Liah Greenfeld interview with Faculti, September 25, 2024
https://faculti.net/a-new-explanation-of-antisemitism-jew-hatred-as-a-civilisational-phenomenon/
discussing Greenfeld’s article “A new explanation of antisemitism: Jew hatred as a civilizational phenomenon,” Israel Affairs, July 2024
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13537121.2024.2367877
How does the article link the borrowed monotheism of Christianity and Islam to the psychological dynamics of envy and inferiority complex toward Jews?
Imagine what is to know that you are obliged for God who gives meaning to your life and defines your identity to someone else. The identity of the borrower by definition references the lender and is not self-sufficient. Judaism is the foundation of the monotheistic civilization. The One God billions of Christians and Muslims worship is the Jewish God, the God of the Hebrew Bible, the Creator of and the central participant in the history of the Jewish people it depicts. (This is explicitly recognized in the Christian and Muslim Holy Scriptures.) The attention of Christians and Muslims is of necessity fixed on Jews; their identity (as Christians and as Muslims) is not self-sufficient, it depends on a justification of their separation from Jews, on explaining why they (Christians and Muslims) – believers as they are in the Jewish God – are not Jews themselves.
The psychological problem in which Christianity and Islam find themselves as a necessary result of their acceptance of Jewish monotheism is dramatically magnified by to them undeniable God’s choice of the Jews as His own people far ahead and above them. They know that, in the eyes of God, they are inferior to the Jews. God’s obvious preference forever replays the parable of Cain and Abel for Christians and Muslims: they forever envy the Jews this preference. Indeed, this is a sibling rivalry of sorts, on a very large scale: a futile and therefore endless competition for the love of the supremely important parent, once and for all given to the eldest child.
The very fact of borrowing God implies that the Jews relationship with God is enviable, that the Jews are envied for having this relationship and that they are freely chosen as a model, an object of admiration deserving of imitation. Originally, therefore, the borrowers believe the Jews to be superior to themselves – and themselves, naturally, inferior to the Jews and in need of becoming like them – but they are certain that they would a) soon become equal to, if not better than, the Jews (as more sincere, more dedicated believers in Jewish God, that is, as better Jews) and b) be admired by Jews for their efforts on behalf of Jewish God. This optimistic anticipation is not fulfilled: Jews never thought much of the borrowers’ efforts. Thus, the borrowers were left with the nagging sense of the inerasable superiority of their model and insupportable, humiliating suspicion of their own permanent inferiority.
Under this emotional distress their initial admiration of the Jews as the model gave way to a much less benign sentiment of envy – existential envy, that is, the envy of the Jews’ existential significance which, by comparison, deprives the borrowers’ very existence of value. And this transforms the temporary sense of inferiority into the self-destabilizing complex, a psychopathology.
What do those concepts mean in this context?
In this context, these concepts (I suppose you refer to the existential envy and complex of inferiority vis-à-vis the Jews?) refer to – and explain — the continuous targeted hatred of the Jews, that is, antisemitism: they explain why there is antisemitism. Existential envy is necessarily connected to the complex of inferiority, i.e., the loathing of one’s own (individual or collective) self. A powerful irritant, constantly rekindled by reminders of the model’s (in this context, Jews) superiority, it poisons from within, festers, and turns to hatred. This leads to the transformation of the model (in this context, the Jews) into the anti-model, ascribing to them as many vices as the borrowers previously discerned in them virtues and making the struggle against them a central orientation of their consciousness.
