Anti-Semitism, the most ancient and persistent of all prejudices, but why?
The unthinkable is happening. As if overnight, Auschwitz is forgotten. A new wave of anti-Semitism sweeps the globe, even pervading Western countries such as Australia. When a Melbourne schoolgirl shouts out her support for Hamas in a public demonstration, the obvious conclusion to draw is that her ignorance is speaking, with her immaturity fed by misguided idealism and righteous indignation imbibed from social media. Yet I wonder if there is not more going on here.
As there is in the progressive left, en masse, taking up Palestine as an example of the oppressed suffering at the hands of the oppressor, in this case Israel, agent of the evil West. There has been just too large a scale of recent attack on Jewish individuals, property and institutions for this protest movement to be read in narrowly political terms.
We have little understanding of the rivers of subconscious ancient collective memory that flow on and on through a culture, influencing the present, tremors of prejudice echoing from the long-distant past, like the shadow of Shakespeare’s Shylock, surfacing occasionally. Or twitches of blind reflex attraction and repulsion that feed into current passions.
The psychotic violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 last year may have hit, in a quite perverse way, a nerve of subconscious unease in some, triggering quite irrational reactions in everyday life on the street.
The public chant “Gas the Jews!” at the Sydney Opera House has illustrated just how much at risk we are of regressing to the European cultural mindset of 90 years ago. In the week before Christmas, stickers appeared on the pavement opposite Parliament House in Melbourne copying the vilest Nazi anti-Semitic cartoon caricatures – seemingly met by indifference from our numerous racial discrimination and human rights bodies.
Why, we should ask, does such hatred fester in others, hatred that traps the Jewish people in inescapable cul-de-sacs of history? Some must be dreading: “Here we go again.”
Many have written in search of an understanding of this most ancient of all prejudices. Its persistence and virulence across centuries and cultures defies rational explanation. There notably has been the Christian input, blaming the Jews for killing Christ, held even by a brilliant mind and earthy personality such as that of Martin Luther – absurd given that Jesus was himself a Jew.
George Steiner, in his book In Bluebeard’s Castle, speculated that Jews triggered a backlash when they set the bar of moral idealism impossibly high, in three surges: as the founders of monotheism, as the creators of early Christianity and as the architects of Messianic 19th-century socialism from Karl Marx onwards. The one God was intolerably demanding compared with the many gods of paganism, as were Jesus’ impractical commands to renounce self and love thy neighbour as thyself, and likewise the socialist ideal of universal brotherhood.
According to the Steiner argument, the Jews became the bad conscience of the West, with Adolf Hitler even accusing them of having invented conscience.
There was, on a complementing front, resentment against a people with the arrogance to regard itself as chosen by God, the chosen people who managed to survive, tribal cohesion intact, whatever persecution was levelled against them.
This culture was so strong and vital, and hermetic, that it showed others up. As did the success of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants in recent centuries into Western countries arriving with nothing, then prospering. Compared with the Jews, other people looked like failures, and many felt it. And indeed, the extraordinary and singular contribution of Jews to modern Western science, philosophy, music, the professions and entrepreneurship does suggest a general superiority of creative intelligence and energy – a fact likely to arouse envy in some quarters.
A clue to taking these varied speculations further was provided by French historian Remi Brague, in a recent lecture delivered here to the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. Brague argued that a key to understanding the ancient Romans was their inferiority complex vis-a-vis the Greeks. They believed, understandably, that they would never be able to match the sheer brilliance of the literature, the art, the architecture, the philosophy and much else of their predecessors. In the Roman case, however, inferiority had a creative effect, spurring them on to their own achievements.
This is a type of speculative cultural theory, like Steiner’s, that is impossible to prove but it is nevertheless suggestive. The resentment that can flow from feelings of inferiority is easy to underestimate. So is the pernicious effect of an inferiority complex in human affairs. This applies most obviously within the confines of a family, in bitter internal rivalries, but it does also across the communities that make up a nation and even more broadly on the international stage.
I suspect Christian anti-Semitism has something to do with anxiety that flowed from the fact of Jewish origins and creation. Inferiority blurs into the fear of being derivative, triggering a kind of derivative complex. The Christian Old Testament and its Genesis myth are copied from the Hebrew Bible; the Christian God is the same Jewish God; early Christianity was founded by Jews, starting with Paul; and most galling of all, Jesus was Jewish – a fact Nazi ideology tried to deny. That the Jewish church leaders killed Christ is just rationalisation, a lame excuse for the deeply embarrassing fact that Christianity is derivative. It was less that Jews set a high moral bar than that they came first.
American literary critic Harold Bloom, himself Jewish, wrote on “the anxiety of influence”. His interest was literature, and the desperate need in highly creative people to be original and underplay the degree they borrow from those who came before. The same psychology applies more broadly. When the great Jay Gatsby is hurt to the quick by being mocked as “Mr Nobody from Nowhere”, he is reeling from the greatest insult he could possibly receive, at his personhood being nullified. Feeling second-rate, or worse, may equally stretch to cultures and religions.
Islamic anti-Semitism, writ large in the 1988 Hamas covenant, is much more pervasive today than its Christian counterpart. It may be read in the same way. Allah descends from Yahweh; much of the Koran copies the Hebrew Bible and its stories; and Muslims and Jews share sacred sites, notably in Jerusalem, but Jews were there first, 1000 years earlier. This primordial insecurity can only be exacerbated in the Middle East today by the reality of Israel. It stands as a triumph of human ingenuity, of building a prosperous and flourishing society, with great innovation in science and the arts, in industry and in bringing inhospitable deserts to life to produce plentiful food. It has created an oasis of success in a region surrounded by stagnant, authoritarian, failing societies.
