Antisemitism is a riddle. It is hard to
explain why a cultural tradition would
become so fixated on a particular group
of people as a source of its problems.
Now we know why in the Western cultural
tradition this hatred exists - it's rooted
in a religious rivalry. It's rooted in
the sense that Christianity developed,
that it had superseded Judaism, that it
therefore had replaced it, and those
people who clung to Judaism, were
dangerous to the faith of the people who
had not, who had embraced Christianity,
and thus these people were regarded as
contaminating, they had to be kept at a
distance they had to be confined. We know
where this tradition came from, but what
is striking is that in the modern world,
which is a largely secular world in the
West, this hatred keeps morphing, it keeps
shape-shifting, it shifts to other kinds
of justifications, and that I think is
the thing about antisemitism that I
regard as different from the motivations
of other perceived genocides. The motive
is protean, the motive keeps changing
shape but the hatred is the constant
element.
I do believe that antisemitism is a kind of superstition, so to try to understand why people are antisemitic
one has to understand why are people
superstitious. One of the reasons is of
course because generations before them
had taught them to be, have said that if
you in fact want to ward off some event
that you don't want to happen to you,
you knock on wood. We all know that knocking
on wood is not efficacious and yet
we somehow think that it's a safe thing to
do just in case. With regard to
antisemitism there is this kind of
fixation on these people as being
hyper-dangerous, and thus they have to be
confined or reconfined in order for our
lives to be safe. There is no empirical
rationality behind, that there is no
demonstration behind that, it is a form
of knocking on wood, and to explain it
any further than that is of course very
difficult because superstitions
are almost impossible to account for.
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