A spectacular rise in Anti-Semitism is recorded by those who monitor it.  There is widespread agreement that it should be stamped out.  It can be stamped out only by removing the cause of it.  In order to remove the cause of it, the cause must be known.

There is no disagreement with that assessment as a general observation.  The difficulty lies in the fact that, in the actual diagnosing of the cause, certain conclusions must be ruled out of consideration as being impossible a priori because they are themselves Anti-Semitic!  And these Anti-Semitic diagnoses of Anti-Semitism are the ones that present themselves most forcefully to the mind on empirical grounds.

To mire oneself deeply into Anti-Semitism—through searching for its cause with the purpose of rooting it out—is a hard fate.  But it is what is likely to happen if you just rush in with good intentions, and are unaware of the irrelevance of factual reasoning in the matter.

The only safe way is to study Aristotle’s list of the modes of false reasoning and apply them diligently.  To be sure, this will not enable you to discover the cause of Anti-Semitism so that you can root it out, but it may well save your reputation for honest and right-thinking with those in authority who decree how the matter should be thought about!

A Discussion!

The panel on the Trevor Phillips’ Show on Sky News on May 3rd mulled over the Anti-Semitism question for a while with relation to the Palestine Marches and the slogans used in them.  They had not heard any slogans that were Anti-Semitic.  The police had the authority to deal with people chanting such slogans.

Melanie Phillips (a columnist on the Times, previously on the Daily Mail) brushed aside this kind of discussion:

“If you have thousands of people effectively chanting for the destruction of Israel, and the murder of Jews, it is extremely hard even for the police to control that…  But I think people are missing the point about what is fuelling this.  Anti-Semitism is always with us, will always be with us, has been with us since the Jewish people first emerged.  To that extent it is a contagion which at best is kept, kind of, kept down.  And, if not being kept down, it has been released, and what is frightening is it has become normalised.”

Melanie Phillips is a well-known commentator on the centre-right of British politics.  Some years ago she coined the named, Londonistan for London, to indicate that it was becoming a Moslem city.

She was called out on a radio programme as a Zionist Jew (by another Jew).  The suggestion was that she was therefore not properly British.  She replied with an article in one of the Jewish papers.  She explained that, as a Jew, she had two national loyalties, British and Israeli.  It was unimaginable to her that they should ever come into conflict.  But, if they ever did come into conflict, her loyalty would be to the Jewish State.

Melanie Phillips is a well-informed Jew on the subject of Judaism.  If she says that Anti-Semitism began with the appearance of Jews in the world, we can be sure that  that is how the matter stands in the Jewish understanding.  Others have said the same thing.

A senior Gentile politician in Britain, Richard Crossman (Labour), confessed, on a visit to to Israel to meet President Weizmann in the early 1950s, that he was an Anti-Semite.  Weizmann thought it was right and proper that he should admit to being an Anti-Semite, seeing that he was a Gentile.  A Gentile cannot shed his Anti-Semitism.  The best he can do is to confess to it.  It is the necessary product of not being a Jew.  A non-Jew who says he is not an Anti-Semite either deceives himself or he is trying to deceive others.  The good Gentile is the one who admits that he is Anti-Semitic by nature, is therefore biassed against Jews, and is incapable of arriving at a fair judgement on any matter on which Jewish concerns are involved.

That is the essential Jewish view of things.  It was not dreamed up by Melanie Phillips.  It was dreamed up by others thousands of years ago.  From the viewpoint of Gentile Enlightenment it can only be that it was dreamed up.  

The Enlightenment vision does not allow the possibility that the Jews were placed in this world—this fallen world—from another world in order to be hated by the fallen because of their special character, but to redeem the fallen world in the long run by means of a final catastrophe.  But that is the view of things that enabled the Jews to maintain themselves as a special people for a couple of thousand years, keeping themselves separate from the Gentile nations in which they lived, assimilating superficially with them, performing certain functions for them, but always being ready to move on when a particular host tired of them, and find another host which had need of them.

(This development refers to essential Jewry, the element which maintains its heritage.  There is another strain which has a tendency to integrate into their host communities, and therefore lose their Jewish heritage.)

Mick Lynch, the retired Trade Union leader, sat next to Melanie Phillips in the Sky News discussion panel.  He looked for the cause of the rise of Anti-Semitism in events.  She explained that events have nothing to do with it:

“There are things I think which are not fully understood, which is that when Mick talks about—as many people do—of outside events causing these things to boil over, what’s being referred to is what the Israelis are supposedly doing in Gaza.  And I think it can’t be exaggerated, the extent to which this hatred—this murderous hatred—is being fuelled of, not just misdeeds by the Israelis in Gaza, but that they are absolutely demonic…

“If you had, as is being said by so many people, Israelis who are committing genocide, Israelis who are killing babies in Gaza, then it follows that those Israelis, in this narrative, are positively evil, they are really Nazis.  And what do you do with people like that?  You have to destroy them.  And so, at the very least, you’re going to give licence, you’re going to give encouragement, to people to come forward and take it out on British Jews?  I mean no one takes it out on Russians who are in Britain for the crimes of the Kremlin…”

Mick Lynch replied that he had been on Palestine marches but had never heard the chants attributed to them.  But it was a fact that the thousands killed in Gaza and the hundreds killed in the West Bank did affect the levels of Anti-Semitism in Britain by activating pre-existing prejudice.  But the marches themselves advocated peace between two peoples.  That was why his Trade Union supported them.  Not to blame British Jews.

Trevor Phillips asked if it was possible to disentangle the position of British Jews from what people think is going on in Palestine.

