Antisemitism and Identity: Theoretical Perspectives

Antisemitism, the oldest hatred in the world, has yet to be vanquished. Who are the haters, and why do they hate Jews? I will explore how identity is socially constructed and negotiated as well as how the hated and haters’ identities are intertwined by reviewing sociological and psychological literature, along with a few historical and biographical examples.

The Enduring Hatred

We can begin the timeline of the history of antisemitism with ancient Greco-Roman persecutions in the 1^st century BCE, to Jews being blamed for killing Jesus, through the Middle Ages with blood libels and conspiracy theories of the Black Plague. It continued through the Protestant Reformation, fueled further by the Russian-fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which were spread

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by Henry Ford in the United States. These events were followed by the eugenics movement, which culminated in Nazism and the horrors of the Holocaust. Antisemitic attacks continue to this day.

The question is, why does this oldest hatred still exist and morph into the beliefs of so many people? It is an abhorrent belief that provides relief for many people who need to explain to themselves their own shortcomings and place in society. In other words, Jews throughout history are a convenient scapegoat.

The usual response to ignorance is that more education is needed. A crucial corrective was the declaration by the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council rejecting collective Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. (It issued the Nostra Aetate [“in our time”], also known as the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions, in 1965.) However, in some cases, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East’s hate-filled textbooks, miseducation serves to inculcate and reinforce traditional negative stereotypes of Jews; for example, teaching math by counting martyrs and suicide bombers as well as teaching social studies using maps, which erase the State of Israel.

The struggle to overcome antisemitic attitudes and behavior is not linear. Consider an institution as significant as the United Nations (UN), which has enormous power to define the situation globally. Its Charter encourages respect for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion. Its General Assembly created an International Day of Commemoration in memory of Holocaust victims in 2005 and condemned Holocaust denial in 2007. Unfortunately, in 1975, it also adopted a resolution equating Zionism with racism, which it did not rescind until 1991. In 2006, the new Human Rights Council placed Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as the only item on its permanent agenda, meaning it is raised at every meeting, thereby treating Israel differently than all other members.

Yet, in 2019, the Special Rapporteur of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recommended to the General Assembly that all States adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism: “Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community

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institutions and religious facilities” (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, n.d.). Similarly, in 2022, the Secretary-General spoke out forcefully against hate speech. While it is encouraging to see positive voices speaking out against antisemitism, it is not enough. (Note, this was written before the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel. It took until December 1, 2023, for a statement attributed to “UN Women” to be released condemning the horrendous sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women.)

Literature Review

Antisemitic crimes have increased throughout the world, including the United States. Social psychologists and psychoanalysts have long tried to explain how one develops a sense of self—theories that apply to everyone regardless of background or feelings about Jews. Might these theories be utilized to decrease antisemitic attacks?

Society is socially constructed and created; hence, identity, status, and power are not fixed in time but can change depending on the historical and political situation. The dominant group confers a master status on the individual. Even though Jews lived in Poland for hundreds of years before the Holocaust, their place of birth alone did not make them part of Polish mainstream society; they remained Jews first and Poles second as second-class citizens (see Bleiberg Seperson, 2004). The same was true throughout Europe but to a lesser extent in some countries, such as, ironically, pre-Nazi Germany and Austria. The conflict between self-definition and others’ definitions remains in all cases. The consequences, however, for Jews during the Holocaust were lethal. In effect, it did not matter how Jews identified themselves; what mattered was how the dominant group identified them. The power to impose a definition of the situation influences one’s own and others’ definition of identity.

Sumner’s keen insights about us and them, in-groups and out-groups, ethnocentrism, and patriotism remain the standards for analyses of majority-minority relationships. The key concept, ethnocentrism, is defined by Sumner as “one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it … Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders” (quoted in Bleiberg Seperson, 1906/1993, p. 110).

Most notably, George Herbert Mead recognized that while

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society has the power to shape individuals, people can also act back on society. He viewed the development of the self as inseparable from society based on the process of seeing ourselves as others see us. This reflexive sense of self is relevant to how victims and perpetrators of antisemitism view themselves and each other. How the individual responds also depends on his reference group. During the Nazi era, and at other times, these ideas manifested as antisemitic attacks against Jews.

Language, Culture, and Antisemitism 

From the days of the biblical diaspora (exiled from their homeland), Jews were bilingual: speaking and reading Hebrew, their religious language, and their secular language, from the culture where they lived. During the Middle Ages, Hebrew was referred to as the “secret language of the Jews;” by the 17^th century, Yiddish became the “secret language” (Gilman, 1986, pp. 16, 78-79). The Others’ (Jews’) language hides its nuance, allegedly to be used to fleece the people around them. Thus, the secret language was construed as conspiratorial whether spoken privately at home or openly in the marketplace. In Poland’s 1931 census, 88% of Polish Jews said Yiddish or Hebrew was their mother tongue (Central Statistical Office, 1938, Table 10, p. 15). Some may infer that assimilation is the answer. The history of the Jews proves that assumption wrong, as well as, in my view, morally indefensible. Two examples illustrate this point below.

Sander Gilman presented the case of composer and antisemite Richard Wagner’s conflict with Giacomo Meyerbeer, a popular Franco-Jewish composer, as Wagner’s attempt to escape the rumor that he was the son of his mother’s Jewish lover. Wagner despised Jews and Hebrews. By invalidating their religious language and denigrating their ability to speak the secular language as alien, Wagner denied Jews’ ability to create valid works of art, including musical compositions. Since “the Jews have no community, they can have no true language. Hebrew is … unable to express … aesthetic perceptions of European experience” (Gilman, 1986, pp. 209-210).

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was born in Freiberg, Moravia, a small town now in the Czech Republic, and grew up in Vienna, Austria. His father, Kallamon Jakob Freud, was born in Tismenits, Galicia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire now in the Ukraine. Despite marrying into an established Austrian-Jewish family and moving his family to Vienna (when his son, Sig-

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mund, was three), the elder Freud presumably retained a provincial Galician accent signifying his origins. Sigmund Freud (1925) said his model of the persecuted Jew was based on his father: “My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself” (p. 7). Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis has many roots, influenced by his blended family, language, and religion. The “hidden” language of the Jews may have been a precursor to his writings on Jewish humor and psychoanalysis raising unconscious desires to the surface.

Conclusion 

Identity is both given and chosen. It matters how you see yourself and how others see you. Also, it matters how you want to see yourself. One chooses to be an antisemite or not. We have a responsibility to remain true to our best possible self so that, collectively, we can have a positive impact. Although we can do this only one person at a time, together, we influence the whole. Antisemitism must never be permitted to be normalized. It will require the concerted effort of political, religious, and social media leaders and influencers to change the trajectory. Language, culture, and history demonstrate both the grip of the past and the possibilities of the future, including a decline in antisemitism. The choice is ours.

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