Biology, Psychology, and Politics: Proceed with Caution

Antisemitism belongs to a group of potentially lethal prejudices, but its uniqueness stems from the centrality of Judaism and the Jews in global consciousness. The basic sentiment is clearly biological. We naturally prefer those who share genes with us, and we act to preserve those genes. In biology, this is known as inclusive fitness. Psychologically, it is a natural extension of innate selfishness. We learn to overcome or control such feelings (if we ever do) along with other forms of selfishness. Threats and insecurity immediately create hostility and the readiness to fight, physically and mentally—but intergroup conflict contributes to group survival. The economy of love and hate in groups (explored by Freud in his 1921 book, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego) means, as sociologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts agree, that externalizing aggression increases cohesion and reduces internal tensions. This can be observed in every human group but is also determined by real conflicts over actual resources, as is the case with the Israelis and Palestinians.

An often-mentioned cause of antisemitism is the traditional economic position of the Jewish minority. Numerous ethnic groups have existed as separate castes in host societies, serving elites and masses in the role of economic middlemen who fill social and economic gaps as merchants, craftsmen, moneylenders, or small manufacturers. Such minorities practice endogamy and often maintain

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purity codes. Men in these groups avoid physical confrontations and sometimes appear relatively non-aggressive. They have strong communal bonds that help them when competing with outsiders, cultivate their cultural separateness and identity, and share a dual ethic, discriminating against out-groups. Their relative economic success and cultural separatism have often led to expulsion and even attempts at genocide.

Ethnic groups in such roles have been the Parsees in India, Indians in East Africa, Arabs in West Africa, and Jews. In the United States, violence has been directed toward Arab immigrants in Detroit or Korean shopkeepers in Los Angeles. There had been no historical tradition of anti-Arab or anti-Korean sentiment, but a new economic arrangement created the same prejudice that Jews, Chinese, or Indians have been subject to elsewhere. Its religious origins are often recognized.

All religions compete with other religions, and Christian mythology has been inflicted on Jews repeatedly. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) explained that “Spirit alone recognizes spirit. They [the Jews] saw in Jesus only the man … for He was only one like themselves, and they felt themselves to be nothing,” and continued by saying, “The Jewish multitude was bound to wreck His attempt to give them the consciousness of something divine, for faith in something divine, something great, cannot make its home in a dunghill” (quoted in Weiss, 1996, pp. 66-67). Martin Luther (1483-1546) wrote On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), denouncing Jews as children of the devil with extreme vitriol. About 400 years later, Dr. Martin Franz Julius Luther (1895-1945) represented the German Foreign Office at the Wannsee Conference, which planned the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

German Martin Niemoller is known today as a hero of the anti-Nazi Protestants. But he was the one who said in 1935 that Jews carried with them “…as a fearsome burden the unforgiven blood-guilt of their fathers” (quoted in Steigmann-Gall, 2003, p. 185) in the mythical Crucifixion of the Christian Messiah. When the papal ambassador to Slovakia was asked in 1942 to intercede in the case of Jewish children being sent to concentration camps, his reply was: “There is no innocent blood of Jewish children in the world. All Jewish blood is guilty. You have to die. This is the punishment that has been awaiting you because of that sin” (Berkovits, 1973, p. 19).

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Paul Weyrich (1942-2008), a religious Right-wing leader in the United States, offered his own interpretation of Christian myth in 2001: “Christ was crucified by the Jews who had wanted a temporal ruler to rescue them from the oppressive Roman authorities. Instead God sent them a spiritual leader to rescue them from their sins … He was not what the Jews had expected so they considered Him a threat. Thus He was put to death” (quoted in Jacoby, 2001, p. A16).

If Christianity has been the main cause of Western antisemitism, then we should expect its decline to lead to a decrease in anti-Jewish prejudice, which indeed happened. Secularization was an important factor in the coming of Emancipation, but the late 19^th century saw the appearance of systematic “new” racial antisemitism that moved beyond traditional prejudices and presented a secular, modern conspiracy theory.

Cataclysmic economic and political changes set up the historical background for modern antisemitism. The Industrial Revolution created a new middle class in which Jews and non-Jews were in economic competition, while the lower middle class and peasants were left out in frustration, envy, and resentment. Jews in most places were better able to cope with economic changes than their neighbors, being urban, literate, and mobile. European nationalism, just as some Zionist leaders had predicted, led to exterminatory antisemitism.

In the 21^st century, it is easy to see that antisemitism has been precipitously declining over the past couple of centuries despite the Holocaust. There has been a visible and real decline in antisemitism on two levels: expressive and practical. One decisive proof is the public success of Jews, unprecedented in history. If Jews hold positions of power in politics, the academic world, the media, and global capitalism, then they cannot be excluded and old stereotypes of Jews have changed. Significant cultural changes are possible, at least for some groups. The formal exclusion of Jews today is rare, except in places such as Saudi Arabia or Jordan.

