The antisemite must be the most frustrated person on the planet. Has anyone ever put more effort into any project? And what does he have to show for millennia of dedicated effort?
After the Jews lost their Temple and sovereign state 2,000 years ago, they wandered wherever they could find refuge – from Babylonia, eventually to Europe and North Africa, and later North America.
Each host country in time turned on Jews as scapegoats for hard times or as an excuse for religious persecutions. Being a Jew in a Christian land or a Muslim state was not a long-term solution to statelessness. Too many stubborn Jews refused to convert in spite of intense pressure and practiced their religion in secret or left for temporary greener pastures elsewhere – hence, “the wandering Jew.”
They survived. Every country that took in Jews benefited from their industriousness, energy, and intelligence. Eventually, though, those Jews became “too powerful” or “too different” to fit in, so they were expelled (in England in 1290, in Spain in 1492, in Portugal in 1496).
The Jew had the misfortune of having the wrong religion. Later in history, it was decided that it was their race that was hated. That’s when Jewish life became really dangerous. You can convert from your religion, but you can’t convert from your race. So, it was no longer good enough to expel the Jews who wouldn’t convert. They had to be killed. Now it is the nation state of the Jewish people that is the cause of all the problems in the world. For the antisemite, Israel must be delegitimized at all costs in order to destroy it.
Truth and history must take second place to outrage
Imagine the horror and dismay of the antisemite. After 2,000 years at the mercy of others, defenseless, alone, needing to run anywhere they would be taken in, the Jews rebuilt their ancestral homeland and created a modern, vibrant, and prosperous country in the desert. That is unbearable for the poor antisemite. That country must be dismantled at all costs.
Israel makes its neighbors look bad. Democracy in the Middle East? Jews and Muslims living as citizens in a Jewish country? Opportunity and prosperity for all? No, that is intolerable. Israel must be portrayed as an interloper, oppressor, and foreigner. Truth and history must take second place to outrage.
Jews with an army means that others cannot carry out a pogrom or Farhud with impunity. Jewish blood has become expensive. This is not the wandering Jew, the ghetto Jew, or the cowering Jew. The antisemite is hysterical. All of his energy, time, and effort to erase this formerly powerless, troublesome group, and they come back, strong and determined! It is enough to drive a hater to distraction.
The antisemite could have put his mind to create something, to build, to contribute to society, to add value to life, whether in the Middle East, Europe, or North America. He and the hated Jews would all be much better served.
Bloody but not bowed, the Jew exists, always tiny in numbers. The small number should signal to the antisemite that the Jew could not possibly control the world, could not be the author of his misfortune, that conspiracy theories are offerings to the feeble-minded who will not accept their own responsibility for their lives. Now the punching bag is punching back, and where will this all end?
What the antisemite can do is cause damage, inflict pain and loss, celebrate death, and wreak havoc. He breaches every norm of civilized life as embodied in the US Constitution, Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the UN Charter, and Enlightenment values, not to mention normative religious values.
The endless suffering of the Jew and the frustration of the pathetic antisemite make a hell of a world that is filled with much beauty and mostly decent people. The antisemite is the most extreme and enduring symptom of a society in crisis. His bitterness and rage are not shared widely in normal times; but when tears appear in the social fabric, the reaction is not better policies and rational examination of problems but radical and harmful responses. This predictable and destructive cycle has a long history and causes so much needless pain.
The yearning for a better life of peace and tranquility is as permanent and desirable as the persistence of hatred and destruction. In the immortal words of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., someday “the arc of the moral universe will bend toward justice” – for Jews and for all people. Someday.■
Paul Socken is distinguished professor emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Waterloo, Canada. This piece was first published in The Jewish Journal, Los Angeles.