You know my opinion that we should just not call anything before 1800, and certainly nothing before the Rhineland massacres, antisemitism so I won't belabour it. However, I think that antisemitism today can be explained in the same way that gold was money for most of history.
a) Not everything can be money. Raisins don't last long enough, diamonds aren't fungible, iron weighs too much per unit of value.
b) Once gold is money, it's just easiest to use that money instead of inventing your own money and trying to get everyone else to use it.
So, similarly, there is a demand for resentment-conspiracy politics, and (a) there aren't a limitless numbers of groups that can fill the role and (b) anti-semitism already exits and has a substantial literature. I think that fully explains the tendency of conspiracy politics to converge on anti-semitism over time, as one of the commenters noted.
I'd somehow missed your 2024 piece on antisemitism but it's excellent and doesn't surprise me we had basically the same point to make about the debate, though I'm personally fine leaving antisemitism as the generic term insofar as its definition is kept generic and basically content-less (although maybe it's true the existence of such a term encourages people to fill out its content in silly ways)
I think that the Jews tend to overfixate on their own suffering because their religion, like Christianity, tends to conflate suffering and persecution with righteousness. Christians were obsessed with the Roman persecutions after their religion was endorsed by the state the way that secular Jews are with the Holocaust. There are many ridiculous and exaggerated stories and hagiography.
Absolutely they both come out of the same martyrological tradition. Was actually thinking of comparing Christian exaggerations of the early Roman persecutions to Jewish exaggerations of Chmelnitsky because they're broadly similar, though I think the lachrymose stuff is probably true for a lot of ethnic/religious history-telling. I came across Sefer Zekhirah looking into the blood libel which documents the first German libels and it's literally just a list of persecutions of Jews for remembrance. Baron wrote all about that kind of thing.
There's no need for specific quotes, it's inherent and implicit in the entire story that the Jews are righteous because they are persecuted and persecuted because they are righteous. This is all throughout the Old Testament.
The origin story of the Jewish people (Abraham) is not one of persecution. It is on monotheism and belief in one God. The main story of Genesis is that the non expected son gets the birthright. This goes through several generations. Jews do emerge from slavery on Egypt the emphasis is on freedom and faith. Not on persecution.
I would agree with cautioning against seeing Anti-Semitism as some uniquely abominable form of prejudice or one uniquely able to give us lessons about humanity.
But the thing that always messes with me is how uniquely deranged it almost always ends up being, especially nowadays. It's one thing to be like 'I don't like those people/don't trust those people', but when someone is blaming Israel for 9/11 or JFK, or saying the Holocaust never happened (and not like other genocide denial which is usually a lot of whataboutism or technical legalisms but fully negating that anything happened), this is just not something that feels normal compared to other groups. The $7000 thing is one of them - it would be utterly mad to imagine literally any other country paying you 7k for a Twitter post (why would you even use a high figure given a low figure would be more embarassing?) but when people see the word Israel there is a level of mental collapse that I've never seen except people talking about countries they're at war with.
I doubt it was always like this, but it feels like Anti-Semitism (owing to Jewish longevity) has just accumulated so many different layers and expressions that the final modern product is almost like the Swiss Army Knife of prejudice - there are so many expressions of it that it can be used for practically any scenario. And with that countless lurid images that simply overwhelm and break the conspiratorial mind.
The 9/11 Truther phenomenon I think is pretty interesting case in point. I was actually a Truther back in the day as a kid and back then there was very little about Israel (the 4000 Jews thing was widely ignored by basically every big Western conspiracist). Silverstein was mentioned but his Jewishness wasn't dwelled upon (to the best of my memory - I didn't even know it was a Jewish name). After Bush went the movement collapsed and obviously I grew a brain but now whenever I see Truthers, 100% of them pin Israel for being the guys behind it. The Dancing Israelis stuff was relatively niche back in the day, now it's literally everywhere, even outside Truther circles.
The point is that Anti-Semitism shows up in places that no other prejudice really shows up at least in the same way - it's so seemingly uniquely deranging that it makes itself more fascinating than it otherwise should be.
There's almost certainly truth to the idea that antisemitism at some point grew its own legs, conspiracy types are drawn to the Jews partly because there's so much baggage there already. The reason antisemitism is so conspiratorial is because it's a type of anti-elite minority prejudice. You can't plausibly blame like blacks or Arabs for controlling world events, so prejudice against those groups takes on different forms.
