The Big Lie

Roger Berkowitz

Writer Dara Horn writes about the “big lie” of antisemitism for The Atlantic:

The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.

In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider “Judaism.” This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.

Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider “Jewish,” this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.

This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist. Around 38 C.E., after rioters in Alexandria destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes and burned Jews alive, the Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Philo and the non-Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Apion both sailed to Rome for a “debate” before Emperor Caligula about whether Jews deserved citizenship. Apion believed that Jews held an annual ritual in which they kidnapped a non-Jew, fattened him up, and ate him. Caligula delayed Philo’s rebuttal for five months, and then listened to him only while consulting with designers on palace decor. Alexandrian Jews lost their citizenship rights, though it took until 66 C.E. for 50,000 more of them to be slaughtered.