In his 2018 book, The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World, Robert Mnookin, a long-time leader in American Jewish organisations, writes: ‘To me “anti-Semitic” does not mean “critical of Israel” or “opposed to the Zionist project”; it means having prejudice against or hatred of Jews.’ As the previous chapter suggests, this is an extremely unusual view among leadership figures in Jewish organisations in the United States (or anywhere else). But it is entirely accurate.

FROM FAITH TO RACE

Prejudice against Jews is very old, though not as old as some historians claim.

Understanding this prejudice is complicated by the fact that Jews are both adherents of a religion and members of an ethnic group. Anti- Jewish prejudice may thus express religious intolerance, ethnic bigotry or both. Originally, it was a prejudice against the Jewish religion – although, as always, history is a little more complicated than it seems. The prime source of the prejudice was European Christianity. In Muslim countries, Jews were regarded as dhimmi – they were not treated entirely as equals but were protected and were free to practise their religion. The period of Muslim rule in Spain was a ‘golden age’ for Jews. One of them, Shmuel ha-Nagid, was appointed the vizier of Granada – effectively prime minister, 4 a role that no Jew was afforded in Christian countries. This did not mean that Jews enjoyed equal rights; the idea that any individual enjoyed rights simply because they were human was yet to take root. But it did mean that Jews were more likely to be tolerated than in Christian Europe.

As the previous chapter suggested, Christian Europe was deeply prejudiced against Muslims and Jews. From the eleventh century, Christian countries embarked on crusades to wrest Jerusalem, in particular, and the ‘Holy Land’ in general, from Muslim rule. But the hostility to Jews was far more intense than antipathy to Muslims for reasons both religious and mundane; the Crusaders slaughtered Jews on their way through Europe to Jerusalem. The religious antipathy against Jews stemmed from the Christian Bible in which they were portrayed as killers of the Christ. The dominant Christian view of Jews and their religion was supersessionism, the claim that Christians had replaced Jews as the people of God and so God’s back had been turned on the Jews.

A common way in which ‘good Jews’ place ‘bad Jews’ beyond the pale is by labelling them ‘self-hating’.

The obvious implication is that the ‘self-hater’ loathes the fact that they were born Jewish and that others see them as Jews. A scholar who acknowledges that the term is used ‘to silence and discredit’ says that it is aimed at ‘those Jews whose overly unfavorable attitudes toward their Jewish heritage or overly favorable attitudes toward non-Jewish culture allegedly threaten the survival or well-being of Judaism and Jewry’. He adds that authors – including the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre – ‘basically agree that selfhating Jews regard negatively all or some aspect of Jewish identity, including their own, in terms acquired from a dominant, non-Jewish, culture in which mistaken and malicious perceptions of Jews and Judaism prevail’. The term is as much an accusation as a description. Mick Finlay, a social psychologist, notes that it ‘is often used rhetorically to discount Jews who differ in their lifestyles, interests or political positions from their accusers’.

The ‘self-hating’ Jew is the ‘bad Jew’ in purest form: she or he is Jewish in the eyes of others but not themselves. It follows from this that the ‘good Jew’ is the genuine article, the ‘real Jew’, and that the ‘bad Jew’ is trying to opt out of Jewishness. In this view, the ‘self-hating’ or ‘bad’ Jew would be much like the black person discussed by Fanon who feels inferior because they internalise the prejudices of white racism. ‘The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority.’ Understood in this way, the ‘self-hating Jews’ respond and act much as people classified as ‘coloured’ by apartheid who tried to pass for white. They seek to be as much like the dominating group as possible to integrate into the dominant society.

Racism, one of the ugliest features of human society, is also among its most resilient.

When the African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, at the very beginning of that century, that the ‘problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line’, he summed up a core reality of the next hundred years. But perhaps not even he could have imagined that, two decades into the twenty-first century, it too was on its way to becoming a century whose problem would be ‘the color-line’. Focused on the ‘relation of the darker to the lighter races’, Du Bois could not have expected that the worst racially motivated slaughter during the century would be visited by whites on other white people, not on people of a darker complexion. The Nazi genocide slaughtered six million Jews and between eight and ten million Slavs simply because they had been born into the ‘wrong’ ethnic group. (If we calculate deaths as a proportion of population size, the most brutal mass murder of the modern era was that of ten million Congolese people at around the time that Du Bois’ observation appeared in print; of course, the sheer number of Nazi victims was greater.)

