Why Jews have such a hard time talking about Antisemitism – Part II - "Eternal Antisemitism"

Part II – Defining categories – “eternal antisemitism”

In Part I of this thought experiment, I proposed to examine the contemporary question of why Jews today (and here perhaps it is appropriate to limit the discussion to American Jews, thanks Susan) seem so divided on talking about antisemitism.

To clarify, I do not mean that Jews today aren’t speaking about antisemitism, in fact it seems that we are speaking about it incessantly! Rather, at least from my perch, it seems that in many cases we are talking past one another/against one another, and very quickly retreat to our respective “corners,” unable to hear those who disagree with us, or perhaps even more profoundly, unable to even understand those who disagree with us. My thought was that there was something structural going on under the surface that was driving this rupture, between friends, co-workers, and family members.

The premise of this discussion is that this issue today has come to revolve primarily around questions of Zionism and Israel. It is this question that has sparked new layers of the discussion, reaching back to the early 1970s when the term “New Antisemitism” was first introduced. New Antisemitism implied both antisemitism in the Muslim world and, more pointedly, accusations of progressive antisemitism on the contemporary Left regarding Zionism and Israel.

While there has been much writing about New Antisemitism in the waning decades of the 20th century, more recently the questions of antisemitism have risen to questions of legality, which require more defined definitional guidelines. Thus, the academic discussion that carried with it nuance, context, and caveats, began to clash with the legal discussion which required firmer boundaries. The first fruits of this turn have yielded the IHRA, the Jerusalem Document, and Nexus, all proposing to “define” antisemitism for the purposes of legal enforcement, even as the author of IHRA Kenneth Stern openly states that his document (IHRA) was not meant to be used as a legal tool but as a working paper for further discussion. The fact that his intention has been ignored is noteworthy in and of itself but as we know, authorial intent is a problematic issue. The problem some of us have with the IHRA (full disclosure I signed on to the Jerusalem Document) is the intentional vagueness of some of the categories which left open broad possibilities of interpretation left up to the authorities (legal, congressional, professional) who choose to use it for legal purposes and weaponize it against those who speak out strongly against Israeli policies and political structures.

In any event, one of the salient debates among scholars on the definitional question revolves around numerous things, three of which I describe below:

(1) Terminology: Antisemitism emerges as a term in the mid-19th century first occasionally used by Jewish historian Moritz Steinschneider (1916-1907) and then more prominently by Willhelm Marr (1819-1904) in the 1840s and then in his book, Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism) 1879. Its first appearance in Hebrew may by the short work by Naftali Zvi Berlin of Volozhin (Naziv) “The Remnants of Israel” (She’ar Yisrael) that appeared in the 1870s. This term soon became the overarching way of describing hatred, animosity, and discriminatory practices against Jews stretching from ancient times to the present. As we will see, scholars hotly debated whether antisemitism was accurate as an umbrella, even all-inclusive, term, or should be limited specifically to the historical context in which it was coined.

(2) Historicity: There is an argument whether the best way to understand antisemitism is though a historical or ahistorical, even theological, lens. Here we can reach back to ancient times. In the Talmud, Shimon bar Yohai famously proclaimed “Esau hates Jacob” which in context likely referred only to Rome, or as it was known by Jews, Edom (Bar Yohai lived during the Hadrianic persecutions in the Second Century CE) but much later “Esau hates Jacob” became a kind of trope of what has become known as “eternal antisemitism.” On Bar Yohai’s comment, there is ample discussion of Rashi’s comment on the Talmudic passage “Esau hates Jacob,” when Rasho writes, “halakha yaduah (or b’yaduah)” [it is a known law – that Esau hates Jacob] but that is for another time. The de-contextualization of Bar Yohai’s comment has become normative in many Jewish religious circles. (see the interesting essay by Marty Lockshin, “’Esau Hates Jacob’: But is Antisemitism a Halakha?” in The Torah.com at “Esau Hates Jacob” - But Is Antisemitism a Halakha? - TheTorah.com).

In his exhaustive book Jacob and Esau: European Jewish History between Nation and Empire (2019), Malachai Hacohen argues that “Esau hates Jacob” does not universalize Esau to refer to all gentiles toward some theory of “eternal antisemitism” until the late nineteenth century, and mostly in Yiddish literature. Malachi argues that the admixture of Yiddish literature and early Zionist writing transformed this trope the serve as a textual (some might even say, halakhic) basis for “eternal antisemitism.”