The most striking piece of evidence for the decline in prejudice is the prevalence of intermarriage, publicly bemoaned by Jewish leaders. When Jews are despised, non-Jews do not want them near them, but over the past 200 years, Jews have come to be regarded as the most desirable marriage partners. Mixed marriages are evidence of the weakening of traditional identities for all in-

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volved, not only Jews but also all religions. Marriage means intimacy in every sense, the mixing of blood and DNA, as genes are shared across traditional boundaries.

Just as it is easy to find evidence for the decline of antisemitism, we can still find signs of its persistence. The case of Richard Nixon, an antisemite in private and a proper politician in public, is well-known. In a recorded 1972 conversation with Billy Graham, Nixon suggested that most Jews are Left-wing radicals who want “peace at any price except where support for Israel is concerned” (quoted in Warren, 2002, p. A3; all the quotes in this paragraph come from this source). Graham agrees that a “powerful bloc” of Jews confronts Nixon in the media. “And they’re the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,” Graham adds. He also says: “…a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel … They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.” To sum up, Nixon says: “it’s also, the Jews [who] are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.” These ideas did not have any practical consequences because Nixon’s policies were not affected by prejudice, and he had Jews working closely with him.

Antisemitic ideas that have gone out of fashion in Europe, such as the blood libel, have found a new home in the Arab world. Fanned by events in Palestine, the pronouncements that come from Arab sources are hard to believe but are quite believable when we recall that the Arab world has not undergone secularization and remains impervious to Enlightenment ideas because of Islamic dominance.

Food for thought about religious and secular antisemitism is provided in the Hamas Charter of 1988:

The enemies … accumulated a huge and influential material wealth … They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about … They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations … the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destructive spying organizations…

They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations in order to rule the

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world … There was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it … The forces of Imperialism in both the Capitalist West and the Communist East support the enemy with all their might… (The Avalon Project, n.d.)

This text is a perfect parody of mad antisemitism. While the 2017 Hamas Charter is less rabidly antisemitic, it does not repudiate the 1988 version.

Palestinian enmity with Israel has been described as a continuation of historical antisemitism. This started early in the 20^th century when Palestinian opposition was interpreted as identical to traditional European antisemitism. Zionist settlers had a burden of heavy memories to draw on when faced with Indigenous resistance. The Indigenous inhabitants were, just like the Poles and the Cossacks, carrying out pogroms against Jews because they were Jews.

In more recent writings, Indigenous resistance has been discussed as religious because Islam cannot accept the idea of the Jewish state. Thus, Saul Bellow (1976) complained, “The Arabs could not tolerate any Jewish state, even a miniscule one” (p. 37). In his 2010 book, Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis stated that the Arabs rejected partition in 1947 because they refused to accept having a Jewish state next door. We can test the validity of such claims by changing just one term in the equation. Would the Indigenous population of West Asia have accepted a Buddhist or a Shinto state in 1947? Would Palestine accept a Christian state? Is it likely that the Vietnamese would have preferred British rulers to French ones? Or would the Indians have preferred German colonizers to British ones?

The inhabitants of a colonized territory do not really care whether their colonizers are French, Norwegian, or Chinese. Is there something unique about Palestinian resistance? Of course, there is a unique history to every colonized group. Whatever you call it, Islamic, Palestinian, and Arab opposition has been unrelenting, but the same was true in Gandhi’s India and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam.

A national liberation movement should create only victors as foreign oppression ends. Zionism, however, created victims. The delusions in the 1988 Hamas Charter emerge from the experience of the dispossessed, who lost their homeland and their homes. The process through which Palestine became Israel, between 1922

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(the start of the British Mandate) and 1948, is nothing short of unimaginable. To the Indigenous inhabitants, it was a diabolical mystery. After World War I, world powers, led by the United States and Britain, decided to create a Jewish state in Palestine, even though Jews made up fewer than 10% of the population there (and most of them were anti-Zionist). Later, Zionism went from one triumph to another—the Indigenous, mostly subsistence peasants, went from one defeat to the next. They were desperate, yearning for revenge.

The Zionist revolution and the creation of the state of Israel were supposed to change the status of the Jews once and for all by providing a safe haven for Jews and eliminating antisemitism. This has not happened. Israel is not safe, and its actions have become excuses for hostility directed at diaspora Jews.

Antisemitism is a living reality. We should grant the defenders of Zionism and Israel their claim that critics of Israel are sometimes motivated by antisemitism. Traditional views of Jews must affect contemporary discussions of Zionism and Israel since they are such an integral part of Western culture. There is no need to assume the appearance of a new antisemitism hiding as anti-Zionism. The old, historical antisemitism is still around and zeroes in on objectionable acts by Israel or Israelis.

Support for Zionism has been based, in addition to imperial politics, on the status of Jews as historical victims. The descendants of Crusaders and Nazis can atone for the collective guilt of all non-Jews by supporting Zionism with enthusiasm. If antisemitism was central to Jewish history, it still does not explain Indigenous resistance in Palestine. Zionism is correct in reminding us that antisemitism has not disappeared but is dishonest in using it to avoid the recognition of Indigenous victimization. In our attempts to analyze this seemingly eternal prejudice, this must be noted.

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