international Jewry and the world Jewish conspiracy. Hitler’s speeches abound in images of the Jews as disease: “All that which is for men a source of higher life … is for the Jew merely the means to an end, namely, the satisfaction of his lust for power and money. … His action will result in the tuberculosis of peoples.”32 “For hundreds of years, Germany was good enough to receive these elements [the Jews], although they possessed nothing except infectious political and physical diseases.”33
National Socialism was, of course, only one among the many European movements, over the entire period separating us from the ancient world, that have based their claims to power upon a claim to possess a unique capacity to restore society to political, social, and spiritual health. All such movements share with Nazism the need to explain away tendencies in society (private property, for instance, or working-class unrest, or religious dissent) that on the one hand can be made to seem inconsistent with whatever notion of social health the movement in question exists to peddle but that on the other hand are far too deeply rooted in the fabric of everyday human life to suit the political and ideological convenience of the movement.
Therefore, if our analysis of the functions of the metaphor of the Jews as disease is correct, then we should expect the discourse of political antisemitism to appear tempting to any movement aiming at political, social, moral, or spiritual renovation, when that movement finds itself faced with the need to explain away, as externally imposed, social phenomena threatening to its program of redemption that are in fact wholly internal to the society it proposes to redeem.
And that, in fact, is what we find. We have already noted one such example, drawn from Nirenberg: Luther’s transition from seeing Protestant “Judaizers” as a threat to his own conception of reformation to seeing real Jews as the real source of that threat. In the case of the philosophes—Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, whose ideas led to the French Revolution—Nirenberg’s discussion is similarly suggestive. He notes that at a time when actual Jewish settlement in France was negligible, the terms Jews and Judaism occur with remarkable frequency in the discourse of the philosophes. Nirenberg suggests acutely that the idea of “Jews” and “Jewishness,” even in the absence of actual exemplars of either, served the philosophes as a means of conceptualizing the limits of their conception of Enlightenment. In the imagination of the philosophes, Nirenberg argues, the Jews, in their extraordinary resistance to conversion, and the strength of their commitment to what was seen as an antiquated and obscurantist superstition, represented the limits of the power of reason to “regenerate” humankind.34 For Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws, the consequence of the medieval Christian forcing of Jews into the credit market had been that “commerce passed to a nation covered with infamy and soon was distinguished only by the most frightful usury, monopolies, the raising of subsidies and all dishonest means of acquiring money.”35
Nirenberg comments as follows on these antique speculations:
Because the Jews were generally imagined as the most fanatically irrational segment of the species (indeed, as the very origins of fanatical irrationality), they provided the perfect proving ground for the powers of Enlightenment. Perfect because Enlightenment won either way. If even the Jews could be “regenerated” then there were no limits to the emancipatory powers of Enlightenment anthropology. But if they could not, it simply meant that reason had reached the boundaries of its authority, and that the Jews lay on the other side [italics mine—BH]. For philosophes bent on exploring the boundaries of their anthropology, the Jews were a “limit case,” an example whose pursuit charts the extremes of a concept. In this case the limits were those of humanity, and the question “Can the Jews be regenerated?” was also the question “Are the Jews human?” In the words of the lawyer Pierre-Louis Lacretelle in his legal brief of 1776 on behalf of the Jews of Metz, “The real question in this case … is whether Jews are men.” Or as the philosophes more often put it “Is the Jew more a human or a Jew?”36
It will be evident how neatly the argument I have been developing in the preceding pages fits with these remarks of Nirenberg’s. If one is committed to the regeneration of humanity, then if humanity, for its part, seems obstinately committed to resisting the proffered regeneration, for example through its obdurate resistance to reason or its devotion to making money, things look bleak. But if irrational fanaticism and cupidity can be seen as vices leaking into humanity from a source located beyond its borders, then immediately things look brighter, the prospects for regeneration more realistic. Blaming such things on the Jews, that is to say, has the useful result of allowing one the luxury of regarding non-Jewish society as, if not altogether healthy, then at least as not suffering from a disease inherent in it, and so as capable of being restored to whatever counts for a given tribe of political theorists as health.
The same interplay of myth and interest is to be found in more recent examples. Bryan Cheyette’s Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 is a mine of such instances.37 Chayette shows how George Bernard Shaw (1912), for example, in his preface to Androcles and the Lion finds it convenient to articulate the political distinction he wishes to draw between “socialism” and “materialism” in terms of a more general and quasi-religious distinction between “baptism” and “circumcision.” “Throughout his Preface to this play Shaw contrasts the universalist world of ‘baptism’ with the particularist world of ‘circumcision’ which reinforces the binary opposition between a socialist Jesus and a materialist Jewry or, as he puts it elsewhere in the Preface, ‘God and Mammon.’ Shaw defines a ‘Christian’ as someone who ‘to this day’ is ‘in religion a Jew initiated in baptism instead of circumcision’ (483) and, at the same time, points to the need to ‘make Christ a Christian’ and ‘melt the Jew out of him’ (487).”38
Shaw’s political interests in the play, in other words, are in forging a link between Christianity and the socialism just at that point beginning to achieve a foothold in British politics. Britain was at that historical moment an overwhelmingly Christian country; yet it was also a country in which a large majority of people of all classes, while certainly Christian in religion, were sharply opposed to socialism in politics. It is therefore to the advantage of Shaw’s political project to be able to represent a commitment to Christianity as in some sense intrinsically a commitment to socialism.
To achieve that effect, Shaw needs some way of associating the denial of socialism with a denial of Christianity. This is the work done for him by the myth of “materialist Jewry.” The myth works for him in two closely connected ways. By allowing him to equate the distinction between baptism and circumcision with that between God and Mammon, it allows Shaw on the one hand to suggest that socialism is the natural political home for the vast majority of his Christian fellow citizens. But on the other hand, that equation allows him in addition to defame opposition to socialism by associating it with a marginal and despised group: a group, moreover, not only placed by its religion beyond the limits of Christian society but also offering through the mythic association of Jews with money, a permanent source of infection of the baptized Christian world by the world of circumcision with its insidious fidelity to the forces of Mammon.
At this comparatively early stage in Shaw’s thinking, the disease metaphor shows its face in a more or less explicit form in the phrase “melt the Jew out of him”—as if what were required to cure Christian/socialist society of the infection represented by the forces of Mammon/circumcision were somehow analogous to relieving a cold by sitting in a sauna or steam room. But as the century wears on, both the disease analogy and its implications become more explicitly realized in Shaw’s writing.
Shaw, in his later plays, both stressed the pernicious nature of non-universal racial, national or religious particularisms and continued, with added stridency, to suggest “eugenic” means of ending such differences. His Preface to On the Rocks (1933), in this regard, was to state blandly that “extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out
