possessed aspects and characteristics capable of renewing and reinforcing, among non-Jews encountering them, the sense of threat and hostility diffused by the imaginary construct?
Such doubts tend to revive the claim central to Prager and Telushkin’s argument: “Antisemitism is, as Jews have always regarded it: a response to Jews”17—that is to say, to “real” Jews committed to the actual outlook known as Judaism, not to imaginary Jews supposedly actuated by some mishmash of fundamentally non-Jewish concerns arbitrarily baptized by their enemies with the name “Judaism.”
What aspects of “real” Judaism might make it particularly repugnant to its enemies? Prager and Telushkin consider the following to be fundamental:
1.Jewish monotheism has challenged the legitimacy of the religious beliefs of others.
2.The affirmation of national identity by Jews has “intensified antisemitic passions among those who viewed this identity as threatening their own nationalism.”18
3.“[The] doctrine of the Jews’ divine election [‘chosenness’] has been a major cause of antisemitism.”19
4.“From its earliest days, the raison d’être of Judaism has been to change the world for the better (in the words of an ancient Jewish prayer recited daily, ‘to repair the world [tikkun olam] under the rule of God’). This attempt to change the world, to challenge the gods, religious or secular, of the societies around them, and to make moral demands upon others (even when not done expressly in the name of Judaism) has constantly been a source of tension.”20
5.“As a result of the Jews’ commitment to Judaism, they have led higher-quality lives than their neighbours in almost every society in which they have lived. For example, Jews have nearly always been better educated; Jewish family life has usually been more stable; Jews aided one another more than their non-Jewish neighbours aided each other; and Jewish men have been less likely to become drunk, beat their wives, or abandon their children. … This higher quality of life among Jews, which, as we shall show, directly results from Judaism, has, as one would expect, provoked profound envy and hostility among non-Jews.”21
I have two worries, of rather different kinds, concerning this list. The first worry is logical and methodological. Prager and Telushkin begin by demanding a unitary, universal explanation of antisemitism, in opposition to those theorists who claim, like Arendt, that the causes of antisemitism change from age to age: that eternal antisemitism is a fabrication. My worry here is simply that the above list of five putative causes of antisemitism is too diverse, too heterogeneous, to figure as the required unitary account.
The second worry concerns the individual entries and whether any of them possess much in the way of explanatory power given the extraordinary, not to say bizarre, character of the attitudes and events they are supposed to explain.
For a start, I can confirm as a non-Jew that the higher quality of Jewish life, in precisely the respects cited by Prager and Telushkin, is quite often remarked on by non-Jews. I recently came across a fellow non-Jew, brought up in the East End of London, who does remember as a child in the 1930s hearing this being cited as one among a litany of grudges against the Jews. Yet until I met her, I would have had to say that I myself had never heard it cited except, in tones of approval, by people one would tend to identify as pro-Jewish rather than the reverse. Of the other four allegedly rebarbative features of Judaism, three (monotheism, national identity, commitment to the improvement of life in this world) are widely shared with non-Jewish sects, national entities, and political movements of many kinds. If such commitments were sufficient to explain the kinds of murderous resentment that Jews have endured, why have not those other groups found themselves similarly afflicted?
That leaves us with “chosenness.” Plenty of casual conversations as well as a brief tour of antisemitic websites will confirm that there is quite a widespread belief among non-Jews to the effect that Jews consider themselves “better than other people.” Equally, people who hold that belief do quite often connect it with the idea that Jews regard themselves as the “chosen people.” But how far will this take us as an explanation? Whatever the accuracy of such beliefs, arrogance and social exclusiveness are scarcely the exclusive property of the Jews. Supercilious snobbery in the non-Jewish world, however, never evokes the bizarre set of responses characteristic of political antisemitism. For the latter, therefore, we must seek some other explanation.
That is what I propose to attempt in the remainder of this chapter and the next. My object is to locate an answer to the question “Why the Jews?” that mediates between the positions of Prager and Telushkin on the one hand and David Nirenberg on the other hand.
To be acceptable, that answer should, on the one hand, satisfy two plausible demands of Prager and Telushkin. It should (1) be universal, that is to say, unitary across time, and (2) consist at some fundamental level in a response to “real” Jews and/or Judaism. On the other hand, it should be such as to leave unchallenged David Nirenberg’s equally plausible and superbly argued account of the centrality to Western culture of an enduring engagement with a range of essentially Eurocentric delusions concerning Judaism and its adherents.
SOME CONDITIONS OF ADEQUACY
The answer I have in mind is, as we shall see, a complex one. It lacks the elegant simplicity and evidence to inspection that compel immediate assent. If it is to carry conviction, that can only be because it manages to meet criteria of adequacy that require it to explain things otherwise difficult to make sense of: things that any adequate answer to the question “Why the Jews?” ought to be capable of explaining.
What might those things, or at any rate some of them, be? For a start, any decent explanation of political antisemitism, at least of the kind we are after, ought to be capable of explaining why the content of political antisemitism is for the most part delusive, if political antisemitism is in any sense a response to real Jews or real Judaism.
Second, an adequate account ought to be up to explaining why the fear and resentment channeled by political antisemitism target the Jews considered as a collectivity, rather than Jews as individuals: why, for example, people terrified by the supposed threat posed by Jews can sometimes say, and even say truthfully, that “some of their best friends” are Jews.
Third, if the discourse of “anti-Judaism” has been as widespread and historically recurrent as Nirenberg shows it to have been, then neither its persistence nor its ability to arise over and over again, in new forms and in very different sets of historical circumstances, can plausibly be accounted for merely in terms of cultural inertia. There must, that is to say, be some advantage or advantages accruing to those who find it expedient either to adopt or to reinvent it. A decent explanation of political antisemitism ought, therefore, to offer some account of what those advantages might be.
Fourth, an adequate answer to the question “Why the Jews?” ought to be capable of addressing the curious fact that while social antisemitism has displayed the appeal to a broad social constituency characteristic of other kinds of social prejudice—prejudice against blacks, say, or against Asians, or the Irish—political antisemitism has found its main constituency among intellectuals. (I use the term intellectual here not only in the broad sense that includes the clergy, and other highly educated groups in Western societies but also, and crucially, in the narrow sense that restricts the term to writers, theologians, philosophers, political theorists, and others exercising major kinds of influence over the content and development of Western culture.) Why, in short, should political antisemitism, from John Chrysostom to Luther, Voltaire to Marx, Wagner to Shaw, Wells to Eliot, have displayed so compelling a hold over the minds of deeply thoughtful people, people highly educated by the standards of their day?22
A fifth question is that of the
