The Psychology of the Scapegoat: Jews and Kurds
This essay asks why, when societies splinter, Jews and Kurds so often become the chosen emblems of blame. It examines the psychology that makes scapegoats useful and the politics that keeps them close: Jews and the land of Israel as a standing case about legitimacy; Kurds and Kurdistan as a standing case about recognition. It traces how language, memory and administrative habit turn neighbours into symbols, citizens into rehearsals for other people’s dramas.
Part One: Projection, Displacement and Belonging in a Fragmented Age
Fragmentation changes the tone of public life. Institutions lose their resonance, facts arrive without a common chamber in which they can be weighed, and trust thins like air at altitude. In such conditions a familiar figure returns to the stage. The scapegoat is not a character invented by one civilisation. It is a recurring device for compressing many causes into a single emblem. In Europe, and in the echo of Europe beyond the continent, Jews have supplied that emblem with unwearied regularity. In the interstices of the Middle East, Kurds have borne a similar symbolic freight. The repetition invites explanation rather than surprise.
The psychology that sustains the figure is intimate and durable. Projection sits at the centre. Qualities a society finds intolerable in itself are assigned to the other, after which denunciation becomes a form of self-praise. The traits vary with the age. In mercantile periods it is avarice and covert influence, often attached to the Jewish neighbour who can be made to stand for invisible finance. In ages of ideological mobilisation it is treachery and metaphysical impurity, easily transferred to the Kurdish family whose speech and songs mark a continuity that states would prefer to file away. Displacement follows. Grievances generated by distant machinery are redirected to nearby minorities because proximity provides the illusion of remedy. A further ingredient is coalitional signalling. Hostility functions as a badge of belonging. It binds people who may agree on little else. There is nothing occult in these manoeuvres. They are the ordinary instruments by which unease is given a single name.
Two deeper currents steady the pattern. The first is the craving for cognitive closure. Uncertainty multiplies when authority is contested and information is abundant. Conspiracy provides the balm and often arrives wearing familiar costumes. The Jews become a transnational cabal; the Kurds become a permanent rehearsal for secession. The second is the creation of the sacred. Communities elevate certain values to a precinct beyond ordinary dispute. Once the precinct is established, pollution language can be attached to the chosen target. The Jewish citizen linked to the land of Israel is framed not as a neighbour with claims but as a contaminant from which the precinct must be cleansed. The Kurdish villager linked to Kurdistan is framed as a leak in the sovereign vessel. Rites follow naturally from this grammar.
History supplies its ledger of episodes without needing to invent a theory for each one. In late-medieval Iberia a working arrangement of mixed languages and trades came under pressure from scarcity and zeal. Administrative prose, unemphatic in tone, prepared the way for expulsion. The deed looked orderly because the sentences that announced it were orderly. The same technique endures in the modern period. The Jewish neighbour is translated into a symbol large enough to sustain any accusation because it is said to represent forces larger than the person, especially when the land of Israel is made to embody world-historical vice. Where institutions require repair, myth steps into their place and offers speed. Antisemitism in these settings is less a doctrine than a utility. It supplies an explanation that makes the complainer feel grand.
The Kurdish case belongs to a different topography yet follows the same contour. Across Kurdistan and its neighbouring states, the problem is posed as one of cartography before it becomes a matter of rights. Names are replaced, alphabets discouraged, and a mother tongue is asked to speak somewhere else. The idiom often chooses a soft register. Harmonisation is a favourite word. It promises music while delivering erasure. At moments when the state is anxious, signs of Kurdish continuity are read as rehearsal for rupture. Failures of administration can be reassigned to the spectre of separatism with minimal labour. The psychological action is displacement under another name.
Language gives the process its lustre. Violence against Jewish communities is narrated in a voice that removes the hand from the verb. Killings become incidents. The weather appears to have done it. In the next column, accusations against Jews as a collectivity harden into unadorned certainties. The asymmetry becomes habit and ceases to surprise. Kurdish experience has its own repertoire. Bans are filed as standards. Suppressions are logged as operations. The map is tidied to improve navigation. The administrative tone, cool and precise, allows the moral to relax. The euphemism does not change the fact. It changes the temperature.
A few compact comparisons illuminate how the mechanism repeats while adapting to circumstance. In late-medieval towns the expulsion writ was recorded like a ledger of tolls. Its sobriety concealed its ferocity. In twentieth-century democracies, where murder required modern justifications, the Jewish neighbour was redescribed as a transnational actor whose alleged ubiquity dissolved the ties of ordinary fellowship, especially once Israel could be drafted as an emblem of power. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of the Middle East, state anxieties about borders were recast as anxieties about vocabulary. Kurd became a word to be pronounced cautiously, then not at all. A festival became a rehearsal reported to the Ministry. The method differs; the intention aligns. The problem is made to stand in one place, where it can be pointed at.
