Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
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is thinking, speaking, or acting injuriously toward Jews without sufficient warrant, because they are Jews.
If we wish to screen out cases like that of the tranquility-loving neighborhood, it is hard to see how we can avoid adopting this or some equivalent reformulation of definition 2. But to take that route is, as Kenneth Marcus shows, to risk arriving at a definition that can serve to disguise rather than expose the true incidence of antisemitism.
A specific case will serve to display both the nature and the extent of the problem. Now famous in France, it is that of the murder of Ilan Halimi. In January 2006, a French Muslim gang calling itself Les Barbares (The Barbarians) kidnapped a young French Jew, Halimi, torturing him over a three-week period before abandoning him in a wood near a train station to which he crawled before dying of his wounds. The French police, along with public officials at levels up to and including that of the office of the Minister of the Interior, were at some pains to deny any suggestion that the attack was antisemitic in character, in effect justifying this stand by appeal to what one might term the Glock/Stark Amendment. They accepted, that is to say, assurances by the leader of Les Barbares, Youssuf Fofana, that Halimi had not been targeted because he was a Jew but merely because the gang believed Jews in general to be rich. Halimi’s injuries were certainly savage enough to suggest far greater interest on the part of the gang in torturing their victim than in making money from him. Despite this, however, the French public authorities, including the then interior minister and subsequent president Nicolas Sarkozy, continued for a considerable time to insist that Halimi had been the victim not of an antisemitic attack but merely of a kidnapping gone wrong. They revised this stance only when another member of the Barbares confessed that the gang had burned Halimi on the forehead with a cigarette because he was a Jew.
This case neatly displays the main problem with definition 3, that its terminal clause makes the question of whether an act is or is not antisemitic appear to depend on the motives, goals, or intentions of its perpetrator. It makes an act’s status as antisemitic or non-antisemitic depend on issues regarding which the perpetrator himself is generally supposed to enjoy the determining voice. If the perpetrators are prepared, like Fofana’s unreliable colleague, to vaunt their antisemitism, then well and good. If, on the other hand (in tune with the majority of Western antisemites at the moment), they wish to disguise it, they need only equip their conduct with some plausible motive allowing them to admit freely to hostility toward Jews while absolving themselves of hostility to Jews because they are Jews.
IS ANTISEMITISM A GENUINE CONCEPT?
The successive difficulties encountered by the above three opening stabs at a definition might prompt one to wonder whether the enterprise itself is misconceived. Does the term antisemitism, when it comes down to it, express any clear notion susceptible of definition in the first place? There is a strain of reputable opinion in the social sciences that thinks not. I am thinking in particular here of the late Gavin Langmuir (1924–2005), a distinguished and influential Stanford medieval historian widely celebrated for his work on the history of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. In his Towards a Definition of Antisemitism, Langmuir (1990) makes the sound point that the very term antisemitism is of very recent vintage and is inseparably bound up with a body of nineteenth-century German theorizing, quasi-anthropological in character, that can now, many think, be regarded as effectively defunct. “‘Antisemitism’ was invented about 1873 by Wilhelm Marr to describe the policy towards Jews based on ‘racism’ that he and others advocated. … As elaborated in the Aryan myth, it maintained that Jews were a race and that, not only were they, like other races, inferior to the Aryan race, but also that Jews were the most dangerous of those inferior races.”6
If Rassentheorie of that type is for us nowadays, as Langmuir hopes, merely another forgotten essay in pseudoscience, and if the original meaning of antisemitism—as, roughly speaking, “hostility to Jews considered as an inferior and dangerous race”—was so bound up with “Aryan myth” as to be reasonably supposed to have died with it, then what residual meaning, if any, can we nowadays suppose to attach to the term?
There is an answer to this question, not infrequently canvassed by Jewish commentators (in chap. 4 we shall find Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin offering a version of it) from which Langmuir strongly dissents.7 “Although [various] adjectives [are often used to] distinguish different rationalisations for the hostility, the noun ‘antisemitism’ still implies a constancy in the basic cause and quality of hostility against Jews at any one time. … Like the Aryan myth, this conception of ‘antisemitism’ depends, I would argue, on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or illicit reification, in this case on the unproven assumption that for centuries, and despite innumerable changes on both sides, there has been a distinctive kind of reaction of non-Jews directed only at Jews that corresponds to the concept evoked by the word ‘antisemitism.’”8
In effect, Langmuir argues that in Jewish hands this story frequently becomes little more than an inversion of the Aryan myth. “What makes that fallacy attractive to many people, I would suggest, is their prior assumption that, whether by divine choice or otherwise, there has always been something uniquely valuable in Jewishness, because Jews have always incorporated and preserved uniquely superior values. They then assume that the resolute and enduring expression of those unique values by Jews has aroused a correspondingly unique type of hostility against them as bearers of that unique quality throughout their existence.”9
Langmuir’s objection to this way of looking at things is, on the one hand, that it is in principle as viciously “ethnocentric” as the Aryan myth itself, and on the other hand, more interestingly to my mind, that it has served, unhelpfully, to focus the attention of many theorists of antisemitism on Jews and Jewish culture instead of, more usefully, on non-Jews and non-Jewish culture.
Such a perspective might fairly be called ethnocentric; and, not surprisingly, those who accept it have not felt any need to examine non-Jews carefully to see whether the quality of their hostility to Jews has in fact been unique and unchanging. Yet the quality of hostility against Jews cannot be determined by premises about Jews, for it is a characteristic of the mentality of non-Jews, not of Jews, and it is determined, not by the objective reality of Jews, but by what the symbol “Jews” has signified to non-Jews. Moreover, the kind of hostility evoked has not been directed only against Jews.10
Three claims are being advanced in the brief passage to which these two citations belong. They are (1) that the idea that there is something “uniquely valuable in Jewishness” is both false and ethnocentric (that is, presumably, as racially condescending as the Aryan myth itself); (2) that for an understanding of antisemitism we must look not to the nature of “Jewishness” but to the mentality and culture of non-Jews; (3) that, when so examined, hostility to Jews turns out to possess no feature unique to it; no feature, that is to say, that is not equally manifested by hostility directed against other groups.
Of these three claims, (2), I shall argue, is in the main true; (1) and (3) false. So far as (2) goes, I am in entire agreement with Langmuir. That antisemitism is a fundamentally non-Jewish phenomenon and that its nature and incidence are determined not by objective reality, Jewish or otherwise, but by a system of political fantasies internal to non-Jewish culture, are among the more central conclusions argued for in the present work.
By contrast, (1) seems to me not only unhappily expressed but factually mistaken. To anyone with an ear for antisemitic discourse, some of Langmuir’s more dismissive phrases—“whether by divine choice or otherwise,” “uniquely superior values,” “ethnocentric”—must seem themselves dismally redolent of “what the symbol ‘Jews’ has signified to non-Jews.” Any persistent and fair-minded student of Judaism and Jewish culture will find that both embody a multitude of insights and styles of conduct both valuable in themselves and unique to those traditions. The difficulty with envisaging antisemitism as a response to what is “uniquely valuable in Jewishness” is merely that the aspects of Jewishness that a dispassionate observer might wish to regard as falling under that rubric are for the most part unknown and invisible to non-Jews.
The only argument