Liberal Anti-Semitism

We all know about how prevalent anti-Semitism is among liberals, and how loathe liberals are to admit it. Ever want to read more about it. Where it comes from? What its history is? What keeps it going? How it affects us and our society and Israel and theirs? Then read the following. I took it verbatim from an exceptional book on Christian anti-Semitism published in 1993. This except is pre-9/11, so it contains little about what we’ve all been experiencing lately, but it’s still clear, pertinent, timely, and well worth reading.

Liberal Antisemitism

Although there can be fierce argument about the new forms of antisemitism, they are relatively easy to identify. The majority culture is pervaded, however, by another, subtler form of antisemitism, whose existence is often denied, especially by Jews. This form of antisemitism is not explicitly ideological. It consists of a prejudice disposing those who harbor it to think somewhat badly of Jews without necessarily finding specific religious, racial, or political justification for doing so. It also disposes people to give undeserved credence to the arguments of more overt antisemites. The pervasive liberal mentality of our time is the background radiation left by the distant big bang of the Christian myth of the Christ-killing Jews.

Liberal antisemitism is often unconscious and indignantly denied when attention is drawn to it. With very few exceptions, everyone brought up in a Christian (or sometimes a post-Christian) home shares some degree of anti-Jewish prejudice, subtly conditioning their reactions to Jews even when the adult conscience repudiates such prejudice. Those who are alert to its existence, because they have confronted it in themselves, can recognize that it is far more widespread than many Jews suppose.

Liberal antisemitism is not always explicitly Christian, but it depends upon the traditional Christian interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, generally cited by liberals as the finest statement of the ethics they subscribe to. As we saw, this interpretation sets Jesus against his own people and tradition, and it sets the perfectionism of his ideal against the practical realities of political and national life, judging the latter by the former. Politically, this leads liberals toward pacifism, the ethic of loving the enemy and turning the other cheek being applied to relationships between states, which do not seem to have been in Jesus’ mind at all. Among liberals, religious and otherwise, it is taken for granted that the Old Testament teaches revenge and hatred and that it is an outmoded book to be discarded except for its historical interest and literary beauty. As a guide to personal and corporate life, it is no longer taken seriously in the liberal world.

Even those who are no longer attached to Christianity frequently retain the impression that the Old Testament teaches an outmoded and barbaric morality, ethically superseded by the teaching of Jesus. Jews are supposed to be vengeful, and incapable of forgiv ing those who have injured them. THey are supposed to be very interested in money and outstandingly skillful at amassing it. Such attitudes have a much wider influence than it is comfortable to admit.

Liberals, however, woiuld be shocked and horrified to be told they were antisemitic. Such an admission would be incompatible with the liberal self-image as someone exceptionally righteous and ethically motivated. Indeed, it sometimes seems that in such circles to call someone an antisemite is a worse offense than being one.

Enlightenment views of Jews remain widespread in liberal circles. Under the influence of such ideas, Jews are not attacked on religious grounds, though there is still an echo of Christian moral superiority, but rather for insisting on their national identity instead of merging with the majority culture as simply one religious group among others. Today, anti-Zionism is the most vigorous descendant of the old Enlightenment view, expressed so clearly by Clermont-Tonnerre during the French Revolution. Everything for Jews as individuals, nothing for them as a nation. Clearly, liberals still share the Englightenment opinion that Jews ae only acceptable in modern society if they reform themselves according to liberal ideals, abandoning their sense of themselves as a nation or people, and contenting themselves with being “Frenchment of the Mosaic persuation.” The Napoleonic bargain is likewise still embraced by many Jews anxious about their reception as fellow citizens in modern society.

Liberals are inclined to be pacifists, or at least to regard resort to arms by nation states as almost never justifiable. On the other hand, they are less shocked by the terrorist activities of groups they regard as politically deprived of their rights. American liberals especially tend to believe that if you adopt a forgiving and tolerant attitude to your enemies, they will be won over to friendship. In the Middle East, such expectations are apt to prove delusory.

Semi-Christian liberals are readily influenced by the diffuse antisemitism of Christian culture as a whole to dislike Israel for two reasons. Modern Israel is easily identified with the Jewish establishment that liberal Christianity believes Jeus opposed, and it is resolved to defend itself by force of arms, including reprisals where necessary against its attackers, whereas Jesus taught the forgiveness of enemies. Worst of all, Israel is believed to possess nuclear weapons and is presumably prepared to use them in a sufficiently exreme situation. The wide popularity of books puporting to reveal Israel’s nuclear secrets is instructive, especially in view of the fact that belif in the existence of an Israeli nuclear option has evidently contributed to peace in the Middle East by deterring further Arab attacks on Israel. For nuclear pacifists, including some well respectied scientists, Mordechai Vanunu, who betrayed his country’s purported nuclear secrets to the press, is a hero.

For the liberal pacifist mind, it would be much more ethical for Israelis to become the victims of Arab genocidal hate, a phenomenon in any case difficult for the liberal mind to take in. In this context, we should not be surprised that Israel briefly regained in liberal circles the popularity it lost by winning in 1967 by suffering the Scud attacks of Iraq in 1991 without retaliation, in order to please America.

The liberal attitude is in these respects a clear descendant of the ancient notion that the Jews should be preserved, but in misery. More generally, liberalism denies national identity to Jews, like the ideas of the Englightenment from which historically it is descended. It calls for their toleration as individuals with human rights, while according little or no legitimacy to Jewish consciousness of being a nation or people. Thus liberalism has an inherent tendency to anti-Zionism, reinforced by the new image of Israel as militarily strong and perhaps at times ruthless in the means it adopts to survive in a hostile and highly dangerous environment.

-from “Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate by William Nicholls”