The World's Oldest Obsession

Reviewed by Alexander H. Joffe

The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day
by Walter Laqueur
Oxford University Press, 2006, 228 pages.

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On the subject of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-Semitism, above all the Holocaust, Laqueur recounts the descent into horror with clarity and authority. He emphasizes here the break with past anti-Semitisms, explaining that while Christians and Muslims at least held out to the Jews a theoretical possibility of conversion, along with legally defined second-class status, for the Nazis this was inconceivable. The Jews were utterly unique and transcendently evil, deserving only of an absolute fate.

By far the most striking development of the past decades—and, thus, one that occupies fully a third of Laqueur’s book—is the shift of anti-Semitism from the Right to the Left. The growing number of Muslims in Europe is the single most important generator of anti-Semitism today. On this, Laqueur acidly notes that European anti-racist ideology and laws, created in the wake of the Holocaust, perversely serve to shield the identity of the new anti-Semites. As he points out, the infamous report by the European Monitoring Center on Xenophobia and Racism that spelled out Muslim anti-Semitism “had to be substantially rewritten because it called a spade a spade and not an agricultural implement.”

Anti-Semitism of the Right was easily explained as a function of xenophobia and conservative religious ideology. But left-wing anti-Semitism poses theoretical problems. As Laqueur states, “Left-wing spokesmen have maintained that… the Left, standing for peace, progress, and equal rights for all, cannot possibly be motivated by anti-Semitism. This is true if the yardstick is the religious anti-Semitism of the Churches or the Koran or the racialist anti-Semitism of the Nazis. Seen from this perspective, even the extreme Left cannot possibly be defined as anti-Semitic—they do not want to exterminate the Jews, they simply want them to disappear as Jews.”

This is where Israel enters the picture. As Laqueur explains, it is one of the fundamental tenets of belief of the extreme Left that “while other nations have the right to their own state, the Jews have not. They did live after all for two millennia without a state, and any attempt to turn back the wheels of history is essentially reactionary. It is bound to conflict with the vital interest of other people and dispossess them.” Therefore, he continues, “the extreme Left concludes that Arab and Muslim enemies of Israel are progressive because they are anti-American and anti-capitalist, however illiberal their ideology in other respects; they should be supported, whereas Israel and those affirming its right of existence are a priori enemies of progress and peace.” Laqueur, it should be noted, is hardly forgiving of Israel’s misdeeds. But he insists that, for Arabs and Muslims at least, “were it not for Israel and the occupied territories, the underlying aggression would find other outlets.”

It is self-evident that anti-Israelism is a modern manifestation of anti-Semitism; this particular Jewish collective is hated with all the accusations traditionally reserved for Jews at large. It stands accused of lying, stealing, cheating, racism, poisoning of wells, hating non-Jews, and all the rest, what might be described, in the words of the late Gavin Langmuir, as “realistic hostility” long transcended by “chimerical assertions.” Not surprisingly, Soviet anti-Semitism provides the pattern and perhaps inspiration for the new anti-Semitism and its focus on Zionism. The fall of modern communism saw adherents in search of a new creed, and the new internationalism of human rights, anti-globalization, and “transnational progressivism” fit the bill. And, as during the early days of Soviet Communism, when revolution failed to take hold throughout the world, the alleged bourgeois nature and imperialism of Jewish nationalism became a convenient target, a diversion from having to explain the empirical failure of twentieth- and twenty-first-century anti-liberalism and anti-capitalism.

The alliance between the extreme Left (a category in the West that includes a goodly number of intellectuals and academics), the “progressive” forces of radical Islam (whose excesses must, of course, be forgiven), and anti-globalization activists (for, after all, Israel and the United States are the quintessential engines of modern capitalism) is now fundamental. Globally, the movement of far-right paranoia about Jewish power and conspiracies, whose archetype is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has completely cross-fertilized the radical Left of Trotskyite anti-globalization activists and Muslims. Paranoia then migrated to the academic Left; the Elders transmuted to neo-cons, doing the unholy “clean break” work of the Likud party, guided by the evil spirit of Leo Strauss and aided by the omnipotent Israel Lobby. These latter developments are uniquely American, thanks lately to the neo-Larouchian analysis of Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, which have in turn been globalized. Therefore, if there is anything “new” to the “new anti-Semitism,” it is precisely this fusion of Left and Right, where anti-Semitism overcomes gravity and friction thanks to the Internet.

