[This was first posted in 2013; we are revisiting as a result of many searchers interested in The Jewish Mystique by Ernest Van Den Haag. Sharing Chapter 5 of this MUST READ book. For visuals connected to this topic, check this link: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/155833/postcards-anti-semitic—-Admin1]
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WHY ANTI-SEMITISM?
Jews “cause” both anti-Semitism and pro-Semitism; without them we would have neither, since both are reactions to Jews. The Jews are the cause of anti-Semitism in the sense–no more, no less–in which marriage is the cause of divorce. No divorce without marriage. No anti-Semitism without Jews. But to end in divorce, there must be specific elements in one or both partners of the marriage, or in their relationship to each other, or to other persons, that lead to divorce. So with the relationship of Jews to their environment. The Jews are necessary to anti-Semitism–but not sufficient. Why is the relationship what it is? Why is it so often hostile?
An anti-Semite is hostile to Jews because of some characteristics which he dislikes and which he thinks Jews have exclusively, or in greater measure than non-Jews. Whether they do or do not have these traits (and whether one regards them as valuable or vile), there must be something in the Jews, or in their situation, that invites the attribution of these characteristics to them rather than to bicyclists; in addition, there must be something in the character of anti-Semites that makes it possible, or necessary, for them to associate Jews with disliked characteristics, or to dislike characteristics which Jews have because it is they who have them.
The characteristics attributed to “witches” burned in the seventeenth century, though sometimes accepted by the “witches” themselves, were the products of the fantasy of their persecutors. But there also was something in the personalities of those singled out as witches, or in their relationship to the world, which invited the attribution; just as there was something in the personalities of the witch-hunters which convinced them of the need to fear and hunt witches. The only thing we can be sure of is that the “something” was not that the women actually were “witches”. Similarly we can be sure that what arouses anti-Semitism is not what Jews actually are; it is, as it were, the negative part of their mystique.
To say that the victim had some characteristics that led to his victimization, is not to excuse, or justify, those who victimized him any more than it excuses, or justifies, a murderer to point out what characteristics of the victim caused the murderer to single him out and kill him. It means, however, that there was something about the victim–actual or, if the murderer is insane or misled, only believed–that led the murderer to select him. It may be a “good” or “bad” characteristics or a neutral one: political prominence, virginity, promiscuity, beauty, or wealth, may happen to attract the murderer, and may lead him to kill the victim.
There certainly are traits, actual or putative, that distinguish Jews. If one loves or hates a person or group, one has oneself the ability to do so, and one’s object has the ability to arouse and focus these feelings–whether because of actual or of putative qualities. What Gentiles see in seeing Jews is likely to be a compound of the Gentile mystique about Jews and of reality–the latter being shaped by both the Gentile and the Jewish mystique.
PRE-CHRISTIAN ANTI-SEMITISM
Fundamental to either view or feeling, though seldom explicit and conscious, is hostility to the Jewish belief in one God, a belief to which anti-Semites very reluctantly converted and which they never ceased to resist. Anti-Semitism is one form this resistance takes. Those who originated this burdensome religion–and yet rejected the version to which the Gentiles were converted–easily became the target of the resentment. One cannot dare to be hostile to one’s all-powerful God. But one can to those who generated Him, to whom He revealed Himself and who caused others to accept Him. The Jewish God is invisible and unrepresentable, even unmentionable, a power beyond imagination, a law beyond scrutiny. He is universal, holding power over everybody and demanding obedience and worship from all. Nonetheless, He entered history and listened to, argued with, and chose the Jews–and the Jews alone. They are His people (though He must have known that He would be in for an endless argument). No wonder they also are the target of all those who resent His domination.
The Jewish God was both universal–the only real God–and tribal: He had chosen the Jewish people and in exchange bound them to worship Him exclusively. Thus the Jews invented both monotheism and religious intolerance, or at least a passive form of it.* They had the only true religion, the only true promise; the only real God had chosen them–leaving the rest of the world to be comforted by false gods and messiahs. The Jews have suffered from their own invention ever since; but they have never given it up, for it is, after all, what makes the Jews Jewish. The Christians, when they became dominant, transformed the passive Jewish intolerance into active Christianity intolerance–of which the Jews became the first victim.
