Risk and Extortion LXXX: Anti-Semitic, Anti-Semantic, Anti-Somatic 4

The realization of the Holocaust after the end of the Second World War constituted a semantic watershed in the usage of the term “anti-Semitism”: From a self-affirmed ideological position grounded in pseudo-scientific racism it transformed into a morally charged accusation whose deployment functions to name, isolate, and discredit the position itself. That is, the semantic re-embedding of the word anti-Semitism in practices of accusation also means that those defining the term are – with the exception of a very few cases – no longer the ones using it to describe themselves. Even political movements who are ideologically very close to the ethno-nationalist sentiments before 1945, will by and large use anti-Semitism to accuse others and certainly not deploy it to describe themselves. Thus, to label anti-Semantic now exclsuively functions as part of the anti-semantic performativity of accusation.

This point is extremely important and completely overlooked by most discourses on anti-Semitism today. Its anti-semantic performativity of accusation namely also means that it is applied as an ascription of identification. The IHRA definition, for example, talks about perceptions that inform expressions and actions that may be interpreted as anti-Semitic. Identifying anti-Semitism becomes a diagnostic practice of psychosocial expertise. The power of labelling now lies with the accusers and they will put the accused on trial. The accused cannot simply deny their guilt by saying they do not hate Jews, because this hatred is hidden more deeply: in the repressed, subconscious realms of psychosocial dispositions.

The certainty that I had as a child during the 1970s that I was and never could be an anti-Semite as I cannot hate people I do not know because of their racial, ethnic, religious or national characteristics, is now being shattered by those that say that criticizing Israel is motivated by anti-Semitism. As I converted to Catholicism as an adult, I was taught to hate the sin but love the sinner. I must confess that the former is easier than the latter, but it is not so difficult to hate the sin and not hate the sinner. IDF soldiers who are being deployed in Gaza of course commit grave sins, but I would not go as far as to hate all of them because of it. I do not know them after all.

It is of course different when considering the mouth breathers that scream for genocide: Israeli ministers, Jewish settlers murdering Palestinians, ordinary people blocking aid going into Gaza, Netanyahu, Trump, Keir Starmer. However, they are exceptions. I hate them for what they do, not for who they are.

I reject the notion of Jewish exceptionalism because of its clear anti-Semitic roots. Only if you accept the first axiom of anti-Semitism – namely that Jews are separate nation unlike any other – can you engage with Jewish exceptionalism. If we understand Judaism as a religion, it is only exceptional in the same way that every religion is more or less exceptional. Any assertion of Jewish exception sets as on a pathway towards some kind of racism. For example, the deployment of Jewish exceptionalism to argue that any comparison between the Shoah and other genocides relativizes the significance of the suffering of the Jewish people. This very statement implies two racist elements: (1) denying the relevance of non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust and (2) creating a hierarchy of human value between Jewish and non-Jewish victims of genocide. 

Jewish exceptionalism implies that asserting that Jews are human beings just like any other is itself anti-Semitic. This means that fundamentally opposing the anti-Semitism of European ethno-nationalism would be anti-Semitic. Murdering a Jewish person because he or she is Jewish is not any better or worse than murdering a Palestinian person because he or she is Palestinian. This, however, is exactly the framework that Zionism deploys, for example when comparing the October 7^th attacks by Hamas with the Shoah or by denying the comparison between the Shoa with the genocide in Gaza.

As an instrument of the performativity of accusation, the word anti-Semitism has lost its semantic and hermeneutic autonomy, which had been rooted in history. As a regulatory device that delegitimates and in some cases even incriminates public expressions of anti-Zionism, the accusatory performativity of anti-Semitism is a direct threat to democracy, not because it prohibits “freedom of expression”, but because it engages in semantic and hermeneutic violations of history. It is thus an attempt at historical revisionism and mnemonic erasure. The anti-Semantics of anti-Semitism stifles historiographic intelligence and empirical precision and thereby enables exactly that which it claims to oppose.

Of course, real anti-Semitism has not vanished. Quite the opposite, real anti-Semitism – which, with the exception of calling itself as such, is almost the same anti-Semitism as the original from the late 19^th Century – is actually festering and spreading fast across the globe. The rapid rise of rabid conspiracy theories such as those propagated under the label of Q-anon are but one example. Right wing populism, be it those of Christian nationalism in the USA or the refashioned corporatist nationalism of the new European right-wing parties, do not shy away from anti-Semitic allusions. They embrace Jewish exceptionalism and support Zionism, while at the same time directing their hateful political rhetoric at “the wrong kind of Jews”, i.e. Jews who refuse Zionism and remain in the diaspora.

