On targeting anti-semitism with the same rhetoric once used to target Jews

A touchstone of the difference between left and right in the Jewish world is the treatments of antisemitism. For some on the Jewish right, it is an inexplicable thing, a mystical concept of pure evil as such.

New York's Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a "liberal" Reform congregation that has flags of both Israel and the US behind the pulpit (as, certainly, not all congregations do), has said repeatedly that antisemitism is a "disease," and as such incurable (and so can only be "eliminated," presumably be wiping those who express this illness). This is the same thing Nazis said about Jews, figuring the German nation as a collective organism rooted in blood and soil whose "health" and vitality were endangered by the foreign bodies that Jews, Gypsies, and others were literally treated as. (Many Zionists in fact took up the same rhetoric and applied it to the European Jews themselves, who had supposedly been sickened by being rentier parasites, a cure that was to be found in a socialist Jewish Palestine based on agricultural hard labor. Zionism itself had first developed in the German-speaking world, where it developed out of the same romantic nationalism that opposed the liberal republicanism of the French Revolution and that led ultimately to Nazism itself.). So all of this is hardly a surprise. The roots of Zionism are profoundly irrational, and it fits that they would replay the same metaphors of health and sickness. (As did the great Jewish religious philosopher Franz Rosenzweig.). In effect, the Nazis conceived of the Jews (and the Gypsies, who were similarly subjected to genocide) on the model of mental illness, the discourse of which was on the rise at the same time in the 19th Century after the failed revolutions of 1848 and the rise of social Darwinism. The basic idea here is a mysterious illness that cannot be explained. It is exactly similar to notions of the Satanic in this regard: an evil force or will that is cause of itself, a kind of eternal evil, that is a mysterious object of an eternal crusading war to establish the good, perhaps in some colonial outpost that can be made secure. Mental illness is thought of similarly: mysteriously, the sick person has an illness that is treated as if it originates within them and is maintained as an evil disposition.

This Manichaeanism then is projected onto the twinned figures of the Jew and the anti-Jew (like Christ and the Anti-Christ, or God and Satan, in Christianity), which are treated as eternal essences. This reveals that, along with much of the capitalist "West" today, much of Judaism still remains the prisoner of Manichaean and Gnostic notions, which are in fact not only profoundly irrational but very un-Jewish, being rooted instead in nihilistic tendencies common in antiquity, more particularly in Greek and some other Indo-European languages, but profoundly affecting the Jewish world, resulting in things like beliefs in reincarnation or eternal life after death, both of which are absent from the Jewish Bible.

The materialist historical explanation of anti-semitism would figure it instead as an understandable mistake. When Jews are hated for identifying with wealth and power, and looking down on the less successful (a Calvinist Judaism, perhaps, and a Nazi one at a further extreme), one may wonder whether oppression in the name of wealth and power exist, and of course they do. So the antisemite thinks of these in a way that is politically ineffective because historically oversimplified, so that he hates a people instead of struggling against an unjust system. That is, a moralism replaces a politics. And again, right-wing thinking in Judaism often mirrors the fascist hatreds, as both target an evil. But the concept of evil is something mystical, an idolatrous because magical way of thinking. There are failures of justice and happiness, but there is no force of evil. The function today of the concept of evil is just to give some people the mistaken idea that they can improve the world by conducting some kind of war against their enemies, or those people who are simply in their way, perhaps extra, to be destroyed if necessary through regrettable collateral damage, or to be eliminated. Maybe some people are just in the way, not needed, extra people.

Does this mean that anyone, including Jews, could be on either side, of the divide between victims and executioners? Indeed, are these not possibilities of people? The difference between morality and moralism is actually quite stark, as they are not the same thing at all. Morality asks, what should I do? Moralism assumes that one is troubled by some inimical force, an evil, inexplicable and magical in origin, that must combatted and destroyed, in the logic of the collective violence of war. This magical attribution is involved indeed in hatred, because what it posits is that what is evil is a will, subjectivity, person or group or type of persons as such, and not a failure of some rational desire and purpose that can be understood. For in that case, there would not be evil as such a mystical force, just people who think well or badly and act with good reason or without it. Right now, it's very important to point out that a lot of people concerned apparently only to protect and defend their own privilege and their right to keep and enjoy it, are being very stupid, which means that they are not thinking clearly, as everyone can.

Either there are bad persons who threaten us, or we live in a world where people whose use of language makes them potentially and thus basically rational actors, a quality shared by all of humanity, sometimes make terrible mistakes. It is clear that today most religious Jews and their leaders are in the latter category, though they are not alone either in this or in presuming that they represent a special holiness which enables them to think they are all called to be soldiers fighting the mysterious people who fit the first description. The sense of threat will undoubtedly endure, for those who think this way, as long as they are alive and, like all of us, mortal. It is a militarist notion at root. And it will be figured in this ideological way as long as they support a politics rooted in the assertion of an unaccountable privilege to rule a territory, as in certain forms of colonialism. Given the obvious fact that this thinking is theologically closer to Christianity, perhaps the fact that the American far right is so predominantly white evangelical protestant helps explain the preponderance of these irrational ways of thinking and the enchanted figures therein that stoke their enthusiastic bellicosity.

It's also unfortunate that such political metaphysics or theology can serve as part of an ideological-military-economic machinery of, indeed quite efficient, as Israel's army must be called at least that, mass killing.