While the Nazis slaughtered Slavs and Roma people too, racism directed at Jews was a core element in their ideology of the Aryan ‘master race’. The prejudice was not new; active hostility to Jews stretches back to the founding of Christianity and was hardened by the emergence of absolutist states in the Late Middle Ages. But Jewish identity is complicated by the fact that Jews are both adherents of a religion and members of an ethnic group. This is not unique; Sikhs are another well-known example of a religious group which is also an ethnic group. But it is unusual.

Until the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, these two identities were fused (for reasons that will be discussed in chapter 4), and all Jews were effectively forced to adhere to their religion by the reigning authorities. When Jews were allowed to choose whether to practise their religion, those who chose not to were still regarded as ethnically Jewish. This made Jewish identity more complicated than that of most other religious or ethnic groups.

The claim that opposition to the Israeli state is ‘anti-Semitism’ has become the official view in Western Europe and North America; in some US states, opposition to the Israeli state has been criminalised.

Deborah Lipstadt, mentioned in chapter 1, exemplifies this distortion of the term ‘anti-Semitism’. She claimed that the founders of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which uses non-violent pressure on the Israeli state to further Palestinian demands, are anti- Semitic because they endorse the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes of which they had been dispossessed ‘and [they] therefore [advocate] the end of Israel as a Jewish state’. For her, to demand that refugees be allowed to return to their homes expresses anti-Jewish hatred. The American government agrees, hence her appointment as its arbiter of anti-Semitism. It is not alone. That anti-Semitism means not hatred of Jews but opposition to the Israeli state is now the mainstream position throughout the West. Western governments have a new-found enthusiasm for rooting out ‘anti-Semitism’, which, in reality, is a thinly disguised assault on critics of the Israeli state.

There is an irony to this. The American Jewish comedian Groucho Marx famously withdrew his membership from a tennis club. On being asked the reason, he responded that he would not belong to any club that would have him as a member. The remark was, it is said, not meant to make a political point. He wanted to resign from the club in favour of another, but it refused to let him go. His witty response secured his exit. But his statement could be seen as an unconscious reaction to the situation of the Jew in polite Western society where, since the Enlightenment, Jews were tolerated but still seen as outsiders, excluded from the places where ‘real’ Westerners gathered. The metaphorical clubs that they wanted to join would not have them as members. Western embrace of the claims of a ‘new anti-Semitism’ makes some Jews – those who endorse the Zionist enterprise – welcome in the Western club that had once barred them.

This partly explains the success of Israeli state propaganda in the West. Nazism deprived anti-Semitism of legitimacy among Western elites and the Israeli state has used charges of anti-Semitism as a stock weapon in the propaganda war.

The devotees of the ‘new anti-Semitism’, the previous chapter argued, now stigmatise Jews who embrace attitudes that have been associated with Jewishness for centuries. But why do Jews not leave traditional mainstream understandings of Jewish identity behind?

The Israeli state and the architects of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ may well agree that the values and worldview of the ‘bad Jews’ are consistent with a long-standing way of being Jewish, which is not the only expression of Jewish identity but the one that dominated for centuries. But, they would add, this traditional way of being Jewish deserves to be left in the past. The ‘bad Jews’ have failed to realise that the world has changed, and they remain museum pieces and obstacles to the new ‘good Jews’ who have created a superior present and a more promising future. They would be bound to say this because it is a central principle underpinning political Zionism and its understanding of Jewish identity.

This belief is based on an interpretation of Jewish history that justifies the creation of a Jewish state but is also, interestingly, adopted by some of the state’s critics. According to this view, the Jews had a state 2 000 years ago but lost it in the year 70 CE. Thereafter, Jews were stateless and, therefore, powerless. Because they lacked a state, they had no control over their lives and no way to protect themselves from those who wished them harm. Their plight reached its peak in the mid-twentieth century when Jews could do nothing to stop the Nazis slaughtering six million of their number.

This view was summed up by David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the Israeli state. In 1944, he told a gathering of youth groups in Haifa that Zionism and the state it was fighting for was a unique ‘revolution’. ‘All other revolts, both past and future, were uprisings against a system, against a political, economic, or social structure. Our revolution is directed not only against a system, but against destiny, against the unique destiny of a unique people.’ For Ben-Gurion and the Zionist movement, Jews were ‘a unique people’ because they had lacked a state for centuries.

For Zionism’s founders, establishing a Jewish nation state was the way to become European. Ironically, this quest for a state serving one group only in territory inhabited by others has found its parallel in a place far from Europe – India.

PASSING FOR NON-JEWISH?