Jews who refuse Zionism are also referred to as “self-hating-Jews”. This concept has a string dialectical relationship to the earliest conceptions of Zionism, such as those of Theodor Herzl. As I have explained in earlier posts, Herzl did not like ordinary Jews, those who still spoke Yiddish and practiced Yiddish culture. He saw them in exactly the same way as people like Wilhelm Marr did: undesireable, uneducated, backward entities. The only difference with European anti-Semitic discourse was, that he wanted to take these uncivilized backward Jews with him to populate the Jewish State. After all, one cannot expect Herzl and his friends himself to toil the lands and clean the toilets.

However, by sharing the anti-Semitic ethos of denouncing Yiddishness as backwards and reprehensible, Herzl also exposed some self-loathing, as if he were ashamed to be associated with them. He even used this to explain the rise of anti-Semitism as he blamed the poorly-integrated Jews who still practices Yiddish culture its trigger. Self-loathing is a persistent aspect of neurosis and alienation, that is rooted in bourgeois thinking, yet expressed by means of projection. It forms the core of “elitism”.  Members of elite groups, such as the Professional Managerial Class today, are always haunted by the suspicion that they are actually just lucky as they are not more intelligent and more courageous than others. However, in order to maintain elite-status, they must pretend that they are not lucky but deserve to be where they are. This in turn generates the imposter-syndrome as the neurotic condition of alienated bourgeois individuality keeps whispering in their ears that they are merely fraudsters.

The neurotic condition of bourgeois elites thus projects self-loathing onto others. This is how Zionism and anti-Semitism collude in the production of the notion of the self-hating Jew. Wilhelm Marr argued that by assimilating too much, European Jews had betrayed not only their host nations such as Germany, but also their own race. This is an almost perfect description of the Zionist critique of the Jewish Diaspora. It still lives on today, especially among the so-called Christian Zionists in the USA, whose eschatological mythology prophesizes that God will only establish his kingdom on earth once the Jews have all returned to the Promised Land. Hence, Jews that refuse to go, are accused of doing the work of the devil.

The stereotypical self-hating Jew who was celebrated by the Nazis for recognizing his own degeneration was the Austrian writer Otto Weiniger. He contrasted the masculine Aryan race with the effeminate Jewish race to lament the latter’s decline. Together with the socialist politician Karl Kraus, Weiniger was also cited by the philosopher Theodor Lessing in his book “Der jüdische Selbsthaß”, which he published in 1930. He accused these Jewish intellectuals of having internalized anti-Semitic stereotypes and – similar to Wilhelm Marr – explained this as the result of the assimilation of Jews under pressure. 

What we can see here is that both anti-Semitism and critics of anti-Semitism (.e.g Zionists) have positively affirmed and reified the stereotype of the self-hating Jew as an actually existing phenomenon (similar to accepting “the Jewish Question” as an actually existing, relevant issue). Moreover, both seemingly oppositional poles share the basic axioms that (a) Jews are a different race; (b) the Jewish race is incompatible with the European race; (c) the Jewish race is inferior either because of what it is (anti-Semitism) or by not recognizing what it is (Zionism). The idea that self-hate is a specifically Jewish phenomenon can only by upheld within an anti-Semitic framing of Jewish identity. What are the good Jews for anti-Semitics become the bad Jews (or wrong kind of Jews) for Zionists. What matters is not the positive or negative valuation, but the affirmation that Jewishness is to be valued in relation to its acceptance of a specific kind of Jewishness.

After the semantic watershed after the end of the Second World War related to anti-Semitism, the reference to the self-hating Jew retained its racist connotations. It now functions as a trope to accuse anti-Zionist Jews of treason and disloyalty, as if this has something to do with their Jewishness. Often, this is directed against Jewish intellectuals who express criticism of the Zionist project of Israel, with echoes of the 1920s, where Jews were often connected to communist parties and movements. Today, critiques of cultural Marxism in populist pseudo-scientific accounts often imply that this kind of Marxism – also associated with “woke” culture – is degenerate, for example by undermining traditional notions of  masculinity.