This is in large part true but I'd argue since the Gulf Monarchies got wealthy in the 70s etc you could easily come up with 'Arabs are behind it' for random events. There were shades of this 10-20 years ago when people alleged Saudi Arabian involvement in 9/11 and nowadays you may start seeing this with Qatar. But I've never seen things like blaming Charlie Kirk's assassination on Qatar.
The Illuminati also receive a ton of blame in conspiracy theories, which is impressive even compared to Jews considering they haven't existed for centuries.
To be fair, if one is going to postulate a 911-conspiracy which involves explosives having been planted in the Towers, then it makes the most sense to look at Larry Silverstein and his Israeli connections.
Shortly after the events of September 11, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called Larry Silverstein, a Jewish real estate magnate in New York, the owner of the World Trade Center's 110-story Twin Towers and a close friend, to ask how he was. Since then they have spoken a few more times. Two former prime ministers - Benjamin Netanyahu, who this week called Silverstein a "friend," and Ehud Barak, whom Silverstein in the past offered a job as his representative in Israel - also called soon after the disaster. Yaakov Terner, the mayor of Be'er Sheva, sent a letter of condolence...
The ascension to power of Benjamin Netanyahu opened a new chapter in the saga. Silverstein is left-leaning in his political views - he supports the Democratic Party - but after despairing of Rabin and Peres, he believed that Netanyahu, whom he called a hero of the free market, would push the project forward.
The two have been on friendly terms since Netanyahu's stint as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. For years they kept in close touch. Every Sunday afternoon, New York time, Netanyahu would call Silverstein.
-----
Nothing in the above link allows us to conclude "controlled demolition!" However, if one starts out convinced that bombs planted by insiders brought the buildings down, then it makes sense to look at Silverstein and the people that he was friendly. For 2 years, 2003-5, I was convinced of "controlled demolition" and therefore accepted the view that Silverstein being tied in with Sharon and Netanyahu must have had something to do with it. As soon as I lost my conviction in the bombs-in-buildings-scenario, I also lost any belief in Silverstein's importance.
There certainly have been a lot of dumb arguments made around Silverstein since I was a 911truther. One of the dumbest is "Silverstein stayed home from work that day." Although it's true that he stayed home and was saved, it's also true that Adolf Hitler survived George Elser's November 8, 1939, assassination attempt just through sheer luck. Hitler was supposed to give a 2-hour speech, but he truncated it because fog forced him to travel by train instead of plane. He left the site 13 minutes before the bomb exploded. Pure coincidence, but something could have altered the whole history of World War II.
Yeah, I think antisemitism is unique in that it often (though not always) turns into an all-consuming vortex of insanity, not just about Jews but about the entirety of 20th/21st-century history and society.
Let me offer a different angle on modern antisemitism.
I have spent plenty of time on those corners of the internet which are rife with it, namely far-right internet forums, and have felt the draw of antisemitic ideas.
The main complaint in these circles is about leftism corroding western civilization.
Communism, intersectional feminism, critical race theory, and in particular everything to do with mass migration is the focus of the modern right's ire. (Justifiably imho)
Antisemitism can flow from these attitudes because people associate leftism with Jews.
Actual Jewish overrepresentation provides the basis for the association.
This is true now, (though less so in Europe for obvious reason) and it was true between 1870-1945.
I asked ChatGPT to estimate for me the percentage of Jews within the CPUSA in the 1930's. It gave me a figure of between 30-50%.
Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf to have grown antisemitic in Vienna when he started noticing that all the leftist newspapers opposed to his politics were run by Jews.
Now how this recognition of a true pattern turns into schizophrenic protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-type theories of Jewish plots for control of the world is a harder thing to explain, in requires some psychology perhaps, but the underlying political pattern is real.
'I asked ChatGPT to estimate for me the percentage of Jews within the CPUSA in the 1930's. It gave me a figure of between 30-50%.'
As Harry Hopkins pointed out, this made the CPUSA much less influential than it would otherwise have been. Most western countries have had large communist parties that have sometimes been part of coalition governments, or at least been an electoral threat to other leftist parties. Nothing remotely like that in the US. It's a bit like how if a posh school takes too many Chinese students, it loses status and eventually even Chinese people don't want to go there. In this case, with Jews you lose.