A continuously targeted hatred, cutting through particular historical contexts, while, perhaps, triggered by historical contexts, is caused, and must be fully explained, psychologically. Though always personally experienced, a continuous hatred which lasts for generations cannot be related to personal grievances or offences by particular individuals; it must derive from a grievance of a group against another group. It is necessarily irrational, not provoked by the threat to objective, i.e., actually entertained and empirically provable interests and attempts to realize them, because such interests change from generation to generation, as do the agents who oppose them. Motivated continuously and irrespective of the specific historical context by the sense of inferiority to Jews, existential envy of them, in contrast to common forms of hostility to the out-group, which are always context-dependent, antisemitism is irrational. As such it emerges only with the spread of Christianity beyond its original Jewish converts. Antisemitism does not result from any declared political (or economic) interest; the interest it expresses cannot be declared, because its very acknowledgment would prevent its realization (indeed, very often antisemitism goes against the antisemites’ declared interests): it is a way to assuage the pain of the complex of inferiority which necessarily arises from comparing the antisemite’s community (religious or political) to the Jews, a form of self-therapy which won’t work if one understands its psychological roots.
How do these dynamics contribute to the development of antisemitic tropes within these religious communities?
Only the small theologically-literate thinking elite experienced personally the existential envy of the Jews and suffered from the complex of inferiority necessarily related to it. This was not the problem affecting the majority of Christians and Muslims. But this elite expressed the hatred produced by their envy and inferiority in holy scriptures and preaching and, while doing so, created tropes – the most important instrument of institutionalization. Tropes are constantly repeated narrative conventions, acquired with language as fully formed habits of thought with corresponding emotional attitudes. The knowledge of a trope is certain but implicit, like the knowledge of words in the mother-tongue. And, as one does not give any thought to common words while using them, so one does not give any self-conscious thought to a trope which is deployed. On the neurological level, therefore, a trope exists in the brain of the member of a culture in its original etymological sense of a (beaten) path, an established neural pathway. Tropes reduce complex symbolic messages to signs which require no interpretation: both their significance and reactions to them, i.e., both the stimulus and response, become automatic. Discouraging explicit thinking, tropes are likely to rely on the systems and mechanisms of implicit, long-term, consolidated memory. Neurologically, they are imbedded deeper in the brain than other linguistic devices. Deeply embedded but not consciously thought about ways of thinking, and therefore acting, they carry on social institutions. Whenever we speak of systemic or institutionalized this or that (e. g., in the USA, we often speak of institutionalized racism), we do in fact speak of tropes which define our subconscious – i.e., not explicit – attitudes, attitudes we would in many cases explicitly deny, if asked point blank whether we subscribe to them. The longer an attitude is transmitted through tropes, the deeper its institutionalization goes. Within our, monotheistic, civilization antisemitism is the deepest embedded – the oldest, the strongest – institution. Most of my article actually focuses on the development of antisemitic tropes in Christianity and Islam.
How do these narratives influence the consciousness and attitudes of the general population toward Jews in societies shaped by these monotheistic traditions?
Antisemitism first appeared in the Christian polemics ‘adversus Iudaeos’ – “against the Jews”; this was, in fact, its first name. ‘Polemic’ means ‘war’ (from the Greek polemos), thus ‘adversus Iudaeos’ polemic clearly and openly announces itself as ‘war against the Jews’. Given that ways of acting by and large follow the ways of thinking, it can be logically deduced that this rhetorical war directly led to the practical one – discriminatory legislation, violence, etc.
“War against the Jews” was the main preoccupation of the early Christian theology. Thus, the history of early Christian thought, the tremendously important centuries between the 2nd and the 7th centuries AD, is in effect a history of antisemitism. If Jew-hatred is not the only aspect of Christian theology of this formative period, it is undoubtedly its central aspect. And it remains at least a central aspect of Christian thought for another 5-6 centuries after that. The greatest Christian theologians (including St. Augustine in the 4th century, St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th) participate in the development of explicit antisemitism — a thousand-year-long continuous labor by the best minds and the most authoritative cultural figures of a millennium, by preachers and teachers of the largely illiterate masses for whom they constituted the only source of knowledge.
