In a post-7 October world, many have finally woken up to the reality that the locus of anti-Semitic sentiment now resides on the left. This is the case virtually everywhere in the West, particularly among the educated classes and the left-dominated media. We see it both in Europe, where Jew hatred has a long history, but also in historically more welcoming places like Canada, Australia and the United States.
This doesn’t mean that right-wing anti-Semitism, once the dominant form, has disappeared. As Alan Dershowitz points out, Jew hatred is once again being ‘mainstreamed’. This can be seen in elements of the ‘new right’, or as the media like to call it, the ‘far right’. Within these movements spreading throughout the West, anti-Semitic tropes represent a cancerous cell that is quickly metastasising.
There are two major elements here. Among some US conservatives, there is the rise of ideologies that place Christianity at the centre of national life. This is, of course, something not exactly embraced by most Jews, Muslims, Hindus or agnostics. Equally threatening has been the rise of white nationalism, which lends credence to views that Jews constitute a foreign body in the nation. They are demonised as outsiders who need to be restrained from exercising undue power and influence.
None of this is new. Anti-Semitism has a long history on the right. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church allowed some self-government for the small Jewish community. But once the Crusades began, many Christians increasingly viewed Jews as something of an ‘internal enemy’. Many were killed, forcibly converted or expelled, as in England in 1290, when King Edward I expelled the country’s entire Jewish population. Throughout continental Europe, crusaders and local mobs – egged on by some clerics – urged parishioners to ‘avenge the crucified’. This eliminationist approach, notes historian John Weiss, presaged the logic of the Holocaust.
The tone of anti-Semitism only became more intense with the rise of Martin Luther. Though at first he was friendly to Jews, Luther recoiled when they refused to support his new Protestant faith and took on a hostile, even genocidal, view towards them.
Not all Protestants were negative towards the Jewish community, however, with many identifying closely with the Old Testament religion. After all, it was the Roundheads under Oliver Cromwell who invited the Jews back to England after the Civil War. Similarly, it was the mostly Protestant founders of the US – notably George Washington – who initiated America’s historically tolerant approach towards Jews and other ‘non-conformists’.
By the early 20th century, anti-Semitism was less tied to religion and more fixated on race. This new anti-Semitism castigated Jews not as heretics, but as a kind of malicious presence threatening the values and culture of native or long-standing inhabitants. Ideas developed by racist philosophers like Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Edouard Drumont and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, notes historian Ernst Nolte, helped lay the basis for fascism and its more openly racist Nazi offshoot.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Neo-Nazi rally in Washington, D.C., August 2002, by Elvert Barnes Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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