Confronting Anti-Semitism, Part III

Breaking the Surface and Searching for the Hidden Text

This portion of the essay has been written under the shadow of the shootings at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.  Rather than random acts of violence, this and others over the past several months in particular, since the attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse through a number of other terrorist events in the France, Morocco, Canada and elsewhere, have confirmed (as though we needed confirmation) that these are not random acts committed by single madmen or small clusters of deranged youths.  Rather they form part of a world-wide scourge of anti-Semitism.  While not necessarily orchestrated by a central command, such as Al-Qaida, the terrorist acts are connected through the constant circulation of anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish ideology, myth and discourse.  On occasion, to be sure, a demented soul, lashing about in search for a shape to his or her rage, may be instigated by this kind of media-born language; such a person may have only the most tangential attraction to Jew-hating propaganda up to this point of personal collapse of personality—perhaps triggered by a private crisis, such as the death of a parent, the rejection by a spouse, or the loss of a job.  More usually, such persons have long been attracted by anti-Semitism and anti-Zionist ravings because they are so common in the press, on television, in places of worship and in political speeches.  They provide long-term shaping of inner feelings of helplessness and rage against society.  Rarest of all perpetrators are professional Jew-haters, rare only in the sense that they are agents of the violence, not the framers of the social, political and religious movements behind them.

What is this madness?  Today—not just in our time, but this day, this hour, this minute—the insane murders make videos of themselves and proclaim their intentions, their causes, their reasons.  Al-Qaida mass murderers do this in a staged manner, with associates, flags, and oiften victims tied up before them ready to be beheaded.  The killer in Toulouse last year and the Belgian museum shooter did this with a camera strapped to himself and recorded his actions minute by minute as he killed his victims.  The eccentric and highly personal motives of the random killer are one thing; those who tap into the deep roots of anti-Semitism, or the delusionary language and imagery of anti-Zionism, are another.  The day of the killing is one thing; the moment of madness an explosion of self into the world through destruction of others.  The years, generations, centuries of visceral and aesthetic hatred of Jews is another.

I have suggested that we analyse this insanity rationally in a way similar to that used by writers when they quickly sketch out the plot of a novel, set out the character of the persons they will display in scenes of argument and violence, and interpret the meanings and implications of the allegorical configuration of their art.  The process is long and painful, both for the writer and the interpreting midrashist, trying to both trace back through the tangled web of the performance to the core features of the motivating crisis, and then also to break apart that crisis itself, to discover why something—usually some traumatic event, something repressed, displaced by more acceptable scenarios—precipitates the explosion. 

Writing, Rewriting and Unwriting the Crisis

Though often simplicity and lucidity are placed at the head of features of style marking good writing, whether fiction or philosophical or historical, these are not always desirable.  Reading is not always a passive experience.  At certain times and for certain topics, a reader must not be flattered, smoothed or cajoled into understanding.  The world is not always as it seems, persons do not represent themselves accurately or truthfully, and the realities of human experience—including history—are too complex to be rendered in a straightforward manner.  The very processes of reading, from recognition or identification of words, as well as of the persons, places, events and ideas have to be challenged.  The reader needs to be shocked, insulted, thrown off balance, that is, asked to rethink fundamentals, examine closely passions that are triggered off, and images smashed apart and then carefully reassembled.

The mind, as it is created by the brain in the womb, at the mother’s breast and in the cradle, does not emerge finally in an innocent form, transparent to experiences, and co-extensive with the words, images, gestures and contextual frames of reference that are assumed to be part of the natural and the cultural worlds.  As we have tried to say in the first two parts of this essay, by the time self-consciousness comes into being, the formations of personality and collective identity have limited the size, volume, shape and atmosphere of the mind—and in all its levels of pre-consciousness, cognitive awareness, and dreamlike or trance formations.  These conditionings arise from natural circumstances, historical contingencies, social pressures, individual ontology, and accidental trauma and disease.  Nevertheless, nothing is absolutely determined; things are not inscribed into the genetic code, but are expressed in response to emotional and material events.  The mind, too, as a product of the brain’s neuronal growth has within itself the capacity to resist, reject, and correct itself in vital components of its cognitive and affective functions.  This capacity exists on both a conscious and unconscious level, and thus more or less responds to the development of will, intellect and moral forces.    

The Analogy of Literary Style

I was recently reading through an 1890 study of Balzac which had many of the chapters as pages from Honoré’s sister Lorre and from a long essay by Théophile Gautier.  In it there is a description of how Balzac would drive his publishers crazy by his endless revisions: actually, he was trying to do what is so much easier today with word processors—he would write out a dozen or so pages by hand, send them to be set up in type, receive back the proofs and start to make big changes and additions, with streams of handwritten material shooting out all over the page and on to extra pages he would glue to the long sheets of printed text; then back to the printers, and when the new version arrived, he would do the whole thing again, maybe a dozen times or more. 

