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The Fight Over Jew-Hatred
Believe the Bible or not, it was prescient in its prophecy that God would bless those who bless the Jews and curse those who curse them.
Societies like the good and great United States that embrace Jews have thrived. Societies that turn on their Jews fare poorly.
But while there is wide agreement among Americans that Jew-hatred is bad, there is disagreement about what Jew-hatred is.
One view is that Jew-hatred is just one form of tribal hatred. In this view:
- The Jew is just an example of the powerless other.
- It’s not Jew-hatred if you hate Jews who are powerful or exceptionalist. Real fighters of Jew-haters stand with those Jews oppress.
- Jews whom Louis Farrakhan and Linda Sarsour hate are not really Jews. They are termites, not Semites. True haters of Jew-hatred are intersectionalists who hate fake Jews like those who are Zionist, rich, or Republican.
This view eliminates the Jew from the concept of Jew-hatred. Proponents of this view often stand with actual Jew-haters against actual Jews, all in the name of fighting Jew-hatred and its equivalents.
There’s another view of Jew-hatred.
It says that Jew-hatred centers on the Jews, and specifically:
- Jews’ claim to be the people chosen by the one true God to remain separate and to spread His word.
- Jews’ rejection of others’ ideas, values and gods.
- Jews’ insistence that Jews are different and special.
Jews’ who hold the first view often really hate Jews who hold the second.
The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson Tweeted yesterday about “the bizarre nexus between Israel and white nationalism” which were both forms of evil “ethno-nationalism” as “extreme right Zionists and anti-Semitic white nationalists have the same core beliefs.”
Davidson apologized for his Tweet being “unclearly written” and deleted it, and then went on to clarify that he meant exactly what we all thought he did. Davidson was not alone.
Fiction writers are taught “Capture the individual and you capture the type. Capture the type and you capture — nothing.”
This is helpful for understanding Jew-hatred. We must first understand the uniqueness of Jew-hatred and the Jew before applying its lessons to other hatreds.
The de-Judaizers see any form of recognizing differences as the equivalent of Jew-hatred. They think you’re a Jew-hater or its equivalent if you would close a border or deny same-sex marriage.
Those with a Jew-centric view of Jew-hatred see these quite differently. They’re more likely to see the equivalent of Jew-hatred in those attacking the Christian baker or the Little Sisters of the Poor. The baker and the nuns just want to be left alone to live by their understanding of the word of God, without hurting anybody else.
Those with a Jew-centric view of Jew-hatred stand with America when she is demonized for standing as a nation apart. They respect Americans’ insistence on deciding for themselves who can join their nation and how.
This rarely articulated difference in outlook splits the Jewish community.
Many Jews just want Jews to be like everybody else (though perhaps with a victim card). They find the ideas of a powerful group being separatists and exceptionalists to be repulsive, worth fighting, and the equivalent of Jew-hatred. They find it especially repugnant coming from the Jews.
On the other side, we have Jews who believe their mission is to remain a separate group that can spread the word and values of the one true God. These people think that Jews must be able to defend themselves and to live according to their beliefs. And they believe other groups, such as Americans and Christians, deserve the same rights. These views are more common among Israelis and Orthodox Jews than among non-Orthodox American Jews.
This split is central to how many Jews think and vote. For many Jews their top issue isn’t abortion, gun control, taxes or health care. It’s where do you stand on Jew-hatred and its equivalents. This may help explain why so many of the most visceral Trump-haters, including most prominent NeverTrumpers, are Jews. They see Trump as a spreader of the equivalent of Jew-hatred, regardless of Trump’s personal views of Jews specifically.
On the other side are people like Dennis Prager. Prager’s classic Why the Jews: The Reason for Antisemitism, the Most Accurate Predictor for Human Evil provides many of the ideas I stole for this piece. His view of the centrality and exceptionalism of Jews and Jew-hatred lead him to view Trump as a man who stands with the Jews against those who would destroy them.
The Tree of Life murders brought this all to a boil and showed the asymmetry. Many of the de-Judaizers of Jew-hatred hated many of the Jews who were coming to stand with them. But those who subscribe to the Jewish-exceptionalist view of Jews and Jew-hatred saw Jews murdered for being Jews, and stood with them in tears, despite the efforts of the misguided Jewish haters.
