Radical Anti-Semitism: Phase 2

After recycling ancient anti-Semitic tales about the death of Jesus in The Passion of Christ, a drunken Mel Gibson informed the local police and then the national media that yes indeed, the Jews are also the cause of modern wars. The implosion of the career of this undistinguished, if commercially successful Hollywood celebrity, would be a welcome aspect of the re-emergence of anti-Semitism he has helped to foster. Since the 1950s, the lines between hatred of Jews as Jews, and hatred of Israel and the Zionist project have converged and diverged within the largely secular, third world and nationalist left in the Arab world and its supporters and sympathizers in Europe and elsewhere. However, since the Iranian revolution of 1979, the emergence of Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, hatred of Jews as Jews that emerged in the canonical texts of radical Islamist intellectuals of the 1940s to 1960s has become a major political force in world politics. While anti-Semitism is as old as Christianity, radical anti-Semitism defined as the ideology and policy that aims to exterminate the Jewish people as a whole, had its only appearance in Western history during the Nazi era,  specifically during the Holocaust from 1941 to 1945. We are living in the second era in modern history in which radical anti-Semitism--paranoid, inflamed with conspiratorial thinking, self-righteous and murderous–is a force in world politics.

The textures, language, context and causes of contemporary radical anti-Semitism differ in important ways from those of the era of Nazism and fascism in Europe yet the lineages and comparisons between the crisis of modernization that fostered Europe’s fundamentalist revolt and the crisis of the Islamic and Arab worlds are significant as well and call for more research and analysis by historians of comparative cultural and intellectual history. One starting point for such a project lies in a reassessment of the nature of radical anti-Semitism during the Nazi period, a reinterpretation that I have offered in my recently published book, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006).

The key components of this reinterpretation include the following: First, we need to think anew about the meaning of the phrase made famous by the title of Lucy Dawidowicz's important book of 1975, The War Against the Jews.  With that phrase, Dawidowicz referred specifically to Nazi anti-Jewish policy during the entire history of the Nazi regime. Yet Hitler, Goebbels and the Nazi ideological hard core, in their public statements and private comments, defined the entire Second World War as well as the specifically anti-Jewish policies as both parts of one all encompassing war against the Jews. In their public statements and propaganda, they described the war against the Jews as the war against England, the Soviet Union and the United States and the Jewish “men behind the scenes” and “wire pullers” who the Nazis claimed were the driving force of the anti-Hitler coalition.

Second, Nazi propaganda entailed a translation of radical anti-Semitic ideology into a narrative of events that appeared in the press and electronic media as well as in ubiquitous visual propaganda posters distributed throughout Germany and occupied Europe. Hitler and his associates repeatedly asserted that a real historical actor called “international Jewry” had started and escalated the Second World War to bring about the extermination and the annihilation of all of the German people. Therefore, as they said publicly on many occasions, Hitler and the Nazi regime had taken the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe as a measure of justified retaliation. The Nazi regime’s wartime propaganda translated radical anti-Semitism into a paranoid narrative of ongoing events in which “international Jewry” was a powerful historical subject while Nazi Germany emerged as its innocent and righteous victim. Throughout the war and the Holocaust, paranoia and projection were the handmaidens of aggression and mass murder. Radical anti-Semitism was, first and foremost rested on a political accusation about Jewish power and malevolence. Though scholars have correctly examined and documented the racial stereotypes about the Jewish body in Nazi ideology and propaganda, these pseudo-scientific claims were not anti-Semitism’s distinctively lethal and murderous dimension.

Now phrases familiar to historians of modern Europe and Germany, such as “the politics of cultural despair,” “the crisis of German ideology,” and, “reactionary modernism” refer to the emergence of the precursors and to the moods surrounding the rise of Nazism in Germany. These and other works traced the ideological roots and political crises that made the Nazi regime possible to the multiple crisis of modernization in Germany between the late 19th and early 20th century. When I was writing Reactionary Modernism I also had in mind the simultaneity of technological advance and cultural reaction that was apparent in the Ayotollah Khomeni’s tape recorded appeals to return Iran to the middle ages. In the Arab, Persian and Islamic world in general, rapid modernization is taking place in the absence of or feebleness of the enlightenment traditions that accompanied modernity to varying degrees in Europe. The similarities and differences in the crises of modernization in Europe and the fundamentalist revolts it produced and the crises of modernization that have spawned radical Islam and its terrorism calls out for further examination.

Third, the presence of radical anti-Semitism, murderous hatred directed against Jews as Jews is now a well demonstrated fact of contemporary history in the Middle East and in the Islamic world. It is no longer only venom in founding texts of radical Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb’s In the Shade of the Koran or “Our Struggle with the Jews.” Now President Ahmadinejad of Iran denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction of Israel. The founding charter of Hamas calls for the elimination of Israel and repeats an absurd version of twentieth century European history that is indebted to the anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hamas and Hezbollah are waging war against Israel after Israel withdrew from Southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. The diffusion of this hatred of the Jews and of Israel was evident in the election victory of Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza.

Fourth, one of the most important implications of the cultural and intellectual history of Nazi ideology and propaganda has to do with what the dean of historians of the regime, Karl Bracher, long ago called “the problem of underestimation.” Both before and after 1933, Hitler’s contemporaries in Germany, Europe and the United States repeatedly assumed that he could not possibly be serious about either his absurd and fallacious interpretations of past events or his threats to “exterminate” the Jews of Europe. Many government officials, leading journalists, distinguished scholars fighting the Nazis agreed that no truly sophisticated analyst could assume that the lunacy of radical anti-Semitism could be the guide to Nazi policy. One result of the revelation of the death camps, as Hannah Arendt pointed out soon afterwards, was that the meaning of political sophistication needed to change.

Today, when leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and, of course, Al Qaeda, make vicious threats against “the Jewish enemy” sophistication, common sense and elementary decency requires that we assume that these people mean what they say. We historians are the inheritors of grand traditions of comparative historical analysis. This is a time to recall them and put them to use in understanding this second, major era of radical anti-Semitism’s impact on world politics.