If we view antisemitism historically (as Hannah Arendt, Gavin Langmuir, David Engel, Jonathan Judaken and many others argue we must) then the question of its “eternality” (that is, its ahistoricity) cannot easily bear the weight of historical scrutiny. An interesting example here is David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013). Nirenberg traces various forms of what he calls “anti-Judaism” without overtly making an eternalist antisemitism argument, although many have read Nirenberg as “historical” proof of what Arendt called the “unhistorical” claim of eternal antisemitism. In fact Nirenberg writes in his Introduction, “The third [methodological deviation of this book]….is the three thousand year sweep of this history, which may wrongly suggest to some readers either that I take ideas to be eternal and unchanging or that I am engaged in a genealogy, and evolutionary history, a question for the origin of the species.” (Anti-Judaism, 7). That is, Nirenberg is not doing precisely what Wistrich and other eternalists are doing, and yet he is often viewed as part of that cadre of historians.

More generally here see the recent book Antisemitism and the Politics of History (2024). My point here is to suggest that eternal antisemitism claims sometimes tie itself to history but often in ways that scholars such as Arendt, Engel etc. argue his historically untenable from a methodological perspective

(3) -Theology: the role of theology in determining (eternal) antisemitism is very popular in religious circles but also tacitly in more secular ones. It may be likened to the way Israeli professor of Jewish history Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin defines secular Zionism: “I don’t believe in God, but He gave us the land.” For some secularists, they do not believe in the theological precept of eternal antisemitism, but they believe that the gentiles always have, and always will, hate the Jews.

The Talmudic sages were quite attuned gentile animus toward the Jews, and had differing, often surprising, things to say about it. I offer two examples. In Pesikta Zutarta, a medieval midrash we read an interpretation of the burning bush (s’neh in Hebrew):

Why “in the bush?” (s’neh). Because Israel will be ensnared in the thorns of servitude in the future. Why bush s’neh? Because in the future Israel will receive the Torah at Sinai. This is the language of sina (hatred), that the hatred of the gentile (the midrash uses the standard form “idolater”) will descend upon Israel [because of Sinai].

The second example is from Pesikta d Rav Kahane:

All my foes heard of my plight and exulted, for it is Your doing” (Lam. 1:21): It is You Who made it [that the nations would rejoice at my downfall]. They gave a parable: To what is this comparable? To a king who married a matron; he would command her and tell her: “Do not converse with your neighbors. Do not lend to them and do not borrow from them.” One time, she mocked him, and [the king] tired of her and expelled her from his palace. She went from door to door among the neighbors, and not a single one accepted her. . . . She said to him, “My lord king, is it not you who did this? Did you not command me and say to me, ‘Do not converse with your neighbors. Do not lend to them and do not borrow from them’?”. . . So too Israel said to the Holy One, blessed be He: “Sovereign of the universe, is it not You Who did this? Did You not write to us in the Torah, ‘Do not marry among them; do not give your daughter to his son, and do not take his daughter for your son’ (Deut. 7:3). Had we married among them or given [our daughters] to marry them, which of them would have seen a son or a daughter standing at the door and not have accepted them?” Thus: “for it is Your doing.

In both cases there is an overt recognition that Jewish separateness, or in the first case, chosenness, will evoke animosity from others. In fact, we know that the Romans, who were in many cases more sympathetic to Jews than, say Christians, were disturbed by this Jewish claim of divine election. Ishay Rosen-Zvi and Adi Ophir argue in their essay “Separation, Judeophobia, and the Birth of the ‘Goy’”: The Chicken and the Egg,” that the Romans did hold negative attitudes toward the Jews but not categorically different than they did toward other peoples (for example, Egyptians). And that hatred was mostly based on lifestyle differences and not some innate hatred of the Jews per se.

This is all concretized much later in Spinoza’s view of divine election and its relationship to Jew-hatred. My point is simply to state that the sages were aware that claims of separateness (divine election) could easily produce an “otherness” (allosemitism, a term used by Zygmunt Bauman as an alternative to antisemitism) that under certain conditions, could lead to antisemitism. This is not to claim divine election is a cause, only to suggest the way those who curated what we now know as Judaism were aware of the hazard.

Critiques of eternal antisemitism: One of the most salient critics of eternal antisemitism was Hannah Arendt, both in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and her unfinished essay from the 1930s “Antisemitism” that appears in Hannah Arendt: The Jewish Writings. Her argument is far more complex than I can go into now, so I just want to state a few points relevant to our concerns.

Her basic claim is that the eternalist argument is, by definition, totally unhistorical, in addition it “naturalizes Jewish hate,” and, in effect, exonerates both perpetrator and victim. If antisemitism is eternal (theological, metaphysical etc.), the victims (the Jews) are always blameless and the perpetrators (antisemites) are not responsible, because how can they be responsible for something that is “eternal” “natural” and thus beyond their control? And if it is “eternal,” there is no way to solve it, only control it. One of the more vocal advocates of this last point was Meir Kahane who fully adopted the eternalist argument and believed that only deterrence (militancy) would prevent gentiles from acting out their innate “antisemitism.”

