I admired a national Christian leader for his smart, honest wisdom. I interviewed him many times.
But to intimates, this leader would sniff his nose and say, “You know who is behind this. The Canadians.” I discovered that he meant Jews.
Why do people become anti-Semitic? The social science of anti-Semitism, unfortunately, has been undermined by politics and secularism.
Social scientists often have had anti-religious prejudices themselves that show up in the research. They would quickly explain the Christian leader’s anti-Semitism as the ravings of an ignorant, slightly unhinged religious person. They would miss the complexity of the causes of anti-Semitism.
In the 1950s, the hot politics was fear of the “unreasonable Right.” So, some researchers naturally produced culture war studies that said that Christian conservatives are irrational, stupid, and dangerous anti-Semites. The researchers didn’t use the buzzword “Christian nationalists,” but the stereotyping was the same.
You had books like The Politics of Unreason by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab. Such narrow, politically partisan research was convenient to the secular liberal personality. but it numbed self-awareness of anti-Semitism on the Left. Then, during Israel’s defensive wars, the liberal social scientists discovered that there were many anti-Semites on the Left! The research started to change its methods and conclusions. The research took some positive steps toward understanding that anti-Semitism is not just simple-mindedness, but sometimes the product of complex thinking urged forward by multiple causes.
Different avenues to anti-Semitism
Traditional elites like those upper-class Brahmans of the traditional liberal Protestant establishment that are found in the State Department and the British Foreign Ministry have frowned upon Jews as pushy, clannish, dishonest foreign competitors. The Ivy League for decades had a bar or limit on Jews entering their sacred halls of learning.
Left anti-Semitism tends to begin with criticisms of the state of Israel. Because they identify as “progressive” and their opponents as retrogrades, left anti-Semites possess psychological safeguards to protect their “progressive” activism that may also blind them to their own anti-Semitism. One study found that left anti-Semites dismiss accusations of deep hostility to Jews as a political ploy to cover up the criticisms of Israel and to undermine the Left. The presence of anti-Semitic aspects of the culture of the British Labor Party was dramatically documented by the party’s Equality and Human Rights Commission.
Some have had a bad experience with a Jew and then generalized it into a prejudice against the whole people. This is pretty simplistic thinking, but its error is not solely the possession of the stupid. Many smart people think this also and create complex mythologies to explain their prejudice. The Christian leader, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this article, was intellectually sophisticated, but maimed by a terrible experience. He had been pushed into a situation by a Jewish colleague so that he was raped by their male cult leader. I don’t think he was ever able to get over that trauma and blame of the Jews.
African Americans have a love-hate relationship with Jews. Some African-American pastors in New York City offer the Jewish practices of excellence in education, business, and compassion as exemplars for their congregations. Jews have suffered persecution and the Holocaust, yet they persist in pursuing the highest ideals. Reverend A.R. Bernard’s friendship with Rabbi Joseph Postasnik, long-time leader on the NY Board of Rabbis, is not based on pragmatics but on an admiration of the rabbi’s morals and character.
However, other African Americans experienced difficulties with Jewish landlords, liquor store and retail shop owners, and loan officers in the poorer areas of the city. Some struggle to contain their envy and anger. Even a good word from their pastor doesn’t get through the prejudicial reasoning. A recent comment by a representative in the U.S. Congress about support for Israel as “It’s all about the Benjamins baby” resonated with some African Americans (while revolting others). The friction between African Americans and Orthodox Jews keeps the antisemite pot simmering among youth and the homeless.
Religious conflict can play a role. The Black Israelites see themselves as true Israel, and the modern Jews as illegitimate. In 2019, assassins tied to the Black Hebrew Israelites shot up a kosher supermarket on the Sabbath in Jersey City, killing three. Last year, an Islamic militant took a whole Jewish congregation hostage in Colleyville, Texas. And, of course, many Palestinians celebrated Hamas’ gruesome attack on one of the more important Sabbaths, the day of the beginning of a new cycle of reading the Hebrew Scriptures.
Christians and Jews who reject Jesus as the Messiah have argued for a long time. At first, the Jewish establishment in Jerusalem was determined to wipe out the sect of Jesus’ followers, and some found satisfaction in the crucifixion of their opponent. But their power and privilege didn’t last long, and the Christians took over. Nursing old grudges, Christian political leaders ghettoized and persecuted the Jews, both those who followed Jesus and those who didn’t. Not a pretty history.
The government leaders forced the Jews into the isolation of the ghettos and into professions that Christians didn’t want to do themselves: liquor dealing, loan-making, and itinerant peddling. In other words, the Christian leaders set the stage for the formation of many bad stereotypes of the Jews that later percolated into the ghettos of New York City.
Christians who admired or defended Jews faced a lot of opposition. The Puritans were accused of loving the Jews too much when they opened England and the Dutch Republic to Jewish refugees. During World War II, the pope tried to protect Jews from being sent to the camps but he was also afraid that the Catholics would be sent instead if he was too open in the defense of Jews. Famously, the German pastor Dietrick Bonhoeffer, who had attended seminary in New York City, sacrificed his life to oppose Hitler and the slaughter of the Jews. In our city, Christians and Jews organized against anti-Semitism and protested the Nazi regime in Germany (look for a book by Alan Shore this next Spring on the New York story.)