That is how I learned to write, too.  In the “good old days” before computers, the university had a group of secretaries in a so-called “work centre”.  I would bring in my badly typed text; they would retype it neatly, and I would start to cross-out, add, and soon there would be as much or more scribbled all around the margins, on the back of the sheets, and stapled new sheets of handwritten changes.  Then back to the work centre.  Because there was usually at least a week before the clean text arrived, I was thinking of other things, writing something else, and so clearing my mind of the original muddle; and when I received the neat pages, I could see and think more clearly, and so started to cross out, add, and shift around paragraphs.  Because actually there were very few of us using the service—and mostly the others were social scientists getting tape-recorded interviews transcribed—the secretaries enjoyed working for me, and sometimes an essay or chapter would go round and round 50 or 60 times before it seemed ready to be sent off to an editor for publication.  Nowadays, though almost all of this rewriting is done by myself on the computer—a few of the last stages when editors send back proofs before publication, but then I have to keep revisions to a minimum so as not to upset page layouts and pagination—what I miss are (a) the days and weeks of cooling down, (b) the pleasant shock of seeing my work in someone else’s typewritten form, and (c) the not ignorant questions and comments by the secretaries about what I was trying to say.

But as I have argued elsewhere, this method of writing is also the method by which reading occurs, and more than of published texts: it is also the way to understand rhetorical moments in history, that is, those processed by the techniques of persuasion—for good and evil purposes; to persuade through enhancing or clarifying an argument or to move to action or to dissuade from taking steps that have been begun out of emotional responses, and these processes of convincing and rationalizing passionate states of mind may have negative rather positive motives—to deceive, to substitute false or only partly true conceptions of truth for the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

From text to Non-text and Anti-Text

Therefore, just as one has to make several efforts to smooth out the infelicities in grammar, syntax and style, so that what you write is finally readable—with as much simplicity, lucidity and grace as possible commensurate with the nature of your topic; so too, when reading both texts and events (that is analysing and interpreting, and eventually applying your understanding to the situation at hand) you need to watch out for bad motives, hidden agendas and the sloppy thinking that lead to disaster. 

In some cases, of course, the explicit nature of the bigotry, ignorance and animosity appears right on the surface of the text.  Then it is a matter of finding out why the person or group expresses such negative feelings and to what extent they are likely to take action on such noxious thoughts and feelings.  That may be followed by steps taken to rectify dysfunctional situations, ameliorate deep senses of rage and fear, and thus avoid the worst consequences of the anti-social currents.  More usually, however, the poisonous passions only partly manifest in recognizable forms, with their true nature displaced to less dangerous words, images and actions, or rationalized into a surface texture of something more or less benign or even purportedly liberal, tolerant and ingratiating; so that when verbal or physical violence does erupt, it may be difficult for the outsider to determine who is victim and who victimizer—or even with the aggressive person or persons perceived to be the unprovoked object of the hatred, In fact, these days especially, with the capture of supposedly moral and ethical discourses by bigots and fanatics, whole areas of the world are misperceived, as though murderous terrorists were innocent recipients of abuse and oppression.  The mass media are particularly vulnerable to these wrong-headed interpretations, if not outrightly collusive in their perpetration.

The Reality of Madness

A good part of the madness rests on the premise that (a) Israel is not perfect and so therefore has no right to exist; (b) Israeli's existence stands as a slap in the face to those who believe that they have the right, duty and spiritual backing to destroy all that is not perfect; (c) the indicator of perfection must be therefore the destruction of everything in the self and the community one belongs to that if other, different, and reminds one that there are laws, principles, morals and methods of determining how these can be achieved. 

Let us look at these three points a little more carefully.

Israel is not perfect and so therefore has no right to exist.  For the past twenty years at least the left-leaning press and other media have given disproportionate attention to Israel, not just to the neglect of scores of nations where there are much worse problems than the seemingly intractable Arab-Israeli conflict, but as though the whole instability of the Mideastern region were due to the presence and existence of Israel, and therefore as though the whole world teetered on the brink of imminent destruction because of one tiny Jewish state in opposition to scores of hostile Arab and Muslim countries that cannot countenance the very idea of a Jewish state.  Therefore these post-modernist journalists and politicians fear the explosive presence of a hostile Muslim population in their midst and, because they deem the cause of that volatility to be something other than their own failure to integrate these non-Europeans into their body politic, and only give a little whisper of lip-service to the old notion of discontent caused by poverty, lack of education and resentment of the surrounding Christian culture, they seek to appease their discontented migrant communities by agreeing with them that Israel is the cause of everybody’s unhappiness—and so it would be better if Israel were wiped off the map of the world, as well as the Jews everywhere they live.