[*The Jews did not actively object to what non-Jews believed. They merely thought the beliefs wrong–to us a very tolerant view. In the context of antiquity it seemed arrogant and ill-mannered. The passivity itself rested on arrogance.]
The ancients had many gods. These gods were powerful to an unspecified degree, and loved, hated, intrigued, and fought with each other, just as mortals did. They even competed for the devotion of the people who worshiped them. People thus had a choice as to which god to appeal to on each occasion–and they attributed their victories and defeats to the relative strength and benevolence of the tutelary deities invoked. No god had a monopoly: worshippers of one god recognized the existence of others, and did what was necessary to pay their respects and to conciliate them.
Each tribe or nation was quite willing to acknowledge not only the actual existence, but also the power of the gods of other tribes or nations, though every nation usually retained a preference for the home-grown deity. The recognition was quite sincere, for the ancients found the existence of diverse tribal and specialized deities quite as natural as the existence of diverse tribes or occupations.
It was regarded both as prudent and as a matter of common courtesy to honor the gods worshiped by others. One joined in the appropriate rituals and sacrifices when meeting with aliens who worshiped alien gods. Further, the gods served as political symbols. To accept the political domination of Rome did not mean that the subject peoples had to give up their customs, language, and culture. On the contrary, these were often accepted by the Romans. It meant an exchange: the subject people would add the Roman gods to their own and recognize them, at least as honored guests in their midst.
The vast religious tolerance prevalent in antiquity went far beyond what we conceive of as tolerance today. People not only granted the right to others to keep their own religion; they were convinced that the religion of the others was no less true than their own, their gods no less real–though each people hoped that their gods were the most powerful where it counted.
The Jewish religion did not fit into this framework at all. It made the Jews misfits in the world of the ancients and probably was one cause for the ultimate destruction of their country and their dispersal by the Romans.
The Romans treated the Jews tolerantly enough; but as victors, they insisted on those of their customs which symbolized submission to Roman power. Symbols of the Roman Empire–statues of Roman gods and semi-divine emperors–had been accepted everywhere else without difficulty. But to the Jews the statues were a blasphemous abomination, because of the Mosaic commandment that enjoins against making “any likeness of anything,” and against “bowing down thyself to them or serving them.” Hence the Jews rebelled with religious zeal again and again, until their community was finally destroyed.
Later indeed the Jews destroyed the Roman framework that had made them misfits: their own religion, or much of it, was universally accepted, with the exception of the troublesome commandment against likeness (although there have been iconoclastic moments in Christian history). But the Jews managed not to fit into the new Christian framework–so largely their own creation–any better. The Jewish Messiah the Gentiles recognized was not recognized as genuine by the Jews. He was not good enough for them–a view the Gentiles rather resented.* The gods the others believed in remained false gods to the Jews. He had revealed Himself to them only and He had chosen them alone. Which left the rest of the world out in the cold.
[*The Jews, of course, merely maintained that he was not genuine.]
The religion of the Jews appeared to Gentiles absurd as well as outrageous; and ridiculous, too, if one considered that it was the religion of a small, insignificant, rustic nation, not distinguished for any major contribution to civilization. The Jewish views were certainly neither diplomatic nor endearing, and in the framework of antiquity, unreasonable, intolerant, and irrational. A tolerant and cultivated man, the emperor Julian Apostata, plaintively wrote of the Jews: “While striving to gratify their own God, they do not, at the same time, serve the others.” This, according to Julian, was “their error.” Politically, it was. And Jewish views were held with unaccustomed fanaticism. For the Jewish God did not serve His people. His people served Him–a wholly unancient conception.
Not content with holding such absurd and intolerant beliefs–which, at best, could provoke only the ridicule, and, at worst, the hostility of all other peoples–the Jews rigidly refused even to tolerate the reasonable beliefs of others. The Romans had conquered them; but the Jews had the audacity to object to any attempt of the Romans to allow their soldiers to worship in their own fashion. All this in the name of what the Jews declared to be God’s law against erecting false idols. It was as though the American Indians were to try to prohibit their conquerors from engaging in Christian worship in America. Such intolerance and apparent arrogance could not but provoke hostility. It did. Of course, in their view, the Jews merely objected to desecration of their holy sites. But try explaining that to a Roman.
