How Antisemitism Shape Shifts

Roger Berkowitz

The final chapter of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is called "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government." Ideology is at the core of Arendt's thinking about totalitarianism. What ideology is for Arendt, however,  is complicated. Arendt often repeats that we are to understand ideology from the Greek, as the logical truth of an idea. As such, ideology is a pseudo-scientific truth, a truth that imposes logical certainty on the real world that is not logical. That is why "Ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality." But there is another, more political way that Arendt describes ideologies. All full-fledged ideologies, she writes, are created, continued, and improved as political weapons. If we are to understand the political import of ideology, it is that ideologies are political weapons. Antisemitism, anti-black racism, and Bolshevism—as ideologies—are all political weapons. 
 
To take Arendt's idea of ideology as a political weapon seriously is to understand that ideologies have little to do with reality. Antisemitism as an ideology is not the same as Jew hatred. Similarly, ideological racism is neither prejudice nor hatred of blacks and Bolshevism is not the hatred of the bourgeoisie. Arendt argues that antisemitism gains its political power because it is able to be weaponized as an ideology that imagines Jews to be the root of all political and social evils; antisemitism, therefore, has little to do with actual Jews. It is a political weapon that deploys fantasies about Jews to achieve political interests, often interests that have nothing to do with Jews themselves. Antisemitism is founded in lies, and yet for the lies to be believed, there must be some believable basis in truth. To take antisemitism seriously, as Arendt insists we must, requires that we attend to the antisemites and understand what they are saying. For Arendt, antisemitism is an ideology that seeks to undermine the government, the “system” or the “state” by imagining these institutions to be controlled by or affiliated with Jews. How and why antisemitism is weaponized is the topic of Arendt’s writings on antisemitism. 
 
Noah Feldman, without mentioning Arendt, makes a similar point in an essay asking how antisemitism is transforming today in contemporary politics. Antisemitism is largely divorced from religion, Feldman rightly sees. It is not primarily wielded by either Christians or Muslims on religious grounds. To the extent Muslims in the Middle East mobilize antisemitism today, is secular, "part of their politically motivated effort to turn a struggle between two national groups for the same piece of land into a holy war." Understanding that antisemitism is a secular ideology is the first step to both confronting and resisting it. As Feldman writes: 
 

It emerges that far from being an unchanging set of ideas derived from ancient faiths, antisemitism is actually a shape-shifting, protean, creative force. Antisemitism has managed to reinvent itself multiple times throughout history, each time keeping some of the old tropes around, while simultaneously creating new ones adapted to present circumstances.
In each iteration, antisemitism reflects the ideological preoccupations of the moment. In antisemitic discourse, Jews are always made to exemplify what a given group of people considers to be the worst feature of the social order in which they live.
 
A crucial reason why is surely that Jews were the most salient minority group living among Christians for the bulk of European history—and Europe was the heartland of historical antisemitism. The practice of projecting immediate social fears and hatreds onto Jews grew from the human need to treat some nearby group of people as the Other. (Muslims and Asians eventually also became subject to projection and fantasy, a practice dubbed Orientalism by the literary scholar Edward Said.) 
 
Once Jews had become the go-to targets for exemplifying societal ills, the habit stuck.
In this way, crucially, antisemitism is not and has never been about actual Jews so much as antisemites’ imagination of them. Because antisemitic ideology isn’t accountable to real-life facts, its content can be altered and changed as a society’s worries and moral judgments shift. Antisemitism’s capacity to keep its familiar character while also channeling new fears is what confers its stunning capacity to reinvent itself....
 
TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLICATED, subtle character of the new antisemitism, notice that the concept of imperialism was developed to describe European powers that conquered, controlled, and exploited vast territories in the Global South and East. The theory of settler-colonial white supremacy was developed as a critical account of countries like Australia and the U.S., in which, according to the theory, the colonialists’ aim was to displace the local population, not to extract value from its labor. The application of these categories to Israel is a secondary development.
 
These borrowed categories do not fit Israel’s specificity very well. Israel is a regional Middle Eastern power with a tiny footprint, not a global or continental empire designed to extract resources and labor. It was brought into existence by a 1947 United Nations resolution that would have created two states side by side, one Jewish and one Palestinian. Its purpose, as conceived by the U.N.’s member countries, was to house displaced Jews after 6 million were killed in the Holocaust.
 
The Palestinian catastrophe, or nakba, of 1948 was that when the Arab invasion of Israel failed to destroy the nascent Jewish state, many Palestinians who had fled or been forced out of their homes by Israeli troops were unable to return. Those Palestinians became permanent refugees in neighboring countries. Instead of ending up in an independent Palestine as proposed by the U.N., those who had stayed in their homes found themselves living either in Israel or under Egyptian and Jordanian rule. Then, in the 1967 war, the West Bank and Gaza were conquered by Israel. Palestinians in those places came under what Israel itself defines as an occupation. They have lived in that precarious legal status ever since despite the 1993–2001 peace process.
 
Notwithstanding undeniable Jewish prejudice and discrimination against Arabs in Israel, the paradigm of white supremacy also does not correspond easily to the Jews. Around half of Israel’s Jewish citizens descend from European Jews, as do most American Jews. But those Jews were not considered racially white in Europe, which is one reason they had to emigrate or be killed. Roughly half of Israel’s Jews descend from Mizrahi, (literally, Eastern) origins. They are not ethnically European in any sense, much less racially “white.” A meaningful number of Israeli Jews are of Ethiopian origin, and the small community of Black Hebrew Israelites in Israel are ethnically African American.

Whether early Zionist settlers should be conceived as colonialists is a hotly disputed question. Were they stateless, oppressed people seeking refuge in their ancient homeland, where some Jews had always lived? That is certainly how they saw themselves. Or were early Zionists agents of the very European states they were seeking to flee, aiming to buy as much territory in Palestine as they could to create their own state? That is the view of critics, who emphasize the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain, still very much an empire, announced that it looked “with favor” on the creation of a national Jewish home in Palestine.