Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
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motive of money is discounted for that reason, what possible motives are we left with? Sadism is one possible answer; extreme resentment is another. If pure sadism had been the motive, it would have been equally well served by choosing a non-Jew. What about resentment? If that had been social resentment, the supposed resentment of the poor, despised Maghrebin immigrant against the wealth and indifference of white French society, then the same argument applies. Why not choose just any white Frenchman to torture? Why choose a Jew particularly?
The only remaining option for the inquiry, it seems to me, is that the motive was antisemitic resentment. Political antisemitism of the classical European variety is now no longer a solely European delusion but is also very widespread in the present-day Muslim world. And in the peculiar demonology of political antisemitism, “the Jew” figures as the fons et origo of everything that is to be resented in this world. Therefore, for people in the grip of antisemitic delusion, to torture and kill a Jew, any Jew, is to direct one’s anger at the real thing, as it were, the ultimate fount of all that is not working, all that is poor, miserable, and contemptible in the lives of the killers.
At the time of writing (early 2018), following the massive attacks of 2015–16 on French and Christian targets in Paris, Nice, and Sainte-Étienne-du-Rouvray, it seems less likely that if a case like Halimi’s were to occur today, the French authorities would attempt to pass it off as a kidnapping gone wrong. But there is doubtless still some way to go before people finally grasp that in order to understand such things from the inside, we need to recognize, as the French authorities in 2006 clearly did not, the sad fact that political antisemitism, antisemitism of exactly the type formerly disseminated by the Nazi magazine Der Stürmer, is once more becoming as widespread in the world as it was in prewar Central Europe. Moreover, we are still far from a widespread understanding that this is a far more dangerous phenomenon in its power to provoke and to its devotees to justify senseless extreme violence than its milder and far less lethal congener, social or racist antisemitism.
CONCLUSION: THE DEFINITION OF ANTISEMITISM
In conclusion, it may be useful to summarize the foregoing arguments in a formal definition of the term antisemitism as follows:
Antisemitism is thinking, speaking, or acting injuriously toward Jews, without sufficient warrant, because they are Jews. It has two main variants; social or racist antisemitism, and political antisemitism.
Social antisemitism is a form of xenophobia or racism. It targets individual Jews, whom it represents, as in the case of racism directed against other groups, in terms of stereotypes lacking widespread applicability but possessing a kernel of truth. It aims at the exclusion of Jews from the society of those prejudiced against them.
Political antisemitism is a cultural formation in the form of a delusive system of beliefs claiming the power to explain a wide variety of human social and political phenomena. It targets Jews (or “the Jews”) considered as a collectivity. Against the Jewish collectivity, it asserts (in their most general form consistently over the past two millennia) a range of entirely delusive accusations, among them an absolute commitment to evil, conspiratorial organization of an essentially impenetrable kind, and vast power to harm any non-Jewish society that harbors Jews. These beliefs necessarily commit devotees of political antisemitism—as the only means, as they see it, of saving the world from Jewish iniquity—to pursuing the goal, not merely of excluding Jews from non-Jewish society but of altogether eliminating from the world either the entire Jewish community or at the very least any organized political entity that it may succeed in setting up.
In the next two chapters, we shall look into two obvious issues raised by this definition. We shall first ask what functions political antisemitism serves in non-Jewish culture and politics, and second, why the Jews, of all people, should have become the subject of the extraordinary collection of delusive beliefs that together make up the content of political antisemitism.
NOTES
1. Allport 1954.
2. I am grateful to my friend David Conway for pointing out the possibility of this objection. I am not sure that it is one that would occur to many readers, but it still seems worthwhile putting it out of court early in the argument.
3. Marcus 2015. One of the virtues of this book is its author’s wide practical knowledge of the legal and constitutional difficulties obstructing the defense of American Jews against antisemitism in the new forms that it began to assume toward the end of the twentieth century. Marcus is an eminent lawyer and academic, who has served as staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights and who is at present president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which he founded.
4. Glock and Stark 1966, 102.
5. Marcus 2015, 120.
6. Langmuir 1990, 311.
7. Prager and Telushkin 2003.
8. Langmuir 1990, 314–15.
9. Langmuir 1990, 315.
10. Langmuir 1990, 315.
11. Langmuir 1990, 321.
12. Langmuir 1990, 352.
13. Langmuir 1990, 306.
14. This and the preceding two citations, Langmuir 1990, 351.
15. Langmuir 1990, 351–52.
16. Langmuir 1990, 307.
17. Marcus 2015, 98. The works Marcus cites in this connection are Georg Christoph Berger Waldenegg, Antisemitismus: “Eine gefa..hrliche Vokabel”? Diagnose eines Wortes (Vienna: Bôhlau, 2001), and Léon Poliakov, The History of Antisemitism, vol. 1, From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vanguard, 1974).
18. Marcus 2015, 192.
19. Marcus 2015, 35.
20. Marcus 2015, 193.
21. Marcus 2015, 193–94.
22. Marcus 2015, 193.
23. Marcus 2015, 6.
24. Earlier, less developed versions of this distinction are to be found in Harrison 2006 and 2013 (see especially pp. 14–17).
25. I should explain, perhaps, for the benefit of the nervous reader who may feel his or her “safe space” to be infringed by these words, that I was baptized and brought up a Catholic.
26. Many of them collected in Cheyette 1993.
27. Marcus 2015, 193.
28. Sartre 1948, 41.
29. Marcus 2015, 155–59.
30. Natan Sharansky, “Anti-Semitism in 3D,” Jerusalem Post, February 23, 2004. Retrieved from: https://www.swuconnect.com/insys/npoflow.v.2/_assets/pdfs/flyers/sharanskyAntisemitism.pdf.
Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated as circumstantially as their intervention in European affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, and no one wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life.
—Ludwig