Pre-Christian anti-Semitism was reinforced by a number of other Jewish traits. Their all-power God was invisible. He had forbidden the making of images not only of Himself but even of humans, let alone other gods. This prohibition helped to protect the belief in one God, for images soon come to be worshiped themselves, and different images would develop into different gods. Images of human beings could easily assume divine stature. And they could be used for magical purposes. Thus the Jewish religion differed from the others in kind; it did not compete with them, or recognize them, or have different rituals of the same genre. It was sui generis, a different kind of religion altogether, and it set its chosen people apart.
This “apartheid” was enjoined on the Jews as a moral duty, too. They were not meant to mingle with non-Jews and did not, to the extent to which they followed their religious leaders. To be sure, tribal pride and its enlargement, nationalism, as well as insistence on the superiority and preservation of one’s culture, have always been with us. But these elements were religiously elaborated and adhered to by the Jews in far greater measure than by any other people–if such things can be measured. The Greeks did not think highly of “Barbarians” either. But the Jews went further and were more exclusive.
The Romans were hospitable to other cultures, religions, and peoples: not without grumbling, but still they were about as hospitable as present-day Americans. The Jews were stiff-necked, literal minded, bothersome, and unrealistic. They refused to make the slightest concession, objecting even to Roman money because it bore the portraits of the emperors. In short, they gave no end of trouble–willfully, the Romans must have thought.
Most unpleasant, their invisible God not only insisted on being the one and only and all-powerful God–creator and lord of everything and the only rightful claimant to worship–He also developed into a moral God.
This, too, distinguished Him, and his worshipers, from the deities familiar to the pre-Christian world. These gods usually were personifications of the forces of nature, such as fertility; or of elements of the human personality, such as cunning; or of the social environment, such as war, craftsmanship, or art. Often these elements were blended, and the gods assumed magnified human personalities or natural powers; a moral element was present at times, but no more so than it is in most human beings. And one invoked the help of these gods by pleading, currying favor, and bribing them through sacrifices and through the fulfillment of their special demands.
The God of Israel, though only slowly shedding these elements, developed into something far more demanding, far harder to understand and obey. He developed from a natural into a truly supernatural spirit, and He demanded that his people follow moral rules and live a righteous life, in obedience to His law. Unlike the gods of others, who represented and accepted all parts of the human personality as they coexisted, fused, or struggled with each other, the God of the Jews came to represent a stern, dominating, and demanding paternal Superego–long before one of His chosen people invented, fathered (or at least baptized) the superego. The Jews exclusively worshiped a father God–not, as others did, a family of gods. This, too, set the Jews apart, not just because of their beliefs, but also because of the style of life that these beliefs enjoined.
The gods of the ancients were more or less helpful to, and protective of, their devotees, and were worshiped and sacrificed to for that reason. The Jews too had been chosen to receive certain promises from their God. But their choice involved incessant fidelity on the part of the Chosen, whose major preoccupation became the interpretation and fulfillment of their part of the bargain–the Law. Jewish life became God-centered, dominated by a priesthood which insisted on rituals and sacrifices, and by prophets who called on the people and their leaders to return to the spirit of Jehovah’s laws; they interpreted all misfortunes as deserved punishments for disobedience, inflicted by an angry God. Jehovah exacted His end of the bargain and was not satisfied with anything but full value.
The Jews were constantly driven by their God, as His perpetual debtors. Their whole life revolved about doing His will, performing their duties to Him, attempting to satisfy Him. But speaking through His prophets, God spoke only of His displeasure. His Chosen People were dutiful enough; they were ungrateful, faithless–in short, their God acted as an insatiable Superego. And the God of Israel punished His people accordingly with wars, floods, bondage, and famines, though saving them at the last moment, despite their sinfulness, because of the merits of one or two among them. He was infinitely merciful, this awe-inspiring father. He had to be, for in His eyes His people were infinitely guilty.