All this can be justified in the eyes of the educated, sophisticated and cosmopolitan media because they discover that Israel occasionally makes mistakes, has pockets of prejudice and narrow-mindedness, and  has not created a perfectly harmonious and fair society; in other words, that it is, in many respects, what the Zionist founders wished to create, a nation-state like all others.  But added to this, in order to avoid having to deal with the fact that Israelis contribute disproportionately to the world’s sum of scientific and cultural knowledge every year and maintain their basic sense of justice, law and social equity better than most, despite the constant harassment of their neighbours, these post-modernist journalists and academics ask Israel to hold to a higher standard than anyone else: why?  Because it is supposed that Jews claim to be a peculiar chosen people in some idealistic form that can never be found in any documents they purport to cite or paraphrase, thus misreading the Hebrew Bible, which is not a history of a people always good in the eyes of God but of a nation constantly admonished to correct its faults and to show compassion to others who cannot even envision such a moral standard.  Because, too, it is assumed that Jews in founding the State of Israel were serving the colonialist and imperialist purposes of the Great Powers and not, as was actually the case, constantly at odds with those big states and often in conflict with them, so that Israel was created out of a movement for national liberation—as well as out of the ashes of the Holocaust.

Israeli's existence stands as a slap in the face to those who believe that they have the right, duty and spiritual backing to destroy all that is not perfect.  All that is said about the wickedness of Israel was said for thousands of years before there was such a sovereign entity, but it was said about Jews—the Jewish nation in Exile and Dispersion.  And even before there were arguments concocted to justify those assertions on the grounds of failing to recognize and believe in a Christian saviour who purportedly fulfilled all their prophetic promises and provided a new testament of salvation or, in another instance, before there were charges that Jews misrepresented themselves as the Chosen People, manipulated their sacred history so as to exclude those tribes who really deserved the favours of God, and who therefore always and constitutionally behave in a perfidious and duplicitous manner, the essential hatred was present.  It may have arisen for intellectual reasons, that the defining quality of Jewish mentality and personality resides in a distrust of hierarchical authority, requires knowledge and understanding manifested in just and equitable actions, and is therefore sceptical, querulous and disrespectful of all kinds of vested power in individuals and institutions.  Jews ask too many questions.  They don’t believe something just because it is commanded from kings, priests and generals.  They disagree with everyone, even themselves most of the time, but recognize proper forms of disagreement and reject those propounded arbitrarily and deceitfully or out of bombastic ignorance.  While never claiming to be perfect, the Jews do not like others to make such claims, and are consequently not easily bamboozled; and if they are, then not for long.

Those peoples who respect authority for its monopoly of power, who need some sort of Leviathan to maintain social order, and prefer hierarchical systems of knowledge cannot abide such questioning, mockery and stiff-necked pride.  To do so would force them to question their own right to authority, their need for obedience and their distancing of faith from legal debates.  It would undermine their belief in a supernal force of spiritual love and the efficacy of sacrifice and suffering. 

The indicator of perfection must be therefore the destruction of everything in the self and the community one belongs to that if other, different, and reminds one that there are laws, principles, morals and methods of determining how these can be achieved.  To maintain a belief in perfect Love and absolute Truth, the nations of the world impose strict limits on what can be thought, believed, felt and known, designating certain persons as more authoritative than others, instating state and ecclesiastical bodies to monitor obedience and punish disobedience, and providing individual illusions and public dreams in compensation.  Such state-entities require at once the presence of a second-class, semi-excluded other to manifest the ever-likely supreme pain of sinful disobedience—a people who can be publically humiliated, expelled or executed from time to time to remind the rest of the society what lies in store and how absolute is the hierarchical power of the rulers; and, at the same time, these historically designed others are scapegoats, clearly marked “poison sacks” into which each individual’s and the collective body’s anxieties and fears of being filthy, impure, uncomfortably restless and suicidal can be ritually poured out through word and action.  

Though absurd, irrational and illogical, the methods of anti-Semitic thinking pretend to be historically rational.  The more there are such ravings and rantings, the more the notion is confirmed—how could so many people be wrong for so long.  If Jews have been despised, feared, and persecuted for so many centuries, there must be some justification to it all.  The more Jews complain and "whine", recall past persecutions, the more they show themselves to be different, other, not part of the majority culture.  Whoever feels guilty for all this has to deny the guilt, shift it on to the victims.  Since the language of liberalism and tolerance has been hijacked by the post-modernists, they have to become blind to their support for fanatics, extremists, terrorists and other insane people: one feeds into the other. A form of cannibalism.

How can this be confronted, prevented, understood in a curative manner?