Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
WHAT KIND OF ANSWER?
In the last chapter, we arrived at a formal definition of the kind of antisemitism—political antisemitism—with which this book is concerned. But that definition raises as many questions as it answers. Political antisemitism in its most general form attributes a range of extraordinary accusations, delusive but profoundly political in character, uniquely to the Jews.1 Supposedly, they are an absolutely depraved people, consumed by hatred of humanity, conspiratorially organized in the pursuit of world domination, and occupied in exercising secret control over the economic, political, and cultural life of non-Jews in an extraordinary variety of sectors, ranging from world finance to American foreign policy, and from Hollywood to revolutionary politics.
But one might ask, why the Jews? These dreamlike terrors neither have historically been nor are today evoked by any of the other alien diasporas—Gypsies, Cathars, Huguenots; more recently the Irish, the British, the Armenians, the Turks, the Chinese, or the Sikhs—that have spilled, over the centuries, into one or another European country. Why has the suspicion of the Other natural to most human cultures never resulted, in their case, in anything like the baroque growth of fantastic indictments, from the blood libel to the alleged direction by the “Israel lobby” of American foreign policy, that fulgurates perpetually and unstoppably around the Jews?
A skeptical reader might well object, “Wait a minute. You say ‘perpetually.’ But that seems to foreclose the discussion by introducing the assumption that antisemitism is a single, unitary phenomenon that persists unchanged across centuries. And that would seem to presume in turn that there must be a single, unitary answer to the question ‘Why the Jews?’ But is that necessarily so? Why shouldn’t there be many different reasons, varying over time and having little in common, why from time to time Jews have found themselves the objects of persecution?”
On the face of it, that is a good question. One theorist of antisemitism who took this line was the late Hannah Arendt. It is not irrelevant, however, that her reasons for doing so were connected with her belief that Jews themselves must bear some responsibility for the twentieth-century version of the phenomenon. In The Origins of Totalitarianism,2 she takes nineteenth- and twentieth-century antisemitism to be strongly causally linked to “‘specifically Jewish functions’ related to commerce and economic circulation that developed in the modern nation-state.”3 If that is the case, of course, then attempts to understand modern antisemitism by relating it to past outbreaks of prejudice against Jews, outbreaks occurring in ages yet to see the rise of economic structures specific to the modern nation-state, are both pointless and misleading. Arendt viewed all such claims as instances, as she put it, of the fallacy of “eternal antisemitism.”
It cannot be doubted that the proportion of Jewish individuals involved in banking and the professions in pre–World War II central Europe was greater than the proportion of Jews in the community. Walter Laqueur estimates that in the 1920s, while Jews in Hungary amounted to 6 percent of the population, Jews made up “about half of Hungary’s lawyers and physicians, and more than half of the banks and leading industries were in Jewish hands,”4 while “half of the doctors in Vienna, and more than half in Warsaw were of Jewish origin.”5 But individual representation has no tendency to support the antisemite’s central contention that the nation is under threat from Jewish influence unless one supplements these figures concerning individual participation with belief in the long tradition of ideological fantasy ascribing to this tiny and relatively powerless people, both the collective will to damage non-Jewish interests and the collective power to put such aims into practice.
The force of Arendt’s argument is greatly weakened, that is to say, if her analysis of the causal roots of modern antisemitism, with its attendant demonstration of the “coresponsibility” of the Jews, cannot be shown to be independent of the idea that the interests that each and every individual Jew has primarily at heart are not those of the country of which he is a citizen but those of a vast Jewish conspiracy in which he functions merely as a humble but faithful foot soldier. David Nirenberg has recently pursued this line of criticism of Arendt.
It was in their special commitment to bourgeois capitalism that [according to Arendt] the Jews were “co-responsible” for the reality to which they fell victim. “[All] economic statistics prove that the German Jews belonged not to the German people, but at most to its bourgeoisie.”6
It is a bit surprising that Arendt so often drew the necessary statistics from work produced by Nazi economists in support of party propaganda. It was, for example, to the “fighting scholarship” of Walter Frank and his “Reichsinstitut for the history of the New Germany” that she owed her indictment of the Rothschilds and other nineteenth-century Jewish bankers as “reactionary,” “parasites upon a corrupt body.”7 But even if her statistics had been less obviously partial and partisan, their selection out of the world’s infinite sea of significance would still be shaped by what her conceptual framework encouraged her to recognize as meaningful. In this case her negative view of “bourgeois capitalism” and its role in the nation state, the ease with which she was willing to assume that Judaism was essentially bound to money, her insistence on the “co-responsibility” of the Jews for the economic order within which they function: these were among the a priori ideological commitments that structured her selection and interpretation of “facts” about the Jews.8
In this drily telling passage, the thought fatal to Arendt’s antiuniversalism is ultimately the one expressed by its final sentence. The problem for Arendt is not whether a viable distinction can be drawn between a “people” and “its bourgeoisie,” or even whether there are sound arguments for regarding “bourgeois capitalism” as hostile to the interests of either “the nation-state” or its “people.” The problem is rather that of showing what on earth the fact that a high but by no means dominating proportion of individuals engaged in carrying forward the affairs of bourgeois capitalism happen to be Jews has to do with any of these vast and imponderable questions.
Nevertheless, to Arendt—and not only to Arendt but also to a very large number of influential German and European figures of the preceding two centuries—much and quite possibly everything concerning the fate of modern Europe hinges on the Jews.
Moreover and more puzzlingly still, similarly disproportionate estimates of the historic importance of this tiny and scattered people had at the start of the modern era already haunted Europe for a millennium and a half.
Contrary to our initial objector, and to Arendt, in other words, we have uncovered what begins to look like a unitary phenomenon consistent across centuries: namely, the strange and persisting obsession of European culture with fingering the Jews as the most ready explanation for its self-perceived defeats and distresses, however diverse the latter. The question “Why the Jews?” now becomes the question, “Why this obsession, this rooted cultural fixation?”
Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, the authors of the best recent book on the question “Why the Jews?” offer closely related reasons for taking that question to demand a unitary, universal answer, rather than a collection of answers specific to times and places.
To ignore or deny that there is an ultimate cause for antisemitism contradicts both common-sense and history. Antisemitism has existed too long, and in too many disparate cultures, to ignore the problem of ultimate cause and/or to claim that new or indigenous factors are responsible every time it erupts. Factors specific to a given society help account for the manner or time in which antisemitism erupts. But they do not explain its genesis—why antisemitism at all? To cite but one example: the depressed economy in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s helps to explain why and when the Nazis came to power, but it does not explain why Nazis hated Jews, let alone why they wanted to murder every Jew. Economic depressions alone do not explain gas chambers.
The very consistency of the passions Jews have aroused demands a consistent explanation. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, mediaeval and many modern Christians and Muslims, and Nazis and Communists have perhaps only one thing in common: they have all, at some point, counted the Jews as their enemy, often their greatest enemy. Why?9
Prager and Telushkin note the paucity