ANTISEMITISM? YOU’RE SOAKING IN IT

There was a long-running series of Palmolive commercials in the 1970s, featuring Madge, a cheerfully intrusive manicurist played by Jan Miner.

A customer would complain about her hands. Madge would praise Palmolive’s supposed softening properties. Then the customer would discover that the little bowl in which her fingers had been resting was not filled with ordinary manicure solution but Palmolive.

“You’re soaking in it,” Madge would declare.

“Dishwashing liquid?” the stunned client would freak the hell out.

It may be the perfect metaphor for antisemitism in Western civilization.

We imagine antisemitism as something outside us: an alien toxin introduced by fanatics, extremists, and obviously wicked people. It belongs to neo-Nazis, medieval mobs, conspiracy cranks, and whichever political faction we already dislike.

Then someone points to the assumptions in which our culture has been resting for centuries.

Antisemitism?

You’re soaking in it.

David Nirenberg’s monumental 2013 book, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, is not a conventional history of antisemitic persecution. It is something more unsettling.

Nirenberg examines the role that ideas about “Judaism,” “Jewishness,” and “the Jews” have played in Western thought over roughly three millennia. His central concern is not simply what societies did to actual Jews. It is how non-Jewish societies repeatedly used an imagined Judaism as a way of explaining what was wrong with the world.

In this sense, anti-Judaism does not even require Jews.

The “Jew” becomes an intellectual tool: a symbol of whatever a thinker, religion, or political movement wishes to reject. The target is not necessarily a Jewish neighbor of flesh and blood. It is the Jew in the mind — the fabricated figure against whom a society defines virtue, truth, spirituality, freedom, or justice.

As one summary of Nirenberg’s distinction puts it, antisemitism needs Jews to persecute, while anti-Judaism can flourish without actual Jews because its target is an idea.

Moreover — and I summarize crudely — Nirenberg suggests that anti-Jewish ideas are not a bug of Western civilization but a feature. To create a unified, Christian European civilization, it was necessary to create a unifying common enemy.

The Jew.

Christianity emerged from Judaism, yet much Christian identity was constructed by defining itself against a caricature of Judaism.

Christianity represented spirit; Judaism was reduced to dead letter.

Christianity represented grace; Judaism represented merciless “Old Testament” legalism.

Christianity offered universal love; Judaism was accused of being tribal particularism.

Christian faith was sincere and inward; Jewish religious practice was derided as mechanical, legalistic, and materialistic.

These contrasts did not accurately describe Judaism. But whatever.

In the Christian/European imagination, Judaism became a fabricated, negative category through which Christians explained what Christianity was not.

The process continued after European thought became less explicitly religious.

For some Enlightenment thinkers who had abandoned theology for rationalism, “Judaism” represented superstition, backwardness, and irrational obedience.

For certain revolutionaries, Jews represented commerce, money, and bourgeois self-interest.

For some socialists, Jewishness became entangled with capitalism and financial exploitation.

For anti-communists, Jews became revolutionaries and Bolsheviks.

For nationalists, Jews represented rootlessness and cosmopolitanism.

For cosmopolitans, Jews could be accused of tribal nationalism.

The contradictions did not weaken the prejudice. They made it versatile.

Jews could be blamed for capitalism and communism, nationalism and globalism, racial separation and unwanted integration, excessive religious tradition and corrosive modernity.

Nirenberg’s history proceeds from the ancient world through Christianity, Islam, European literature, political philosophy, and modern ideologies. His argument is not that every Western thinker was secretly motivated by hatred of actual Jews. It is that thinking negatively through Judaism became one of the West’s recurring ways of thinking about itself.

Anti-Judaism was not merely a stain on the tradition.

It built the tradition.

This is what makes antisemitism so difficult to confront.

We like to believe that our ideas are our own.

In reality, we inherit languages, symbols, categories, and stories assembled long before we arrived. They enter through religion, literature, art, political rhetoric, family expressions, journalism, and popular culture.

We may consciously reject hatred of Jews while unconsciously retaining the mental architecture that has made Jews useful as an explanation for social evil.

Consider how naturally certain ideas continue to circulate.

There are allegations of hidden Jewish influence. There is suspicion of Jewish money. There is the belief that Jews possess unusual control over governments, banks, media, or foreign policy.

There is the portrayal of Jews as simultaneously clannish and globally integral. There is the assumption that Jews exploit victimhood, manipulate guilt, and exaggerate prejudice for political gain.

Most people repeating fragments of these ideas have never read a medieval theologian, a 19th-century racial theorist, or a fascist pamphlet.

They don’t need to.

The residue is already in the water.

The creation of Israel did not abolish this ancient structure. It gave it a new vessel.

Ideas once attached to “the Jew” can now be attached to “the Zionist” or “the Jewish state.”

The “greedy Jew” becomes the Israel lobby buying politicians.

The “conspiratorial Jew” becomes Zionist control of governments and media.

The “bloodthirsty Jew” becomes the Israeli who supposedly delights in killing children.

The “deceitful Jew” becomes the state whose every statement is presumed propaganda.

The “tribal Jew” becomes a country accused of uniquely racist nationalism.

The “cosmopolitan Jew” becomes the Zionist directing an international network.

The “powerful Jew” becomes Israel secretly controlling Western foreign policy.

The “weak” and “wandering Jew” was despised for having no homeland. The Zionist Jew is despised for having one.

When a civilization has spent centuries using Jews and Judaism as shorthand for greed, conspiracy, cruelty, tribalism, materialism, and malevolent power, we should not be astonished when those same themes attach themselves to the collective Jewish political project.

The customer in the Palmolive commercial does not know what surrounds her fingers until Madge tells her.

Likewise, few people knowingly wake each morning and select an antisemitic idea from history’s cupboard. They experience the inherited assumption as common sense.

Of course Israel lies.

Of course Jewish organizations coordinate their messages to hoodwink the rest of us.

Of course politicians support Israel because of money — what other reason could there be?

Of course Jews exaggerate antisemitism to silence critics.

Of course Zionism is uniquely sinister.

The speaker does not hear centuries of anti-Jewish thought echoing through these propositions.

The speaker hears herself bravely challenging power.

That is how cultural saturation works. An idea becomes most powerful when it no longer feels like an idea at all. It’s just part of the zeitgeist.

Which brings us to the endlessly repeated assurance that antizionism is not antisemitism.

As a narrow logical statement, it is possible to imagine opposition to Jewish nationalism that does not arise from conscious hatred of Jews. Jews themselves have held different views about Zionism at different times, for religious, political, and philosophical reasons.

But as a sweeping declaration about contemporary Western culture, the phrase is simply ridiculous.

It asks us to believe that a civilization saturated for millennia in negative ideas about Jews has suddenly discovered a form of hostility toward the world’s only Jewish state that is hermetically sealed from all that history.

It asks us to believe that the old tropes have disappeared at precisely the moment they have acquired a new vocabulary.

It asks us to believe that the Jewish state is uniquely conspiratorial, bloodthirsty, deceitful, illegitimate, money-driven, and malevolently powerful — and that none of this has anything to do with inherited ideas about Jews.

Perhaps some antizionists believe themselves entirely free of antisemitism.

That is not the same as being free of it.

Madge’s customer did not know her fingers were resting in dishwashing liquid.

She was soaking in it.

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