All this was hard to understand for the more easygoing ancients, and struck them as superstitious, a little ridiculous, ignorant, and unrealistic, as, indeed, it often strikes today’s easygoing sophisticates, who may regards the whole business as “neurotic.” The Jewish law seemed almost perverse in the value it placed on the invisible benefits of moral righteousness relative to the accessible pleasures of the senses. And yet, the Jews seemed uncanny. For there was no denying the moral fervor with which they stuck to their supernatural beliefs in the midst of a world concerned with quite different things. (In a similar way, the Roman Catholic Church, which certainly understands the power of more ascendency, has gained much from the almost eerie respect the ordinary man pays to the priest whose choice it is, on religious grounds alone, to live in celibacy.)
CHRISTIAN ANTI-SEMITISM
Pre-Christian anti-Semitism is explained largely by the Jews’ contempt for Gentile gods and values, and by their continued insistence that they had a monopoly on the true God, and had been chosen by means of a special covenant. It is all right to love one’s own God. It is certainly dangerous, however, to assert that the gods worshiped by others are false, and that their worshipers are being fooled–and to insist further that, unlike oneself, these worshipers of other gods were not chosen by the only true God, as evidenced by the unalterable fact of being born into the wrong group. Too bad for them.
When expressed by a small and powerless people, such as the Jews, such ideas cannot but lead to hostility and ridicule. When held by a dominant one, such ideas can lead to, or be used for, all the evils of racism. Which is what happened. The anti-Gentilism of the Jews was as real as–and preceded–the anti-Semitism of the Gentiles. But the Gentiles were materially stronger. The Jews were hoist by their own petard in more senses than one.
Christianity added elements to anti-Semitism which have their roots in the historical relationship between the Christian and the Jewish religions. Yet the Christian anti-Semites were no more conscious of the nature of these elements than the Jews. As was pre-Christian anti-Semitism, so Christian hostility to the Jews was overdetermined: in addition to the historical-religious, many other elements contributed to it; each of these, economic, religious, political, or psychological, might itself be a sufficient cause of anti-Semitism.
Christianity accused the Jews of having slain God. (As late as Vatican II, this accusation was seriously discussed, and cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church were on both sides of the question.) Deicide was attributed to the Jews because one of them, who proclaimed himself the Messiah and later was deified by His followers, was crucified in Jerusalem. The execution was carried out in the Roman manner (crucifixion was not a Jewish manner of execution) by the Roman troops occupying Jerusalem, probably because Jesus, as did other religious leaders of the time, appeared to the Romans as a dangerous subversive who might stir up the people against the Romans.
The Gospel tales–written long after the events–which have the arrest made and the death sentence pronounced at the behest of the Jewish Sanhedrin are scarcely plausible from a legal or historical viewpoint. The writers of the Gospels knew that Christianity was not making much headway among the Jews, whereas the number of Gentile converts, particularly Roman converts, was steadily mounting. It would have been undiplomatic, therefore, to saddle the Romans with deicide–while to accuse the Jews of hating the new God who came from their midst was to make that God more acceptable to the Romans. We don’t know whether such considerations actually entered the minds of the Gospel writers. But these considerations would plausibly explain why the Jews, and not the Romans, were accused of what certainly must have been a Roman action– the condemnation and execution of Jesus.
It is quite likely, however, that the Jewish authorities did not greatly oppose the anti-subversive measures of the Romans. They, no less than the Romans, were opposed to whatever might stir up the people and lead them to attempt armed rebellion. For they saw–and history proved them right–that such a rebellion was quite hopeless. The prophets who arose from the people had little grasp of the distribution of power and relied, more than did the priestly hierarchy which dominated the Sanhedrin, on supposed divine revelation–which had led to disastrous adventures in the past. The many sects, the many enthusiasts, the many would-be prophets, the many fanatics and anti-Romans kept the established authorities, both Jewish and Roman, quite busy. If the Roman authorities wanted to avoid trouble, so did the Jewish authorities, for they feared the defeat which would–and in the end did–cost them the remnants of their independence. So much for the history of the matter, which is perhaps less important than the psychological genesis of anti-Semitism.
The Jews were accused of having killed God. Actually, the hostility to them may be based as much on having given birth to Him. For the Messiah, too, was a demanding and moral god who exacted sacrifices undreamed of before Christianity. Those making these sacrifices may well have turned into unconscious resentment not against the Savior–clearly an impossibility–but against His progenitors and relatives. After all, these relatives had mistreated the Savior, and murdered Him–which rationalizes any amount of hostility.
