ANTISEMITISM: A FEATURE, NOT A BUG
IDEAS ABOUT JEWS ARE AT THE HEART OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION.
Negative ideas about Jews and Judaism — what we call antisemitism — are not an incidental bugbear of our society. They are the ideological foundations on which our civilization was built.
This is my takeaway from the landmark book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, by David Nirenberg.
In preparation for a presentation tomorrow, I have reread this 2013 tome, which argues that “anti-Judaism” is not just a prejudice held by some people against Jews. It is an entire way of thinking that has precious little to do with actual Jews and everything to do with creating an integrated society that unites insiders (Christian European-descended people, as well as Muslims and others who employ the tactic) by isolating and vilifying Jews and Jewish ideas.
Nothing unites people like a common enemy, and Jews (or Judaism), however caricatured and misrepresented, have played that irreplaceable role for millennia.
Nirenberg, an American historian, argues that “Judaism” is a conceptual tool in Western culture: a symbol for whatever a society wants to condemn as stubborn, materialistic, literal-minded, legalistic or spiritually blind. Real Jews suffer from this, but the deeper claim is that the idea of “Judaism” has been repeatedly used as a key building block of Western thought.
“Judaism,” in this construction, is less about actual Judaism than a catch-all for everything that those who practice anti-Judaism hate. It is about “Judaism” as an idea, not only Jews as people.
Nirenberg distinguishes attacks on actual Jews (violence, expulsions, discrimination) from the ways “Judaism” functions as a negative symbol inside Christian, Muslim, and secular thought.
What makes anti-Judaism so resilient, though, is that it can function just as well (or better) where no Jews exist. This is another reason why I always call anti-Jewish bias the Perfect Prejudice™: You can hate Jews without ever meeting one. (In fact, antisemitism works better that way, since it is usually a form of dehumanization that is challenged by actual, living Jews.)
Nirenberg is a penetrating thinker and his book is a dense, difficult read in many ways. So I doubt he would appreciate my over-simplifications, but my reading is this: Negative ideas about Jews are a feature, not a bug, of Western civilization.
“Judaism” is a durable stand-in for what the dominant culture fears or rejects.
Most forms of racism construct the object as evil. Antisemitism (and Nirenberg’s formulation of anti-Judaism) flips this scenario. Or, rather, doubles down on it, making it a two-way mirror.
Not only is everything Jewish evil.
Everything evil is Jewish.
Hating or blaming Jews is a narrow approach to a particular people.
Condemning everything abhorrent as “Jewish” universalizes this hatred and blaming into something much more vast and malleable.
Throughout history and even today, whatever and whoever is out of favor is condemned as “Jewish,” whether they are Jewish or not.
Again, to massively oversimplify Nirenberg’s scholarly work, “Jewish” as a disparaging catch-all for all things detested is like the high school denunciation “gay.” Kids don’t call each other “gay” (necessarily) because they think the other kid is actually homosexual. They use it because it is the worst thing they can think of, an all-purpose umbrella for everything they despise.
Except the stage on which anti-Judaism plays out is not high school. It is our civilization writ large. And, Nirenberg suggests, our entire societal self-definition is built on opposition to Judaism and Jewish identity.
I oversimplify Nirenberg’s work by conflating anti-Judaism and what we generally call antisemitism, but the Venn diagram overlaps a lot. Anti-Judaism is a more specific thing, but it often justifies attacks on Jewish people.
I can’t think of too many more depressing theses than the idea that antisemitism (or anti-Judaism) is not just another form of racism we need to fight, but rather an intrinsic characteristic that defines our civilization — and us as products of that civilization.
That suggests that defeating antisemitism (or anti-Judaism) would require a complete redesign of our civilizational DNA.
Of course, Nirenberg may be wrong. Maybe anti-Judaism is not irrevocably baked into our civilizational makeup.
But he makes a pretty strong case.
Depressing, I know. But, if you’ve given any thought to antisemitism, you probably didn’t expect it would be an easy thing to overcome.
Better to know what we’re up against.
If you want to explore these ideas more, I’m presenting on this topic tomorrow at 5 PM Pacific / 8 PM Eastern as part of Upstanders Canada’s Idea Lounge series. You could watch the Superbowl. Or you could join me to discuss Anti-Judaism. Totally up to you.
Register here to join me tomorrow.
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Yes, the Nirenberg book is excellent. People should read it for the well researched history. Yet it still remains a puzzle for me. The foundation of the West is built upon Athens and Jerusalem. Obviously, Christianity was birthed by the ancient Jews, so the liberal West would simply not exist if it weren't for the Jews. On the other hand, Islam attacked the West for centuries in an attempt to destroy it and extend the Islamic empire. More recently, we have seen tens of thousands of Islamic terrorist attacks on both the West and on other Muslims, and now we see an attempt to take over by the West by immigration. Western leaders shrug.
This is madness. We are living by lies, and civilization cannot exist under such circumstances. It's cultural suicide.
At the opening ceremony of the winter Olympics, Europeans booed only one country. It's not hard to guess which one. These folks are fine with all the dictatorships in the world, but the one Jewish state that has been defending itself from a genocidal Islam...boo. This is incredibly ugly. What we have been seeing is parhological, an illness that seems to have no cure. We were naive to think that the Holocaust would finally innoculate people against the disease.
I began to notice this when I started attending services in Christian churches. I was born and raised in the United States and I had never heard words that criticized Jews and Judaism in such a black and white, good/bad way!
The only Jews who were good were the ones who followed Jesus. The ones who didn’t weren’t necessarily all horrible and evil, but they were you could say politely they were in the dark. They were mistaken. They were out of it.
And I never could figure out how a person could leave church services and then go out and see an interact with Jews without carrying that negative attitude with them.