Anti-Semitism? It's Ingrained in Our Culture By Seth Armus June 27, 2003 http://www.nynewsday.com Anti-Semitism is back in the news. Religious fanatics from Eric Rudolph to members of al-Qaida find common ground in their belief in worldwide Jewish conspiracy. More disturbingly, on the secular left, in anti-globalization, anti-war, anti-American, internationalist and other "progressive" movements one also hears these ancient libels. Since Jews have, historically, supported left-wing causes, this betrayal is particularly painful. All of this creates a classic Jewish dilemma - how to call attention to a real crisis without playing into Jewish "paranoia" stereotypes? The Arab world has long displaced its failures onto Israel, but the vilification has recently gone one step further, combining Nazi-style racial anti-Semitism with the medieval Christian notion that Jews are a "satanic" people. This is, in turn, echoed in Europe, where the ugliest of Christian slanders are revived in political diatribes against "Zionists." For many in a generation still tainted with Holocaust guilt, the subject remains touchy, but others seem to find condemning Jews an exercise in freeing themselves from their pasts. Critics of Israel frequently complain that they are unfairly labeled anti-Semitic. While there may be truth to this, there is something about the quantity of negative attention given Israel, one besieged democracy in a region of fascist tyrannies, that should, and does, make Jews suspicious. In April 2002, a cartoon appeared in the left- of-center Italian daily La Stampa that chillingly condensed this. It showed a menacing Israeli tank pointed at the Christ child, with the caption, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again?" So there we have it - a vile image from Christian history used to serve Arab political ends. The newspaper's defense, that it was purely a political criticism of Israel, demonstrates typical bad faith. Accusations of Jews killing Christ cannot be merely political. The package that anti-Semitism sells is a time-proven one. It is a great simplifier that provides glue for otherwise irreconcilable ideas. The American anti-war movement repeatedly tripped over this problem - torn between its desire to unite with the Arab cause and the realization that this means accepting tyranny, the destruction of civil rights, oppression of women. In short, everything they normally oppose. A sizable minority of the war protesters believed that the war against Iraq was being directed by Jews or in the interest of Israel. For some, the anti-war marches were merely a forum to proclaim Israel's eternal culpability. Having just removed ourselves from a century where traditional Christian anti-Judaism, combined with race and technology, led to the murder of most of Europe's Jews, we now confront what we are told is an epidemic of anti-Semitism spawned by a new generation of idealists. If the actual violence is most often perpetrated by Muslim youth, it remains a legacy of centuries of Christian vilification of the Jews. It is, like so much else, a Western export. Egyptian television's recent broadcast of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a 100-year-old piece of anti-Jewish fantasy, is a fine example of Western anti-Semitism being adopted as anti-Israel propaganda. Simply put, hatred of Jews is deeply embedded in Western civilization. The story here is neither pleasant nor encouraging. Jews had the misfortune of being crucial to Christian theology - once Christianity decided, in the second century, that it would "supercede" Judaism. Christianity required the disappearance of the Jews - the Christian religion could therefore fulfill a new covenant that invalidated the old one. The persistence of Jews, however tiny their numbers, served as a constant reminder of this failure. The response was, historically, to destroy the Jews, and thus eliminate the evidence, but with every massacre the survivors also served to remind Christianity of the hypocrisy just beneath its message of peace. So Jews bore a double witness, first to a theological failure and then to the moral one. The theology is so filled with this problem that one need not be a Christian fanatic to embrace it. Christians today may, with the best intentions, unintentionally reiterate supercessionist ideas (such as the Easter "seders" that have become quite popular). Hatred of Jews rests largely on such supernatural assumptions. One of the reasons we fail to comprehend it is that we are continually searching, naively, for rational explanations. Given the sociological focus of our world, we are accustomed to this. We are taught that effects invariably have causes - poverty leads to crime, child abuse to spousal abuse, etc. But to accept this is to misunderstand one of the great lessons of modern history - humans are not necessarily rational, and their hatreds least of all. The best we can hope for with anti-Semitism is recognizing it for what it is, and keeping in mind that an idea so firmly rooted in Western culture is best understood in the context of history and not in the political issues of the moment. ---------- Seth Armus is a professor of history at the Suffolk campus of St. Joseph's College.