Sure, I'm just sperging out, but actually there's a serious point. What is the significance of this fact (and all related facts)? Is the US more communists than other western countries that have less Jewish influence? Is it more influenced by the far left generally?
The significance of that fact is that the right wing anti-Semite's associating of Jews with leftism is correct to a significant degree.
Now as in the 1930's.
The large existing corpus of antisemitic literature perhaps provides the basis for the grand conspiracy theories, but the initial opposition to Jews in the minds of modern right-wing antisemites would not have been formed had Jews not been overrepresented in politics&media, or it would have been at least quite a bit less had that overrepresentation been more equally distributed across the political spectrum.
I understand that, but if it has a small effect on your society, or actually impeded the progress of communism, then why would you get steamed up about it?
Leftism itself obviously has no small effect on society.
Would leftism itself be more effective if it wasn't so Jewish? I doubt that but even if it were, that is completely besides the point. I'm trying to explain why right wing antisemitism exists from the late 19th century untill today. And the possibility of Jews actually impeding communism is basically impossible to gage from the outside. All that can be readily observed is the toxic cultural and political waste flowing from the far left, and the suspiciously large number of Jews amongst the ranks of that political faction.
Whatever Harry Hopkins thought is completely irrelevant here.
Besides the CPUSA was just an illustrative example, I knew there would be decent data on it and the numbers of Jewish members. Chatgpt gives a figure of 15-30% of leadership figures for the KPD in Germany.
Also this is why antisemitism reared it's head again in the latter 19th century, it downstream from the democratisation that got going especially post 1848. Political differences didn't differentiate Jews before.
Definitely true Jewish leftism is the big issue for diehard neo-Nazis online but I think most antisemitism currently gets its appeal from Zionism, even on the right with dual loyalty. That really seems to be the most motivating issue for a lot of people nowadays. I ofc grant it used to be a much bigger cause of antisemitism but my understanding is that was more of a 20th-century thing. Antisemitism from the Hep Hep riots (as Katz argues) to its more formal (and political) emergence w coverage of the 1873 crash and depression I think was fundamentally motivated by points about Jewish assimilation and role in the stock markets/economic elite, that's where the debate was at intellectually if you read the major documents from like Treitschke and Stoecker and I think at a popular level too. I didn't want to make the essay too massive so I decided to just focus on this root.
But not on the right. I have to disagree. When rightist criticise Israel it always seems to me piggy-backing off leftist moral outrage, and coming after antisemitism has already developed from other sources.
There is plenty of complaints double standards, how Israel gets to have border enforcement and close itself to islamic immigration whilst western Jews call for mass migration, but that latter is the prime complaint.
Because ultimately, it doesn't matter much directly for the future of Europe of the United States wether western countries support Israel or drop it.
The domestic political winds are a thousand times more important.
Most antisemitism today seems more motivated by conspiracism, which today has become something of an ideology in its own right. I doubt that Candice Owens or Jake Shields would even be able to read "Culture of Critique," let alone understand it.
> I asked ChatGPT to estimate for me the percentage of Jews within the CPUSA in the 1930's
The 1920s should be of more interest. After January 30, 1933, anyone who was awake should have been able to figure out that the future of Europe was going to be decided by a conflict between Hitler and Stalin. This was how a German Protestant like Klaus Fuchs ended up with the Communist Party. He had been a Social Democrat until 1932 when the SPD was being denounced as "social fascist" by the KPD which claimed that Hitler coming to power would help the revolution. Klaus Fuchs and some others from the KPD were still forming contacts because they saw that an alliance between the KPD and SPD was the only way to keep the NSDAP from coming to power. Fuchs was expelled from the SPD over this and eventually became a Soviet agent.
Though only a small minority of US Jews ever actually joined the CPUSA, many of those who did were certainly influenced by Hitler, and many of those who did not nonetheless felt a need to advocate for an alliance with the USSR. This was certainly to the way that White pogroms in the Russian Civil War many people to support the Red Army. You would do better to gather about the late 1920s and early 1930s when the Whites had been clearly defeated and Hitler had not yet come to power.
