There is no racism so unabashedly and so publicly expressed, nor so graphic and varied, as anti-Semitism.
Consider the following:
‘Finally! Science has discovered a cure for the most insidious disease of our time… Jewishness…. 3 down, 5,999,997 to go!’
‘Jews, Zionists have organized & engineered #Corona virus as biological weapon just like bird flu & Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF).’
‘They want to design the world, seize countries, neuter the world’s population.’
Despite being transmitted by 21st century media, these anti-Semitic comments could have come straight from the medieval era.
In a world where people self-censor at the slightest fear of being accused of racism, anti-Semitism seems to include licence for people to express whatever loathsome utterance about Jews takes their fancy.
It matters not that the statements are false. Expressing them will attract insufficient condemnation from world leaders. The same comments about virtually any other group would cause untold outrage.
Muscularity
The Conservative government in Britain under Boris Johnson has displayed muscularity in responding to the issue. It is matched neither by the opposition Labour Party nor by most European governments.
The anti-Semitic tropes don’t have to be true, rational or sane. They are millennia old and derive their unique quasi-legitimacy from their ecclesiastical origins.
The Greeks and Romans (BCE) mistrusted the Jews because they kept separate from mainstream society. Most criticism, however, concerned their refusal to show obeisance to their divinities.
Christian Judaism worshipped the Jewish God, but also posited the divinity of Jesus Christ. For traditional Judaism, belief in Christ compromised monotheism.
The apostle Matthew (27:24-25) first enunciated ‘the blood curse’ in the first century CE – ‘His blood is on us and on our children!’
Melito may have been trying to bolster the fortunes of a minor Christian sect
The earliest recorded accusation of deicide against all Jewish people came from Melito, Bishop of Sardis (Turkey) in 167 CE. Melito may have been trying to bolster the fortunes of a minor Christian sect where the Jews had a thriving community.
The apostle Paul portrayed the Jews as Christ’s killers, but did not condemn all Jews merely by virtue of their Jewishness.
John Chrysostom, the archbishop of Constantinople, made deicide the cornerstone of his theology. He held that pardon or indulgence was not possible. In his role as an elder in Antioch (386–387 CE), John denounced the Jews in homilies to prevent Christians from participating in Jewish customs.
Then in the 5th century, Peter Chrystologus, the Bishop of Ravenna, held that the Jews present at Christ’s death and all Jews for all time had committed deicide.
Though not part of Roman Catholic dogma, many Christians came to believe that all Jews for all time were responsible for killing Christ. It was from the Middle Ages that anti-Semitism became persistent and genocidal.
As the Roman Empire was disintegrating in the 5th century, Augustine (354 – 430 AD) became the major influence on the medieval world view, the Western Church, philosophy and Christianity.
Through Augustine’s eyes
According to historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, Augustine’s impact on Western Christian thought cannot be overstated; only Paul of Tarsus had been more influential, and Westerners have generally seen Paul through Augustine’s eyes.
Augustine left a legacy of ambivalence towards the Jews: the Jews needed to be preserved for a properly ordered Christian society because they embodied the biblical legacy that Christianity claimed to have originated from, and replaced. Yet Jews also had to be subordinated, scattered and enslaved, but according to Augustine not killed. This dualism preserved a Jewish community in the Western Middle Ages for a while.
According to Professor Jeremy Cohen, the Abraham and Edita Spiegel Family Foundation Professor of European Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, by the end of the Middle Ages Jews had been expelled from most of Europe.
In 1096, the Western European church embarked on the first crusade. On their way to Jerusalem the crusaders launched a wave of pogroms against Jews in north Germany, converting or killing Jews.
This killing wasn’t mandated by the church – however, these events awakened European society to the problematic yet unique status of the Jews: they were present yet represented everything Christians disagreed with.
People started to focus on Jews’ association with money, trade and money-lending
At this time Western European society was also burgeoning economically, with increased trade and commerce, the growth of a middle class, and the establishment of schools and universities.
People started to focus on Jews’ association with money, trade and money-lending. The Jews were excluded in the Middle Ages from professions, confined to ghettos and prevented from owning land.
Christianity held that charging interest was sinful, which kept Christians from becoming financiers. Jews filled that vacuum. Regarding money lending as sinful fed the notion that Jews were morally deficient and willing to engage in unethical business practices that decent people had rejected.
Jews also came into conflict with newly empowered Christian bureaucrats.
The crucial catalyst for change in Christian perceptions of Jews, however, was the realisation by the church that Jews were not ‘fossils of antiquity’, as Augustine held. Jews hadn’t waited for salvation – Judaism had evolved.
Civil and ceremonial law
Judaism had become Talmudic Judaism, the law of the rabbis. The Talmud is the body of Jewish civil and ceremonial law, and legend. The Church knew of the Talmud, but no one had ever read it.
From the beginning of the 12th century, Christian theologians read the Talmud and were shocked to find that the rabbinic tradition was still evolving and flourishing when it was supposed, according to Augustine, to have become extinct.
