On Antisemitism Eternalized
Some thoughts regarding a prevalent understanding of the nature of Jew-hatred
Is there something timelessly unique about Jew-hatred?
Consumed as you may have been by the recent escapades of a well-known ice cream company, you might have missed that this past week the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs convened an annual conference on antisemitism that brought together scholars, communal leaders, and politicos. The debate provoked by that conference broaches anew the concept of “eternal antisemitism,” an important way that many Jews continue to understand Jew-hatred around the world. This article will explore the concept’s lineage and shortcomings and why it all still matters.
On July 14th at the 7th Annual Global Forum on Combating Anti-Semitism, Israel’s newly appointed Foreign Minister Yair Lapid delivered a speech which caused a stir among Israeli pundits and politicians. Construing antisemitism as part of a wider family of hatreds that stigmatizes people not for what they do but rather for who they are, Lapid declared at the conference: “Anti-Semitism is racism, so let’s talk to all those who oppose racism. Anti-Semitism is extremism, so let’s cooperate with everyone who is afraid of extremism. Anti-Semitism is hatred of outsiders, so let’s recruit anyone who was ever an outsider and tell them: This is your fight too.” Insofar as this interpretation deemphasizes antisemitism’s specialness and allows for alliance-building with other oppressed groups around the world, this, for Lapid, is “the right story about antisemitism.”
The condemnation was swift in coming. Lapid’s oration raised the hackles of none other than the previous prime minister, who harangued the foreign minister in a dyspeptic tweetstorm for getting antisemitism dangerously wrong. “While the hatred of Jews, or ‘anti-Semitism,’ is part of an overall human phenomenon of xenophobia,” wrote Netanyahu, “It differs in its intensity, in the fact that it has persisted for millennia and in the idea that over generations, this murderous ideology laid the groundwork for efforts to exterminate the Jewish people.”
This quote adumbrates a particular view of antisemitism that Netanyahu has championed throughout his career and, I’d argue, it captures the thinking of many Jews today. For Netanyahu, hatred of Jews is unique in its potency and cascading in its effect. But it is also eternal, having been around longer than any other form of hatred. It has and continues to follow Jews wherever they go, all of which explains the manifold abuses they’ve faced across space and time, whether it be the Holocaust or anti-Zionism. It used to be, in Netanyahu’s words, “hatred for Jews” but now it is “hatred for the state of the Jews,” for its essence is unchanging even if the target shifts.
According to the former prime minister, then, the current foreign minister rejected “eternal antisemitism” and in so doing falsified Jewish history.
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Netanyahu’s understanding of antisemitism has been a favorite of Zionists since the movement’s inception.
Consider, for instance, future president of the World Zionist Organization Nahum Sokolow, writing as a young journalist amid violence against Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement in 1882: “A cry of despair has engulfed the entire House of Israel. The hatred that has lain in wait since time immemorial for a despised and despoiled nation is rampaging forward like a storm. In every city and state where the Jewish question has appeared, the noise of quarrelling factions grows stronger and stronger . . . The ancient infectious hatred and licentiousness, which calls itself by a new name — ‘anti-semitism’ — again appears upon the brow of all the world’s princes.”
It wouldn’t be a great challenge to produce similar quotes from Pinsker, Herzl, or any of the other early paladins of the movement. But this quote of Sokolow’s is especially useful because it reveals how adherents of the “eternal antisemitism” school can collapse all the varying threats Jews may face in different eras and places into one unifying hatred that undergirds everything. Sokolow is aware here that “antisemitism” is a new term. At the time of his writing, in fact, it meant something quite specific, at least in imperial Germany where it was coined — politically-organized opposition to Jewish emancipation. Nevertheless, for Sokolow this and any other piece of hatred is cut from an eternal cloth. Antisemitism is the same as pogroms in Eastern Europe (which is what Sokolow was immediately responding to in the quote) which is the same as the Jewish question in other states which is the same as older persecutions stretching back to the dawn of time.
This approach has generated a veritable library of Jewish historical research on both sides of the Atlantic. Take the prolific writings of the transnational scholar Robert Wistrich, considered by some to have been one of the foremost experts on the history of antisemitism. One need only ponder the title of books like his 2010 doorstopper A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to Global Jihad to appreciate how much an “eternal antisemitism” approach propelled his scholarship. He wrote within that book that “[t]here has been no hatred in Western Christian civilization more persistent and enduring than that directed against the Jews. Though the form and timing that outbursts of anti-Jewish persecution have taken throughout the ages have varied, the basic patterns of prejudice have remained remarkably consistent.” (For an illuminating discussion of Wistrich and others of the same school, see this article.)
Incomparable, enduring, remarkably persistent — these are hallmarks of the “eternal antisemitism” approach.
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The phrase “eternal antisemitism” derive from The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece of political theory.
First published in 1950, Arendt agued in Origins that antisemitism was a crucial step on the path from the politics of the 19th century nation-state to the 20th century totalitarian dictatorship. In order to make the case that antisemitism derived from specifically modern political conditions that engulfed both Gentiles but also Jews, Arendt felt compelled to reject the alternative, if prevalent, a-contextual and suprahistorical approach to understanding antisemitism, or, what she called the “eternal antisemitism theory.”