Arendt understands (modern) antisemitism from a historical perspective, claiming that it emerges from the (European) nation-state, combined with “certain aspects of Jewish history and especially in Jewish functions during the last centuries.” In her reading, antisemites are responsible for their antisemitism, and Jews also are not totally innocent of behaviors that could exacerbate negative reactions against them because, she claims, that is how human societies work; actors with agency all contribute to historical realities. Again, this is not “blaming the victim” but simply arguing that as a historical phenomenon, all actors play a role, and one job of the historian is to interrogate those structures.

In some sense, this is not that far from the rabbinic sources cited above, albeit the rabbis are more explicit that theological/religious claims create the hazard of negative reactions and base their position purely on the theological (in the second case, blaming God), whereas Arendt is more gently claiming that historicizing antisemitism casts the net of responsibility far wider and in some cases, views political, economic, and cultural developments (not specific to any one group) as integral in understanding antisemitism.

The non-theological eternalist claim: Perhaps the most widely known non-theological (although it may be tacitly theological) is Robert Wistrich’s The Longest Hatred (1992) which used historical documentation (not necessarily in a particular analytical way) to claim that antisemitism is sui generis in relation to other forms of hatred. The sui generis nature of antisemitism is a hotly debated topic that also informs the use of the term “genocide” either to people other than the Jews or, in the case of the Gaza War, if Jews can, by definition, be guilty of genocide. Genocide was a term invented to describe the Nazi Final Solution. Whether it is transferable to other conflicts is a matter of disagreement among scholars (I will write more on this in the next post on the debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust).

A later iteration of Wistrich’s thesis is Kenneth Marcus’ The Definition of Anti-Semitism which Jonathan Judaken in his Critical Theories of Antisemitism calls “cyclical eternalism” to suggest that antisemitism isn’t everywhere and always (closer to Wistrich) but rather moves in cycles contingent on historical realities. In some way it tries to split the difference between someone like Wistrich and Arendt but in my view never breaks the eternality circle and thus is never open to the possibility of human responsibility, either of the perpetrator or the victim. For example, Marcus holds the position, common in today’s discourse, that “Israel is the collective Jew” (popularized by Canadian politician Irwin Cotler) to argue that therefore anti-Zionism is really a guise for antisemitism (the state has become “the Jew). But of course, this is an unhistorical and speculative claim at best, a weaponized claim at worst. How does one know that? What would be the evidence for such a sweeping claim, etc.”? And what does it mean for a nation-state (where only half the world’s Jews live) to function under the assumption that the world is always, by definition, against it. How can such a state be part of a global community of states under those premises? For one who believes in eternal antisemitism, even “cyclical eternalism” none of that is necessary, as antisemitism is viewed as being embedded in human civilization.

The choice to use other terminology such as Judeophobia to describe contemporary instances of animus against Jews is proffered by scholars such as David Engel and Jonathan Judaken each of whom, as historians, reject the premise of eternal antisemitism as having any basis in history and believe that each instantiation of animus against Jews needs to be examined thoroughly within its particular context and, as a matter of historical method, terminology should not extend from one historical context to the next.

This would include anti-Zionism. The problem with the eternalist argument as applied to Zionism is that, as Arendt argued, for eternalists, the victim is always innocent, almost by definition, which in cases where Jews were subject to imperial or state power is less problematic (although also not historically certain) but in the case of a Jewish nation-state with power over others, exonerates all behavior toward those others as a legitimate form of defense against “antisemitism.” Thus, we hear Israeli politicians arguing that Israel is in a perennial “existential crisis” even as it gets more support from the US per capita than any country in the world. I am not making this claim polemically but trying to create a definitional map of ways scholars understand what we mean when we attempt to define antisemitism

In sum, what I am suggesting here is that the extent to which Zionism is built on the foundations of antisemitism (Herzl certainly argued that it was in his essay “The Jewish Question,” although in a complicated way), the eternalist argument is either openly or tacitly adopted to deflect critique of that nation-state from accusations of bad actions (systemic inequality, racism, even genocide – even as that is a contested term in our time). For me, the more difficult case is not the one of the overt eternalists, but the covert eternalist. That is, the one who claims that antisemitism may not be eternal (certainly not theologically) but tactically acts as if it is, especially regarding accusations against Israel, for example, in the campus protests. This is not to say that there was not blatant antisemitism in the campus protests (there was, and that is another topic worth exploring), it is to claim that they are not antisemitic by definition. And by eliding the legitimate protest against a war that has killed close to 18,000 children and maimed tens of thousands more, with antisemitism, is the latest act of deflection that legitimizes such a war, whatever one may think about the justification of the war.

In Part II I will examine the claim of Holocaust uniqueness as a second principle as to why it is so hard for many American Jews to talk about antisemitism. From there I will move on to Israel exceptionalism. Thanks for reading and looking forward to your comments