The theory of anti-Semitism

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Two Israelis who had been invited by the Autonomous University of Madrid to participate in a debate were almost lynched. They had to leave under police escort, while a mob banged on their car. Another university is very worried because one third of the scholars invited to give lectures at an international congress on mathematics have Jewish surnames. They fear protests.

The organizers of the annual gay pride parade in Madrid, a colorful and merry European festival, this year excluded the Israeli delegation. Anti-Israelism, the “prog” disguise of anti-Semitism, is stronger than the natural empathy of Spanish gays with their Israeli counterparts, even though they share the same sexual preferences and the same homophobic enemies.

What's happening? Something that has fatally hounded the Jewish people for two thousand years: certain powerful social groups take Jews as a tool to quickly express the identity with which they want to be known. Today, the left, the ill-called “progressive” left – people who, paradoxically, admire the model of development of the nations that progress the least – uses anti-Israelism as a sign of identity that saves them the trouble of elaborating a complex political and social discourse.

All it takes is wrapping a Palestinian shawl around one's neck and shouting anti-Israel slogans to let the press, the neighbors, the barrio girls, friends and enemies know that one is a “prog” who subscribes to the leftist agenda and worries about the glorious destiny of humanity. Anti-Israelism / anti-Semitism is, then, a sign, a poster, a tattoo, a statement without names, a homeopathic substitute for ideology.

I fear it has always been thus. It all began (or heightened) in Fourth-Century Rome, when Emperor Theodosius (who was born in Hispania) decreed Christianity to be the Empire's official religion and branded those who did not submit to the moral authority of the Bishop of Antioch as “demented and wicked.” And, because Christianity had emerged as a rift between Jews in the synagogues of the Middle East until the Christians renounced their origins and created a separate and universal religion, the ones who ended up defeated and persecuted were the Jews.

During those Roman centuries, the Fourth and the Fifth, there were two urgent ways to demonstrate allegiance to Caesar and loyalty to the State. The less-important one was anti-paganism. The other was anti-Judaism. The new faith was proclaimed by denouncing the alleged “killers of Christ.”

The Germanic tribes that destroyed, imitated and, to a degree, continued the Roman tradition in Western Europe, learned the lesson. To be anti-Jews was useful to them as an unequivocal sign of the Christianity that, beginning in the Fourth Century, they assumed as proof of the Romanization they had experienced. They then dictated ferocious anti-Jewish rules to please the Pope, the source of political legitimacy at that time, and initiated severe punitive rules against the Jews that remained in effect for a millennium – exclusion, ghettoes, cruel punishment.

By 711 A.D., when the Arabs invaded and ruled Spain, a kingdom then controlled by the Visigoths, a people of Germanic origin, the expulsion of the Jews was already being prepared.

Things did not change during the Middle Ages. The wicked acts of the Jews explained the plagues, pestilence and catastrophes that were then incomprehensible. Blaming the Jews was showing solidarity with the victims. It was the “prog,” the right thing to do. Blaming the Jewish usurers and bankers served to demonstrate solidarity with the poor people who could barely feed themselves when the droughts came, or when the wars depleted the monarch's coffers.

It is a mistake to think that Francisco de Quevedo, the great Spanish writer of the 17th Century, was a reactionary because of his harsh anti-Semitism. The “prog” thing to do in that era, the way to fight injustice, was to point to the Jews as the people responsible for numerous calamities and sorceries.

And the tradition continued. In the 19th Century, when nation-states emerged, combatting the Jews (an eccentric group) served to underline nationalism. That is why, one hundred years later, the fascists and the Nazis incorporated the practice into their ideology. Those strong and hegemonic states, molded by the speeches of Hitler and Mussolini, leaned toward uniformity. To be anti-Semitic was the most efficient and economic way to be patriotic and nationalistic. How could they not wipe from the face of the earth those impertinent elements, culturally foreign to racial purity and always ready to betray the fatherland?

These days, it is no longer elegant to utilize the biological or racial argument (except in the radical Islamic media) but there's still the subterfuge of anti-Israelism. A “prog” who is unshaken when Sudan murders 50,000 people is infuriated by the lamentable incident of the flotilla where 10 Muslim activists died. Why that double standard? Because protesting against Sudan does not define or outline his identity. It is not useful. On the other hand, that usefulness has been magnificently provided by the Jews over the past two millennia.

June 13, 2010