For Arendt, one of the major problems with the theory was that it absolved Jew-haters of blame for the terrible crimes of the 20th century. This theory saw the world, in her words, as one “in which Jew-hatred is a normal and natural reaction to which history gives more or less opportunity. Outbursts need no special explanation because they are natural consequences of an eternal problem.” How can one hold Nazis fully responsible for murdering Jews if, to quote Arendt, antisemitism is “a normal, and even human, occupation”?
Arendt, however, did not stop there. A major point of Origins was that Jewish political behavior, specifically the Jews’ naïve alignment with the European nation-state just as it came under grave assault from reactionary populist forces that sought its replacement with something more far-reaching and sinister, help explain the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. For Arendt then, “eternal antisemitism” was problematic not only because it provided cover for Nazi apologists and accomplices, but also for Jews who “do not want wish under any circumstances to discuss their share of responsibility” in the events that led to that horrific tragedy.
Of course, it was this unsparingly critical approach to Jewish history that ended up earning Arendt the deep enmity of her Jewish contemporaries. Interestingly, Origins, a dense theoretical tract, didn’t attract nearly as much notoriety as did her series of popular essays on the Eichmann trial, but the latter ignited a firestorm over the same interpretive stance. Among other things, Jews at the time were outraged that Arendt in the Eichmann essays attributed blame to Jewish councils in the major ghettos for the deportation and murder of Jews in the camps. Over the years, Arendt’s trenchant interpretation has had more than its fair share of detractors but also a few prominent defenders (see these two books for deep dives). In any event, her critique of “eternal antisemitism” still has great relevance for our own day given how much the theory still holds sway in Jewish politics.
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Many Jews, the former prime minister no doubt included, genuinely believe that theory is an accurate understanding of Jewish history. Whether or not this is the case, Arendt’s critique can help us appreciate some of the risks in embracing the “eternal antisemitism” theory to such an extreme that we reject out of hand Lapid’s approach.
One issue Arendt’s critique points up is the differential benefits of construing antisemitism as eternal. Netanyahu acknowledged a salient one in his tweetstorm. “How will the State of Israel continue to demand that the nations of the world continue to make a special effort in protecting Jewish communities abroad from antisemitic attacks and from a stubborn war of incitement against our people?” In other words, claims to the uniqueness of antisemitism persuade other countries to expend special effort to fight it, or to defend Israel in the face of it.
This makes a great deal of sense once you appreciate that the state of Israel can easily reap that benefit without incurring any costs. In a country where Jews predominate and have a monopoly on the rule of law, there’s little risk in implying that antisemitism is so timeless and natural that those who perpetuate it may not be fully responsible for their actions. Jews in diaspora, of course do not have the same luxury. They have to be far more sensitive to how their more numerous Gentile neighbors understand antisemitism and culpability. Likewise, Israeli Jews risk little in asserting antisemitism’s specialness, but diaspora Jews, who rely on the good-will of other harried minorities to fight hate, risk quite a bit in emphasizing the uniqueness of Jew-hate relative to other bigotries.
A second issue Arendt’s critique raises is the matter of causality, and for this one the benefits and risks are more uniform. Now, before you continue, please try to read what follows in good faith. What I am about to say is not meant to excuse anti-Jewish hostility anywhere, no matter what form it takes, but only to understand its dynamics more clearly. There’s a big difference between saying that certain political decisions on the part of Jews may exacerbate antisemitism and saying that Jews are culpable for the hatred they face, that they are to be blamed for violence directed at them. Please know that I strenuously disagree with the latter.
For the state of Israel, and for its many diaspora supporters who wage a constant public relations battle on the state’s behalf, it is useful to have a theory of antisemitism that elides the possibility that the state’s action may encourage animus against the state. It isn’t the occupation, the settlements, longstanding historical grievances over refugees, or any of the other obdurate features of the conflict that generates anti-Zionist discontent, they can say, it’s antisemitism the eternal hatred. This absolves Jews in Israel of coming to terms with some of the most pressing aspects of the conflict, and it makes it easier for diaspora Jews, who have little control over the state’s decisions anyways, to defend the state from delegitimization.
This too, however, has costs for both Israeli and Diaspora Jew. For Israelis, there’s a risk of becoming prisoner to this kind of thinking, making it impossible to pursue what might actually be promising measures to ameliorate the conflict. For Diaspora Jews, adopting this rationale forfeits their ability to leverage their considerable potential influence over Israel to pursue policies that are more aligned with the values and priorities of diaspora Jews.
This is not to say that there isn’t a grain of truth in Netanyahu’s stance or that Lapid’s approach is without its own pitfalls. Like the other articles I’ve written in this series, our exercise here was merely to highlight how salient interpretations of antisemitism that purport to be historically virtuous or intellectually rigorous have political underpinnings to them and significant consequences. Whether antisemitism is indeed eternal I cannot say, but we should be aware of what we mean and imply when we say it is, and what other interpretive routes we forego when we do.
