On Antisemitism Diagnosed
Some thoughts on the “disease/virus” metaphor
Is antisemitism a disease? Is it a virus?
These are some of the more ubiquitous ways that pundits describe antisemitism nowadays. There’s good reason to think that it’s popularity has even increased in the last decade or so.
The two metaphors have a history to them. They were devised to meet a specific political need not too long ago, but their meaning gives the impression that the term “antisemitism” is not a creation of political actors but rather a thing to be discovered in the world. And that has unwanted implications about Jews’ place in liberal polities and their agency in combatting animosity.
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Of late, pundits have displayed an eagerness to use the disease/virus metaphor both figuratively but also sometimes literally. Consider a few recent examples.
A few months ago, Tabletmag published a sociological study that purported to show that educated people in the US were even more likely to hold antisemitic stereotypes than those lacking a college education. The article’s sub-header was: “A new survey shows that a remedy American Jews have put their faith in for the past century may now be spreading the disease.” In this case, we are ostensibly dealing with a figurative usage.
Another Tabletmag article opted not for “disease” but instead “virus,” arguing that the notion of a unified “the Jews” with a set of sinister characteristics is similarly contagious. Interestingly, where that piece began by positing that antisemitism is like a virus, however, it ended by dropping the simile and instead making a literal equation: “The broad reach of “the Jews” — alternately a myth, a meme, and a virus, with its powerful combination of ethnoreligious bigotry and conspiracy attribution.” It isn’t like a virus, it is one.
In her popular book How to Fight Anti-Semitism, Bari Weiss seemed to say that antisemitism is best understood as a kind of virus. She quoted approvingly of Paul Johnson’s notion that antisemitism is an “intellectual disease.” She then reverted to seeing it as a “thought virus,” arguing that like other viruses that humans carry it lays dormant until at such a moment that conditions are fertile for it to afflict the human mind and society at large (33).
The COVID pandemic, which many seem to believe has exacerbated the problem of antisemitism, has no doubt further encouraged the use of the disease/virus metaphor. “Vaccinating Against the Virus of Anti-Semitism” is the title of one Jerusalem Post oped from last summer. Then there’s the convergence between the lightning speed of social media transmission and the prevalence of Jew-hate online. Viral: Anti-Semitism in Four Mutations is the title of a recent Andrew Goldberg documentary which you can currently watch on PBS.
But the disease/virus metaphor is in fact quite a bit older than the COVID outbreak.
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At the risk of oversimplifying a complex history, prior to the late 1800s most Jews thought of Jew-hatred in one of two ways.
Traditionalists believed that God had long ago scattered the Jewish people among the nations of the earth, and they were to suffer at the hands of non-Jews until God sent a messiah to deliver them from their exilic fate. For Traditionalists, then, Jew hatred was part of the ontological order of things.
In the 1700s Enlighteners began to reject the notion that Jew-hatred was divinely-ordained and incorrigible. They maintained instead that it was a function of medieval legacies that would all but disappear as Jews abandoned their clannish separateness for the mores of European bourgeois culture and European states in turn emancipated their Jewish inhabitants.
Zionists in the late 1800s questioned but also synthesized these two views. They agreed with traditionalists that Jew-hatred was a feature, not a bug, of diaspora, but they also agreed with Enlighteners that Jews had the power to do something about it. That, for Zionists, was not integration but rather the creation of a state or something approaching it somewhere beyond Europe. This would normalize the Jewish condition, which is to say it would eliminate the Jews’ diasporic character (the true cause of Jew hatred, in the Zionists’ view) by reconstituting them in a polity of their own like all other “normal” national groups.
It’s at precisely this time that you begin to see the rise of the disease/virus metaphor. One of the first to do so happened to be one of the earliest Zionist leaders, the Russian physician Leo Pinsker. In his proto-Zionist manifesto Self-Emancipation, published in 1882, Pinsker argued that the disunified, dispersed, de-territorialized profile of Jews everywhere made them appear in the eyes of non-Jews as neither living nor dead, as a frightful apparition. That, Pinsker surmised, provoked within non-Jews “Judeophobia,” a fear-hatred that could only be understood in a psychiatric terms: “Judeophobia is a form of demonopathy…a psychic disorder…hereditary…a disease transmitted for two thousand years, it is incurable” (3).
One plausible reason Zionists like Pinsker did this is because they sought to divest the phenomenon of Jew-hatred of any divinely-inspired underpinnings. They thus needed terms, phrases, and metaphors altogether new and different from the ones Traditionalists had been using for centuries (sinat yisrael, eisav soneh et yakov, etc) to connote the phenomenon’s social-political, rather than ontological, origins. But they also needed to point up what Enlighteners had ignored, namely that Jew-hatred would not easily disappear as integration proceeded apace. The medical metaphor (“incurable”!) accomplished both of these tasks.
It also, however, obscured the fact that what lay behind this terminological departure was not a breakthrough in observable reality or medical science but rather a political need. In calling it a phobia, Pinsker at once provided Zionists with an innovative way of describing a phenomenon that challenged the views of their Jewish opponents, but at the same time gave the appearance that Pinsker’s view stemmed from something observable and verifiable in nature.
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The same dynamic is at work today. Seeing antisemitism as a disease implies that actions or expressions that some Jews find threatening emanate from an identifiable mental state or medical condition that you can find in the world. And that view confirms one’s interpretation of what is and is not antisemitism, a notoriously slippery word whose definition has become more contested of late.
Historians have and continue to disagree on the meaning of the term “antisemitism,” and, to this day, it is the subject of stubbornly diverging communal definitions. I’ve written a bit about two of those definitions and their limitations elsewhere. But those disagreements, at bottom, flow from the fact that the word was popularized by Jews to categorize a suite of varying and possibly disparate behaviors under a single conceptual rubric. It is not a thing in the natural world to be discovered that possesses objective truths. You cannot go out into the wild and locate with certainty an “antisemite” or “antisemitism,” but only behaviors and expressions that some would say should be grouped together under the term and others who may disagree. The force of the term’s appeal is social consensus, not scientific objectivity.
But to call antisemitism a disease is to erase that very distinction, and instead to posit that “antisemitism” or an “antisemite” can be readily identified — anyone who possesses the disease does things that are antisemitic. Maybe that’s why the metaphor appears so in vogue nowadays — as dissension over the term in recent years has increased, some of the term’s more vigorous defenders have seized on the metaphor to double down on one or another understanding of the term.
In any event, the metaphor’s implications are problematic. For if antisemitism is indeed pathological, doesn’t that mean that those who express it are to some extent blameless, and doesn’t it mean that those who are victimized by it possess only so much agency, if any at all, to eliminate it?
For a long time American Jews worked hard to prove that this was not true, that race-hatred was not a natural feature of American life and culture, that those who engaged in it were not blameless for doing so, and that it could indeed be reduced by concerted governmental and communal efforts. This is at least in part why American Jews became advocates of public schooling, free speech protections, progress on civil rights issues, and race-blind immigration law. It’s also why they’ve poured millions of dollars over the years into defense agencies that engage in tireless educational campaigns to explain race-hatred and promote ethnic pluralism to broader publics. These initiatives were rooted in a belief that education, politics, and law could all be put to work to ameliorate racial tensions and promote civic harmony.
Is this an idea that American Jews are ready to give up on? Even in our more troubled times, my sense is that many of them are not. Those who aren’t should think more carefully about deploying the disease/virus metaphor. Those who are might still consider how describing antisemitism in this way fundamentally misconstrues what it means to call something “antisemitism.”
