We were talking about Israel and you said “damn Jews”. Not damn Israelis, or damn Israeli government, or damn Israeli army, but damn Jews. When I challenged you, you didn’t apologise, but justified the comment by your anger. You have damned all Jews, and that includes me, for the actions of the State of Israel. You would never say “damn Blacks” when talking about the conflict in Sudan. Or “damn Muslims” about the oppression in Iran. Because that kind of racism is entirely unacceptable among liberals like you. You would never accept the scapegoating of Muslims for extremist violence perpetrated by other Muslims. And I assume that you don’t blame the citizens of Iran for their government’s actions or the Sudanese citizens either. So why is “damn Jews” acceptable?
There are multiple explanations. For a start, it’s acceptable because for most of European history suspicion and hatred of Jews was usual. Pick up a novel or a short story published before the Second World War and you’re very likely to find a passing reference to an oily Levantine or a wily Jew. And the conduct of Israel, with the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians and the starvation of Gazans, has once again normalised that long-held attitude towards Jews. Israel is proving what everyone always knew about Jews: that they are bad people.
The evidence for the innate badness of Jews is littered through the history of western culture, starting with the Bible. The Jews killed Jesus Christ. That’s where the character assassination begins. But the big irony here of course is that Jesus was a Jew and the early Christians were Jews, too. The gospels and the writings of St Paul are not in fact evidence of the badness of the Jews, they are evidence of a struggle for supremacy largely within a Jewish society. They are polemical. The early Christians needed to damn the Jews and Judaism to assert their legitimacy and superiority to Judaism. St Paul sets up the Jews as the opposite to Christianity—the opposite of everything good. They are carnal, of the flesh, while Christianity is of the spirit and the truth.
That’s where it started—and it stuck. It has been replayed over and over again through the centuries. The carnal Jew becomes the material Jew, obsessed with money. The Jew who is the enemy of truth becomes the enemy of reason to the thinkers of the Enlightenment.
This propaganda was repeated in churches, in art, in music, in literature, in politics and even in mathematics, as the historian David Nirenberg has shown in his revelatory history Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition.
So how can it be anything other than normal to say “damn Jews” if you’ve grown up in a culture that has set Jews up as evil, that has repeated this across a thousand years of European history? We don’t even need to think about it. You, my friend, didn’t even question yourself. It’s just the way things are. It’s the natural order of the world. It’s as normal as saying the sky is blue.
The Holocaust was supposed to put an end to that. The shame of Europe was so great. Not just the shame of Germany, but of all the countries from France to Poland that collaborated in the destruction of the Jewish population. Only it didn’t. Hatred of Jews just put on new clothes.
I often hear people express astonishment that Jews, the victims of the Holocaust, have become victimisers. As if being the victim of racism should somehow be good for your character and even immunise Jews from ever discriminating against another people themselves. If there is one lesson Israel learned from centuries of persecution it was to never be a victim again. In their vision for a Jewish state, Zionists deliberately set out to create a new kind of Jew who would be tough and fight back.
But Jews in fact have always been seen by antisemites as victimisers, intent on causing harm to the Christian population—from the accusation of ritually murdering Christian babies in medieval England to, more recently, the claim that Jews are seeking to destroy the white population, a far-right conspiracy theory. It goes all the way back to the Jews as killers of Christ, out to do harm. Israel’s actions fit with that characterisation of a bloodthirsty people.
But Israel’s actions have nothing to do with the character of the Jewish people and everything to do with the toxicity of ethnic nationalism. The recent history of Serbia is a pertinent example. Yet because Jews have been the embodiment of evil throughout the history of modern Europe, you, my friend, didn’t reach for a political expression to vent your fury, you chose a racist one. Without any awareness that this is what you are doing. Because it’s always been acceptable to disparage Jews.
I am horrified by the destruction of Gaza and by the ambitions of the Israeli government to extinguish any chance of self-determination for the Palestinian people. And I despair, too, that some of my dearest friends (and you are sadly not alone) now think it’s ok to be racist when it comes to Jews.
I don’t blame you for what you said. I understand how you can curse Jews without realising there’s anything wrong—because you’ve absorbed this way of thinking from your earliest years, like everyone else.
