The Peace FAQ:

Antisemitism, Anti-Semitism

Frequently Asked Questions:

• What is antisemitism? Where does the word come from?
• Why are the Jews hated so much?
• Can someone be antisemitic even if they say they are not?
• Can someone be antisemitic even if they say they have Jewish friends?
• Can someone be antisemitic even if they say they do not hate Arabs, who are also Semites? Or if they are an Arab themselves?
• In order to avoid antisemitism, should Jews become less Jewish?
• Can Jews be antisemitic?
• Where are the most vocal centers of antisemitism in the world today?
• Where in the West is antisemitism most acceptable?
• What should be done to combat antisemitism?
• What are the lessons of historical antisemitism for the world today?

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What is antisemitism? Where does the word come from?

• antisemitism, anti-semitism

  \n, usu cap S 1: hostility towards Jews as a religious or racial minority group often accompanied by social, economic, and political discrimination - compare RACISM 2: opposition to Zionism : sympathy with opponents of the state of Israel.

  - Webster's Third New International Dictionary

• The attributing of all or part of one's own misfortunes,and those of one's country, to the presence of Jewish elements in the community, and proposing to remedying this state of affairs by depriving the Jews of certain of their rights; by keeping them out of certain economic or social activities, by expelling them from the country,by exterminating them etc.

  - Jean Paul Sartre, from "Anti-Semite and Jew".

• Attitudes and actions against Jews based on the belief that they are uniquely inferior, evil, or deserving of co ndemnation by their very nature, or by historical or supernatural dictates.

  - from "Anti-Semitism: The Causes and Effects Of A Prejudice", by Crosser & Halperin.

• A general term denoting a prejudice expressed by all forms of hostility manifested towards the Jews throughout h istory...

  - from Israel Pocket Library "Anti-Semitism"

• "opposition to, prejudice against or intolerance of the Jewish people",

  - from Funk & Wagnells Britannica Dictionary

• "The hatred and persecution of Jews as a group; not the hatred of persons who happen to be Jews, but rather the hatred of persons because they are Jews"

  - Charles Y.Glock & Rodney Stark in Christian Beliefs & Anti -Semitism.

• The term "anti­Semite" was coined in Germany in 1879 by [the antisemite] Wilhelm Marr to refer to the anti­Jewish manifestations of the period and to give Jew­hatred a more scientific sounding name. "Anti­Semitism" has been accepted and understood to mean hatred of the Jewish people.

  - by Mitchell Bard in The Treatment of Jews in Arab/Islamic Countries

• I decline to bestow the term "opinion" on a doctrine directed expressly against individuals, calling for their destruction or denying their rights. The right to the free expression of opinion exists to protect freedom of thought, but not anti-Semitism. Incidentally, anti-Semitism derives not from thought but from fear of oneself and of truth ...In a word, anti-Semitism is fear of being alive.

  - Jean-Paul Sartre, in "Antisemite and Jew", 1966

 

Why are the Jews hated so much?

• Jewish philosophy, and even the very existence of Jews, threatens the fragile utopian illusions that others have built up around them to shield them from the harsh light of reality.

  - The Society for Rational Peace

• Jewish scepticism about pie-in-the-sky has to be paid for by persecution, attempts at assimilation, or condescension.

  ...the survival of the Jews is a refutation of that eschatalogical view of things which history has so obviously condemned, including the high hopes once entertained of the 1917 Revolution. Hence, anti-Semitism is in no sense a feature of the Right alone.

  ...If, then, the very existence of Israel is felt by some to be an aggression, it is because the affirmation of a Jewish existence is felt to be an aggression by the eschatological faiths deriving from Judaism. For them, Jewish emancipation, as soon as it goes beyond demanding that toleration (which is the maximum that can be allowed) represents and intolerable provocation. Any freedom to return to the deeper sources radically challenges (although in a form not very clearly understood) the diluted and composite rivulets which spring therefrom.

  - Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"

 

Can someone be antisemitic even if they say they are not?

• Experience has shown that most of those attempting to deny the accusation of antisemitism fit that description well.

  - The Society for Rational Peace

 

Can someone be antisemitic even if they say they have Jewish friends?

• It is the group (or the group with some power) that a bigot hates, not necessarily all individuals. We can see this in the frequent defense of the bigot that "I have friends" who are such-and-such. This may indeed be true, but those "friends" tend to be the rejects of the hated community, and not in any way representative. For example, self-hating Jews and antisemites often form productive partnerships.

  - The Society for Rational Peace

 

Can someone be antisemitic even if they say they do not hate Arabs, who are also Semites? Or if they are an Arab themselves?

• In the first place, this term anti-Semitism is a nonsense term, because my understanding is that the Arabs are also Semites, not only the Jews, so I don't know what that means. I'm definitely not anti-Arab.

  - Chess genius, and self-hating Jew, Bobby Fisher, from the Bobby Fischer Home Page, shows us that intelligence is no match for one's inner demons.

• Arabs sometimes claim that, as "Semites," they cannot possibly be anti­Semitic. This, however, is a semantic distortion that ignores the reality of Arab discrimination and hostility toward Jews. Arabs, like any other people, can indeed be anti­Semitic.

  The term "anti­Semite" was coined in Germany in 1879 by Wilhelm Marrih to refer to the anti­Jewish manifestations of the period and to give Jew­hatred a more scientific sounding name.(1) "Anti­Semitism" has been accepted and understood to mean hatred of the Jewish people.

  While Jewish communities in Arab and Islamic countries fared better overall than those in Christian lands in Europe, Jews were no strangers to persecution and humiliation among the Arabs and Muslim. As Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis has written: "The Golden Age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam."(2)

  Muhammad, the founder of Islam, traveled to Medina in 622 A.D. to attract followers to his new faith. When the Jews of Medina refused to convert and rejected Muhammad, two of the major Jewish tribes were expelled; in 627, Muhammad's followers killed between 600 and 900 of the men, and divided the surviving Jewish women and children amongst themselves.(3)

  The Muslim attitude toward Jews is reflected in various verses throughout the Koran, the holy book of the Islamic faith. "They [the Children of Israel] were consigned to humiliation and wretchedness. They brought the wrath of God upon themselves, and this because they used to deny God's signs and kill His Prophets unjustly and because they disobeyed and were transgressors" (Sura 2:61). According to the Koran, the Jews try to introduce corruption (5:64), have always been disobedient (5:78), and are enemies of Allah, the Prophet and the angels (2:97­98).

  - by Mitchell Bard in The Treatment of Jews in Arab/Islamic Countries

 

In order to avoid antisemitism, should Jews become less Jewish?

• I oppose assimilation as a policy because, contrary to what its champions believe or would have us believe, it in no way brings us nearer the advent of a world-wide republic; rather does it reinforce the ethnocentrism of other peoples to the detriment of the Jews alone. Throughout the ages, and especially since the events of this century, many Jews have dreamt of escaping from the cycle of persecution-toleration. This dream the assimilationist fails to see, or seeing, denies, and remains unmoved by a natural human reaction to an intolerable threat.

  - Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"

 

Can Jews be antisemitic?

• There is little doubt that psychologically, racism is harmful to its victims. The most profound effect associated with situations of extreme degradation (such as is found under slavery or in concentration camps or in racist states like South Africa) is the acceptance by the oppressed group of the dominant group's definition of the situation. This is the phenomenon of self-hatred found, for example, in cases of Jewish anti-Semitism or in the acceptance by blacks of white aesthetic criteria of having straight hair or a light skin. Self-hatred is often accompanied by symptoms of apathy, anxiety, and depression or by forms of self-destructive escapist reactions such as alcoholism or drug addiction or, in extreme cases, by paranoid, schizophrenic or manic depressive psychoses. In such situations of extreme degradation then, the oppressed group frequently reacts in an 'intropunitive' fashion; that is, it turns its frustrations inwardly against the self or the 'in' group at large.

