Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
href="#ue094082e-f5cf-5f2c-9f84-42e29bfd0837">Part II—“Why the Jews?”—addresses the question of why the strange collection of beliefs constituting what I shall here call “political antisemitism” should have attached itself to the Jews, rather than to any other diasporic people.
The first four chapters (6–9) of part III return to the question of whether “anti-Zionism” and BDS are antisemitic movements, and if so, in what ways and to what extent. They argue that the burden of proof should be shifted from questions of motive to questions of fact. If antisemitism can manifest as fraudulent theory, then the issue of antisemitism in political discourse comes to turn, not on the motives or emotional dispositions of those who disseminate it, but on the alignment, or lack of it, between discourse and fact. If the various accounts of the nature and history of Israel on which the two movements depend for their ideological legitimacy are simply and straightforwardly true, then, indeed, we are dealing with legitimate political criticism. If, on the other hand, they systematically defy belief, to the extent of representing merely the results of a sustained attempt to cut, stretch, and deform the facts to fit the procrustean bed provided by the traditional categories of antisemitic theory, then the latter is the enterprise to which they belong, and there’s an end of the matter. This therefore becomes the central issue addressed in these chapters.
Those active in anti-Zionism and BDS are, almost without exception, academics, students, or university-educated people employed in politics, the arts, charitable organizations, or public service. If, as I argue, political antisemitism is an inextricable element in both, then that fact alone raises the larger question, already opened in part II, of why, in the history of the West over many centuries, antisemitism of the theoretical, pseudo-explanatory kind has exercised such a hold over the minds of intellectuals. That question occupies chapter 10.
chapter 10 serves, among other things, to provide, after the long intervening discussion in part III of the history and politics of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, a bridge between part II and part IV (“Judaism Defaced”), and thus to return the argument of the book from the narrow concerns of chapters 6–9 to the wider issues of the nature and functions of political antisemitism across the centuries broached in chapters 1–5.
Antisemitism as a delusive theory concerning the collective power and guilt of the Jews usually includes one or more items drawn from a small collection of equally ill-founded beliefs concerning the nature of the Jewish religion and outlook itself. The business of part IV (chapters 11–13) is to examine in some detail the three most salient of these beliefs. According to the first of these, Judaism, the supposedly crabbed fabric of grotesque medieval absurdities and rationalizations to which observant Jews are widely supposed to cling with irrational fanaticism, is a primitive religion, a religion of vengeance rather than love, long since superseded by the “new covenant” of Christianity or the rise of Islam. According to the second, the religious and moral law (halakah) at the center of Judaism is a tissue of absurd and arbitrary rules to which the observant Jew abandons his power to direct his own life according to his own reason. The function of these laws is, it is supposed, merely to bind Jews into a closed community in moral isolation from the rest of the human race; a community, whose crabbed “particularism,” according to the third of the beliefs to be examined in part IV, stands in stark contrast to the generous universalism characteristic of both Christianity and the moral philosophies of the Enlightenment.
There is much more charged by antisemites to the account of the Jews, but these three historically prominent accusations will do to be going on with. They are childish and, for anyone with the least acquaintance with actual Jewish life and thought, childishly easy to refute. But without a clear sense of what makes them absurd, it is difficult to emancipate the mind fully from the influence of antisemitic fantasy in its role as a body of pseudo-explanatory theory.
Finally, it is a main contention of this book that the fantasy of exceptional Jewish power and guilt, while a good deal more harmful to Jews than to non-Jews, is also harmful to non-Jews. It corrupts institutions and political parties, encourages bad political and administrative decisions, sometimes at the highest level, and generally darkens counsel. These matters are touched on, more cursorily, no doubt, than they deserve, in the three chapters of part V (“Antisemitism as a Problem for Non-Jews”) that conclude the book.
Ten years ago, I published one of the earliest books to appear on “the new antisemitism.”13 In that book, I argued, among other things, that the primary, the originating habitat of antisemitism is not, or not only, the individual mind but in addition and more centrally, the public consciousness manifest in what I there called climates of opinion. The implication of that shift of focus, I suggested, was that we should move from treating antisemitism as a quirk of individual psychopathology to treating it as a type of social or cultural pathology, and therefore as something for which responsibility, and at least the basic tools required for understanding and resistance, may reasonably be regarded as generally shared.
The object of the present book is, in effect, to take up that thought again but this time to develop it a good deal further and more systematically than was possible in 2006. It is not merely that my thoughts on these matters have changed and developed a good deal over the intervening years. Over the past decade, a substantial academic and extra-academic literature of remarkably high quality has grown up around the topic, the work of a formidable collection of academics and media commentators, not to mention major political figures of the calibre of Manuel Valls, until recently prime minister of France, Irwin Cotler, lately attorney general of Canada, or the former Soviet dissident and later Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky in Israel. To this recent body of work, either to borrow or to dissent, I shall be making constant and extensive reference in what follows. If that to any extent proves helpful in making this literature better known to the general reading public, I shall be well content.
NOTES
1. Robert Booth, “Antisemitic Attacks in UK at Highest Levels Ever Recorded,” The Guardian, Thursday, February 5, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/05/antisemitic-attacks-uk-community-security-trust-britain-jewish-population.
2. Aftab Ali, “Oxford University Labour Club Co-chair, Alex Chalmers, Resigns Amid Anti-Semitism Row,” The Independent, Wednesday February 17, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/oxford-university-labour-club-co-chair-alex-chalmers-resigns-amid-anti-semitism-row-a6878826.html.
3. Rich 2016, 239.
4. Rossman-Benjamin 2015, 218.
5. Rossman-Benjamin 2015, 230–31.
6. Michael Kaplan, “Attacks on France’s Jews Surge amid Concerns of Rising Anti-Semitism in Europe,” International Business Times, July