The Two Most Insidious Forms of Jew Hatred

As antisemitism surges, one of the aspects of this disturbing phenomenon is how antisemitism manifests itself. One way to look at all this is to recognize that sometimes it is a matter of talking about Jews with regard to a negative development where such mention is inappropriate. And sometimes it is a matter of ignoring the Jewish component where one can’t truly understand what is happening without a reference to Jews. 

In the latter case, historically what stands out was the way the Holocaust was portrayed too often in England following World War II. Often, when the atrocities of the concentration camps surfaced in public discussion, one did not see or hear the word “Jew” appearing. Here we had he greatest systematic killing of a people in history, and yet the target of these exterminations, after a decade of actions taken by the Nazis against German Jews, was all-but absent from public discussion. One can attribute this to ongoing antisemitism in Britain or, more specifically, to hostility toward Jews emanating from the conflict in British Mandate-era Palestine between the Jews and the British. 

Whatever the underlying factor, the absence of Jews in a mass expulsion and genocide that was 100 percent about Jews was an indication of how deep the hostility was.

Less surprising, considering its policies towards its own Jewish population, was the way the Soviet government depicted the massacre at Babi Yar, where more than 33,000 Jews were gunned down by the invading German army. A good deal was said about the Nazi atrocities, but not a word about who the victims were. Sympathy for murdered Jews was out of the question. As a sociologist once put it, “Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.”

In current times, this phenomenon is not as broad based but appears in cases where obvious hate crimes are committed against Jews but are not deemed to be such. A number of these cases surfaced in France in recent years.

The most famous was the killing of 85-year-old Sarah Halimi, who was beaten and thrown from her Paris apartment window in April 2017 by an individual shouting, “Allahabad Akbar” and “I killed the devil.” For several months the government and parts of the media hesitated to label it antisemitic, and when they finally did four years later, the court ruled the killer could not stand trial because of delirium. So a verdict on brutal antisemitism was never reached. 

In another egregious example of minimizing antisemitism, a 42-year-old Algerian nanny was tried for attempting to poison the Jewish family she worked for using cleaning products. Upon her arrest she told police: ”Because they have money and power, I should never have worked for a Jewish woman; she only brought me trouble.” The court ultimately dismissed the antisemitism charge and a court of appeal upheld the dismissal ruling the remarks did not constitute antisemitic speech. 

Ignoring Jew hatred is bad enough. Blaming Jews for things they have nothing to do with is even worse and the generator of the worst kinds of antisemitism. While conspiracy theories about Jews have existed for millennia, the first decades of the 20th century saw the promulgation of the two most egregious which set the stage for the Holocaust.

First was the “discovery” of the infamous forgery, “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” which claimed to be the secret conversations of Jewish leaders to take over the world. This forgery became the justification for atrocities against the Jewish people. 

And at the end of World War I came the Nazi accusation that Jews had ”stabbed Germany in the back,” the alleged reason Germany was defeated in the war. This became the major theme of Hitler’s rhetoric and was the vehicle on which the Nazis rose to power. 

Finding Jews in places they have no presence continues to be a hallmark of conspiracy makers today. We have seen it in the effort to blame Jews for the spread of COVID 19. We have seen in theories that actually, Jews were behind the attacks on America on 9/11. We have seen it in the current war against Iran, where Israel is accused of luring President Donald Trump into conflict to serve their selfish ends and where American Jews are targeted for playing a role against the interests of America to serve the Jewish state. 

Jew hatred takes many forms, but two of the most insidious are the absence from where they belong, and their presence where they don’t.