  - from Racism And Its Effects, By Shreya Khatau, Bombay, India

 

Where are the most vocal centers of antisemitism in the world today?

• The saddest part is that hatred towards Jews is not an old out moded idea from the far past, but millions of Muslims today have the same sick idea that one day they will do the same to all Jews in the Holy Land as Mohammed did to the Jews in Saudi Arabia.

  In fact the permission to kill Jews and Christians, and take their wives as concubines was engraved in the Islamic "Holy Koran", and is the main cause for the hatred of Jews by Muslims to this very day.

  - Walid, a Palestinian Arab defector
  quoted from "Answering Islam"

 

Where in the West is antisemitism most acceptable?

• Universities.

 

What should be done to combat antisemitism?

• "The cause of the Jews would be half won if only their friends brought to their defence a little of the passion and the perseverance their enemies use to bring them down........"

  - Jean-Paul Sartre, in "Antisemite and Jew"

 

What are the lessons of historical antisemitism for the world today?

• ISRAEL, MEMORY AND IMAGINATIONS OF DISAPPEARANCE
  C'est beau, n'est-ce pas, la fin du monde?
  Giraudoux, Sodome et Gomorrhe
  
  By Louis Rene Beres
  Professor of International Law
  Department of Political Science
  Purdue University
  

  Imaginations of the end of the world are often accompanied by visions of a terrible beauty. It is as if wholly catastrophic destruction were much more than the regrettable death and suffering of individuals, but actually a thoroughly appropriate instance of divine justice. With such apocalyptic imaginations, logic inevitably yields to passion, and technology can make the surrender complete.

  Israel's Islamic enemies are animated by certain apocalyptic imaginations, by visions of a Third Temple Commonwealth that has been reduced to ashes. What is more, as this Commonwealth approaches the end of the Second Millennium, Israel's political leadership - in an ironic twist of circumstances - does a great deal to encourage these portentous imaginations. For Israel's regional enemies, the destruction of the Jewish State is now a positively beatific expectation, one made distinctly possible, even probable, by the combining of Israeli territorial concessions with assorted Islamic weapons of mass destruction.

  More than anything else, Israel requires memory. Without memory, Israel will be unable to recognize the critical imperatives of justice and power. Without a concern for justice and power, Israel will be unable to survive.

  Memory, not forgetfulness, is a plaintive reminder of the recently- celebrated Jewish New Year. But it is on all days, not only on the "world's birthday", that memory is indispensable to justice and power. Failing to remember, the Jewish State will charge blindly into the next millennium. It should come as little surprise, therefore, that the absence of memory is now leading Israel to death, diaspora and even apocalyptic disappearance.

  There is an important lesson here for Israel, a lesson that draws productively upon centuries of Jewish victimization and upon millennia of international politics. Learn from the past! Do not place the very State at risk of annihilation! Recognize that the use of military force must always be limited, unavoidable and judicious, but that it assuredly has its proper place! Recall that previous Jewish suffering, no matter how terrible and total, generates nothing in the way of present sympathies. Recall that others will not recall!

  Why, exactly, is Israel now in great danger, in existential danger? The most obvious threat lies in rapidly expanding ballistic missile and unconventional warfare capabilities among its several regional enemies. Terrorism, as a more routine and obvious threat to Israel, endangers the Jewish State not only by its steadily climbing number of casualties, but also because of its significantly synergistic connections to war. The State of Israel, the individual Jew in macrocosm, is - like an individual human organism - weakened by multiple "insults". Although singular acts of terror will not "kill" the State, it may weaken it sufficiently to encourage enemy-initiated acts of war.