Well, you could've looked that up yourself, but again here ChatGPT:
"For most of the early–mid 1920s, historians generally estimate:
Roughly 40–50% of CPUSA members were Jewish,
With especially high concentrations in New York City and other immigrant urban centers.
By contrast, in the 1930s (especially during the Popular Front period), the percentage likely declined somewhat as the party broadened beyond immigrant communities."
So no, Jews didn't flock to Communism due to Hitler.
If anything the earlier CPUSA was even more Jewish, they were seemingly slightly earlier to the party.
Another indication that this was clearly not a response to Hitler is the fact Russian/eastern European Jews were far more highly represented in the CPUSA than German Jews were.
There certainly would have been higher numbers (as opposed to percentages) in the 1930s than in the 1920s.
> Another indication that this was clearly not a response to Hitler is the fact Russian/eastern European Jews were far more highly represented in the CPUSA than German Jews were.
In light of the fact that Hitler's target for living space was Russia, this isn't much of an indication of anything either way. Someone like Harry Dexter White was born of Lithuanian Jews and played the leading role in setting up the Bretton Woods Agreements. The latter were regarded by Soviet authorities as a threat by the capitalist world against the USSR. White was clearly not driven by Marxism-Leninism, but rather by a view that the USSR was Hitler's main opponent.
This was solid. I'm not great at reading more theoretical stuff (tried listening to Arendt audiobook on the subject totally went over my head) so I couldn't really offer any additions even if I tried, but very readable and digestible. I still just think its overall a meme and Christianity defined the Jew a certain way that stuck more so than the pagan did or would have, but its certainly not all just "Christ killer" stuff.
Hey thanks man. Will say that Arendt's book is annoying to read through because of the style of writing, very philosophical/contemplative and it can be hard to know what exactly she's even arguing at parts. I haven't read the entire thing either though.
I conceptualize a religion as a meme that is subjected to evolutionary pressure. I think that anti-semitism exists because if there wasn't some conflict between Jews and gentiles than the meme of Judaism would have been interbred out a long time ago. This seems to be happening in modern America with high intermarriage rates and little genuine anti-semitism. One can debate if the Jew meme causes conflict because of bad things about Jews or gentiles, but I think that is the core of it.
South India, I think, is a good example of a place with a multi-millennial history of significant Jewish presence and no anti-semitism at all.
The endogamy norm is probably enough to keep Jews separate. Significant outmarriage events are fine and survivable because they generally leave a more committed core.
There are today two divergent and incompatible people groups who both claim the label "Jew". Antisemitism against one group, antisemitism against the other group, and antisemitism against both at once each require unique explanations.
While you've shown that the reasons for antisemitism used to change over time, now they also change over location.
>> To finish Arendt’s quote: “just as antisemites understandably desire to escape responsibility for their deeds, so Jews, attacked and on the defensive, even more understandably do not wish under any circumstances to discuss their share of responsibility.” <<
I’m afraid this might be true. There’s something that Jews have been carrying for millennia that, when first introduced, was truly novel, creative, insightful, and potentially world-changing. Over time, that “something” has become a source of tension and violence. I call it Narrative Darwinism: https://outofbabel.substack.com/p/my-unified-theory-of-anti-semitism >> Is it dumb? Short-sighted? Derivative? Self-serving? Any and all comments and criticisms would be welcome.
It could just be due to resentment by the majority population at their disproportionate influence and hostility towards the culture and identity of whatever society they reside in or at best, indifference to it. Another factor could be Jewish attitudes and behavior which never seems to be cited as a possible factor. Hostility between groups often exists because of divergent economic, social, cultural, and political interests.
You know my opinion that we should just not call anything before 1800, and certainly nothing before the Rhineland massacres, antisemitism so I won't belabour it. However, I think that antisemitism today can be explained in the same way that gold was money for most of history.
a) Not everything can be money. Raisins don't last long enough, diamonds aren't fungible, iron weighs too much per unit of value.
b) Once gold is money, it's just easiest to use that money instead of inventing your own money and trying to get everyone else to use it.
So, similarly, there is a demand for resentment-conspiracy politics, and (a) there aren't a limitless numbers of groups that can fill the role and (b) anti-semitism already exits and has a substantial literature. I think that fully explains the tendency of conspiracy politics to converge on anti-semitism over time, as one of the commenters noted.
