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.

Benedict Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities, states that the sense of identity and unity of every national community is also the product of spirit and imagination.¹⁵ But there is a vast quantitative and qualitative difference between the imaginative and mental effort the Jew must invest in order to build and maintain identity and the parallel effort among other nations. The Italian, Thai, or Finn, for example, does not require feats of imagination to fashion his identity; for that purpose, he draws on elements from his real environment. Territory, landscape, climate, historical sites with clear memories, a common language with all its cultural associations, and, of course, human interrelationships in the obligatory frameworks of ruling institutions, enable these other nations to maintain their identity simply and easily. The need for speculative, imaginative qualities is limited by the concrete components of reality. The Jew can imagine his country as a “land of milk and honey,” since, for him, it has not been real for many generations; whereas the Saudi, for example, cannot do so, because he lives surrounded by desert. The Jew can entertain fantasies about his scattered people because he is unlikely to meet many of them, while for the people of other nations, imagination is curtailed by the actuality of their tangible human environment.

As a result, the Jew can easily change not only his place and his national context, language, and behavior, but also his national ideas and opinions. The structure of his identity does not depend on permanent, external elements (territory, language, and frameworks of communal life), but rather on the internal workings of identity, which transfer different elements from place to place and exchange them for others while willfully preserving some hidden “essence.”

It is true, however, that this identity is sometimes gripped by the fear of a vague threat to the “common Jewish destiny”—a problematic concept, in my opinion, usually lacking any basis in reality, rooted only in the mind. If we examine whether the Jews do, in fact, have a common destiny, we will find that this is far from being so. In World War II, for example, European Jews were sent to the gas chambers, while in the United States or South America Jews continued to live completely normal lives. The expulsion of the Jews of Spain in the late fifteenth century disrupted and shocked one Jewish community, while Jewish communities in the rest of the world continued their economically and personally secure existence. Or consider the difference between everyday life in contemporary Israel and Jewish life in the Diaspora: The fate of the Jews in the spheres of society, economy, and security is bound to the fate of the nations among whom they live rather than to that of other Jewish communities. The British, the Argentinians, the Egyptians, the Palestinians, and the Israelis each have their own common destinies, but the Jews do not.

The belief in a “shared Jewish destiny,” which is deeply held, as if it were an anchor of identity, is often a matter of the heart more than a reality. In fact, when one speaks of a “shared Jewish destiny,” one does not mean a good destiny, but usually a bad one, meaning that those whose current fate is good are waiting for it to go bad, as this is the true Jewish destiny. Therefore, the Jews assume that the existence of antisemitism is a permanent phenomenon, and in places and times when it is not prevalent or active, it is always presumed to be a future possibility. As a result, a complicated relationship has been created with antisemitism: on the one hand, fear of it and anger toward it, and, on the other hand, an attraction toward and empowering of it in order to use it as powerful cement with which to reinforce the unstable structure of Jewish identity.

Ultimately, a Jew’s identity is entirely in his own hands, to be annulled or revived by him (except during the Holocaust, and even then only part of the Jewish people was affected). By converting to one of the major religions which surround him, such as Islam or Christianity, which are not only accessible but also eager to embrace him, he can with relative ease cancel his Jewish identity without having to uproot himself or change his language and lifestyle. For members of other nations such a change is either impossible or subject to great difficulties. Throughout centuries of exile, many Jews were easily absorbed, changing their identity either by conversion or, like today, simply by assimilating. The number of Jews in the Second Temple period is estimated at four to five million, whereas at the beginning of the eighteenth century they numbered only one million, indicating the massive assimilation that continues until today. However, even after the Jew seemingly revoked his identity, he kept it in an “inner box,” enabling him to return to it at will, sometimes with less difficulty than he had experienced in giving it up. Thus, the gentile is faced with something amorphous that possesses astonishing potential for change over the widest range of possibilities. The disappearance of the Jew is never final, and his presence is never certain.

This flexible virtual element that surrounds a very tough and very compacted nucleus of religion and nationhood makes it possible to spread the wings of Jewish identity to remote and unidentified boundaries. These wings of identity can be stretched very thin, enabling them at times to easily infiltrate the identities of other nations, who sometimes cannot determine what has entered them and certainly cannot be sure of their ability to digest it effectively; for these penetrative elements bear an unclear connection (is it religious? national? a mindset? an implicit principle?) to other Jewish elements that exist far beyond their borders.

We now come to the crucial point: The non-Jew’s ability to connect with the imagination and virtual capability of the Jew living alongside him. In his imagination, the non-Jew can tap into the mechanism of the Jew’s unidentified elements with relative ease and project his fantasies, fears, and wishes onto them—for better or, mainly, for worse. If the non-Jew also happens to have a weak and disturbed sense of identity, and perceives a real or imagined threat to it from that vague element alongside him and within him, he might be provoked to acts of madness and frenzy. The Jew becomes a text full of huge gaps that invites different readings with many nuances, all in keeping with the reader’s inner needs.

I do not know if Hitler actually uttered the shocking statement attributed to him: “We have to kill the Jew within us.”¹⁶ This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit. As mentioned, this perception has prevailed ever since the beginning of the Babylonian Exile, when the Jews began the imaginary “transfer” of national elements to a bed of religious or other elements and back again, over generations. Therefore, when the antisemite—because of his own identity problems—becomes obsessed with the murderous idea that something has infiltrated him, he begins a saga of hatred that climaxes in rounding up the Jews, marking them with an actual physical sign (a tattooed number on a Jewish arm is a diabolic continuation of the yellow patch of medieval times), and then annihilation by gas.

This essay is an attempt to locate the root of antisemitism and to show that it has more to do with structure than with content. To be concise: The Jew possesses purely virtual elements that allow his identity to become flexible and fluid with no clear or easily identified boundaries; this can incite, for better or worse, the parallel virtual activity of the non-Jew, which taps into the Jew’s identity more easily than into national identities that are clear and defined by territory, language, and other traditional and natural elements. This link is usually formed by the needs, fantasies, fears, or various wishes on which the edifice of antisemitism—its religious, historical, social, economic, and political rationales—is built.

This is also why many societies that differ from one another (pagan, Christian, Muslim, secular, and even liberal) have revealed, over such a long stretch of history, the same signs of the antisemitic disease that manifests itself, in extreme cases, as an individual psychosis before it becomes a public phenomenon. This is also why it is occasionally possible to find severe antisemitic expressions among artists and intellectuals with strong and sometimes disturbed imaginations. The list is long and impressive.

In my view, this is the root, and, I emphasize again, it has to do with structure rather than content. It is not connected to any real aspect of the Jewish character or personality, because it is impossible to speak of any shared Jewish character or personality, let alone a shared Jewish ideology—just as it is impossible to speak of a German character or personality shared by Goebbels and Thomas Mann, Goethe and Himmler, or a French personality shared between de Gaulle and Sartre. The non-Jew sometimes imagines to himself that because Trotsky and Rothschild were both Jews, they also shared a secret ideology, in the style of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” But the truth of the matter is that the variety of opinions and personal qualities which exist among the Jewish people is no different from that of any other people, and the dispersal of the Jews has only enhanced this mélange.

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