Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism is the active or passive, individual or collective, hatred of either empirically existing or purely mythological Jews, such that the signifier “Jew” functions as a representational substitute for social conduct or institutions deemed by the anti-Semite to be abnormal and pathological. Especially important is the manner in which “the Jew” stands in for excesses and deficiencies in social relations such that “Jews” embody a simultaneous “too much” and “not enough” logic. For example, Jews have been criticized for being simultaneously too egoistic and too altruistic or agents of both anomie (deregulation or normlessness) and fatalism (excessive regulation); in other words, “Jews” personify social imbalances.

Anti-Semitism may manifest itself in religious, political-economic, ethnoracial, and cultural terms and is typically correlated positively with psychological authoritarianism and political models such as fascism, Nazism, right-wing populism, nativism, and other movements that scapegoat a pernicious “other.” It can find expression in reactions ranging from stereotypical insults at one end of the spectrum to all-out genocide at the other. More than routine bias or simple prejudice, anti-Semitism is a demonizing ideology that attempts to explain events, crises, inequalities, exploitation, and villainy by exposing the malevolent intentions of Jews as the primary, visible or invisible, causal factor. The Jew, in other words, becomes the master key to unlock the mysteries of all social problems and can therefore shade off into a freestanding worldview. In Western political culture, references to “the Jew” are frequently veiled in populist and fundamentalist currents with codes such as “European bankers” or anti-Christian, international “money barons” in order to preserve a veneer of respectability.

As a social problem, anti-Semitism fluctuates in intensity, depending on changes in social organization and social dynamics. After the Holocaust, for example, anti-Semitism was inextricably associated with Nazism and, as such, was relegated to the fringes of society in the industrialized West, and, by the 1960s, anti-Semitism was believed to be, if not nearly extinct, then definitely on the list of endangered ideological species in the United States. Since the mid-1990s, however, anti-Semitism appears to be making a comeback in the United States, especially among minority groups that, in previous generations, were relatively immune to the abstract demonization of Jews. Also, through the Internet, many hate groups have found a way to maximize their anti-Semitic diatribes. Globally, levels of anti-Semitism may be at an all-time high, especially in the Middle East, where demonological anti-Semitism has reached hysterical proportions and Jews are fully identified with Israeli state policies. Any attempt to further explain anti-Semitism must, first, distinguish between concrete anti-Jewish bias and abstract demonization and, second, between premodern and modern forms of anti-Semitism.