I'd somehow missed your 2024 piece on antisemitism but it's excellent and doesn't surprise me we had basically the same point to make about the debate, though I'm personally fine leaving antisemitism as the generic term insofar as its definition is kept generic and basically content-less (although maybe it's true the existence of such a term encourages people to fill out its content in silly ways)
I need to self-publicise more.
I think that the Jews tend to overfixate on their own suffering because their religion, like Christianity, tends to conflate suffering and persecution with righteousness. Christians were obsessed with the Roman persecutions after their religion was endorsed by the state the way that secular Jews are with the Holocaust. There are many ridiculous and exaggerated stories and hagiography.
Absolutely they both come out of the same martyrological tradition. Was actually thinking of comparing Christian exaggerations of the early Roman persecutions to Jewish exaggerations of Chmelnitsky because they're broadly similar, though I think the lachrymose stuff is probably true for a lot of ethnic/religious history-telling. I came across Sefer Zekhirah looking into the blood libel which documents the first German libels and it's literally just a list of persecutions of Jews for remembrance. Baron wrote all about that kind of thing.
Show me texts where Judaism conflates suffering with righteousness. Texts that are not from the Crusades.
Exodus
I asked for quotes.
There's no need for specific quotes, it's inherent and implicit in the entire story that the Jews are righteous because they are persecuted and persecuted because they are righteous. This is all throughout the Old Testament.
The origin story of the Jewish people (Abraham) is not one of persecution. It is on monotheism and belief in one God. The main story of Genesis is that the non expected son gets the birthright. This goes through several generations. Jews do emerge from slavery on Egypt the emphasis is on freedom and faith. Not on persecution.
You are way over simplifying.
And throughout the whole Old Testament the Jews are persecuted for their religion and their belief in one God. The two are interwoven.
I would agree with cautioning against seeing Anti-Semitism as some uniquely abominable form of prejudice or one uniquely able to give us lessons about humanity.
But the thing that always messes with me is how uniquely deranged it almost always ends up being, especially nowadays. It's one thing to be like 'I don't like those people/don't trust those people', but when someone is blaming Israel for 9/11 or JFK, or saying the Holocaust never happened (and not like other genocide denial which is usually a lot of whataboutism or technical legalisms but fully negating that anything happened), this is just not something that feels normal compared to other groups. The $7000 thing is one of them - it would be utterly mad to imagine literally any other country paying you 7k for a Twitter post (why would you even use a high figure given a low figure would be more embarassing?) but when people see the word Israel there is a level of mental collapse that I've never seen except people talking about countries they're at war with.
I doubt it was always like this, but it feels like Anti-Semitism (owing to Jewish longevity) has just accumulated so many different layers and expressions that the final modern product is almost like the Swiss Army Knife of prejudice - there are so many expressions of it that it can be used for practically any scenario. And with that countless lurid images that simply overwhelm and break the conspiratorial mind.
The 9/11 Truther phenomenon I think is pretty interesting case in point. I was actually a Truther back in the day as a kid and back then there was very little about Israel (the 4000 Jews thing was widely ignored by basically every big Western conspiracist). Silverstein was mentioned but his Jewishness wasn't dwelled upon (to the best of my memory - I didn't even know it was a Jewish name). After Bush went the movement collapsed and obviously I grew a brain but now whenever I see Truthers, 100% of them pin Israel for being the guys behind it. The Dancing Israelis stuff was relatively niche back in the day, now it's literally everywhere, even outside Truther circles.
The point is that Anti-Semitism shows up in places that no other prejudice really shows up at least in the same way - it's so seemingly uniquely deranging that it makes itself more fascinating than it otherwise should be.
There's almost certainly truth to the idea that antisemitism at some point grew its own legs, conspiracy types are drawn to the Jews partly because there's so much baggage there already. The reason antisemitism is so conspiratorial is because it's a type of anti-elite minority prejudice. You can't plausibly blame like blacks or Arabs for controlling world events, so prejudice against those groups takes on different forms.
