It seems equally clear that antisemitism is in one of its standard forms a theory. It is the theory, or political fantasy, that Jews are conspiratorially organized to exercise secret control over the world in order to pervert the energies of non-Jewish society into the service of sinister Jewish ends. Antisemitism of this type peddles, among many other delusive notions, the idea that “the Jews” are the real agents behind vast and dangerous forces threatening world peace.
In pursuit of that thought, let us return for a moment to Ambassador Bernard’s unwise remarks at Barbara Amiel’s reception. While the phrase “that shitty little country Israel” might be considered undiplomatic, I do not, myself, find it particularly antisemitic. One might be led to say the same thing of England, or even of France, neither of them particularly large tracts of territory by global standards, and both of them well equipped with local habits and customs highly irritating to foreigners, doubtless including some ambassadorial ones.
What I do find antisemitic about Bernard’s remarks, and profoundly so, is the thing he then went on to say, which practically no contributor to the chorus of indignation at the time seems to have noticed. Once again I cite Gross’s report: “‘Why,’ he asked, ‘should the world be in danger of World War Three because of those people?’”
On the sour breath of this question can be detected the authentic odor of antisemitism in the mode of theory, or better, political fantasy. At the point when it was asked, in 2001, there was as compared to many moments in the preceding half-century little need to worry about an outbreak of “World War Three.” So far as any dangers to peace existed in embryo, they involved powers far greater than Israel and conflicts for the most part remote from the Middle East: the possibility of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, of a recrudescence of the recent wars in the territories of the former Yugoslavia, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea, and so on. But to Jacques Chirac’s ambassador to London, these perfectly genuine threats to world peace paled into insignificance beside the imaginary one posed by “those people”: the Jews.
Antisemitism of this kind, the kind that poses as an explanatory theory about who really possesses the power to determine world events, is among other things, the lethal kind—the kind that accounts for the Holocaust. One does not, after all, set out to extirpate a people from the face of the earth because one happens to dislike or despise them on an individual basis. One takes such a step because one sees them as constituting, collectively, a threat so serious that it can be countered in no other way than by their total removal from the world scene. Hitler and his circle did not set the Final Solution in motion because they viewed Jews individually as a tribe of hucksters and vulgarians given to pushing their noses into social circles in which they neither belonged nor were welcome. They did so because they seriously believed the real enemy of the Third Reich to be not America, or the British Empire, or the Soviet Union but the vast Jewish conspiracy that, they supposed, secretly controlled these—only seemingly independent—powers through its control of world capitalism.
As we shall see, it is nowadays widely believed in mainstream liberal circles that that kind of antisemitism was a delusion peculiar to the German National Socialist Party—one that largely disappeared with its fall and survives today only in a few obscure neo-Nazi groupuscules. Those who believe this believe in consequence that the only kind of antisemitism we need to bother about nowadays is what I shall call—to distinguish it from the theoretical kind—“social” antisemitism: the kind that indeed consists, in the words of the BBC’s version of the OED, in “hostility and prejudice directed against Jewish people” taken individually. It is this that persuades them, as we have just seen, that the anti-Zionism currently so popular on the liberal left of Western politics can have nothing to do with antisemitism.
It is often asserted, both by Jews and by others, that social antisemitism has greatly declined in Western societies over the seventy years that have elapsed since the end of World War II. That is broadly—though somewhat patchily—true. What I shall argue in this book, however, is that social antisemitism is by no means the only kind we have to worry about today. As I shall show in what follows—and as many others have noted—antisemitism as a political fantasy concerning the mysterious, demonic, and conspiratorial power of “the Jews” to determine world events has enjoyed a political rebirth since September 2001. All that has changed is that “Zionism”—understanding by that term the State of Israel together with its Jewish supporters (though not, as we shall see, its far more numerous non-Jewish ones)—has taken over, in effect, the role traditionally assigned in antisemitic theory to the world Jewish conspiracy. In that new form, antisemitism as a delusive political theory is once again as active in the political life of the West as it has been at any time over the past two millennia.
Unfortunately, that political rebirth has taken place chiefly on the left. The left has, of course, its own traditions of antisemitic theorizing. These theories were specific to the left and in any case not particularly active or influential during the greater part of the twentieth century. But what the French ambassador’s remark exemplifies, as we shall see in what follows, is a straightforward transfer from one end of the political spectrum to the other of what used to be the exclusively right-wing fantasy that the Jews are to be blamed for most of the evils besetting the world and, among other things, for being the main force pushing the world toward war.
In short, I shall argue in this book that those who presently complain of a revival of antisemitism in sections of the British Labour Party, in American academia, and for that matter in the wider drift of liberal opinion in the Western world do not for a moment, pace the BBC, suppose that problem to consist only in the entertaining, by individuals who may or may not happen to be on the left, of private attitudes of “hostility and prejudice” toward anybody who happens to be Jewish.
On the contrary, they take it to consist also, and most importantly, in a revival, largely on the left this time, of antisemitic theory: of belief in the ancient fantasy of a collective Jewish threat to non-Jewish interests.
In the minds of the believers, that threat consists primarily in the supposed hidden conspiratorial power of the Jewish community to dominate world events; the commitment of the community to the exercise of darkly demonic powers in the service of purely sectional Jewish interests; and more seriously still, in what believers imagine to be the collective recalcitrance of the Jewish community toward the very moral and political values that believers find most reasonable and compelling.
VI
The subject of the book is that fantasy: its extraordinary persistence over the centuries; its remarkable ability to transform and adapt itself, like some strange virus of the mind, in order to speak afresh to the concerns and anxieties generated by new historical circumstances; the functions it serves in non-Jewish culture and political life; and finally the reasons for its extraordinary recrudescence in liberal-left circles in the twenty-first century.
If we are to get clear about the nature of the recurrent delusion that “the Jews are to blame” for what are virtually always in reality failures and deficiencies of the non-Jewish world, we need to examine that delusion’s nature and content in relation to other kinds of prejudice, including other forms of antisemitic prejudice. This is the business of part I of this book: “Varieties of Antisemitism.”
Chapter 3, “Problems of Definition,” addresses these questions directly. But because questions of definition are best approached on the back of concrete and clearly described examples, chapters 1 and 2 introduce the formal arguments of Chapter 3 by offering two real-life examples of political discourse dominated by very different versions of the fantasy, the first taken from the Charter of the Islamist organization Hamas, the second drawn from American academic debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust.