...In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s historical drama King Richard III, the Duke of Clarence has been arrested and taken to the Tower for the sole reason, as he innocently and cluelessly explains to his nemesis Richard, “because my name is George!”
There is no point, except for deluding ourselves and thus doing ourselves a disservice, to explain anti-Semitism either by a pathological hatred of Moslems toward the Jews, or by the Christian religious prejudice against the Christ-killers. Hitler’s Germany was neither a Moslem, nor exactly a Christian nation. As I said before, the German animus toward the Jews after Germany’s humiliating defeat in the first World War was more of a Marxian class struggle attitude of the very poor towards the very rich, as well as a nationalist suspicion that these “fifth-column self-serving foreigners,” having ingratiated themselves into German society, had blown it apart from the inside, facilitating the enemy’s victory in a war that had been going decisively the German way just before it was suddenly lost, through sabotage and desertion, identified with the workings of Jewish agitators at the front and within, the latter being indeed a visible and substantial force, to reckon with.
By the same token, the bitter animosity of the Arab nations of the Middle East--- not toward the Jews, who had been living there for ages, but toward the geopolitical entity of the State of Israel that forced them out, as the Arabs saw it, from their rightful lands, was, in their eyes, a direct result of the militant Zionist movement, aided and abetted by the Europeans, who wanted to get rid of their Jews at the Arabs’ expense, and together made it happen. No matter what the implications, this was a territorial, rather than religious, or ethnic dispute.
While personally I have an understanding and even a sincere empathy for Zionism, I find it misleading and infinitely counterproductive to place the heart of the Middle East problem elsewhere, talking about a "war of civilizations," and other such nonsense. Yet, there is no question that this particular territorial grievance had indeed fueled the anti-Jewish sentiment in the Moslem world. I am sure that had the other side not raised the red flag of anti-Semitism, an equitable solution would have been much easier to come by. But, having thus provided a common umbrella to several essentially unrelated problems, we see an incredible empowerment of anti-Semitism as such, as a result.
Another powerful enabler of anti-Semitism are the excesses of modern financial capitalism, its international profiteering, manifestly responsible for the never-ending miseries of the current global financial crisis, with several unmistakably Jewish names achieving an unfortunate international notoriety in the process. Today I see a further exacerbation of the global anti-Jewish/anti-American revolt in the dogged persistence, despite the already heated emotions, of militant Globalism, a neo-Imperialist policy conducted by the United States under a heavy influence of a group of Jewish ideologues (and their Christian-Zionist comrades), known as the neocons. Their arrogance and belief in the eventual triumph of the internationalist capitalist ideology is combined with an irresponsibly cavalier dismissal of the legitimate and inevitable nationalist backlash. It is most unfortunate that Washington seems to have bought into the preposterous fairytale of Uncle Sam being able, and competent enough, to turn the world into a Pax Americana solely with the help of his soldiers and his wallet.
In fact, today’s Globalist Jew reinforces the image of the heartless Capitalist Jew, denounced by Marx and deplored by the whole Gentile world as the Usury Jew throughout the ages. Now, it is the Jewish-American nexus above everything else, including the territorial conflict in the Middle East, that feeds the anti-Semitic stereotype.
Coming back to the definition of anti-Semitism, if I may, in the simplest terms it means taking out the grudge against a “bad Jew” on a “good Jew.” But how do we qualify a good Jew, like Abraham Avinu, who acts revoltingly in the case of his wife and the Pharaoh, or like David Melech Yisroel, who acts revoltingly in the case of Uriah and Bathsheba?
These mercilessly unflattering, often shockingly nauseating stories of the greatest Jews of the Bible, whose complex characters seem to coalesce the heights of greatness with the depths of depravity, serve to buttress the idea of Jewish collectivity--- collective chosenness and collective condemnation, collective blessing and collective curse, collective pride and collective guilt. This is how I see those Biblical stories: allegorically! Abraham and David are each a collective portrait of the Jewish people as a whole… Perhaps, there exists a certain providential certainty both in the conception and in the inevitability of their collective fate?
In that case, the future of Judenthum holds very few surprises and a lot of continuity. The once Jew and the future Jew are essentially one and the same, and their name is both specific and generic too: Israel! But, to me, this fatalistic and even homiletic logic fails to make a persuasive case. Grigori Permyakov-German, my brilliant Moscow University mentor and a genius of structural paroemiology (see my entry From Proverb To Greatness), and my good family friend General Mikhail Milstein (see my entry Father Frost) cannot be merged into a "collective Israel" with a Richard Perle and a Paul Wolfowitz. A Sabbath Jew and a Renaissance Jew have nothing in common, in my mind, with a Stock Market or a Globalist Jew. And, whatever the truth of the matter is, the celebrated scar of Judas Maccabee (a Jewish national hero, and also a revered saint of the Russian Orthodox Church, together with several other Maccabee martyrs of the Russian Bible) is not a horcrux for Judas Iscariot (I am alluding of course to the denouement of the Harry Potter saga) on the face of my saga of the once and future Jew.
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