This is in large part true but I'd argue since the Gulf Monarchies got wealthy in the 70s etc you could easily come up with 'Arabs are behind it' for random events. There were shades of this 10-20 years ago when people alleged Saudi Arabian involvement in 9/11 and nowadays you may start seeing this with Qatar. But I've never seen things like blaming Charlie Kirk's assassination on Qatar.
The Illuminati also receive a ton of blame in conspiracy theories, which is impressive even compared to Jews considering they haven't existed for centuries.
To be fair, if one is going to postulate a 911-conspiracy which involves explosives having been planted in the Towers, then it makes the most sense to look at Larry Silverstein and his Israeli connections.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220526200935/https://www.haaretz.com/2001-11-21/ty-article/up-in-smoke/0000017f-dc11-d856-a37f-fdd16fb20000
-----
Shortly after the events of September 11, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called Larry Silverstein, a Jewish real estate magnate in New York, the owner of the World Trade Center's 110-story Twin Towers and a close friend, to ask how he was. Since then they have spoken a few more times. Two former prime ministers - Benjamin Netanyahu, who this week called Silverstein a "friend," and Ehud Barak, whom Silverstein in the past offered a job as his representative in Israel - also called soon after the disaster. Yaakov Terner, the mayor of Be'er Sheva, sent a letter of condolence...
The ascension to power of Benjamin Netanyahu opened a new chapter in the saga. Silverstein is left-leaning in his political views - he supports the Democratic Party - but after despairing of Rabin and Peres, he believed that Netanyahu, whom he called a hero of the free market, would push the project forward.
The two have been on friendly terms since Netanyahu's stint as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. For years they kept in close touch. Every Sunday afternoon, New York time, Netanyahu would call Silverstein.
-----
Nothing in the above link allows us to conclude "controlled demolition!" However, if one starts out convinced that bombs planted by insiders brought the buildings down, then it makes sense to look at Silverstein and the people that he was friendly. For 2 years, 2003-5, I was convinced of "controlled demolition" and therefore accepted the view that Silverstein being tied in with Sharon and Netanyahu must have had something to do with it. As soon as I lost my conviction in the bombs-in-buildings-scenario, I also lost any belief in Silverstein's importance.
There certainly have been a lot of dumb arguments made around Silverstein since I was a 911truther. One of the dumbest is "Silverstein stayed home from work that day." Although it's true that he stayed home and was saved, it's also true that Adolf Hitler survived George Elser's November 8, 1939, assassination attempt just through sheer luck. Hitler was supposed to give a 2-hour speech, but he truncated it because fog forced him to travel by train instead of plane. He left the site 13 minutes before the bomb exploded. Pure coincidence, but something could have altered the whole history of World War II.
Yeah, I think antisemitism is unique in that it often (though not always) turns into an all-consuming vortex of insanity, not just about Jews but about the entirety of 20th/21st-century history and society.
Let me offer a different angle on modern antisemitism.
I have spent plenty of time on those corners of the internet which are rife with it, namely far-right internet forums, and have felt the draw of antisemitic ideas.
The main complaint in these circles is about leftism corroding western civilization.
Communism, intersectional feminism, critical race theory, and in particular everything to do with mass migration is the focus of the modern right's ire. (Justifiably imho)
Antisemitism can flow from these attitudes because people associate leftism with Jews.
Actual Jewish overrepresentation provides the basis for the association.
This is true now, (though less so in Europe for obvious reason) and it was true between 1870-1945.
I asked ChatGPT to estimate for me the percentage of Jews within the CPUSA in the 1930's. It gave me a figure of between 30-50%.
Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf to have grown antisemitic in Vienna when he started noticing that all the leftist newspapers opposed to his politics were run by Jews.
Now how this recognition of a true pattern turns into schizophrenic protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-type theories of Jewish plots for control of the world is a harder thing to explain, in requires some psychology perhaps, but the underlying political pattern is real.
'I asked ChatGPT to estimate for me the percentage of Jews within the CPUSA in the 1930's. It gave me a figure of between 30-50%.'
As Harry Hopkins pointed out, this made the CPUSA much less influential than it would otherwise have been. Most western countries have had large communist parties that have sometimes been part of coalition governments, or at least been an electoral threat to other leftist parties. Nothing remotely like that in the US. It's a bit like how if a posh school takes too many Chinese students, it loses status and eventually even Chinese people don't want to go there. In this case, with Jews you lose.