The primary self-defense strategy of Jews in the West was to emphasize their contribution to host societies. There were other strategies as well, such as Zionism and assimilation. Even so, Laqueur concludes, “as far as many assimilated Jews were concerned, the burden of being Jewish outweighed the positive elements.” But for some Jews, at least, the Jewish Question would not be solved by assimilation alone. Jewish self-hatred was the next logical step.

The “non-Jewish Jew,” as formulated by Isaac Deutscher, is a key that links Marxism and today’s Jewish Question. It was, according to Laqueur, the

unwritten party line according to which some groups were more progressive than others and Jews were considered reactionary. The very least that was demanded of Jews in order to be accepted as equals was to disassociate themselves totally from Judaism, not only from the Jewish religion or sympathies with Zionism but from any identification with other Jews, and to actively struggle against all national Jewish feelings. Only on these conditions could these non-Jewish Jews… hope to be treated as comrades in the fight for justice and progress. Even in these circumstances a residue of suspicion and hostility remained.

The central role of Jews in today’s opposition to Israel, from the truly scurrilous like Norman Finkelstein to the merely distasteful like Tony Judt, shows the degree to which some must go to escape the burden of Jewishness. Even Jewish tradition has been subverted to the cause of passing as progressive, as the cause of tikun olam and tendentious “social justice” readings of the prophets are enlisted to depict Israel and its supporters as a unique evil. The price of admission to respectable society has always been high.

Despite its various sources and iterations, however, Laqueur is clear that modern anti-Semitism radiates most powerfully from the Muslim world. Muslim ideologues of our own day are forthright in explaining their hatred of Jews as deeply rooted and essential to Islam. The re-export of the new hybrid from the Muslim world back to Europe—partly traditional European, partly re-Islamified, yet imbued with old-new apocalyptic vigor—completes the circle.

Laqueur’s approach usefully exposes the sheer unoriginality of anti-Semitism from antiquity through the post-modern period. The elements of the discourse are recombinant, and only occasionally updated. Anti-Semitic “discourse” is almost infinitely mutable; Jews are indicted on the basis of the universal or the particular, and obvious or hidden features; they are even hated in their absence. The result seems less of an identifiable anti-Semitic tradition than a system with a coherent “logic”. Anything and everything can be assimilated and explained, no matter how contradictory. Little wonder an early academic approach regarded anti-Semitism as a manifestation of mental illness.

Do societies, cultures, or even civilizations require Jews to be transcendentally or uniquely evil? The concepts of the “other” and “alterity” are severely shopworn, thanks to persistent overuse by “scholar-activists.” But to posit Jews as the Universal Other is to assert a psycho-social explanation that predicts similar results everywhere in all times. Recourse to the collective unconscious is not satisfying.

Refining this one step further, however, allows Jews to be seen as an unlikely duality that combines contradictory forces of innovation and tradition, both of which engender negative reactions. Jews are communities of interpretation, with some energies focused on maintaining group cohesion and identity, and others on diffusion and escape. The sheer tension of the contradiction has driven immense creativity—and not a few Jews to despair and self-loathing. Jews are engines of modernism as well as islands of conservativism. Put simply, there is something for everyone to dislike.

This conclusion puts Jews at, or at least near, the center of history, another assertion that drives anti-Semites mad. Is this yet another variation of the “lachrymose version” of Jewish history, but one where Jewish suffering is instrumental, possibly even a good and necessary feature of civilization? Or is it, to use an older vernacular, a sign of God’s having chosen the Jews for a historical mission? Where does all this lead? Eternal anti-Semitism? Eternal scapegoat? Eternal damnation? Laqueur is wisely silent, but the conundrum remains.

It is hard to come away from this book without a sense of despair, but the measure of its success is the thoughts, both negative and positive, that it inspires. Ours is a new Romantic Age where chimeras may be downloaded by the gigabyte. Laqueur has provided us with an admirable guide to the problem. Thus forewarned, we set out once again in search not of the answer, but merely of the latest solution.

Alexander H. Joffe is an archaeologist and historian. He is currently a director of research for the David Project, Center for Jewish Leadership.

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