20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism

Anti-Judaislll and Anti-Selllitislll li,..~t:J"to~N ,';N'~~·liN~~ Hyam Maccoby I t is generally agreed that the term anti-Semitism should be used not in its purported sense of "antagonism to Semites" but as the equivalent to "Judaeophobia" or "Jew hatred." The term anti-Semitism was coined in the nineteenth century as a would-be scientific attempt to give a rational justification for Jew hatred when theological explanations had come to seem out of date, but the alleged biological or racial reference and the implied extension of hatred to other Semites, for example, Arabs, were never taken very seriously even by anti-Semitic theorists . The term anti-Semitism is thus parallel to Anglophobia or Francophobia , and means a hatred of Jews at a paranoid level, that is, accompanied by an inclination to attribute a wide range of evils to the activities and influence of the Jews. The term anti-Semitism, therefore, can even be used to describe the attitude of ancient writers such as Apion or Seneca, who had no biological or racial theory about the Jews but regarded them as a pernicious people actuated by hatred of mankind and responsible for a wide range of harmful activities. Even the Jew hatred evinced in the present by 14 ANTI-JUDAISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM Arabs, themselves a Semitic people, is described correctly as anti-Semitism given the history of the term, though it is unfortunate that this usage has become so universally accepted. The question to be discussed here is: How does Judaism fit into the antiSemitic picture? Does anti-Semitism always entail anti-Judaism? If it does, the question arises: Is Judaism regarded as the cause or as the symptom of Jewish evil? Finally, the question must be asked: Does anti-Judaism necessarily entail anti-Semitism? This last question is of special significance in view of certain arguments that have been put forward to defend traditional Christian teaching from the charge of being anti-Semitic. In almost all forms of anti-Semitism, Judaism also is the subject of adverse comment, although it is not always made clear whether the Jews are considered evil because they have an evil religion or vice versa. In Apion's anti-Semitic scheme, as reported by Josephus, the Jews were originally a band of outcast lepers who, on being ejected from Egypt, concocted a misanthropic religion; here, clearly, the despicable status of the Jews as a people is primary, the defects of their religion secondary. In modern times, Nazi anti-Semitism followed a similar pattern. The defect is located primarily in the Jews themselves, as constituting an inherently inferior racial group; Judaism is secondarily stigmatized as the kind of poisonous weltanschauung to be expected of such flawed beings. In Nazism, ideologies are merely the outward expression of the underlying reality, which is racial. In Karl Marx's thought, the underlying reality is not race, but economic class; and in his form of anti-Semitism, Judaism is merely the ideological expression of the economic position of the Jews as hucksters and middlemen, roles he considered representative of all that is wrong with capitalist society. In one very significant variety of anti-Semitism in the ancient world, the relationship between the Jews and their religion is apparently reversed. In certain Gnostic sects contemporaneous with the birth of Christianity, the Jewish religion is regarded as the primary source of evil and the Jews are seen as its agents rather than its originators. This view arises from a fundamental dualism in which the universe is conceived as the arena of a conflict between a good Power and an evil Power. The evil Power created the earth and rules over it. He is the God worshiped by the Jews, who are his chosen people, and to whom he gave the evil revelation known as the Torah. The Jewish religion is thus a direct expression of evil, emanating from the source of all evil, and the Jews are the people chosen by the evil Power, or Demiurge, to act as his earthly representatives in the struggle against the Light. As against the Torah, it is alleged, there exists an alternative tradition of true knowledge (gnosis), transmitted from early times by ANTI-JUDAISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM 15 non-Jewish sages such as Seth, Enoch, and Melchizedek, by which initiates may escape from thralldom to the Demiurge and join the good Power in the heavens. This radical...