Not exactly my point. I mentioned the Jewish figure in the CPUSA to highlight the reality of severe Jewish overrepresentation in far-left circles.
Sure, I'm just sperging out, but actually there's a serious point. What is the significance of this fact (and all related facts)? Is the US more communists than other western countries that have less Jewish influence? Is it more influenced by the far left generally?
The significance of that fact is that the right wing anti-Semite's associating of Jews with leftism is correct to a significant degree.
Now as in the 1930's.
The large existing corpus of antisemitic literature perhaps provides the basis for the grand conspiracy theories, but the initial opposition to Jews in the minds of modern right-wing antisemites would not have been formed had Jews not been overrepresented in politics&media, or it would have been at least quite a bit less had that overrepresentation been more equally distributed across the political spectrum.
I understand that, but if it has a small effect on your society, or actually impeded the progress of communism, then why would you get steamed up about it?
Leftism itself obviously has no small effect on society.
Would leftism itself be more effective if it wasn't so Jewish? I doubt that but even if it were, that is completely besides the point. I'm trying to explain why right wing antisemitism exists from the late 19th century untill today. And the possibility of Jews actually impeding communism is basically impossible to gage from the outside. All that can be readily observed is the toxic cultural and political waste flowing from the far left, and the suspiciously large number of Jews amongst the ranks of that political faction.
Whatever Harry Hopkins thought is completely irrelevant here.
Besides the CPUSA was just an illustrative example, I knew there would be decent data on it and the numbers of Jewish members. Chatgpt gives a figure of 15-30% of leadership figures for the KPD in Germany.
Also this is why antisemitism reared it's head again in the latter 19th century, it downstream from the democratisation that got going especially post 1848. Political differences didn't differentiate Jews before.
Definitely true Jewish leftism is the big issue for diehard neo-Nazis online but I think most antisemitism currently gets its appeal from Zionism, even on the right with dual loyalty. That really seems to be the most motivating issue for a lot of people nowadays. I ofc grant it used to be a much bigger cause of antisemitism but my understanding is that was more of a 20th-century thing. Antisemitism from the Hep Hep riots (as Katz argues) to its more formal (and political) emergence w coverage of the 1873 crash and depression I think was fundamentally motivated by points about Jewish assimilation and role in the stock markets/economic elite, that's where the debate was at intellectually if you read the major documents from like Treitschke and Stoecker and I think at a popular level too. I didn't want to make the essay too massive so I decided to just focus on this root.
On the left Zionism is the big thing of course.
They basically see it as European colonialism.
But not on the right. I have to disagree. When rightist criticise Israel it always seems to me piggy-backing off leftist moral outrage, and coming after antisemitism has already developed from other sources.
There is plenty of complaints double standards, how Israel gets to have border enforcement and close itself to islamic immigration whilst western Jews call for mass migration, but that latter is the prime complaint.
Because ultimately, it doesn't matter much directly for the future of Europe of the United States wether western countries support Israel or drop it.
The domestic political winds are a thousand times more important.
Most antisemitism today seems more motivated by conspiracism, which today has become something of an ideology in its own right. I doubt that Candice Owens or Jake Shields would even be able to read "Culture of Critique," let alone understand it.
Conspiracy is the result, not the cause. It's doesn't work as the cause because you're stuck with the question: why the Jews?
Why not the Jesuits? Or homosexuals?
I think that it's the cause. 'The Jews' are like crack for conspiritard.
You know, Lenin and Stalin were Jewish.
> I asked ChatGPT to estimate for me the percentage of Jews within the CPUSA in the 1930's
The 1920s should be of more interest. After January 30, 1933, anyone who was awake should have been able to figure out that the future of Europe was going to be decided by a conflict between Hitler and Stalin. This was how a German Protestant like Klaus Fuchs ended up with the Communist Party. He had been a Social Democrat until 1932 when the SPD was being denounced as "social fascist" by the KPD which claimed that Hitler coming to power would help the revolution. Klaus Fuchs and some others from the KPD were still forming contacts because they saw that an alliance between the KPD and SPD was the only way to keep the NSDAP from coming to power. Fuchs was expelled from the SPD over this and eventually became a Soviet agent.
