For it is the distinguishing mark of prejudice that it leaves the actual behind, so as to arrive at a generalization about a group that cannot be affected by anything that a member of the group might say or do. There is no evidence against such a generalization, because the evidence for it seems to be everywhere; and where evidence is everywhere, evidence is nowhere. Prejudice is not a mistake; it is a fiction. Mistakes can be corrected, but prejudice can only be fought.
Anti-Semitic beliefs about the Jews are not merely false; they are also, for those who believe them, unfalsifiable. For the anti-Semite, everything that a Jew thinks or does is regarded as a Jewish thought or a Jewish deed. Such a generalization is most accurately described as a fantasy. Anti-Semitism is a tradition of fantasy that non-Jews have of Jews.
It seems just as obvious that there would have been no anti-Semitism if there were no Jews. Never mind that in many places and in many times the presence of Jews has not been required for the presence of anti-Semitism. (Japanese anti-Semitism is an almost comic illustration of this point.) In the books about anti-Semitism, one reads again and again that anti-Semitism is ‘as old as Judaism’ or ‘as old as the Jews.’ We must be careful with such language. When it is not a historical banality, it is an essentialist error.
So it is important that we understand correctly the proposition that the hatred of the Jews has no basis in the reality of the Jews. For there was something about the Jews that made the hatred of them plausible and popular, particularly in Europe.
I refer, of course, to their apartness. The classical anti-Semitic allegation against the Jews was lucidly stated by Haman in his cunning speech to the weak-minded king of Persia: ‘There is a certain people that is scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all peoples; neither keep they the king’s laws; therefore it is not for the king’s profit to suffer them.’
The otherness of the Jews was their offense. They would not mix, they would not dissolve, they would not vanish. They did not attack, but they did not surrender. This view of the Jews as fundamentally unassimilable is common to Jew-hatreds that share almost no other characteristics.
The hatred of others for which Jews were vilified by Greek and Roman writers; the spiritual incorrigibility for which they were impugned and oppressed in the supercessionist theology of the medieval Church; the corporatism for which Jewish communities were resented in the modern period, when Jews were attacked as a ‘state within a state,’ an innuendo that was invented by an obscure German writer in the 1780’s and introduced into the political culture of modern Europe by Fichte — these were all condemnations of difference.
And even when Jews did assimilate to a significant degree — unwillingly, in the coerced conversions in the Iberian peninsula in the 15th century, or willingly, in the uncoerced conversions in Western Europe and elsewhere in the 19th and 20th centuries — new definitions of otherness were devised, racial and biological ones, so that the phobic mythologization of Jewishness, the terrifying rumor of Jewish non-conformity, might live.
Now, the difference of the Jews certainly was real. The anti-Semites who dwelled upon the otherness of the Jews were not imagining it. The institution of the ghetto did not begin its infamous career as an instrument of anti-Jewish persecution; it was an arrangement that was welcomed and even demanded by certain medieval Jewish communities for the security and the insularity that it would provide. And yet all this does not imply that the object of this prejudice was its cause.
