Blaming the Jews, livre ebook

In recent years Western countries have seen a proliferation of antisemitic material in social media, and attacks on Jews such as that on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Much of this has stemmed, not from personal hostility to Jews on the part of this or that individual, but from a resurgence in groups at both ends of politics of the ancient delusion that "the Jews" collectively dominate world affairs and lie at the root of all the world's evils.

In Blaming the Jews author Bernard Harrison, offers a new and unique analysis of this second and far more dangerous form of antisemitism and its persistence as a cultural phenomenon. Questioning the assumption that antisemitism affects or targets only Jews, he demonstrates that, allowed to go unrecognised or unchecked, antisemitism is potentially damaging to us all.

In a world where rhetoric is fashioned on stereotypes and driven by political ideology, Harrison argues it is our responsibility to be vigilant in exposing the delusions of antisemitism and their consequences for Jews and non-Jews alike.

It is often asserted, both by Jews and by others, that social antisemitism has greatly declined in Western societies over the seventy years that have elapsed since the end of World War II. That is broadly—though somewhat patchily—true. What I shall argue in this book, however, is that social antisemitism is by no means the only kind we have to worry about today. As I shall show in what follows—and as many others have noted—antisemitism as a political fantasy concerning the mysterious, demonic, and conspiratorial power of "the Jews" to determine world events has enjoyed a political rebirth since September 2001. All that has changed is that "Zionism"—understanding by that term the State of Israel together with its Jewish supporters (though not, as we shall see, its far more numerous non-Jewish ones)—has taken over, in effect, the role traditionally assigned in antisemitic theory to the world Jewish conspiracy. In that new form, antisemitism as a delusive political theory is once again as active in the political life of the West as it has been at any time over the past two millennia.

Unfortunately, that political rebirth has taken place chiefly on the left. The left has, of course, its own traditions of antisemitic theorizing. These theories were specific to the left and in any case not particularly active or influential during the greater part of the twentieth century. But what the French ambassador's remark exemplifies, as we shall see in what follows, is a straightforward transfer from one end of the political spectrum to the other of what used to be the exclusively right-wing fantasy that the Jews are to be blamed for most of the evils besetting the world and, among other things, for being the main force pushing the world toward war.

In short, I shall argue in this book that those who presently complain of a revival of antisemitism in sections of the British Labour Party, in American academia, and for that matter in the wider drift of liberal opinion in the Western world do not for a moment, pace the BBC, suppose that problem to consist only in the entertaining, by individuals who may or may not happen to be on the left, of private attitudes of "hostility and prejudice" toward anybody who happens to be Jewish.

On the contrary, they take it to consist also, and most importantly, in a revival, largely on the left this time, of antisemitic theory: of belief in the ancient fantasy of a collective Jewish threat to non-Jewish interests.

In the minds of the believers, that threat consists primarily in the supposed hidden conspiratorial power of the Jewish community to dominate world events; the commitment of the community to the exercise of darkly demonic powers in the service of purely sectional Jewish interests; and more seriously still, in what believers imagine to be the collective recalcitrance of the Jewish community toward the very moral and political values that believers find most reasonable and compelling.

The subject of the book is that fantasy: its extraordinary persistence over the centuries; its remarkable ability to transform and adapt itself, like some strange virus of the mind, in order to speak afresh to the concerns and anxieties generated by new historical circumstances; the functions it serves in non-Jewish culture and political life; and finally the reasons for its extraordinary recrudescence in liberal-left circles in the twenty-first century.

Preface
Introduction
I. Varieties of Antisemitism
1. Hamas Addresses the Jewish Question
2. "Profiting" from the Holocaust
3. Questions of Definition
II. Why the Jews?
4. The Disease Metaphor
5. An Obstinate People
III. Is Israel "illegitimate"?
6. Accusation and Narrative
7. Narrative and Reality
8. The Legacy of 1967
9. Is "Anti-Zionism" Antisemitic?
10. Israel, the Left and the Universities
IV. Judaism Defaced
11. A Primitive Religion?
12. Mitzva and Moral Theory.
13. What's Wrong With Universalism?
V. Antisemitism as a Problem for Non-Jews
14. Jew-Baiting on Campus
15. Defamation Disguised
16. Judgement Unhinged
Bibliography
Index