Though only a small minority of US Jews ever actually joined the CPUSA, many of those who did were certainly influenced by Hitler, and many of those who did not nonetheless felt a need to advocate for an alliance with the USSR. This was certainly to the way that White pogroms in the Russian Civil War many people to support the Red Army. You would do better to gather about the late 1920s and early 1930s when the Whites had been clearly defeated and Hitler had not yet come to power.
Well, you could've looked that up yourself, but again here ChatGPT:
"For most of the early–mid 1920s, historians generally estimate:
Roughly 40–50% of CPUSA members were Jewish,
With especially high concentrations in New York City and other immigrant urban centers.
By contrast, in the 1930s (especially during the Popular Front period), the percentage likely declined somewhat as the party broadened beyond immigrant communities."
So no, Jews didn't flock to Communism due to Hitler.
If anything the earlier CPUSA was even more Jewish, they were seemingly slightly earlier to the party.
Another indication that this was clearly not a response to Hitler is the fact Russian/eastern European Jews were far more highly represented in the CPUSA than German Jews were.
There certainly would have been higher numbers (as opposed to percentages) in the 1930s than in the 1920s.
> Another indication that this was clearly not a response to Hitler is the fact Russian/eastern European Jews were far more highly represented in the CPUSA than German Jews were.
In light of the fact that Hitler's target for living space was Russia, this isn't much of an indication of anything either way. Someone like Harry Dexter White was born of Lithuanian Jews and played the leading role in setting up the Bretton Woods Agreements. The latter were regarded by Soviet authorities as a threat by the capitalist world against the USSR. White was clearly not driven by Marxism-Leninism, but rather by a view that the USSR was Hitler's main opponent.
This was solid. I'm not great at reading more theoretical stuff (tried listening to Arendt audiobook on the subject totally went over my head) so I couldn't really offer any additions even if I tried, but very readable and digestible. I still just think its overall a meme and Christianity defined the Jew a certain way that stuck more so than the pagan did or would have, but its certainly not all just "Christ killer" stuff.
Hey thanks man. Will say that Arendt's book is annoying to read through because of the style of writing, very philosophical/contemplative and it can be hard to know what exactly she's even arguing at parts. I haven't read the entire thing either though.
The GOAT
I conceptualize a religion as a meme that is subjected to evolutionary pressure. I think that anti-semitism exists because if there wasn't some conflict between Jews and gentiles than the meme of Judaism would have been interbred out a long time ago. This seems to be happening in modern America with high intermarriage rates and little genuine anti-semitism. One can debate if the Jew meme causes conflict because of bad things about Jews or gentiles, but I think that is the core of it.
South India, I think, is a good example of a place with a multi-millennial history of significant Jewish presence and no anti-semitism at all.
The endogamy norm is probably enough to keep Jews separate. Significant outmarriage events are fine and survivable because they generally leave a more committed core.
There are today two divergent and incompatible people groups who both claim the label "Jew". Antisemitism against one group, antisemitism against the other group, and antisemitism against both at once each require unique explanations.
While you've shown that the reasons for antisemitism used to change over time, now they also change over location.
What do you make of Philo’s description of the situation in Alexandria in 38 A.D.?
Fascinating piece. One question…
>> To finish Arendt’s quote: “just as antisemites understandably desire to escape responsibility for their deeds, so Jews, attacked and on the defensive, even more understandably do not wish under any circumstances to discuss their share of responsibility.” <<
I’m afraid this might be true. There’s something that Jews have been carrying for millennia that, when first introduced, was truly novel, creative, insightful, and potentially world-changing. Over time, that “something” has become a source of tension and violence. I call it Narrative Darwinism: https://outofbabel.substack.com/p/my-unified-theory-of-anti-semitism >> Is it dumb? Short-sighted? Derivative? Self-serving? Any and all comments and criticisms would be welcome.
It could just be due to resentment by the majority population at their disproportionate influence and hostility towards the culture and identity of whatever society they reside in or at best, indifference to it. Another factor could be Jewish attitudes and behavior which never seems to be cited as a possible factor. Hostility between groups often exists because of divergent economic, social, cultural, and political interests.
Already addressed in the section on Modern Antisemitism
What about the relationship between jews and porn?
Rabbi Telushkin and Prager answered this question decades ago.