Political antisemitism thus, while it shares the fundamental characteristics of political prejudice mentioned earlier, adds several further characteristics of its own. The first is that unlike the stereotypes that masquerade as knowledge for the socially prejudiced and the heightened allegations of plot and conspiracy that direct some types of political prejudice (anti-Catholic prejudice in sixteenth-century England offers a good example of the latter), the above five founding claims of political antisemitism have in them not even the grain of truth that such stereotypes possess. The Jewish community, as anybody at all closely acquainted with it knows perfectly well, is far too small and far too divided in historical, cultural, political, and religious terms to be remotely capable of marshalling the darkly secret and demonic power in the service of evil attributed to it by claims (1)–(5). All five claims are, not to put too fine a point on it, wholly delusive. In terms of Langmuir’s vocabulary as noted earlier, they are chimerical.
Nevertheless, versions of (1)–(5) differing only in the specific nature of the concrete evils assigned to collective Jewish agency in one period or another, from well poisoning or religiously sanctioned child murder, to organizing the Russian Revolution or determining the outcome of World War I in favor of the Allies, have commanded unwavering belief from large numbers of otherwise sane people over many centuries. The Jews, moreover, would appear to be the only minority or diasporic group of which this extraordinary combination of claims has ever been asserted.
A second characteristic in terms of which political antisemitism differs sharply both from social prejudice and other forms of political prejudice is that the goal that it pursues is neither merely the exclusion of individual Jews from “decent” society nor merely the political defeat or neutralization of a feared collective entity sought for the most part by other forms of political prejudice. Political antisemitism, given its belief in the demonic power of world Jewry to preserve the Jewish conspiracy from outside scrutiny, cannot, short of doubting its own principles, avoid the conclusion that the only way to deal with the Jews is to remove them wholesale from the scene. Political antisemitism, that is to say, unlike other forms of political prejudice, is essentially eliminative in character.
A third feature to be noted is that it is political antisemitism—antisemitism masquerading as a universally explanatory worldview—and not social antisemitism, that is the potentially lethal form of Judeophobia. Social antisemitism is not eliminative. Consisting as it does merely in contempt for Jews as individuals nourished by more or less feeble stereotypes, it tends to present the Jewish collectivity less as a source of threat than as a source of indulgent comedy: a little world populated by Jewish mothers, gefilte fish, klezmer music, and demented dietary restrictions. In itself, it can no more provide a motive for eliminating the Jews than blackface minstrel shows could have provided a motive for eliminating the harmlessly brainless, banjo-strumming blacks who populated such entertainments. Genocide has fear as its necessary precondition. Contempt, as we noted earlier, tends to drive out fear. For genocide to become a possibility, we need a wide diffusion of the outlook noted by Sartre in the French writer and antisemite Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961):
Anti-Semitism is … a form of Manichaeism. It explains the course of the world by the struggle of the principle of Good and the principle of Evil. Between these two principles no reconciliation is conceivable; one of them must triumph and the other be annihilated. Look at Céline: his vision of the universe is catastrophic. The Jew is everywhere, the earth is lost, it is up to the Aryan not to compromise … the anti-Semite does not have recourse to Manichaeism as a secondary principle of explanation. It is the original choice he makes of Manichaeism which explains and conditions anti-Semitism.28
Political antisemitism, now, both articulates and encourages exactly that type of Manichaean panic.
Finally, it is to be noted that if social antisemitism is the antisemitism of unthinking bigots, then political antisemitism, by contrast, is very much the thinking person’s version of Judeophobia. One can become a social antisemite without doing anything as demanding as reading or thinking—become one, perhaps, as the result of no more than a bad personal experience at the hands of a real Jew. Political antisemitism, on the other hand, given its rich and specific conceptual and doctrinal content, cannot simply materialize out of the thin air of that sort of bad experience. One can become a political antisemite only through a process of intellectual conversion, of reading, of listening to speeches, of thinking things out until it comes to seem to one, in the burst of enlightenment characteristic of conversion experiences, whether by having been talked into it or by having talked oneself into it, that the Jews are at the root of everything evil in the world. It is no doubt for this reason that as we shall see in chapters 5 and 10, while social antisemitism is the antisemitism of the common man, political antisemitism—the lethal, the eliminative kind, in other words—is and has always been peculiarly a disease of intellectuals.
SOME PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION REVISITED
It is time to ask ourselves whether the distinction between social and political antisemitism, as we have here developed it, can help to resolve some of the problems of definition we encountered in above sections of the present chapter.
In the light of the above arguments, it might seem tempting to agree with Kenneth Marcus that “the bewildering array of definitions of anti-Semitism … arises because people are trying to define different phenomena.” But in fact that way of putting it misdescribes the problem. The problem is not that we are dealing with a single concept, “antisemitism,” which happens, for some mysterious reason, to be exemplified by a range of “phenomena” too diverse and mutually incompatible to permit a single definition. Rather, it is that the word “antisemitism,” as we use it in discourse, covers a family of distinct though closely related concepts. In the most general terms, the word antisemitism picks out the concept of hostility lacking in cognitive warrant toward Jews. In virtue of that definition, however, the word ranges in addition over (at least) the two subordinate concepts we have distinguished as those of social antisemitism and political antisemitism. It is in the nature of concepts to rank themselves into hierarchies of this kind, and definition must proceed accordingly. In legal terms, one would hardly expect the definition of tort to include within itself the definitions of terms for individual torts. In scientific terms, it would be equally futile to expect the definition of the term element to include the content of the definitions of terms such as hydrogen, strontium, and so on, naming specific elements.
In much the same way, once we have a grip on the idea that the term antisemitism might correspond not to a single concept but to a hierarchically organized family of concepts, it becomes possible to envisage the possibility that the apparent incompatibility of phenomena associated with the term might disappear as a result of partitioning them between different members of the family of concepts it covers. Might there not be, for instance, phenomena closely associated with social antisemitism but not at all with political antisemitism, and vice versa?
A natural place to begin exploring this suggestion might be Gavin Langmuir’s distinction between kinds of xenophobic hostility whose stated grounds share a “kernel of truth” and those he calls “chimerical hostility” whose grounds are entirely delusive. If we have argued correctly, then both of these types of hostility are characteristic of antisemitism—but of entirely different types of antisemitism. What Langmuir calls, following a consensus among social