As chapter 5 shows, Freud, Herzl and their fellow European Zionists initially saw assimilation, blending into European society, as their way out of the new Jewish ghetto.

But as Herzl’s play The New Ghetto shows, they felt that they were constantly rebuffed. Jacob Samuel, the play’s (Herzl-like) main character, is challenged to a duel but initially declines because he is busy with his dying father. He complains to a non-Jewish friend that, if the friend had backed out of a duel in this way, he would have seemed like a ‘solid clear-headed chap’. But if Jacob, a Jew, did so, it ‘makes [me] a coward’. Like Herzl, Jacob wants to fit in but feels unable to. This view was obviously hardened by the Dreyfus affair. After that case, Herzl, Freud and their fellow travellers did not abandon blending into European society (whether by mass conversion or by other means); rather, they tried to do it in a way that seemed most feasible. Founding a state seemed simpler and a better bet than hoping that European society would admit them. It was this which prompted them to become the first architects of what the Jewish theologian Marc Ellis has called ‘Constantinian Judaism’ – a religion (or form of ethnic identification) that centres on a state.

Why would a state enable Jews to become like everyone else? As Max Weber famously pointed out, states are not states unless they use force. He believed that states deserved that title only if they could ‘uphold a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’. And that is why states have armies and soldiers. They are manly and they enable Jews to become the heroic, duelling and fighting Europeans around them – not effeminate scholars. This entailed not a return to Jewish cultural roots, but the opposite. One consequence of the absence of statehood was that the dominant Jewish culture had developed an ethic which associated violence with non-Jews and so excluded such force from Jewish cultural expression.

As the previous chapter showed, a key feature of this analysis has been a critique of racial essentialism, the idea that racial or ethnic groups have an ‘essence’ to which all members of the group do or should conform.

FREEZING DIFFERENCE: THE PROBLEM OF ‘ESSENCES’

We have seen that this essentialism can be used to stigmatise or to impose conformity within a group. As chapter 3 showed, Marr, Chamberlain and other anti-Semites regarded Jews as inherently evil or as threats. In their view this evil or threatening nature is a product of birth, just as a ‘black, brown or yellow skin’ is a permanent marker of inferiority purely as an accident of parentage. For the ideologues of the Israeli state and their allies – as well as many of today’s anti- Semites, of course – a particular brand of ethnic nationalism is ‘authentically’ Jewish and all other expressions of Jewishness are, at best, cheap imitations, or, at worst, frauds which pretend to be Jewish but are not.

The theorist and philosopher Judith Butler, in her attempt to develop a feminist alternative to essentialism, notes that it enables ‘the regulation of attributes along culturally established lines of coherence’. Essentialisms are ‘hostile to hybridity in that they promote policing the boundaries of identity and acts of exclusion and domination sanctioned by an appeal to an essential core of an individual’. Essentialism ignores or suppresses differences within identity groups and cultures and vastly exaggerates differences between them. It also denies the reality that all cultures are influenced by others and that the loudest advocates of cultural authenticity often promote practices that are borrowed.

One of the ironies that essentialism produces is that, while it sees all members of a group as one, it creates differences within the group because its adherents use it as a weapon to police the boundaries of what is acceptable within the group. Smearing Jewish opponents of the Israeli state as inauthentic Jews is a frequent tactic. Rudyard Kipling did not regard Indians who valued British education, culture and customs as really Indian; his Indian acolytes today use the ideology of Hindutva to stigmatise ‘self-hating’ Hindus. His fellow colonial ideologues who encouraged the colonised to become like the coloniser were not breaking with essentialism.

As the introduction to this book noted, its title is inspired by a work that seems to cover very different ground but, on close inspection, throws important light on the discussion of Jewish identity in these pages: Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.

Mamdani’s book was written in the shadow of the events of 11 September 2001, or, more accurately, following the Western reaction to them, the consequences of which are still very much with us. The 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre hardened already strong hostility to Muslims in the West – strengthening the stereotype, mentioned in chapter 2, that they are inherently violent and fanatical. These prejudices seemed, to some degree, to be leavened by the view, publicly expressed by authority figures in the United States and Western Europe, that only some Muslims were threats to peace and security. They distinguished between ‘good Muslims’ who were law-abiding domestic and international citizens and ‘bad Muslims’ who were violent religious fundamentalists hostile to the West. Great energy and effort have been spent in Western countries on ‘deradicalisation’, ‘preventing violent extremism (PVE)’ and ‘countering violent extremism (CVE)’ programmes that have sought to prevent ‘good’ Muslims from becoming ‘bad’ ones (and, sometimes, converting ‘bad’ ones into ‘good’ ones).

