Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
of what we have here distinguished as social or racist antisemitism. What Langmuir calls “chimerical hatred” of Jews on the other hand is characteristic of what we have here distinguished as political antisemitism.
However, because Langmuir treats antisemitism as a name for a single concept requiring a single definition, rather than as a name for a family of differently definable concepts, he is led to treat chimerical hatred as a sort of odd, not easily explicable adjunct to what is for the most part a standard type of xenophobia: in effect, an unusually factually baseless variety of stereotype. This not only leads him to fail to grasp the full oddity, the extraordinary strangeness, of antisemitism in its political, ideological version. It also leads him to reject as “fallacious” the idea that there has ever existed such a thing as “a distinctive kind of reaction of non-Jews directed only at Jews that corresponds to the concept evoked by the word ‘antisemitism.’” It now appears, if we have argued correctly, that political antisemitism constitutes exactly that: a distinctive type of hostile reaction by non-Jews to Jews and to no other group. Moreover, it is one that has been central in organizing lethal hatred of Jews across a period far longer than the one Langmuir assigns to “chimerical hostility.” As we shall see in later chapters, while the specific accusations offered in support of those fundamental beliefs—in the absolute commitment to evil of the Jewish community, in the community’s quasi-demonic power, in its conspiratorial character, and so on—have displayed a bewildering and protean power to reinvent themselves in new forms as the centuries pass, the fundamental beliefs themselves have remained effectively unchanged in Europe since late antiquity. Their persistence offers an explanation for the curious proneness of Jew hatred, relative to hatred of other groups, to express itself in the terms that Langmuir labels “chimerical”: the blood libel, the supposed capacity of Jewish males to menstruate, the alleged Jewish control not only of major branches of the United States government but also of the Lions or Kiwanis, and so on. If one has already accepted that the Jewish people is collectively committed to demonic goals and that it is conspiratorially organized in systematically impenetrable ways, then there is no reason why anything alleged of these abominable people should not be true and no reason to demand evidence for any of it, since in any case the quasi-supernatural efficiency of the Jewish conspiracy can be relied on to have ensured that any evidence that might have been available has been ruthlessly suppressed.
Dropping the idea that antisemitism names a single, unified kind, rather than a small number of distinct (though hierarchically related) kinds, may equally shed light on the issue, one that bulks large in Kenneth Marcus’s discussion, of whether antisemitism is to be understood as a type of personal animosity or as a species of ideology. The answer suggested by the present analysis is that neither understanding is false but that each applies to a quite different version of antisemitism. Social antisemitism is indeed a form of personal animosity applied to individual Jews and grounded in hostile or derisive stereotypes. Political antisemitism, by contrast, is an ideology—one offering a comprehensive explanation of any of a wide range of non-Jewish discontents in terms of the malignity, not so much of individual Jews, as of the Jewish collectivity conceived as vested, in virtue of its conspiratorial organization, with quasi-demonic powers.
If this is correct, then we have to regard ourselves as dealing under the label antisemitism not merely with more than one kind of phenomenon but with more than one kind of antisemite and hence with more than one kind of “antisemitic mentality.” Certainly, those antisemites whom I have encountered personally and listened to over the past sixty years or so have fallen fairly consistently into two quite sharply distinguished types that correspond with the categories of social versus political prejudice distinguished earlier. In one group, there is the barroom blowhard with an antipathy to any Jew he encounters based on the usual stereotypes. He finds Jews, that is, vulgar, pushy, money grubbing, prone to “get above themselves,” given to insinuating themselves into social milieus that should by rights have rejected them, and to using their undoubted cleverness to obtain positions of influence that should by rights belong to “our sort.” And that is not all that is wrong with Jews, he is very willing to tell you sotto voce. They are also constantly on the lookout for any advantage to be gained by complaining about the supposed injustices under which they suffer.
In the other group, one finds people obsessed not with despised traits of individual Jews but with the alarming nature of the threats posed by “the Jews”—the imagined Jewish collectivity—to whatever causes or values the speaker happens to hold dear. The two sets of concerns may overlap in the minds of some antisemitic individuals, but equally, they may not. In the thinking of the first group, emotional dispositions—animosity, resentment, contempt—dominate, and ideology plays very little part. In the thinking of the second group, ideology is the main factor, the nerve of the obsession. Hence, members of this group, unlike members of the first, tend to be anxious to assure one that they nourish no personal antipathy toward individual Jews, and indeed that “some of their best friends are Jews.”
These two branches of antisemitism, it seems to me, require very different treatment if we are either to understand or to deal with them. With the first, we are dealing with very familiar kinds of xenophobia based on dislike and exclusion and supported in the individual mind by appeal to stereotypes whose irrationality consists, as we have already argued (in partial conformity with Langmuir) not in lacking a kernel of truth but rather in lacking the generality claimed for them. Although it may be common in this or that social group, we are dealing here with a type of antisemitism essentially rooted in the individual mind in the sense that what this kind of antisemite has against Jews is to be explained in terms of the individual’s own tastes, self-image, and group allegiances. For such an antisemite, his dislike of Jews plays no particular explanatory function in his larger worldview and connects with no large concerns of public or political morality. While this kind of casual, stereotype-buttressed animosity may lead the antisemite to wish to exclude Jews from groups or clubs to which he and his friends belong, there is nothing about it that could give him a reason for wishing to eliminate Jews from society or from the world.
With the second branch, political antisemitism, matters are very different. Here, we are dealing not with merely personal prejudices, seated in the individual mind, but with a cultural formation: a body of wholly delusive but supposedly explanatory beliefs, claiming, in Marcus’s telling phrase, to “make sense of the entire world and all its history,” not just the tiny part of it actually occupied by the Jews. Like many other cultural formations, it is equipped with a public presence, a complex internal logic, a long history, and a substantial body of literature. These, as with other cultural formations, give it the power to transmit itself to new believers by standard processes of gradually increasing familiarity leading eventually to conversion. Its internal logic commits its converts to demanding not merely the exclusion or disadvantaging of Jews but the outright elimination of Jewish influence, whether by the literal destruction of the Jewish people or by the destruction of Jewish institutions such as the State of Israel.
The influences exerted by political antisemitism over minds susceptible to it are thus very different from those exerted by antisemitism entertained as a merely social prejudice. Political antisemitism affords a potent means of constructing “the Jew” as the enemy of whatever values the political antisemite happens to regard as central to national or human progress. It is thus very easy for a mind so influenced to give anti-Jewish hostility a mask of seeming moral virtue, and thus to justify as moral demands, actions and emotions that under any other circumstances it would recognize as prejudice and persecution.
To reach an understanding of a phenomenon of this kind, it is plainly not enough to confine our attention to the psychology of individual minds or even to individual minds viewed as expressive of group loyalties and hostilities. What requires explanation is the strange permanence of political antisemitism as an element in European culture. It has displayed, after all, a remarkable power to reinvent itself in the radically different conditions presented by successive periods of European history and to attach itself as a strange kind of bolt-on addition, somewhat in the manner of a virus attaching itself to the biochemical systems of a living cell, to systems of belief as radically diverse as medieval Christianity, British imperialism, nineteenth-century German nationalism, and Soviet communism. This power of attraction