None of the Christian antisemitic tropes has been of a greater moment than that of Jews as the killers of Christ. This racist and irrational image which justified every Jewish massacre in Christian and post-Christian Europe, including to a very large extent the Holocaust, has proved ineradicable. In 1965, the Catholic Church, recognizing the contribution of this notion to the Holocaust renounced the idea of Jewish collective guilt transmitted from generation to generation by blood. But, as a scholar commented on the Second Vatican Council, ‘so deeply has this portrayal of the Jew penetrated Christian thought’, [Jeremy Cohen[i] writes,] ‘that [the curia] encountered more than token resistance at the Second Vatican Council…; even in the aftermath of the council, the notion of collective guilt [for deicide] continues to appear in contemporary Christian scholarship, both Catholic and Protestant’. And the Papal renunciation made very little impression on the general population: a one-time decree from above, however authoritative, proved no match for the attitude institutionalized for 2000 years, a trope deeply embedded in people’s brains.
Similarly, Islamic antisemitism was born together with Islam. In fact, it came into the world complete in the form that it is to keep forever, because it was a part of divine revelation in the Quran. Therefore, it was from the beginning institutionalized. As soon as the religion of Islam was preached, expressions of Islamic antisemitism became tropes. Coming directly from God, the Quran cannot be doubted, questioned, or innovated upon. It is absolutely true in its contents as well as form – a trope in its entirety – and can be interpreted only in the way of endless repetition and application to new situations.
As we are reminded by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University – the equivalent of the Pope in Sunni Islam – Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, more than one-third of the Quran is devoted to the Jews. Jews are the supreme preoccupation of God himself. The antisemitism in ‘Allah’s book’ is reinforced in the overlapping canonical hadith (stories about Muhammad) and sira (Muhammad’s biographies).
Why are antisemitic traditions notably absent in non-monotheistic societies such as China and India?
Antisemitism is a product of borrowed monotheism. Without the psychological dynamic set off by the borrowing of God, antisemitism would not exist. Therefore, there are no native antisemitic traditions in non-monotheistic civilizations. In fact, and throughout their very long histories these civilizations manifest remarkably little awareness of Jews altogether. Our, monotheistic, civilization, in both its Christian and post-Christian, and its Muslim and post-Muslim halves, in distinction, is fixated on the Jews, for reasons that we talked about. It is because this very absence of indigenous antisemitism and widespread interest in Jews in Sinic and Indic civilizations, compared to their ubiquity across the many societies and historical periods in the monotheistic civilization that a comparison with these other two civilizations existing now in the world prompts us to connect monotheism and antisemitism, making possible finally and for the first time in history a systematic analysis and explanation of antisemitism.
Wrap up with conclusions, implications and areas of future research.
Here one should probably focus on the practical conclusions and implications. Antisemitism is the oldest, most entrenched institution, that is, established way of thinking and acting, in our civilization; throughout the last 2000 years it has been the most common motive behind group violence, whether domestic or interpolitical, that is, the most common cause of political conflict, both domestic and that between polities. It lies behind the greatest crime against humanity in history. Just within the last century, within living memory, it caused a World War and it is quite likely to cause another World War right now.
Without understanding the reasons for the existence of antisemitism we, obviously, have not been able to fight it effectively. Now that we understand these reasons we have a chance to do so. We must reveal these reasons – again and again – both to the antisemites and to those who are not antisemites – and to the latter both in our own civilization and in the Chinese and Indian ones. We must drum it into the brains of humanity, that is, make it a trope, that behind antisemitism lie the complex of inferiority and existential envy, that, in other words, antisemitism is the attitude of people who know themselves to be inferior and envious, which means, of objectively inferior and envious people. No doubt, members of the other civilizations, usually inclined to look up to ours, would be interested to know that a very large segment of the monotheistic population consists of inferior and envious people. This knowledge, and the knowledge that this knowledge is available to other civilizations, would surely make the non-antisemites in our civilization ashamed of antisemitism, eager to protect our civilization from this shame and the contempt of other civilizations, and perhaps at last actively turn against antisemites in our midst. Perhaps, even more important, understanding that antisemitism is caused by the complex of inferiority and existential envy would make antisemites ashamed of antisemitism and change themselves.
[i] Cohen, “The Jews,” 1–27; the discussion of the transformation of the “ignorance” tradition into one of “intentionality” relies on this text and all the respective quotations are from it.
Liah Greenfeld 