This reawakening has implications extending far beyond the Jewish community. In his posthumously published masterpiece Defying Hitler Sebastian Haffner noted how in 1930’s Germany the passions unleashed against the Jews were fungible: Once the violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans and even made into a duty it is a simple matter to change the target. Haffner set those words to paper in early 1939. Only months after he did so much of the world was in flames; along with six million Jews tens of millions would perish in the war that Hitler unleashed.
The same transpositional possibilities do not merely threaten today they are already upon us. Those in Pakistan who beheaded the journalist Daniel Pearl as they forced him to utter the words my father’s Jewish my mother’s Jewish I’m Jewish have already selected other targets for destruction in their zeal to eliminate Jews and other infidels from the face of the earth.
Although our government hardly acknowledges the fact and fails to orient its policies accordingly the United States is today locked in a conflict with adversaries for whom hatred of Jews lies at the ideological core of their beliefs.
In attempting to account for these developments I have reached a set of conclusions about why events are unfolding as they are. Some of these conclusions are obvious and familiar; they revolve around the way certain perduring myths have time and again served to fuel suspicion and fear and hatred of Jews. But some of my conclusions are far more surprising even counterintuitive.
One is that today the most vicious ideas about Jews are voiced primarily not by downtrodden and disenfranchised fringe elements of society but by its most successful educated and ‘progressive’ members. This is true in the Islamic world and it is even truer in the West. One is less likely to find anti-Semites today in beer halls and trailer parks than on college campuses and among the opinion makers of the media elite.
This shift reflects an unexpected twist in the helix of anti-Semitism’s DNA. In the past anti-Semitism has typically come to the fore in undemocratic countries and almost always in periods of great economic and political stress. But Europe today is democratic and tranquil as is the United States yet the disease is spreading nonetheless. This development places a crucial question squarely before us: are we witnessing a repeat performance of an old play or the beginning of something new? An answer alas can hardly be definitive. Anti-Semitism is a complex historical virus. And like any such organism it is composed of a variety of strains: ancient and modern racialist and religious left wing and right wing.
During the last century we became intimately familiar with the right-wing variety with its racialist and religious roots: the variety that found its most extreme expression in the Nazi era. Today with that form of anti-Semitism utterly discredited it is another tradition — anti-Semitism of the Left — that is gaining respectability and momentum. The roots of this strain can be traced back to the Enlightenment.
The 18th-century avatars of universal reason could not but perceive Judaism as the enemy of their rationalist faith; as the tree trunk from which the branch of Christianity had sprung the religion of the Hebrew Bible was they contended ultimately responsible for Europe’s subjugation to an irrational creed and the arbitrary reign of clerics.
And the Enlightenment’s apostles of tolerance were not exactly tolerant when it came to living Jews: a ‘nation of usurers ‘ in the words of Immanuel Kant; the flag-bearers of ‘superstitious blindness ‘ in the words of Baron d’Holbach. This strand of anti-Semitism having proliferated several branches of its own — socialist populist liberal — is today supplanting its right-wing cousin to become the dominant form of anti-Semitism in the West. Paradoxically because Jews are so heavily overrepresented on the Left one finds a significant contingent of Jews who are themselves promoting nakedly anti-Semitic ideas.
