The disconcerting heritage of anti-Semitism in the 21st century
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EMANCIPATION AND PERSECUTION
The weed of anti-Semitism, currently rampant, testifies to some essential aspects of the contemporary historical moment. Contextualizing this situation requires trying to understand this particular phenomenon under a general view. What emerges from this resurgence of repugnant anti-Semitic hatred and violence is the evident failure of an objectively and ethically valid knowledge with, at its core, a conception of factual truth not chained to any political ideology or propaganda strategy. One can speculate here that it is precisely problems intrinsic to the contemporary age capable of bringing back the weed of anti-Semitism that was believed to have been eradicated as mere junk of the past.
There is, despite the enormity of what has happened in the past century, a direct relationship that surfaces, clearly, between the dark past of anti-Semitism and contemporary times. Indeed, anti-Semitism is modern; the term itself is a nineteenth-century coinage and is distinct from anti-Judaism, even though the two terms now intersect empoweringly: “old poisons decanted into new bottles,” to use an expression by Jake Wallis Simons.
Beginning with the tearing down of the ghetto gates, followed by the ideals of equality advocated by the Enlightenment and acquired as a part of the French Revolution, the Jewish people began to be associated with modernity. The flourishing, then, of representative Jewish personalities — even if largely assimilated — in the various modern disciplines, from science to economics to politics and sociology, will consolidate, in the eyes of anti-Semites, the association between Judaism and modernity. Emancipation thus degrades into new forms of persecution. It is then no coincidence that German National Socialism, a fundamentally tribal movement built on low anti-modern racist impulses, particularly targets the Jewish people. From Wilhelm Marr to Karl Lueger, anti-Semitism and discrimination represent a reaction against the political ideals advanced in modern liberal revolutions. In the deviant psychology of the leaders and ideologues of National Socialism, the Jew is an imaginary character who embodies those ideals of freedom and equality of modernity that they oppose. It is in this context, particularly after World War I and the narrative created about German humiliation following the defeat, that the Jewish presence in Germany is transformed, as in other eras, into a political tool useful to reactionaries. The “Dolchstoßlegende,” the legend of the stab in the back — not unlike the imaginative assumptions of apartheid, genocide, or colonization directed against Israel nowadays — served to exonerate the German leadership from having triggered and lost the Great War. Today, similarly and without any historical consciousness or sense, some declare, even from institutional venues, that Oct. 7 begins even before 2023 trying, with these dastardly words and through false contextualization, to take away from the murders and rapists of Hamas the responsibility for brutally attacking Israel with genocidal intent. Once again, a certain Europe, through a sophistry lacking even a semblance of historical or moral legitimacy, refuses to acknowledge the gravity of the tragedy that occurred. Curiously, one of the common traits of anti-Semitism is, in addition to resorting to emotionalism, to propose views in which causes are excluded, focusing only on effects and thus destroying, from the outset, any possibility of rational or even judicial dialogue. Anti-Semitism is, essentially, irrationalism. That the 21st century can be associated again with such a disgrace is a troubling and revealing sign.
Some scholars of the history of the last century might, at this point, recall how current anti-Semitism, but also “Israelophobia,” re-emerges as the after-effects of propaganda activities that the Nazi regime spread, during the war, in the Arab world starting with the infamous pamphlet “Islam and Judaism.” The other trickle, in the postwar period, is that of the disinformation techniques developed by the Soviet regime against Israel. Underlying these patterns of anti-Semitic and, later, anti-Israel propaganda is the same source, namely the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion:” a forgery created for political reasons which, in addition to being a vulgar text placeable in the context of Russian anti-Semitism, also represents a reaction, on the side of the feudal Czarist powers, to modernity — see also Norman Cohn’s excellent book, “Warrant for Genocide.”” These bizarre anti-Semitic mystifications belonging to the distant past are, as is easy to note, still very much alive: the Arabic translation of the blatantly false pamphlet of “The Protocols” is, for example, one of the best-selling texts today. Recently, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported, “Anti-Semitism going viral at the Cairo Book Fair” (https://www.wiesenthal.com/about/news/cairo-book-fair.html), showing the proliferation in the area of obscenely anti-Semitic texts. This is worrisome because propaganda, as we know just from the last century, produces disruptive effects on society and history. The Nazis, within a short time of seizing power, succeeded in convincing most Germans that the root of their problems came from elsewhere, largely rewriting history and inventing entire aberrant disciplines with which they brought into the abyss, even the German academy where the theory of relativity could no longer be studied because it was labeled as “Jewish physics” (Jüdische Physik), or professorships and degrees were awarded in eugenics and race theory. Within a few semesters, in Nazi Germany, science became non-science and vice versa.
The National Socialists, through the sleazy criminalization of Jews, were responding, in their way, to a catastrophic social, economic, and political situation which, since the end of the war, had already included hyperinflation and political uprisings of which they too were a part. Anti-Semitism, whose ideological foundations had been laid in the previous century, became a “response,” albeit an imaginary one, to a period of decadence. This criminal and childish psychology, which used the move of creating the image of the “eternal Jew” (Der ewige Jude), making him responsible for the evils into which the German people had stumbled, also achieved the purpose of artificially relieving Germany of the burden of its historical and moral responsibilities. The perception of a state of crisis and the attribution of responsibility to the Jews — the old theme of the scapegoat is a trick of mass manipulation to make the situation psychologically tolerable: “It’s not our fault, it’s the bad guy’s fault, so we have no responsibility.” This theme, despite its blatant absurdity, continues to recur even today when the State of Israel is held, by some, as responsible for the unacceptable situation in which Palestinian Arabs have placed themselves. Again, the history of Israel’s attempts at peace agreements and political settlement or the statements of PLO or Hamas leaders, for example, the 1988 Hamas charter-are not analyzed, as the effect is confused with the cause. This also allows for the inversion according to which the murderers are paradoxically presented as victims and the innocent as perpetrators.
The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, in his speech at the Day for Dialogue between Catholics and Jews in January 2025, noted, “Israel, in the original sense of the Jewish people, and then of the state that has this name, is back in the dock.” The fact that this is happening before everyone’s eyes — some among us stunned, others indifferent, and others participating — indicates a dangerous regression to a past whose costs have already been paid. The task of those who still try to reason according to sense and conscience is, then, to resist the tide of the absurd, which, re-emerging from the sewers of history, tries to give itself, once again, a legitimacy that it is imperative to deny.