The future force of this emerging Western form of anti-Semitism is impossible to gauge. As an intellectual movement it is not particularly impressive. Indeed among its leading exponents are several crackpots and cranks. But because it is becoming increasingly energetic at the same moment that Islamic anti-Semitism is flourishing it is enjoying successes far beyond what its modest numbers and the low caliber of its thinkers would suggest. A process of symbiosis is at work and it would be cavalier to dismiss its potential.
Whatever anti-Semitism’s prospects the past would seem to contain an ample supply of lessons about the dangers of quiescence. In 1924 Louis Marshall a distinguished leader of the American Jewish Committee confidently proclaimed that there was ‘not the slightest likelihood that the Nazis’ plan will ever be carried out to the slightest extent.
In 1924 that seemed like an entirely reasonable prediction. It turned out to be entirely wrong. Yet even as the 1930’s unfolded and the Nazis rose to power and openly proclaimed their aim of exterminating world Jewry many still found it impossible to look evil in the face and grasp its true objectives. Few observers comprehended the depth of Adolf Hitler’s obsession with the Jewish question or the fact that he regarded both Stalin and Roosevelt as themselves tools of the Jews or what any of this signified for the peace of the world. Willful ignorance indifference and stunned disbelief fed directly into the policy of appeasement which ended with a catastrophe of unprecedented dimensions.
Today the world does not face another Adolf Hitler. But we inhabit a planet in which there are weapons of mass destruction where there are terrorists working assiduously to obtain such weapons and where many of those same terrorists openly proclaim a desire to murder Jews. To complete the circle there are also those eager to downplay the danger and who suggest that those concerned with fighting it or even with writing about it have become prey to irrational fears or are wrongly projecting the lessons of the 20th century onto the more secure screen of the 21st.
Great shocks as we know from the last century can produce political flux beyond all foresight. In recent years the world has been subjected to a series of such shocks September 11 being the greatest of them. More may be on the way and where their repercussions will end no one can yet know. In this light the concomitant and hardly coincidental revival of the ancient fear and hatred known as anti-Semitism must make one tremble. So too must the indifference and denial that have greeted its resurgence.
The barriers around my office in New York are not a sign of ‘ethnic panic.’ They are a sign of realism in the face of danger. If the danger is growing one reason is that as those physical barriers have gone up other and even more necessary barriers — political moral and intellectual — have fallen with frightening rapidity. A taboo thought to have been firmly fixed in place a half-century after the greatest paroxysm of violence and hatred in the history of the world is no more. In the concluding words of Warrant for Genocide his 1966 study of European anti-Semitism in the years before World War II the historian Norman Cohn summarized the causes of 20th-century anti-Semitism and its significance for the destiny of nations:
A grossly delusional view of the world based on infantile fears and hatreds was able to find expression in murder and torture beyond all imagining. It is a case-history in collective psychopathology and its deepest implications reach far beyond anti-Semitism and the fate of the Jews.