Jew-hatred is an ancient and eternal hatred. United Nations votes are just one more indication of how Jew-hatred seems to unite the world, other than the one great nation that stands with Israel. Jews and Israel are safer and stronger than they’ve been in at least two thousand years. One evil man in Pittsburgh and some false statistics spread by people trying to demonize America and her president do not change that. We will fight the Jew-haters. We will thank those who stand with us. And we will strive to fulfill our exceptional mission.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Jews don’t proselytize, do they?
Thanks, Gil. Only the Leftist Jews could make these issues so complicated. It’s mind-boggling. You lay out the issues very well, though; I thank you for that. And it breaks my heart.
No, they don’t and even try to talk a possible convert not to do so.
Right. We welcome converts who show sufficient desire and commitment to live as Jews, but we don’t seek them. We do wish to influence people and to help them live better lives. But there’s no reason that has to be as members of our nation, unless that’s what they want.
This is part of a larger phenomenon. @gilreich wrote
To that, perhaps we should add:
I’d like to propose a working model:
• People and groups which have over the years laid claim to be the chosen people (Christian replacement theologies – including claims to be the New Israel, German National Socialism)
• People and groups which have thought it was a good idea to immanentize the eschaton by any and all means
• People and groups which reject Jewish nationhood and the Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael
• People who themselves or their ancestors left the constraints of traditional Judaism and follow (or, like Marx, found) secular messianic belief systems which do proselytize,
generally wind up overtly or tacitly antisemitic themselves, and their followers generally even more so.
This was certainly the case for the Frankfurt School (virtually the entire Frankfurt School was Jewish or of Jewish descent; they or their ancestors left the constraints of traditional Judaism) which has had a generally malign influence on today’s world; much of the progressive antisemitism of the day stems directly from these thinkers or those influenced by them.
Excellent
Ruth Wisse, referring to antisemitism in today’s (behind the paywall) Wall Street Journal as “a politics of misdirected blame” concludes:
She did a podcast on the subject earlier this year.
I’m more confused than when I started reading.
I read her piece, too, @ontheleftcoast, but I realize now that I’m not sure I understand what she’s saying. Maybe that’s what @suspira is saying. What would that uniting around anti-Semitism look like? Both sides see us as the ones to “blame”–for whatever?
This topic makes me very sad.
I think this goes along with my theory that many Republicans that hate Trump really don’t get how centralized power has gotten dysfunctional in this country and they just need it to work for their gig or their lifestyle or something no matter what. It’s like they are Rockefeller Republicans or something.
For example Jonah Goldberg is truly for smaller government, he gets that centralization is bad, and that it’s screwing people. People understandably want their cut of this garbage or they want it fixed. All of those guys on that Niskenen Center Republican list, not so much. Tom Nichols makes a great big deal out of the fact that he’s a conservative, but he explicitly says he’s for “strict gun control”.
This isn’t a great day for me to think about this stuff, but I wanted to throw it out there.
One other thing. I just saw a screen capture of a tweet of the President of the Niskenen Center praising George Soros. What a loony bin.
I’ve always assumed that Jew-hatred stems from their disproportionate representation in the banking industry. Governments that want to default on their debts need to make sure that nobody minds if the secret police round up all the government’s creditors and put bullets in their heads.
It antedates the banking industry and firearms. More like dominant cultures that appropriated Abraham and then feel the need to dispossess the main branch of the family, but it then has attached itself to other “root causes.” It seems to be the sole known example of perpetual motion.
In the age of corporations, shooting the individual bankers is only going to complicate your next loan application.
I think you need to take a couple of things into account when reading Wisse: For a comp lit professor she’s down to earth, but… she was a Harvard comp lit professor.
And she centers her understanding on “misdirected blame” which isn’t a sufficient explanation. Come to think of it, “misdirected blame” sounds like a literary analysis, doesn’t it?
Misdirected blame may be an aspect of the following, but it’s not the whole thing:
Gillum’s ideas include abolishing “predatory capitalism” and prisons. His organizations are ground troops in his gubernatorial campaign.