  Israel marches toward disappearance because so many of its leaders fail to understand this essential truth: The Jewish State is despised in the Islamic world not because of anything that it does, but because of what it is. There is absolutely nothing that Israel can do to diminish the apocalyptic imaginations of enemy states. For these states, any sort of peace settlement with Israel is inconceivable, an intolerable affront to Islam and a negation of their Islamic identity. Territorial compromise over "Palestine", therefore, is completely out of the question. As a Muslim land in the heart of dar-al-Islam, the abode of Islam, can be ruled properly only by a Muslim authority, Israel's "usurpation" of any Arab land must be met conclusively with Jihad, with Holy War. Described by Islamic leaderships as a "cancerous growth in the Middle East", Israel is approached as a malignancy not because of its particular policies, but because it is there.

  Historically, the Islamic world's orientation to genocide against the Jews has not been limited to idle phrasemaking. Even before Israel came into existence in 1948, on November 28, 1941, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin, met in Berlin with Adolph Hitler. The subject of their meeting was "the final solution of the Jewish Question". This meeting, which followed Haj Amin's active organization of Muslim SS troops in Bosnia, included the Mufti's promise to aid German victory in the war. Later, after Israel's trial and punishment of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in 1961, Iranian and Arab newspapers treated the mass murderer as a "martyr", and congratulated him for having "conferred a real blessing on humanity" by liquidating six million Jews.

  All over the "civilized" world, violence and propaganda against Jews are again in fashion. In Germany, in Russia, in Hungary, in Latvia, even in Japan, Jewish life is emerging once more as extraneous and expendable. In the United States, nearly half the population feels that "the Jews have too much power," a belief that not long ago foreshadowed and precipitated mass executions.

  Lest we forget that such murder, as an expression of anti-Semitism, has coexisted with civilization for a long time, consider this contemporaneous description of a typical day during the Chmielnicki pogroms of 1648-1653:

  "Some of the Jews had their skin flayed off them and their flesh flung to the dogs. The hands and feet of others were cut off, and they were flung onto the roadway, where carts ran over them and they were trodden under foot by horses....And many were buried alive. Children were slaughtered in their mothers' bosoms, and many children were torn apart like fish. They ripped up the bellies of pregnant women, took out the unborn children and flung them in their faces. They tore open the bellies of some of them and placed a living cat within the belly and left them alive thus, first cutting off their hands so that they should not be able to take the living cat out of the belly."

  Unique and exceptional? Hardly! In a history overstocked with victims, the Chmielnicki pogroms were a very minor episode. As it was at Chmielnicki, so it was at Speyer, at Mainz, at Worms, at Cologne, at Prague, and, during the Black Plague, in all of Christendom.

  Dreadfully medieval? Perhaps. But was it any more unbearable than certain twentieth-century atrocities? Consider the testimony of Treblinka survivor Pinchas Epstein at the Demjanjuk trial in Jerusalem:

  "He (meaning the notorious guard known as "Ivan the Terrible") worked in the vicinity of the gas chambers. I would come there to take corpses, and he was there all the time. He would stand and look at the results of what he had done, the stabbing of girls, the gouging of the eyes, the cutting off of girls' breasts....He would stand and look at this with delight, as if he had accomplished something. Would look at the crushed faces, crunched...blood flowing. And he would stand and look at this with some sort of pleasure, as if he had accomplished something important. A healthy human mind cannot absorb what happened in Treblinka....Almost a million human beings, souls, were slaughtered, children, old people, and infants....and I ask - Why? Because they were Jews."

  In 1882, Leo Pinsker, a Jewish physician of Odessa, horrified by the pogroms of 1881, concluded that anti-Semisitsm is an incurable psychosis, and that the only available remedy for Jews lies in self-help and self- liberation. Later, Theodore Herzl, having witnessed the trial of Alfred Dreyfus and hysterical cries of "Down with the Jews" in Paris, wrote THE JEWISH STATE. An attempt to solve "The Jewish Question", Herzl's pamphlet was premised on the following idea: "The nations in whose midst Jews live are all either covertly or openly anti-Semitic." This means, he argued straightforwardly, that a perfectly simple plan is needed: "Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves."