Further, the Jews remained faithful to their old God and repudiated His son. By this faithfulness, they show that they regard themselves still as chosen–and that the Christians worship a false god, a phony Messiah. Theirs remained a Father religion. Christianity became a Son religion. By their rejection of the Son, the Jews identified themselves with the Father, thus calling upon themselves all the resentment–all the ambivalence, at least–that comes with being identified with the Father.
But there is more. According to Freud, the Jews probably murdered not the Son, but God the Father–symbolized by Moses, the man who led them out of Egypt and out of the wilderness and gave them their Law. The grave of the father of Judaism was never found. According to Freud’s speculation, the Jews in one of their many rebellions against his leadership actually murdered Moses. They never overcame their guilt feelings and became zealous and obedient sons to the father they had slain.
Even if Freud’s speculation is no more than Freud’s own fantasy, it seems a fantasy that meets, articulates, and explains, if not the facts, the conscious and unconscious fantasies of mankind and certainly of the Jews. The idea of parricide, and of expiation by the guilt-ridden sons through sacrifice of one of their own, was widespread among Oriental peoples, and quite popularly accepted among the Romans at the time the Gospels were created.
The Christians, through acknowledging the hereditary sin against God the Father, were purified of it and made, they thought, reacceptable to Him by their identification with the sacrifice of the Son. Jesus voluntarily allowed Himself to be slain. He was sent by His Father to redeem the world. The people who actually killed Him, according to the Gospels, however, did not accept their Oedipal guilt, and, above all, the expiatory sacrifice of Jesus. Thus they were not redeemed. They continued to refuse purification, and thus to bear their sin, and, by their insistence that Jesus was a false Messiah, to add to it.
This insistence on the invalidity of Christ’s redemptory sacrifice–for the sake of which the Jews suffered so much–could not but throw some doubt on the certainty of salvation. There were some–the Jews–that denied that Jesus had saved anyone; they were willing themselves to die for the sake of this denial. Thus in Christian eyes the Jews became representatives of the offended, vengeful, and, according to them, unappeased Father.
In sort, the Jews repeated – however involuntarily and unwittingly – in the Christian world the arrogance which had caused the ancient world to hate them. They told the Christians that they had fallen for phony Messiah, just as they had told the ancients that they worshiped false gods.* They, the Jews, alone were in possession of the true religion. What chutzpah.
[*Perhaps “signified”–by their very existence and beliefs–is a better word than “told”: the Jews did not proselytize, but their beliefs could not be ignored either.]
But the Christians understandably were far more irked than the ancients. To the ancients, the Jewish religion was arrogant, foolish, and alien. To the Christians, it cast doubts on their most cherished beliefs. For many centuries Christians regarded the promise of life everlasting–paradise–as the most important thing on earth. Yet doubt was thrown on their belief in their salvation out of the same tradition from which the belief itself sprung, by the very people among whom the Messiah had arisen. An uncomfortable situation. It is not astonishing that the Jews were treated as one is always tempted to treat those who arouse doubts about one’s own most cherished beliefs.
Things would have been different if one of them, Paul, had not decided that the Messiah rejected by the Jews could be accepted by the Gentiles, provided they would not first have to become Jews and be circumcised. The story of salvation could be universalized. Paul proceeded to do this quite successfully.
Thus Gentiles accepted what the Jews had rejected and, in turn, rejected the people that did not want to give up being chosen. The Jews were burdened thenceforth not only with the sin which is the heritage of mankind, but also with their refusal to accept redemption, with slaying Him who wanted to redeem mankind, and finally with casting unrepentant doubt on the genuineness of the salvation vouch-safed the Gentiles.
The Christians now felt they could do to the representatives of the Father, in the name of the Son, what Christians would normally be punished for–were it not that the Son had removed the credentials of these representatives, the unredeemed Jews, and thus allowed them to be punished. To the Jews were attributed, unconsciously and sometimes consciously, all the things the sons fear: the father will castrate and kill them. And vengeance was taken on the Jews for these dreaded paternal intentions and fantasied deeds.
The Jews obdurately denied their share of guilt and their need for salvation and insisted that they had a special arrangement with God, the Father, which would save them and (the Christians thought) nobody else. If the Jews were right to extent, the many renunciations that Christianity had imposed on its Gentile converts were in vain. The pleasures of this world would have been renounced for the sake of a paradise which was, after all, reserved for Jews.
