An Attempt to Identify the Root Cause of Antisemitism

By A. B. Yehoshua

A prominent Israeli author gets to the bottom of the world`s oldest hatred.

What is the nature of this insane and absurd fear—now echoed throughout the Muslim world—which sometimes brings disaster on the antisemite himself? From where does it stem and how does it evolve into such strange and dangerous fantasies? This must be investigated. As mentioned, apart from profound research into the problematic personality of the individual antisemite, it is necessary to discover what it is in Jewish identity that causes such an intense reaction.

At this point, it must be said that in referring to sharp expressions of antisemitism we do not mean only common xenophobic phenomena. First, in most cases, the Jews are not foreigners, but veteran inhabitants who generally do not look foreign at all. Second, research into xenophobia recently conducted among members of the extreme right in Europe shows a clear differentiation between xenophobia and antisemitism. The fantasies and heinous accusations against the Jews are wilder and more serious than those concerning declared minorities, and they come from people who are learned, enlightened, and liberal in other spheres. Take, for example, the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, who recently said that “today it is possible to say that this small nation [the Jews] is at the root of evil”;¹³ or the words of the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer José Saramago: “What is happening in Palestine is a crime.… We can compare it to what happened in Auschwitz. Ramallah is the barracks of the camp, and the Palestinians are the prisoners inside”;¹⁴ or the words of the former Malaysian prime minister—that the Jews rule the world (when the Jews are not even capable of ruling over a weak people like the Palestinians).

All of this requires a specific analysis which will lead us, through this absurd fear of the Jews and their evil intentions—which are, apparently, to rule over all other peoples in order to crush them—to the projected element at the root of all these irrational emotions and thoughts.

Any in-depth investigation of the structure of Jewish identity must concentrate on the component that separates the Jews from most other nations and relates to the special combination of religion and nationality, or religion and peoplehood—the same combination emphasized in the Book of Esther. Namely, a monotheistic religion with universal components that inspired the birth of two great religions, intended solely and by definition for a specific nation with a language and territory of its own. This combination is so essential that the Jews cannot remain part of the Jewish nation or the Jewish people if they convert to another religion. Exactly how is this connection created? The scope of this essay does not permit me to enter into the details of its essence and evolution, except to say that it is indeed unique. So powerful and persevering a combination is impossible to find in other nations. Even if this type of bonding exists in primitive tribes, it always relates to a strictly local religion that relies on rites and rituals performed in a physical location and in an almost familial, territorially aligned tribe.

In my opinion, this singular formula was created in the Jewish consciousness in three main phases: the story of the binding of Isaac, the gathering at Mount Sinai, and the Babylonian Exile. In the story of the binding of Isaac, the new monotheistic religion that Abraham created did not relate to humanity as a whole, as did the other great religions, but was created to answer the needs of a specific biological family. Nevertheless, even in that family there was selectivity regarding those who were or were not worthy of bearing the religion: Isaac and not Ishmael, Jacob and not Esau. The animosity of the rejected ones became a symbol of eternal, universal hatred in the eyes of the chosen ones. The second phase of the bonding came at Mount Sinai, where a pre-territorial and possibly pre-linguistic group of freed slaves was joined to a unique religion that became an essential component of its national identity. The connection was disrupted and almost collapsed in the First Temple period, in both the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judea. Although the Israelites worshipped foreign gods during the First Temple period, they remained legitimate members of the people of Israel. But the additional component that to this day has succeeded in renewing and maintaining the connection in spite of its problems was first found in the period of the Babylonian Exile: a partly Jewish lifestyle, on foreign territory, within the tapestry of foreign nations.

When I describe the first two phases, I relate not to real, historical occurrences, but to events in the sphere of consciousness that become myths which establish identity. Of course, anthropological research shows how the connection was created and developed from a historical point of view; but when modern archaeologists want to disprove large tracts of biblical lore, they are unable and, in my humble opinion, even unwilling to damage the national consciousness it has created.

It would seem that an identity created by the fusion of a unique nationality and religion is solid and strong, so that anybody wishing to abandon it would find it more difficult than he would if he belonged to a nationality that was singular in itself but whose religion could be shared by other nations. Anyone wanting to convert to another religion while retaining his nationality can do so more easily in peoples other than the Jewish people, because in the latter religious conversion implies expulsion from the nation as well.

Strangely but understandably, this double helix of religion and nationality created another element—free, imagined, and virtual. The significant discovery of this element during the Babylonian Exile gave the Jews the fully exploited possibility of choosing to remain in the Diaspora without forfeiting their identity. It has enabled them to make virtual and imaginary transfers of essential and basic components—such as territory, language, and even a natural framework of national solidarity—from national to religious life, and to preserve them for thousands of years as if they were realistic and practical: The actual territory of the Land of Israel has been kept as the symbol or metaphor of a Holy Land in prayer or religious texts; Hebrew became a holy language restricted to prayer; the sovereign institutions, the royalty, and the army became symbols and metaphors which the Jews could shape with various spiritual interpretations to suit their wishes and needs, but not by action in the physical world.

This virtual transference from the national to the religious component is not one-directional. With the passage of time, it has also transferred religious elements to purely secular or exclusively intellectual frameworks in an attempt to define the Jewish essence and role: to foster justice in the world, or missions of teaching and enlightenment, or a kind of spiritual sensitivity—the vague something that Freud called “a common mental construction,” resting on virtual national elements designed and interpreted according to the needs and inclinations of the individual imagining them.

For example, when the British literary critic George Steiner, a secular Jew, states that the purpose of the Jews is to be wanderers, eternal guardians of alienation and foreignness in a definitive nationalistic bourgeois world, thereby therapeutically invigorating petrified values, he is moving quasi-religious elements to a secular framework, exploiting the virtual transfer of Jewish national components to serve his own philosophical viewpoint. If Steiner believes that the values of alienation, wandering, and foreignness are important as a kind of immunization against the power of territorial nationalism, why must it be the task of the Jews to spread them? He exploits a certain imagined, weak, and sleepy nationalism of Diaspora Jewry as a platform to nourish the spiritual, moral goal he has set for himself. What does this resemble? It is as if a Jew contended that the goal of the Jews in the exile is to spread the gospel of ecology and that environmentalism is the true national essence of the Jewish people, along the lines of: “There is no Israel but the Tora, and the Tora is improvement of world ecology.”

The mechanism of this imagined identity transference operates in an accelerated manner to preserve Jewish identity itself, since the Jew must maintain a grip, mainly in his imagination, on the unity of a nation that is scattered among other nations, speaks various languages, and lives under various cultural and economic conditions. For example, though a Polish Jew regards himself as sharing a national identity with a Yemenite Jew (and not only through religion), or vice versa, his view cannot be put into effect because reality provides very few tangible means of doing so. The Polish Jew has never seen Yemen, has never encountered a Yemenite Jew, and, if he had, would not have been able to converse with him. Such a partnership would exist mainly in the realm of imagination or spirit. Nationalism, religion, and, in their wake, other elements are designed according to the imagination and needs of the Jew—whether in an independent, individual, or communal framework—and the Jew’s identity thus becomes much more flexible and fluid than that of members of other nations.

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