The church concluded that the teaching of the Talmud by the rabbis who came after Jesus was heresy: the rabbis had replaced the law of Moses (a part of Christianity) with the law of the rabbis. The Jews had deliberately forsaken the truth of the Bible. Judaism had created another religion to avoid admitting the truth in Christianity.
Augustine had taught that Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death, but did not know what they were doing. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas proclaimed that Jews murdered Christ deliberately, knowing that Christ was the son of God.
As there was no place for heretics in a properly ordered Christian society, inquisitions were established. The Inquisition was a group of institutions within the Catholic Church, the aim of which was to combat heresy. Incidentally, for first time in Western European history, gays were also persecuted by Christian authorities.
The Jew became a foul odour. The Jew was not human
The Jew became an irrational being, a monster and an agent of Satan. This new perception fostered popular beliefs in ritual murder, ritual cannibalism, ritual use of blood, poisoning wells, and seeking the host from mass and deliberately desecrating it. The Jew became a foul odour. The Jew was not human.
The Middle Ages spurred anti-Semitism towards its murderous denouement in the 20th century and beyond. Islam had low regard for Jews and Christians equally, and for any group which didn’t convert to Islam. Virulent Muslim anti-Semitism came to Syria from Catholic priests in the mid-19th century.
The nadir came with Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. To propagandise hatred of the Jews to the point where genocide was conceivable, the Nazis repeatedly used terms such as ‘the Jew is a parasite’, ‘Judenscheisse’ (Jewshit), ‘Judenschwein’ (Jewpig) and ‘the Jew is a planetary bacillus’.
Now in the 21st century people make the following untrue utterances:
‘Israel has separate medical treatment for non-Jewish citizens’.
‘Israel and the global Zionist elite are up to their old tricks regarding COVID–19.’
‘American Jews’ are behind coronavirus and ‘Zionist elements developed a deadlier strain of coronavirus.’ – Iranian politician
‘Jews are more dangerous than coronavirus, AIDS and cholera.’ – Islamic cleric on Jordanian TV.
‘The coronavirus was an Israeli ‘plot to reduce the world’s population.’ – An Iraqi political analyst on TV.
‘This virus serves Zionism’s goals of decreasing the number of people and preventing it from increasing, and important research expresses this…Zionism is a five-thousand-year-old bacteria that has caused the suffering of people.’ – Fatih Erbakan, head of the Refah Party in Turkey.
‘Israel has had a vaccine for a year and a Jewish-run business is withholding information for profit.’ – Rosanna Arquette, American actress, director and producer.
Called out as a ‘liar’
Mohammed Desai, founder of Boycott Disinvestment Sanctions in South Africa, on a television debate charged Israel with refusing to issue vital life-saving instructions in Arabic to Arab speaking residents of the Jewish state. The debate’s other guest, an Israeli Arab, Yoseph Haddad, called Desai out as a ‘liar’ as he knew that Israel had disseminated information in Arabic.
Ronnie Kasrils repeated this lie when he told Daily Maverick ‘Israel…only delivers its coronavirus advice in Hebrew, ignoring the Arab mother tongue of 20 percent of Palestinians living within the Zionist state’.
Israel is operating joint situation rooms to combat the virus in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Israel has offered medical workshops to Palestinian hospital staff on best quarantine practices, and provided virus testing-kits to Palestinian medical staff in the Territories.
However, the Israeli NGO, Monitor, tracks critique of Israel by pro-Palestinian and international rights groups. It states: ‘The ongoing demonisation and political war against Israel, continuing unabated despite the global corona disaster, is an important reality check for all of us.’
Accusing Israel
Official Palestinian media continues, as it has always done, to feature anti-Semitic cartoons comparing Israel to the coronavirus and accusing Israel of spreading it across Palestinian communities. The facts are that the virus entered the West Bank with Greek pilgrims and entered the Gaza Strip with Gazans returning from Pakistan.
In 1974, Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein wrote The New anti-Semitism. They dealt with the then new manifestations of anti-Semitism from radical left, radical right and ‘pro-Arab’ figures in America.
Forster and Epstein argued presciently that the new anti-Semitism took the form of indifference to the fears of the Jewish people, apathy in dealing with anti-Jewish bias, and an inability to understand the importance of Israel to Jewish survival.
The upsurge of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 21st century has seen European leaders expressing their sorrow and uttering blandishments about not tolerating any form of anti-Semitism. But anti-Semitism continues to be ‘tolerated’ by the West. There is little evidence of follow-up action or of vociferously exposing those responsible lest they alienate a constituency.
Society’s leaders need to do more than condemn anti-Semitism. European countries must join America in condemning it in the organs of the United Nations, particularly with regard to the hugely disproportionate extent to which Israel is vilified, and stop supporting organisations that seek Israel’s destruction.
A vaccine for Covid-19 will be found, but a vaccine against the virus of anti-Semitism probably never will be.
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