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 of scholarly attempts to arrive at a unitary answer to the question “Why the Jews?” understood as we have so far suggested.
Why such hatred and fear of a people who never constituted more than a small minority among those who most hated and feared them? Why, nearly always and nearly everywhere, the Jews?
Many answers have been offered by scholars. These include, most commonly, economic factors, the need for scapegoats, ethnic hatred, xenophobia, resentment of Jewish affluence and professional success, and religious bigotry. But ultimately these answers do not explain antisemitism; they only explain what factors have exacerbated it and caused it to erupt in a given circumstances. None accounts for the universality, depth and persistence of antisemitism. In fact, we have encountered virtually no study of this phenomenon that even attempts to offer a universal explanation of Jew-hatred. Nearly every study of antisemitism consists almost solely of historical narrative, thus seeming to indicate that no universal reason for antisemitism exists.10
In the dozen or so years since 2003, things have improved a little in the last of the respects they mention but possibly not in ways that would have satisfied Prager and Telushkin. What they see as important is not only the issue of universal versus piecemeal explanations of antisemitism. There is also the issue of “Judaizing” versus “de-Judaizing” explanations. They contend that “the traditional Jewish view that the Jews were hated because of Jewish factors” is the correct one.11 And they reject “modern attempts to dejudaize Jew-hatred, to attribute it to economic, social and political factors, and universalise it as merely another instance of bigotry, [that are] as opposed to the facts of Jewish history as they are to the historical Jewish understanding of antisemitism.”12 It is a problem for Prager and Telushkin, therefore, that the most impressive recent attempt to construct a universal answer to the question “Why the Jews?”—David Nirenberg’s “anti-Judaism”—offers in important respects a conspicuously “de-Judaizing” one.
Nirenberg’s central claim, with which I broadly agree, is that anti-Judaism is by no means an irrational hiatus in the edifice of Western thought and culture but rather an essential element in the construction of that edifice. This sets him, of course, entirely at odds with Arendt. “Her pithy mockery of approaches that looked to the long history of ideas about Judaism to understand modern ideologies—she dubbed these approaches ‘Eternal Anti-Semitism’—could serve as an ironic title for my own book.”13 At the same time, Nirenberg sees both the inception and the subsequent luxuriant development of the Western obsession with Jews and Judaism as minimally dependent on knowledge of or even contact with actual Jews. On the contrary, Nirenberg argues, what has rooted the obsession in Western culture is the fact that certain—for the most part hostile—stereotypes concerning Jews and Judaism have come to afford a means of conceptually articulating a range of issues having little to do with actual Jews or with the actual nature of Judaism but much to do with certain enduring problems and stresses internal to Western culture itself.
Thus, Nirenberg argues that Luther initially has recourse to the concept of Judaism as a means both of opposing and of conceptually bundling together various versions of nascent Protestantism more radical than his own, such as the Sabbatarianism of Oswald Glaid.14 All these people could in one way or another be classed—by other Protestant Christians—as “Judaizers.” And of course the effects of such metaphors, once introduced, are hard to keep within bounds.
For Luther, however, the sectarian struggle was not only against Christian “Judaizers,” but also against “real” Jews. He seems to have experienced the rise of Biblicist groups like Glaid’s as a wave of Jewish proselytism [for which, as Nirenberg later argues, no shred of historical evidence exists—BH] endangering entire provinces of Christendom. His own treatise aimed at such groups, “Against the Sabbatarians” of 1538, began with the claim that Jewish missionaries were converting Christians to Sabbath observance and circumcision. The treatise therefore took the form of a question “Whom should we believe more, the true, trustworthy God or the false, lying Jews?” His answer extended for thirty printed pages of polemic against the Jews, pages that flowed directly into “On the Jews and their Lies” and his other “cruel” works of 1543.15
What sets Nirenberg in opposition to Arendt is his concern as a historian of ideas to trace the interwoven continuity, across centuries, of such conceptually and polemically motivated deployments of the concepts “Jew” and “Judaism” among non-Jews, most often people with no inward understanding of Judaism or for that matter much in the way of contact with “real Jews.”
What sets him in opposition to Prager and Telushkin, on the other hand, is the gap his methodology as a historian of ideas introduces between, on the one hand, the consequences for real Jews of the salience of the notions Jew and Judaism in non-Jewish theological, cultural, and political debate and, on the other hand, the absence of any very evident causal link between those consequences and anything plausibly identifiable as a real characteristic of real Jews. As Nirenberg trenchantly puts it,
I am not interested in contributing to arguments, so often dominated by apologetics and anachronism, about whether Martin Luther was an anti-Semite or an architect of the Holocaust. My point is simply that Luther’s reconceptualization of the ways in which language mediates between God and creation was achieved by thinking with, about, and against Jews and Judaism. Insofar as these reconfigurations diminished the utility and heightened the dangers Jews posed to the Christian world, they had the potential to transform figures of Judaism and their fates. How powerful this potential might be, and what work it might perform in the future, were not Luther’s to control. In the event, his teachings woke into startled ferocity the long slumbering debate about the place of letter, law and work in the Christian world. The conflict raged far beyond the borders of the Bible, invaded many provinces of human thought and action, and ensured that the spectre of Judaism would stalk battlefields in which scarcely a real Jew was left alive.16
Are we to choose Nirenberg’s approach to the explanation of antisemitism over Prager and Telushkin’s or vice versa? Neither, at least exclusively, I would like to think. I shall argue here that both answer to certain aspects of the truth. Nirenberg powerfully confirms my own sense that the actual content of political antisemitism is both deeply delusive and profoundly divorced from engagement with the actual nature of Judaism or the actual character of any real Jewish community. At the same time, it seems to me that Nirenberg’s methods as a historian, sound and skillfully deployed as for the most part they are, work to deepen that divorce more than is entirely plausible. Could a largely un-Jewish Judaism have come to seem to non-Jews over many centuries to constitute as salient a key to the understanding of the world