No wonder the very existence of the Jews became a thorn in the side of Christianity. A useful thorn, as it were. For the Jews, by attracting hostility to themselves, solidified the identification of Christians with each other. Nothing does as much for internal solidarity as the existence of an external enemy. To the enemy, the group can attribute whatever it fears or detests in itself. Against him it can unite. Against him it can discharge hostility. As the chastity of nineteenth-century women required prostitutes, so the purity of Christian faith required Jews.
THE JEWISH CONSPIRACY: AN ANTI – SEMITIC FANTASY
In the primitive way in which they conceive it, the community of attitudes and characteristics among Jews was a myth invented by the Nazis for their own convenience. Radical parties, right or left, always simplify experience, however illegitimately, so as to manipulate a series of stereotypes in the end. It is their way of making life intelligible–and of proving that they could change it for the better and, therefore, ought to be on top.
Above all, Nazis, contrary to logic and fact, believed that the common attributes of the Jews (some real and some imagined for convenience) would lead to concerted actions and common purposes, to a conspiracy aimed at dominating and exploiting Gentiles. This “theory” was occasionally supported by faked documents–e.g., the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Support for this sort of idea is produced by the general human inclination to attribute whatever is unpleasant or undesired to malevolent demons. With increasing secularization, the demons have been replaced by malevolent human groups–e.g., Jews, or capitalists. Witches form the bridge between these two versions. Thus the Germans, according to Hitler, did not lose World War I because they had been defeated by their enemies–an unacceptable blow to their superiority feelings–but because they were stabbed in the back by the Jews. And again, the Great Depression of the 1930’s was caused by Wall Street Jews somehow acting in concert with Communists, who were also, it seems, Jews. And so on.
The Nazis were not very original in these fantasies. One model of the technique had been furnished – in secular form – by Karl Marx, a Jew. Of course, the Nazis are right: Jews are on all sides. The Nazis were wrong only in believing that they act in common: Germans, too, may be on all sides and so may women.
Marx attributed all the evils of the world to the capitalistic system; his less sophisticated followers (at times including Marx himself) went on to attribute the evils of the world directly to the malevolence of capitalists. They humanized the theory, as Madison Avenue would say. Hitler blamed “the system,” and “the Jews” who were supposed to be dominating it, for every wrong. Marx before him had blamed the capitalist system and “the capitalists” who were supposed to be dominating it. The “logical” structure is the same.
The socialist leader August Bebel – a German who died long before Hitler became known – was more accurate than he realized when he said: “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the lower middle class.” Psychologically it is indeed the equivalent of socialism, and takes its place for those to whom socialism is, or, as a result of its failures, becomes, unacceptable. (All utopian systems, and all systems supported by utopian enthusiasts, “fail”: nothing ever lives up to our fantasy.) The symbols are different by the psychological essence of either ideology is the same: the evils of the world are presumed to be caused by a wrong system maintained by a small group who benefit from it and deliberately use the system to exploit the great majority. That majority – the people – are actually superior to the exploiters, either by virtue of their “race” and historical mission (Hitler) or by virtue of their “proletarian” descent, economic position, and historical mission (Marx).* The superior majority has the historical mission of eliminating the historically or racially corrupt minority, after which the millennium begins.
[*Marx was considerably more sophisticated than Hitler and, above all, unlike Hitler, he was part of the rationalistic humanitarian tradition even though he repudiated it as sentimental in favor of science. Wherefore he appeals more to intellectuals. But his popular appeal has the same source as Hitler’s: secularized Manichaean eschatology.]
The origins of this conspiracy theory are found in primitive anthropomorphism. A traffic accident, or for that matter, a war, an economic depression, low farm prices, or the obsolescence of a given industry–all these things happen without being necessarily willed by anyone; yet they may injure or damage almost everyone, although in different degrees. As everyone pursues his course, the collision happens. As every farmer produces, prices fall, given certain circumstances. As each nation tries to achieve goals regarded as necessary by its government, it may collide with another nation pursuing its goals. An industry becomes obsolete because of technological developments not necessarily aimed at making it obsolete.