Israel is an obstacle to the progress of competing messianic agendas; the Left has always been violent to one degree or another in advancing its vision and looks to be in the process of completing its assimilation of the Democrat Party.
UPDATE: Gillum thinks that the attitude revealed here will get him elected:
We’ll know next week. One of the comments at Conservative Treehouse’s thread thinks it might work. He was responding to a commenter that thinks Project Veritas’ exposé will help the Republicans win:
The ZMan blog, which is sorta kinda white nationalist is on the money today. In a post entitled The Cancer of Fanaticism which takes Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer as his starting point, he writes:
Today’s Daily Dose from Chabad seems apt:
In all my years of business I only encountered one Jewish banker. It just so happens he was also the best to deal with.
Well, in America Jews have always been allowed to own property, so they didn’t have to go into banking like they did in Europe.
This must be at least part of what makes this whole issue beyond my understanding. I’m not sure I want to spend my remaining days trying to reach an understanding of complicated hatred schemes.
I have a stupid question. Isn’t part of what’s going on the fact that the Jews had a more civilized and constructive society centuries before everyone else? Dennis Prager had a guest on about this. They got rid of multiple wives and a bunch of barbaric stuff. So then what happened was their human capital compounded like crazy. I know somebody very close to me who is very smart and she was a very strong believer in epigenetics. I think everyone just got jealous of them, and it never let up. I mean they were the only ones the could do certain things well in some societies, for a long time.
From Thomas Sowell’s essay Are Jews Generic:
Great stuff about the middleman minorities.
Also good comments about hatred from people who saw their religions as sequels to Judaism.
And about Jew-hatred being a rebellion against the idea that we can and must make this world better through limited, incremental changes.
Ben Shapiro focuses on Jew-hatred as a form of seeing a sinister conspiracy at the root of all our problems.
There are many, many reasons people have hated Jews. Because they’re powerless or powerful, Communists or capitalists, globalists or nationalists, assimilationists or separatists, radical revolutionaries or defenders of the status quo, misers or bleeding-hearts, etc.
And there’s a lot to all of these things.
These are all facets or manifestations of a deeper hatred. Jew-hatred is eternal. It started long before Christianity. And Jew-hatred is powerful and consequential. It is more true to say that Hitler carried out a world war in order to exterminate the Jews than to say he murdered Jews while fighting his war.
Believe the Bible or not, it gives some examples of early Jew-hatred that seem to eerily forecast later Jew-hatred.
In the Persian Empire, which included 127 separate nations, Haman singled out the Jews for annihilation stating “there is one nation, both scattered and separate.. and their beliefs are different from everyone else’s and they do not comply with commands of the king.” The Jews spread everywhere but remain separate, and they live by their own views and values.
Pharaoh, the all-powerful tyrant of the world’s lone superpower, justified killing Jewish slave babies by saying that the nascent Nation of Israel was stronger than Egypt. Hitler would later explain that the Germans were ” in danger of being oppressed or even exterminated” by the Jews and that the “instinct of self-preservation on the part of the oppressed (the Germans) will always justify, to the highest degree, the employment of all possible resources (against the Jews).” The idea that you can declare yourself oppressed and then justify any form of evil against Jews and others has long been a central pillar of Jew haters (and Jews who support this rhetoric when used by SJWs against white Christians are doing something both evil and stupid).
The Bible also prophecizes (Deuteronomy 28) that Jews will wander from nation to nation, abused at every stop, until God allows them back home. This doesn’t explain why Jew haters hate, but it establishes that Jew-hatred will be a constant so long as Jews are in exile and not serving God. Note: Bible believers should not interpret this as excusing the Jew-haters, as God clearly establishes in Genesis 15:14 “and I will judge that nation (the nation that hurts Israel) too.”
There may be one speial case. Shalom Spiegel’s The Last Trial, (about the binding of Isaac) brings an Arab “midrash” to the effect that it wasn’t Isaac on the altar, it was Ishmael, and Isaac was waiting at the bottom of the mountain. WhenI read ir decades ago my first thought was “that’s not something you can negotiate a compromise on.”