Why Jews Cannot Cause Antisemitism

Jews Could not Cause Antisemitism if Their Lives Depended on It

Antisemitism is not a more extreme form of legitimate criticism, it is an entirely different beast. Legitimate criticism does not, when steadily intensified, at some point turn into antisemitism. The genealogies of legitimate criticism and antisemitism are categorically distinct from the outset. They stem from completely different motivations and their mechanics differ not merely by degree but in kind. Hence, no amount of Israeli public diplomacy, no matter how professional or artful, can combat antisemitism.

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Attempts to combat antisemitism are massively hampered by the fact that even most of those who wish to do so in earnest are addled by a fundamental misunderstanding. Wellnigh universally, they accept the assumptions of what scholars of antisemitism rather charitably call the correspondence theory of antisemitism but ought, in fact, to be called the correlation fallacy. This so-called theory is simply a black box that presupposes what it claims to explain. It works like this: you insert some characteristic or behaviour displayed by some Jew or Jews in a particular place at a particular time at the front and out comes antisemitism at the back. Not only are the questions of how and why antisemitism comes out at the end not answered, they are never even asked. Why does the same characteristic or behaviour not lead to the same response when displayed by non-Jews? Why are only certain characteristics or forms of conduct fed into the black box to the detriment of all others? Why can the same response be generated when no Jews display the characteristic or behaviour in question? Indeed, why can the same response be generated without any Jews being present who could conceivably display the characteristic or behaviour in question even if they wanted to? Why are people so interested in Jews in the first place and how do they know whether or how many of the people displaying a particular characteristic or behaviour are Jewish?

I could go on for quite a while. It is perfectly obvious that the so-called correspondence theory invariably presupposes what it claims to explain. The unexplained, mysterious reasoning that supposedly takes place in the black box makes perfect sense, provided one accepts the antisemites’ pre-assumptions in the first place—in which case, needless to say, one no longer needs the black box anyway. Need I even point out that correlation—even where some Jews may behave in ways that match antisemitic perceptions—is not the same as causation?

Almost a century ago, it began to dawn on critical observers, aided not least by the emerging insights of psychoanalysis, that antisemitism cannot plausibly be explained in terms of (some) Jews’ actual negative characteristics. Ultimately, it was the outlandish extremism of the Nazis’ antisemitism that allowed for projection-theoretical approaches to antisemitism to emerge in the 1940s. This approach was presented in its most productive formulation in the final section of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Elements of Antisemitism.”

Combining Kant and Freud, Horkheimer and Adorno noted that all perception is, in the first instance, projection. We recognize and initially make sense of objects and events around us based on knowledge we already own. We don’t know that a pencil is a pencil because it tells us so but because we already know or are capable of inferring what it is. Conversely, someone from a culture without pencils who has not previously accessed information about pencils would fail at what would seem the simplest of tasks: recognizing and knowing what a pencil is. Should we want to find out more about pencils and their uses and qualities, we have numerous options of doing so by engaging with them and their context. In the process we not only find out more about pencils, we also gain a more profound sense of our own position in the world and become more rounded individuals as a result.

Yet antisemitism, Horkheimer and Adorno explained, is a form of pathic projection. It never moves beyond projecting pre-existing assumptions outwards and can only perceive of the external world as the projecting subject already “knows” it to be. Hence, no matter what Jews do or do not do, the antisemite only ever “sees” what he already knows about “the Jews.” No amount of empirical evidence will ever touch this pre-existing “knowledge,” “knowledge” that few antisemites would even claim to have acquired themselves; as a general rule it has already been passed down to them, though each generation tends to tweak it to meet their circumstances and needs.

Consequently, any attempt to treat antisemitism as a form of prejudice, i.e., a form of judgment that is erroneous because it is premature and based on insufficient knowledge, is doomed. It is a fundamental misunderstanding that antisemites are amenable to reasoned argument. If they were, they wouldn’t be antisemites in the first place. Antisemitism is a learned response that has been woven into the fabric of Western and Muslim societies for more than a millennium, so much so, that even some Jews find it irresistible. Anyone, and this certainly holds true for all non-Jews, who does not want to be an antisemite needs to make a conscious effort to unlearn it again. Someone who has unlearnt it can no more be moved by greater or lesser amounts of more or less accurate information to draw antisemitic conclusions than someone who has not unlearnt it can ever draw anything other than antisemitic conclusions from anything and everything placed before them.