However, all of us find it hard to accept that anything really occurs without anyone willing it. Human beings usually have, or think they have, a purpose in their actions. They tend, therefore, to ascribe purposes to the world at large and to nature – and even more to actions undertaken or set in motion by fellow humans, such as wars or traffic collisions. It is hard for us to see that these may be simply the unintended result of deliberate acts. When these results are particularly unpleasant, they are ascribed to malevolent spirits and–with the secularization of our imagination – to malevolent people. Jews, for the reasons given, were easily the most likely malefactors.
Long after Marx, and not so long after Hitler, new versions of this ever-popular story, which in the childhood of the human race started with myths of demons and their human servants, abound. What else is C. Wright Mills’ fascinating fable of the “power elite”?* In each of these versions, the believer has discovered that there are men more powerful than others, and that they often have more prestige and income than others, too. He then discovers that men outstanding in one activity are or become important in others, too: generals become corporate directors, directors of one corporation become directors of another, a man powerful in California may be influential in Washington and New York. The believer then concludes that these people, who have in common the fact that they are powerful, have little to divide them from each other, and that they share an overriding aim: to act in concert to their advantage and to the detriment of the less powerful. And that explains whatever happens that is unpleasant. “They” done it, whatever it is: started the war, or lost it… caused the depression, or the inflation… brought about the imperialistic expansion, or the cowardly retrenchment.
[*Mills updated the matter: since the nation is more prosperous, it is harder for most people to believe that economic circumstances determine everything; they have found otherwise. Hence the “power elite” is not, in the main, an economic class. It is a status group.]
Just as Hitler and C. Wright Mills did, I too have come to the conclusion that we are dominated and exploited by a “power elite.” Only, unlike my fellow scholars, I don’t identify the members as either rich or Jewish. Upon extensive research, I found that we are dominated by men wearing glasses; they succeed in getting each other into corporate directorships, become generals, music critics, stockbrokers, senators, Supreme Court justices, and cabinet members. They conspire against anyone not shortsighted. I can prove that easily. (For statistical tables about eyeglasses worn by men in leading positions, which clearly demonstrate my theory, see Appendix.)
Until Hitler nearly killed them all, the Jews were excellent targets for this sort of thing. To Gentiles, they were strange and uncanny: in, but not really accepted as part of, the society in which they lived. They were active, often reached outstanding positions, yet were different and therefore did not quite belong. And they certainly had something in common that could not be denied and that differentiated them: they were Jews. It is as though they were some kind of family mysterious to nonmembers, some kind of network with an eerie communications system, omnipresent, powerful, sinister, and yet almost anonymous at the center of the body politic. Were they not on all sides? Did they not therefore cause everything? It is the “therefore,” of course, that constituents the fallacy: men with glasses are prominent on all sides but do not “therefore” act in common to cause everything. Even if people have things in common, it does not follow that they will act in common, let alone conspire. But it’s too nice a theory just to drop.
Among many widely recognized and ambivalently admired characteristics of the Jews are a desire for education, a low rate of alcoholism, an almost invisible rate of what we not call juvenile delinquency (“radical” activity is the Jewish form of defying authority). These characteristics do not make the anti-Semites like Jews – on the contrary. After all, such traits can be explained: the desire for education is part of Jewish pushiness and of the plan for world domination; if you are engaged in a serious conspiracy, you can’t afford to get drunk–in vino veritas: people who have so much to hide won’t dare to get drunk; and there is no need for juvenile delinquency if you, together with your parents, are conspiring to do in the rest of the world.
The interesting thing is that all of these paranoid fantasies are also negative versions of half-truths: Jews are ambitious; they have messianic dreams; and their abstemiousness may have something to do with fear of baring guilty secrets to a hostile world. These semiconscious Jewish feelings are perceived by anti-Semites and projected as realities. Thus, anti-Semitism on the psychological level is the product of a cooperative effort involving Jews and their enemies; on a rational level it is nonsense, a pseudo explanation of history which, particularly in time of distress, helps people shift the blame from themselves.
This nonsense was accepted by enough people to make possible the horrors of concentration camps and the murder of six million Jews. It is hard to believe in God; it is harder still to believe in human rationality.
Sweet Hour of Prayer,