Israel stands as a vital symbol in the Middle East of the superiority of Western democratic capitalism over any other modern form of social organisation and the talent of the Israelis in mastering it.
An example of a derivative complex and the anxiety of influence that is easier to document lies in one of the motivational strands feeding the Russian drive to conquer Ukraine, as expressed by both Vladimir Putin and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian Orthodox Christianity was founded from Ukraine, so if Putin can capture Kyiv and redesignate it Russian, reclaiming its St Sophia Cathedral, he can erase the stigma of his culture being derivative, coming second.
Maybe there is even too, with anti-Semitism, some ongoing psychic residue of the noxious centuries-old envy theme targeting Jewish success at making money, caricatured endlessly from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare’s Shylock, and on to paranoid conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers controlling the world. An ancient trope of money being filthy lucre, the pursuit of it grubby and tainted, perhaps endures, also feeding in here, despite modern bankers more likely to be seen as colourless bureaucrats. Shakespeare writes his Shylock portrait with some empathy: “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? … If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?” But any sympathy evoked in the play for the moneylender does not wash away the stigma that he is distastefully alien.
I am struggling here to get some handle on where these baffling prejudices, erupting in 2023 Australia, have their source, prejudices causing the first serious fissure in our nation’s celebrated multicultural harmony. Both the Christian polemic and the moneylending slur were in the distant past, remote from the post-Christian reality today – only 5 per cent of the Australian population attends church regularly. The wealthy now come from diverse backgrounds and tend to be admired as much as envied for their success.
These thoughts of mine are necessarily provisional – tentative, perhaps unsatisfactory. Considered as a collective whole, they fall short of getting to the heart of deep and ongoing reservoirs of anti-Semitism, and the outpouring of intense chaotic anxieties we see now gushing around us and being expressed in collective form on the streets, in the media, and across our cultural institutions from the universities to the theatres.
Of relevance is that Jewish history seems to keep repeating itself. In Israel, yet again, the people are stuck with no clear way out. Long-term, there seems no happy ending. The two-state solution – one Israel and one Palestine – favoured by many other countries is now an impossibility. It is not going to happen, for two reasons.
First, Israel already tried it two decades ago when it gave the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. Gaza then could have been developed into a thriving and peaceful metropolitan city on the Mediterranean coast. Instead it was turned into an economically bankrupt terrorist base for launching missile attacks on Israel, followed now by an invasion of medieval barbarity. Israel is not going to repeat the same mistake with East Jerusalem and the West Bank territories.
Second, those West Bank territories are now crisscrossed by Jewish settlement, many peopled by fundamentalist fanatics. Perhaps this was a mistake but it is now reality.
The alternative one-state solution will not work from the Israeli perspective either, for Jews may become outnumbered by Palestinians, if they are not already, and Israel is a democracy. So, the country is stuck in an unsatisfactory, perilous and deteriorating status quo.
The sense of dark and hopeless fatality prompted by October 7 may be best understood by switching our frame of reference, to draw on the other source of Western culture, that of ancient Greece.
Periodically, throughout their history, the Jewish people have found themselves trapped in a web of malign necessity, as they are today in Israel, such as depicted in Greek tragedy, a web that is as unforgiving as a steel cage. The Palestinians are no less trapped. When there is no chance of resolution, those affected can merely do their best, trying to shake off feelings of doom as they move blindly forward into an obscure future.
Events in classical tragedy unfold under a miasma fog of discombobulation, seemingly obeying some unseen malevolent logic, drawn relentlessly towards their dark, fated end. The characters desperately try to do their best but have little control.
One of the deepest of the tragedies, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, echoes the horrors perpetrated in Israel on October 7. Atrocities rise seemingly out of nowhere and over generations. A father has been served his own children for dinner cooked in a pie. His nephew, King Agamemnon, is forced by necessity to sacrifice his beloved daughter; in revenge his wife, on his victorious return home from the Trojan War, stabs him to death in his bath. In turn, her son will kill her. Aeschylus wrestles throughout the play to make sense of nightmare events, to find a logic, or some plausible part-reason at least, and fails. The best he is left with is the hope that “Grace comes somehow violent”, whatever that may mean.
Humans are puny, insignificant and powerless in relation to the dark, inscrutable forces of destiny and necessity. The anti-Semitic impulse itself may be likened to a malevolent Greek fury erupting periodically out of the underworld.
I am writing as one who remains troubled and perplexed. I have visited Israel once and didn’t warm to the Old City of Jerusalem. Its dark labyrinth of alleys seemed like a magnet for crank fundamentalists from three religions – the monotheisms. In contrast, the Sea of Galilee was serene and beautiful – I could understand why Jesus chose to teach there.
Israel is both an outpost of the West and home to one of the sacred sources, with ancient Greece, of its deepest religious inclinations.
The Jewish people, individually and collectively, are indissolubly integrated into our culture and history, a part of us. A war against Israel is a war against our civilisation.
However, this simple truth is of feeble use when confronted with the diabolic forces unleashed when Greek tragedy writes the script, and when the subliminal fury of anti-Semitism has once again been let loose.
John Carroll recently published The Saviour Syndrome, Searching for Meaning in an Age of Unbelief.
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