Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
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marked love of marijuana and wild parties; and so on.
What is wrong with the stereotypes on which social prejudice feeds is not that they fail of—at least partial—truth but rather that they lack the generality that they claim for themselves. On the one hand, there are plenty of West Indians, Jews, women, Scots, and Englishmen who fail utterly to conform to the usual stereotypes. On the other hand, there are always, equally, plenty of people around who conform exactly to one or other of them but who happen, unfortunately, not to be Jews, West Indians, Scots, Englishmen, or women as the case may be. Sober, productively employed West Indians are in fact as common as marijuana-puffing white party animals. Writers as good as Virginia Woolf or Cynthia Ozick happen to be female; ones as bad as Jeffrey Archer happen to be male. Curiously enough, the two least financially astute persons I have encountered in my life happened both to be Jews, while on the other hand, the impressive houses of gentile pop stars, footballers, television celebrities, industrial magnates, and bankers to whose stalwartly non-Jewish fingers, unsullied by the least contact with a tallit or a siddur, money has displayed a truly remarkable capacity to stick, can be found all over what the British call the home counties. And while the presence of Jews in the liberal professions may indeed be out of proportion to the relative size of their community, so is that of a number of other groups, including beneficiaries of a private education, Londoners, British Hindus, and children of the professional class. No doubt there are cultural reasons for these disparities, but rather than disparaging them, discontent might be better devoted to inquiring into them with a view to reproducing them in communities—such as that of beneficiaries of a British state education—at present comparatively disadvantaged in these respects.
I turn now to the second type of phenomenon that satisfies D0: political prejudice. Political prejudice differs from social prejudice in a number of respects, three of which seem to me more fundamental than the rest. The first is that it is directed—in the first instance at least—not against individuals but against collective entities, real or imaginary. Second, it is driven emotionally not by contempt but by fear of the collectivity in question. Third, this fear is both supported and inculcated by a complex, theory-laden narrative that purports to explain why the collectivity in question is to be feared.
The difference between social and political prejudice can readily be exemplified in common life. One example is to be found in the differing forms taken by the anti-Catholic prejudice that used to be not uncommon in England. Social prejudice against Catholics involves dislike of individual Catholics as superstitious, idol worshipping, Jesuitical, and priest-ridden hypocrites incapable of thinking for themselves—and for all these reasons, not at all the sort of person one finds it pleasant to be forced into contact with in daily life or to have brought home to the house by one’s less fastidious children.25 Someone politically prejudiced against Catholics, on the other hand, may find individual Catholics amusing, enjoy playing chess with a Jesuit friend, and so forth but entertain a holy fear of the hidden power of the Catholic Church and of such organizations as Opus Dei, concerning whose sinister machinations he or she will be prepared to inform in some detail anyone prepared to listen.
To conclude, the defining contrasts between social and political prejudice can be briefly summarized as follows:
C1.Social prejudice targets individuals; political prejudice targets collectivities.
C2.Social prejudice is driven emotionally by contempt, political prejudice by fear.
C3.Social prejudice justifies itself merely by appeal to a range of contemptuous stereotypes to which individuals of the despised group are held to conform. Political prejudice, by contrast, embodies some complex, theoretically elaborated narrative explaining why the targeted group, considered as an organized whole, is to be feared.
SOCIAL VERSUS POLITICAL ANTISEMITISM
Prejudice against Jews can also come in either or both of these two forms. Social prejudice against Jews—social antisemitism—sees individual Jews as, inter alia, greasy, hook nosed, money grubbing, noisy, overfamiliar, and overemotional alien vulgarians, too clever, moreover, for their own good: as thoroughly disgusting types, that is to say, with whom no English gentleman, however sadly short of the money that sticks so miraculously to Jewish fingers, would wish to associate either himself or his family. Such an evocation of the mind of the social antisemite is, like my earlier evocation of anti-Catholic animus, to some extent parodic; yet it does to a degree serve to capture both the content and the essential silliness of the thing. English literature and letters offer plenty of actual examples no less startling in their inanity.26
Political antisemitism on the other hand can in principle cohabit easily with friendship toward and even a high moral regard for individual Jews (the cant phrase, “Some of my best friends are Jews,” uttered by a political antisemite, may at times express no more than the truth, that is to say). This is the case because political antisemitism is driven not by contempt for Jews as individuals but by fear concerning the supposed “threat” posed by the Jewish people considered as an organized community.
Like other forms of political prejudice, political antisemitism disposes of a complex, theoretically elaborated explanatory account of what is to be feared from “the Jews” and why it is to be feared. The character of the beliefs that give it substance and direction are, however, as we have already seen in chapters 1 and 2, far stranger and far less in accord with any remotely plausible reading of reality than those that direct any other form of political prejudice.
I have in mind here generalized forms of the beliefs that in chapter 1, we found openly exposed in article 22 of the 1988 Hamas covenant and in chapter 2 covertly active in the debate over the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In neither case are the various indictments of the Jews we encountered in those chapters original, either to Hamas or to the American academics to be found on one wing of the uniqueness debate. On the contrary, versions of its main clauses can be found directing antisemitic discourse at most periods over the entire twenty centuries of the Common Era. The bulk of these variants can be assimilated to the following five claims:
PA1.The obsessive concern of Jews with their own interests and their indifference or contempt for the interests of non-Jews make them directly and solely responsible for human suffering on a scale far exceeding anything that can be alleged against any other human group, and in particular for whatever specific evil or evils (SEs) most concern this or that concrete version of political antisemitism.
PA2.The Jewish community is conspiratorially organized in the pursuit of its self-seeking and heinous goals to an extent that gives it demonic powers not to be suspected from the weak and harmless appearance of its individual members.
PA3.Through the efficacy of its conspiratorial organization and through its quasi-miraculous ability to acquire and manage money, the Jewish community has been able to acquire secret control over most of the main social, commercial, political, and governmental institutions of non-Jewish society.
PA4.Given the secret control exercised by world Jewry over (only apparently) non-Jewish institutions and given the obsessive concern of the Jewish community with its own interests to the exclusion of those of non-Jews, it is simply not feasible to remedy the evils occasioned by the presence of the Jews in non-Jewish society (and in particular SE) by any means short of the total elimination of the Jews.
PA5.Since the evils that the Jews do in the world (and in particular SE) owe their existence solely to Jewish wickedness, the elimination of the Jews will cause those evils to cease without the need for any further action on the part of non-Jews, whose world will, in the nature of things, return forthwith to the perfect state of order natural to it, from which it would never have lapsed had it not been for the mischievous interventions of the Jews.
It is to be noticed that these five beliefs are not logically independent