the minds of the believers, that threat consists primarily in the supposed hidden conspiratorial power of the Jewish community to dominate world events; the commitment of the community to the exercise of darkly demonic powers in the service of purely sectional Jewish interests; and more seriously still, in what believers imagine to be the collective recalcitrance of the Jewish community toward the very moral and political values that believers find most reasonable and compelling.
VI
The subject of the book is that fantasy: its extraordinary persistence over the centuries; its remarkable ability to transform and adapt itself, like some strange virus of the mind, in order to speak afresh to the concerns and anxieties generated by new historical circumstances; the functions it serves in non-Jewish culture and political life; and finally the reasons for its extraordinary recrudescence in liberal-left circles in the twenty-first century.
If we are to get clear about the nature of the recurrent delusion that “the Jews are to blame” for what are virtually always in reality failures and deficiencies of the non-Jewish world, we need to examine that delusion’s nature and content in relation to other kinds of prejudice, including other forms of antisemitic prejudice. This is the business of part I of this book: “Varieties of Antisemitism.”
Chapter 3, “Problems of Definition,” addresses these questions directly. But because questions of definition are best approached on the back of concrete and clearly described examples, chapters 1 and 2 introduce the formal arguments of Chapter 3 by offering two real-life examples of political discourse dominated by very different versions of the fantasy, the first taken from the Charter of the Islamist organization Hamas, the second drawn from American academic debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Part II—“Why the Jews?”—addresses the question of why the strange collection of beliefs constituting what I shall here call “political antisemitism” should have attached itself to the Jews, rather than to any other diasporic people.
The first four chapters (6–9) of part III return to the question of whether “anti-Zionism” and BDS are antisemitic movements, and if so, in what ways and to what extent. They argue that the burden of proof should be shifted from questions of motive to questions of fact. If antisemitism can manifest as fraudulent theory, then the issue of antisemitism in political discourse comes to turn, not on the motives or emotional dispositions of those who disseminate it, but on the alignment, or lack of it, between discourse and fact. If the various accounts of the nature and history of Israel on which the two movements depend for their ideological legitimacy are simply and straightforwardly true, then, indeed, we are dealing with legitimate political criticism. If, on the other hand, they systematically defy belief, to the extent of representing merely the results of a sustained attempt to cut, stretch, and deform the facts to fit the procrustean bed provided by the traditional categories of antisemitic theory, then the latter is the enterprise to which they belong, and there’s an end of the matter. This therefore becomes the central issue addressed in these chapters.
Those active in anti-Zionism and BDS are, almost without exception, academics, students, or university-educated people employed in politics, the arts, charitable organizations, or public service. If, as I argue, political antisemitism is an inextricable element in both, then that fact alone raises the larger question, already opened in part II, of why, in the history of the West over many centuries, antisemitism of the theoretical, pseudo-explanatory kind has exercised such a hold over the minds of intellectuals. That question occupies chapter 10.
chapter 10 serves, among other things, to provide, after the long intervening discussion in part III of the history and politics of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, a bridge between part II and part IV (“Judaism Defaced”), and thus to return the argument of the book from the narrow concerns of chapters 6–9 to the wider issues of the nature and functions of political antisemitism across the centuries broached in chapters 1–5.
Antisemitism as a delusive theory concerning the collective power and guilt of the Jews usually includes one or more items drawn from a small collection of equally ill-founded beliefs concerning the nature of the Jewish religion and outlook itself. The business of part IV (chapters 11–13) is to examine in some detail the three most salient of these beliefs. According to the first of these, Judaism, the supposedly crabbed fabric of grotesque medieval absurdities and rationalizations to which observant Jews are widely supposed to cling with irrational fanaticism, is a primitive religion, a religion of vengeance rather than love, long since superseded by the “new covenant” of Christianity or the rise of Islam. According to the second, the religious and moral law (halakah) at the center of Judaism is a tissue of absurd and arbitrary rules to which the observant Jew abandons his power to direct his own life according to his own reason. The function of these laws is, it is supposed, merely to bind Jews into a closed community in moral isolation from the rest of the human race; a community, whose crabbed “particularism,” according to the third of the beliefs to be examined in part IV, stands in stark contrast to the generous universalism characteristic of both Christianity and the moral philosophies of the Enlightenment.
There is much more charged by antisemites to the account of the Jews, but these three historically prominent accusations will do to be going on with. They are childish and, for anyone with the least acquaintance with actual Jewish life and thought, childishly easy to refute. But without a clear sense of what makes them absurd, it is difficult to emancipate the mind fully from the influence of antisemitic fantasy in its role as a body of pseudo-explanatory theory.
Finally, it is a main contention of this book that the fantasy of exceptional Jewish power and guilt, while a good deal more harmful to Jews than to non-Jews, is also harmful to non-Jews. It corrupts institutions and political parties, encourages bad political and administrative decisions, sometimes at the highest level, and generally darkens counsel. These matters are touched on, more cursorily, no doubt, than they deserve, in the three chapters of part V (“Antisemitism as a Problem for Non-Jews”) that conclude the book.
Ten years ago, I published one of the earliest books to appear on “the new antisemitism.”13 In that book, I argued, among other things, that the primary, the originating habitat of antisemitism is not, or not only, the individual mind but in addition and more centrally, the public consciousness manifest in what I there called climates of opinion. The implication of that shift