Melanie Phillips:  “No.  I think it’s an absolute driver of it.  And it’s lies.  The Israelis are not committing genocide.  They are not wantonly killing children.  They are mounting a war of self-defence and actually their behaviour has been exemplary…”

Some Comments!

All the Panelists seemed to agree that the Jews in Britain were not to blame for what Israel may be doing in Palestine.

England is the great moralising State in the world.  It has devised a very effective kind of morality for itself, forensic ethics, which can always be made to tell it what it wants to hear.  Forensic ethics displaces causal understanding in its reckoning of affairs.  And the appropriate question here should be phrased in terms of Cause rather than Blame.

The question should be:  Does the presence of a number of people of Jewish nationality result in the occurrence of Anti-Semitic sentiment in society as a a matter of fact if that number rises above a certain percentage of the whole?

If, on the whole, the answer to this question is “Yes”—and it seems to be that it is—then some other word than “blame” is needed for referring to it.

If it is something that happens predictably, as if it belonged to the order of nature, it is not helped by being blamed—any more than other phenomena of nature are.

When Britain, in the Summer of 1939, was preparing to launch its Second World War, Oxford University published a series of pamphlets about it.  One of them was about the ‘Jewish problem’—which it treated as a real problem of objective fact, which could not be cleared away through moral exhortation.  it was the problem of having one nation living within another nation and pursuing its own national interests while doing so.

The remedy proposed by Oxford University for removing the problem from Europe was the resettlement of Europe after the War was over, to ensure that the Jewish population stayed well below the danger level.  (xxxxxxx)

That was written when Britain expected to win the War that it intended to launch, and to have the post-War settlement in its hands.  But things worked out differently.  Britain retreated from Europe after the first encounter.  The War passed into other hands.

And, at the end of the War, Britain exacerbated the Jewish problem by surrendering to Jewish terrorist extremists in its Palestinian colony—and reneging on its promise to the Arabs that their interests would not be damaged by the Jewish population Britain brought to Palestine.  

Because of these events, we did not see how Britain—if it had won the battle in France in 1940, and broken the Nazi regime—would have reduced the Jewish population in Europe below the Anti-Semitic level.

Meddling And Disaster!

Certain features of the Jewish problem have changed since then.  And Britain is directly blameable for the change that is currently causing a disturbance.  It prevented evolutionary or revolutionary developments in the Middle East after destroying the Ottoman Empire in 1918.  The peoples and religions of the region had lived together  peacefully under Ottoman rule—which maintained order while allowing religious autonomy.

Britain invaded the Ottomans’ state in 1914 and, in the process of its conquest, it replaced Turkish Imperial Government with British Imperial Government from India.  Then, because the Turks were proving unexpectedly difficult to defeat, Britain decided to stir up Arab nationalism against them—which it did by means of a Jihad preached by the Sharif of Mecca, in return for a British promise to recognise Arabia as a Kingdom.

And then, almost at once, Britain made an agreement with the Jewish Board of Deputies in Britain to recognise the Jewish claim to nationality and their national right to Palestine—and to open Palestine to Jewish immigration as colonists who would eventually establish a Jewish State within the Empire.

This offer was first made in a letter to Lord Rothschild and rejected by the Board of Deputies—which indicated that they wished to discard the claim to nationality and be simply a religion.  But, within a week, the Board of Deputies reversed that decision.  It accepted the Balfour Manifesto and ever since then has held to the position that Judaism is a nation.  And it has never disowned connection between the segment of the Jewish nation in Britain and the Jewish nation state.  [This position has practical implications, one of which is that British Jews do national service in the Israeli Army, ed.]

A book entitled Jews Don’t Count has been published by David Baddiel.  Baddiel is a comedian but his complaint about Jews not counting appears to be in earnest—but I did not think that Jews wanted to be counted.  They had good reason for not wanting to be counted.  And can they count without being counted?

The Jewish mode of national existence has been to live in segments within other states, adapting sufficiently to the ways of life of those states to be economically functional in them, but all the while preserving themselves as a separate people with ambitions which are not the ambitions of the host.

That Jewish mode of national existence was viable when there was a world order consisting of Empires.  in the late 19th century the Viennese Jews, Theodore Herzl, saw that nationalist developments inspired by the French Revolution endangered that way of life and he founded a Jewish nationalist organisation, Zionism, with the purpose of gaining a national territory for Jews and founding a Jewish State.  The Zionist project was getting nowhere fast until it was adopted by Britain as an anti-Arab measure in 1917.

In 1917/18 most of the Empires fell.  They were not overthrown by nationalist revolutions.  It was only in Ireland that there was a nationalist revolution against Empire.  Britain destroyed its rival Empires—Austro-Hungary and Turkey—when it got the power to do in 1918,  and the Russian Empire collapsed under the stress of the World War into which it had been lured by Britain. 

Nation-states suddenly appeared through no effort of their own.  The Jews—having been people of the Empire—had no position within these new nationalisms.  New middle classes began to form out of the native populations.  There was a vigorous upsurge of anti-Semitism across the region from the Baltic down through Poland to Western Ukraine.

The only safe place for Jews was Communist Russia—where they were active in the construction of the new social system.  The Russian revolution was, in a sense, cosmopolitan, and so, in a sense, were the Jews:  and that was how a large population of Jews survived the quarter-century following the remaking of Europe by the Versailles Conference.x

The Jews were a cosmopolitan people stretching across a large part of the world and having their own network of inter-connections.  But, once the actual formation of the Jewish State began, the latent nationalism which Judaism had always harboured, became the narrowest, the most single-minded, the most exclusive, and the most unconditional of all nationalisms.      

[p9o , Brendan Clifford