  The necessary grant of sovereignty took effect in May 1948. The portion of the globe encompassed by the grant was less than that occupied by certain counties in the state of California. The world continues to begrudge Israel this tiny portion. And portions of Israel's leadership, glib archeologists of ruins-in-the-making, express grudgingly identical sentiments.

  It is time for Jewish memory. Recalling the precariousness of Jewish life before 1948, we must never forget that a world without Israel would be a world of darkness, a world of the sort forseen by the Irish poet Yeats: "There is no longer a virtuous nation, and the best of us live by candlelight."

  The phrase "Death to Israel" is always uttered in the same breath as "Death to the Jews." The one implies the other. To assume that the former can be detached from historical anti-Semitism, that it is spawned by concerns over politics and land rather than by theology and immortality, is to validate delusion and to invite disappearance.

  "Vain hopes delude the senseless," we learn from Ecclesiasticus, "and dreams give wings to a fool's fancy." Today, hopes for an authentic Israeli peace with sworn enemies of the Jewish State propel Israel's march to disappearance. Founded upon dreams that can only become nightmares, these hopes must quickly be countered by reasonable assessments of justice and power. Before these assessments can be undertaken, all who would seek survival of the Third Temple Commonwealth must first return to that most primary of all lands, to the extraterritorial domain of memory.

  - by LOUIS RENE BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971), author of the new book FACING THE APOCALYPSE: ISRAEL'S "PEACEFUL" MARCH TO DISAPPEARANCE. He is also the author of fourteen previously-published books and several hundred scholarly articles in professional journals. Professor Beres, on the Editorial Boards of B'TZEDEK and NATIV, lectures frequently on Israeli security matters in Israel, Europe and the United States. His work is well- known to Prime Minister Netanyahu. E-MAIL BERES@POLSCI.PURDUE.EDU

 

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• RELATED SECTIONS:

  Jews, Self-Hatred, Bigotry, Double-Standards, Anti-Zionism, Edenism, Media Bias, Genocide, Holocaust, Zionism-Is-Racism, Socialism, Chosenness, Hamas, Islam, Moral Relativism, Incitement, Fear

• WWW RESOURCES:

• BOOKS & PRINTED MATERIAL:
  • Europe and the Jews: The Pressure of Christendom on the People of Israel for 1900 Years, by Malcolm Hay [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Out of Step: Politics and Religion in a World at War, by Jack Bloom [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Why I Left Jihad: The Root of Terrorism and the Return of Radical Islam, by Walid Shoebat [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, by Dennis Prager, Joseph Telushkin [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, by Edward H. Flannery [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, by Robert S. Wistrich [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It, by Phyllis Chesler [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • The Return of Anti-Semitism, by Gabriel Schoenfeld [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present, by Marvin Perry, Frederick Schweitzer [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Our Hands Are Stained With Blood, by Michael L. Brown [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, by Deborah E. Lipstadt [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, by Michael Shermer, Alex Grobman [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Assassins of Memory, by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jeffrey Mehlman [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • The Devil and the Jews, by Joshua Trachtenberg [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, by John Weiss [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • The Lie That Wouldn't Die: The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, by Hadassa Ben-Itto [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Islam and the Jews: The Unfinished Battle, by Mark A. Gabriel [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Islamic Anti-Semitism As a Political Instrument, by Yossef Bodansky [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism, by Cynthia Ozick, Ron Rosenbaum [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Peace: The Arabian Caricature of Anti-Semitic Imagery, by Arieh Stav [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore, by Alan Dundes [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Mr. Death: The Rise & Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., by Errol Morris [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice, by Bernard Lewis [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Antisemitism in America, by Leonard Dinnerstein [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840, by Ronald Florence [VIEW BOOK HERE]

  • Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From, by Daniel Pipes [VIEW BOOK HERE]

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