This distinction, Mamdani’s book seeks to show, ignores a key reality – that while the ‘bad Muslims’ were not inventions of Western powers, particularly the United States, they were, nevertheless, their creations in that they would never have acquired their impact without active US assistance. The United States enabled them when it was fighting the Cold War against Soviet communism and it saw ‘fundamentalist’ Muslims as allies against the Soviets – particularly in Afghanistan where militant Islamist groups played a central role in defeating the Soviet occupation. It was the US’s own proteges who were later to turn on it and to attack its people and its installations. Given this, the existence of ‘bad Muslims’ says less about the Islamic faith and the people who adhere to it than it does about the way that power is wielded in the world and the new forms of colonial strategy and ideology.

The new abuses of anti-Semitism shed important light on racial dynamics in much of the world. In South Africa, despite claims on both the left and the right that race is a fiction manipulated by economic power holders or attention-seeking activists (depending on your side of the ideological divide), it continues to be the society’s chief fault line and the core factor in most of its conflicts. The manipulation of anti-Semitism in the service of an ethnic nationalist state that defines itself in racist terms has important lessons for the state of race in the world in general, and in South Africa in particular.

THE ART OF VICTIM BLAMING

The most important focus of our analysis has been the way in which allegations of racism have been used, ironically, to protect racism. Here the Israeli state and its admirers have no monopoly – on the contrary, they reflect a wider trend.

The white supremacy of the late nineteenth century – of which the anti- Semitism of Chamberlain discussed in chapter 3 was a prime example – was explicit in its insistence that discriminating against human beings who were not white and Christian was justified. Colonialism shared this assumption. Kipling was not an eccentric exception. The notion that a ‘superior’ group of people, defined by their race, deserves to control others, and that this would ‘civilise’ the latter societies, was a mainstream view in Europe and among those, originally from Europe, who colonised the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia.

Not all colonisers shared Kipling’s view that the colonised could and should not be recruited into the coloniser’s ‘way of life’. The idea that, as the political philosopher Rick Turner noted, ‘“western civilisation” is … superior to other forms, but … that blacks can, through education, attain the level of western civilisation’ was a very strong theme in colonial thought. One of many examples of this attitude was the franchise rule of the British-run South African territories before 1910. Black people were allowed to vote if they had acquired a sufficient degree of ‘Westernness’, which was expressed as property ownership or formal education. But this was only another way of asserting white superiority; black people, according to this view, could become white if they tried hard enough.

Anti-Jewish bigotry just isn’t what it used to be.

On 6 January 2021, demonstrators incited by then president Donald Trump stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn the result of a presidential election that Trump had lost. Since the event was a festival of white nationalist prejudice, it was perhaps predictable that some demonstrators would be wearing garments bearing the slogan ‘Camp Auschwitz’, celebrating a death camp in Poland where the Nazis had murdered Jews and others. But the January 2021 event was a little more complicated than it initially appeared. First, one of the participants, apparently a Christian Zionist, proudly waved an Israeli flag. Also, ‘another masked protestor sported a black-and-white Israeli flag sown onto his paramilitary vest, beside a pro-police “Thin Blue Line” flag’. News agencies reported that several Israeli flags were waved in the protest. Second, among the participants were Orthodox Jews, who, reportedly, had voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

To anyone familiar with the history of anti-Jewish racism, the event sent very confusing messages. Why would people who cheer the genocidal murder of six million Jews also support a state whose parliament, in 2018, passed a basic law declaring itself the ‘nation state of the Jewish people’? What were Orthodox Jews doing on the same side of the barricades as those who hanker for Nazi death camps? What, for that matter, were they doing supporting a president given to repeating and endorsing anti-Jewish slanders and who, in 2016, used an image in his campaign literature that included the Jewish Star of David to brand his (non-Jewish) opponent Hillary Clinton as corrupt? Trump had also told American Jews that the Israeli state was ‘your country’, repeating the stock prejudice that Jews are not really loyal to the countries in which they live – much like telling South Africans of Indian descent that their country is India. In one view, this ‘betrayed his understanding of U.S. Jews as not fully American, in keeping with his overall exclusivist notion of citizenship’. Why would a politician who harbours such prejudices enjoy any Jewish support, particularly from some who enthusiastically embrace their Jewish identity?

The answer to these questions is that the world has moved on in some odd and disturbing ways.