Notice that there are multiple roots of anti-Semitism. We should also learn to distinguish and tolerate normal democratic criticism of some Jewish leaders, Israel, or Zionists from remarks motivated by hatred of Jews.
Anti-Semitism as an idolatry
It is sociologically and theologically interesting that those Christians who abhor anti-Semitism sometimes turn their eyes to the Suffering Servant portrait found in Isaiah 53 to explain the hostility to Jews. The Jews suffered and suffer still because they are stand-ins for Jesus the Messiah. They suffer like he suffered. They died like he did. They hope in the messianic age of salvation from persecution and suffering just as Jesus did in his resurrection. In contrast, the Anti-Semite wants a world in which they are the heroes, and the sufferers are despicable. Jesus the Jew has to be forgotten by the grand inquisition of the anti-Semitic regimes.
At its roots, the argument is that anti-Semitism is an attack on God and the history of salvation in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The anti-Semites want to offer an alternative total solution to their troubles. Rather than turn to God for help in their troubles, they turn to seizing power for themselves to implement final judgment. Rather than looking forward to the apocalypse of the arrival of God, they unbound all restraints to deliver their own apocalypse. Rather than identify their own sins and the weight of humanity’s sins, they narrowly focus on the Jews as the sinners and the cause of all their troubles. The Jews become a sort of Negative God, the Devil Incarnate. The anti-Semite imagines the power of the Jews as divine-like, mysterious, and playing the world’s nations like puppets on a string.
In essence, the anti-Semite wants to play God, rather than pray to God. The anti-Semite no longer hears God but his own delusions of divinity. He or she sees himself as all alone on the stage pitted against awesome evil powers that threaten control of life’s outcomes. The anti-Semite no longer recognizes any moral restraints and defines happiness as death. Various social science studies have shown that the more the anti-Semite contemplates mortality, the more likely that person will create intentions to act against Jews. He or she goes mad with rage, cut off from all restraint, and self-immolates.
Anti-Semitism is one form of idolatry: the exaltation to all-powerfulness of one aspect, one people, in the world created by God. The idolatry creates its semiotic renaming of the social universe as the product of a grand conspiracy of the Jews. Various studies have found that belief in conspiracy theories is one of the most powerful pushes in the anti-Semitic mind to contemplate anti-Semitic acts.
This psychological dynamic of anti-Semitism coincidentally matches the unstable world in which loners, wanderers, and the mentally disorganized live. It seems plausible to the lonely, the aimless, and the confused to inhabit such an identity as anti-Semite. It gives the fragmented self a sense of direction, power, and meaning. Hatred is a powerful directive force that gives the illusion of power, a meaningful life, and a promise of peaceful relaxation at its apocalyptic end. They think they are rising above their troubles and even other people. But after its destructive path, anti-Semitism brings no salve to the raging beast within.
We need to pity the anti-Semite for his pain and sad destiny. Before destruction, we should hope to deliver them into a better state. Anti-Semitism increases as violent anti-Semites become loners with loose social connections. They may become isolated into small anti-Semitic groups as a substitute for family and small fellowship groups in a religious congregation. The offer of friendship may help stabilize the anti-Semite from going over the cliff. However, don’t think that friendship itself is enough to transform the anti-Semitic mind. There have to be moral and legal constraints also. The creation of a moral consensus to oppose antisemitism is necessary to create a public space in which it is easier for antisemites to
recognize the limitations of their actions.
However, we must protect the objects of the false god’s wrath—the Jews, morally and legally restrain the antisemitically possessed, and reinforce the moral order with strong punishments, if needed, against anti-Semitism. This attention to the moral order is just as important as counseling to help the anti-Semite escape his wild life. If the anti-Semite thinks that he won’t be morally condemned and effectively policed, then public acclaim seems like a good substitute for loneliness, violence as empowering, and hatred as the hallmark of a meaningful life. One anti-Semite told me, “What else am I going to do with my time?”
Publicly standing with Jews and their organizations as protectors and co-belligerents against violent idolatries and prejudice will help build in the public sphere a cultural and moral vocabulary, guardrails against people totally going off the rails, taking us with them. The public can drop notes of support at the synagogues, or pray in front of each Jewish site for protection and care.
The other religious groups, particularly Christians and Muslims but also all the religious, can celebrate the gifts of God that the Jews have given to the people of God. They have brought to the world: the creation story and creativity; the Ten Commandments and morality; the prophetic tradition that inclines us to insight and innovation; the de-divination of the state that allowed democracy to eventually develop; and a high value for the ordinary individual as made in the image of God. The non-religious will also appreciate these things, though they might drop the God part.
To my Christian leader who is inclined toward anti-Semitism, I would say, I feel your suffering. It is so painful to be sexually abused. I can’t really imagine the full depths of its darkness. But you cannot get out of the suffering by making another suffer. Only God can take on all the suffering and say, “I have done enough, you are free.”
