one unusual feature specific to it. Langmuir considers, and here I agree with him, that for the most part xenophobic hatred is “realistic hostility,” meaning by that “that well-nigh universal xenophobic hostility which uses the real conduct of some members of an outgroup to symbolize a social menace.”12
Resentments of this kind, he thinks, often share “a kernel of truth.” Langmuir also allows, however, for “a new kind of stereotype, which I shall call chimerical [having] no kernel of truth [but depicting] imaginary monsters.”13 And he suggests that what is unusual about xenophobic hostility toward Jews is that it involves, to a greater degree than other forms of xenophobia, “socially significant chimerical hostility.”14 Here, perhaps, and only here, he thinks, is there a legitimate role for the term antisemitism to play. Social scientists, he concludes, should
free “antisemitism” from its racist, ethnocentric or religious implications and use it only for what can be distinguished empirically as an unusual kind of human hostility directed at Jews. If we do so, we may then be able to distinguish more accurately between two very different kinds of threats to Jews. On the one hand there are situations in which Jews, like any other major group, are confronted with realistic hostility, or with that well-nigh universal xenophobic hostility which uses the real conduct of some members of an outgroup to symbolize a social menace. On the other hand, there may still be situations in which Jewish existence is much more seriously endangered because real Jews have been irrationally converted in the minds of many into a symbol, “the Jews,” a symbol whose meaning does not depend on the empirical characteristics of Jews yet justifies their total elimination from the earth.15
Fully chimerical hatred of Jews, however, Langmuir takes to be a late and aberrant development, commencing in the twelfth century with “the first European accusation of Jewish ritual murder … created in Norwich about 1150 by the cumulative irrationality of a superstitious insignificant priest and his wife, a mendacious Jewish apostate, and an unimportant monk who sought to overcome his sense of inferiority.”16
For this reason, Langmuir considers that the term antisemitism is misused to describe earlier hostility to Jews. In view of the turn that my own argument will take later in this chapter, however, it is worth recording in passing that Langmuir’s sense of chimerical accusation as a late and relatively marginal ingredient in xenophobia directed against Jews is contested by other scholars, who note many earlier examples of chimerical beliefs concerning Jews going back as far as the first-century Greek rhetorician Apollonius Molon and including ninth-century beliefs to the effect that Jewish men menstruate and pray to Satan.17
IDEOLOGY VERSUS INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY
Suppose for the sake of argument that we were simply to disregard Langmuir’s arguments for the conclusion there is no distinctive type of non-Jewish hostility experienced only by Jews and side instead with the many Jews and others who have always believed that the term antisemitism does mark a distinctive form of hostility encountered only by Jews. Would that get us any further toward a definition of the term?
No, because either choice commits us to thinking of antisemitism as a form of hostility. Hostility, after all, is a psychological state. And if that is what antisemitism is, then its site, its habitation, as it were, is the individual mind: the mind of the antisemite. And here, a further problem confronts us. Ideologies are not inhabitants of the individual mind. Marxism or liberalism, for instance, is not simply the sum of what happens to be believed about politics by individual Marxists or liberals. An ideology comes to more than is contained in the mind of any of its individual adherents. It has an internal structure, a logic of its own that none of its adherents at a given point in history may fully comprehend. An ideology is a cultural, not a psychological, entity in roughly the sense in which history, or physics, or the romantic movement are cultural rather than psychological entities.
The problem confronting us now is that there are many reasons for regarding antisemitism both as a form of animosity and as an ideology. By purporting to offer, among other things, a systematic account of how the world is secretly governed, antisemitism takes on a significance for believers far transcending any merely personal ground of animosity or contempt. As Kenneth Marcus puts it, “As an ideology, it [antisemitism] provides a way to make sense of the entire world and all of history, not just the relatively small territory occupied by the descendants of Jacob.”18
At the same time Marcus, as I read him, continues throughout his book to share the founding assumption of Langmuir (and indeed of most other writers on the topic) that what we are trying to clarify in seeking a definition of the term antisemitism is the nature of a state of mind: an enduring psychological disposition, that is to say, characteristic of a certain class of individuals, namely, antisemites. Unless I badly misread him, that seems certainly to be the underlying premise of the following passage, which sets the tone for his opening chapter, “Attitude, Behavior and Ideology”: “The bewildering array of definitions of anti-Semitism—and the resulting difficulty in understanding cases like Ilan Halimi’s—arises because people are trying to define different phenomena. To some, anti-Semitism is an attitude, to others a form of conduct, and to still others an ideology or pathology. The differences reflect the varying qualities that people find most important or troublesome about anti-Semitism: the way that anti-Semites feel about Jews, the things they do to Jews, or the mindset that makes them think and act as they do.”19
The word that I find most troubling in this passage, for reasons that I have just explained, is of course mindset. A mindset is, at least to my conceptual ear, a complex state of some individual mind. An ideology, on the other hand, is not a constituent of any individual mind but rather a constituent of a culture. The prospects for a unitary definition seem at this point even worse than Marcus suggests.