On the off chance you hadn’t noticed, the world appears to be at an especially precarious moment presently. Obviously, war continues to rage in Ukraine and Gaza, with no end in sight to either conflict. Great Britain and Japan are currently in recession. Canada’s economy is an absolute disaster, with almost no hope of near-term recovery. Much of continental Europe and China are struggling economically, if not officially contracting. Some experts believe that the global economy more generally is sliding, slowly but surely, into recession. The only economic bright spot in the world is the United States, and even here we have our problems with consumer spending and sentiment, massive credit concerns, and inarguably sticky inflation.
Meanwhile, China is investing in and winning friends, and influencing people in the Global South. U.S.-backed Kurdish leaders are warning that ISIS is resurgent in Syria and Iraq. The Marine general in charge of U.S. Africa Command is warning of Russia’s increasing influence on that continent. Sudan remains mired in civil war. Nigeria is plagued by Islamist terrorism and mass kidnappings. Mexico is in the midst of a full-blown war with the drug cartels, who continue to grow bolder and more militarily sophisticated.
Everywhere one looks, chaos reigns—or, at the very least, bubbles just below the surface.
Perhaps most telling among the signs of disarray is the unnerving rise of antisemitism in the United States, Europe, and throughout the world. Antisemitism, in general, has been intensifying, slowly but surely, over the last decade or so. Over the last few months, however, it has emerged fully into the open, undaunted and unembarrassed. What was once considered shameful and disconcerting is now warmly welcomed as a “rational” response to American foreign policy, Israeli war practices, “colonialism,” and “white privilege.”
All of this is troubling, to put it mildly, both in and of itself and as a harbinger of greater and more deadly global unrest.
Hatred of and anger toward Jews is not the same as other forms of bigotry. In many ways, the history of Western anti-Jewish hatred mirrors the history of Western political chaos and collapse. Or, to put it another way, historically, Jews are not only the perennial scapegoats during periods of social upheaval and displacement, but resurgent anti-Semitism serves as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the rise of revolutionary movements.
In his classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the British historian Norman Cohn argues that the Jewish diaspora generally fit comfortably, if tentatively into European society for most of the first thousand years or so A.D., and only became a hated and perpetually persecuted minority with the rise of utopian Millenarianism that accompanied and then outlived the Crusades. Beginning then and continuing for the next nearly a thousand years, Europeans came to associate Jews with the antichrist and thus to associate hatred and persecution of Jews with preparing the battlespace for the Second Coming. Many historians, including Hannah Arendt, believed that the anti-Semitism that was such an integral part of the West’s 20th-century collapse into totalitarianism was relatively new and, in any case, distinct from medieval anti-Semitism. Cohn’s history suggests otherwise, connecting the religious eschatology of medieval Europe to the quasi-religious eschatology of post-Enlightenment Europe, thereby connecting the persistence of Western anti-Semitism as well.
Cohn tells us that millenarian moments and the millenarian movements that capitalize on those moments all share a common group of characteristics. They all appear under certain social and economic conditions. They all appeal to a certain segment of the population at large, who then present themselves as economic, spiritual, and political leaders. They all utilize scapegoats, meaning that they all identify a different, usually much smaller segment of the population on whom they can blame all the world’s ills and then set about to cure those ills through the elimination of the scapegoat. And more often than not, that scapegoat tends to be Jewish.
In the conclusion to the second edition of Pursuit of the Millennium, Cohn notes that the millenarian fervor of the middle ages may have changed, but it never really died, and it maintained its common characteristics even as it became secular or “quasi-religious.” He wrote:
The story told in Pursuit of the Millennium ended some four centuries ago but is not without relevance to our own times. [I have] shown in another work [Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion] how closely the Nazi phantasy of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy of destruction is related to the phantasies that inspired Emico of Leningrad and the Master of Hungary; and how mass disorientation and insecurity have fostered the demonization of the Jew in this as in much earlier centuries. The parallels and indeed the continuity are incontestable.
The parallels between the rise of Nazism and the current global unrest and demonization of the Jewish people are also largely incontestable. The election that brought Hitler to power didn’t happen in a vacuum, after all. It happened in the midst of global chaos, namely the Great Depression. It also followed the decadence and distortion of the Weimer Era. As the New York Fed has shown, even a global pandemic—the 1919 Spanish Flu outbreak—contributed to the sense of discomfort and disconnect among the German population, prompting increased support for Hitler and his Nazis.
The present global chaos doesn’t have to end the same way the chaos of a century ago did. It doesn’t have to result in the ascension of millenarian ideologies and their totalitarian defenders. History has shown that extremism can be short-circuited and radical ideologies undone. The first step in doing so, however, must be to bring an end to the rationalization of the persecution of the world’s Jews. The second step is to end the persecution itself. Antisemitism is ugly and shameful, and it must be treated as such. For their sake and ours.
Antisemitism is thriving among the political classes and especially among those who have control of the levers of power. The American colleges and universities, where DEI flourishes, are ostentatiously antisemitic and do so without fear of media reprisals which, itself, reflects something seriously wrong with American and European journalism. How soon after October 7 did it take for the pendulum to swing the other way? But what is most concerning and disheartening is that antisemitism is, not only ignored but, actually, supported by many self-hating Jews such as George Soros, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders who, today, are actively seeking to change the Israeli political leadership just the way they did in America in 2020 and will attempt to do so again, in 2024, not just because they fear retribution from sanity, and a functional legal system, but because they so much also fear and loathe Donald Trump’s solid support for the Netanyahu Administration.
At least two-thirds of American Jews will support Joe Biden whose Administration is openly hostile to the war efforts of Israel under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. The support for the Iranian nuclear efforts are as least as genocidal as was the Nazi Holocaust extermination efforts. No one should forget that it was the NY Times, operated by the Sulzberger Family, which was always far more influential than the Rockefeller family, that was fully aware of what Nazi Germany was doing, yet virtually ignored the coverage.
Antisemitism will stop when powerful media moguls, which also includes those in Hollywood, who are Jewish, use their talents to end the discrimination, bias and prejudice they harbor against people who are on the side of, not only Israel but, also, America’s Constitution and Founding principles and who are as far removed from Marxism and antisemitism as Donald Trump is from Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer.
Americans - and the world - need to be aware that “anti-Semitism” is a term invented by a Jewish intellectual in the mid-1800s who was involved in debate with a fellow Orientalist over Semitic language. Jews seized it as a weapon and have been using it ever since. The current issue is not antisemitism, it’s anti-Zionism, which dates back to the early 20th Century when Russian and Ukrainian Jews started migrating to Palestine. The world doesn’t hate Jews, Jews just think it does.
I disagree with the author to a point. It’s Christians who are the most persecuted group in the world. One need only review the eradication of Christians throughout the Middle East by America - yes, George Bush successfully managed that. More recently, Russian Orthodox Christians in Ukraine are being eliminated. Yet, none of that gets barely a mention here and elsewhere in the Conservative Net. I think perhaps when major religions have weak or subversive leadership, as, for example, the Catholic Church does now, it invites attacks on those groups. I believe many Jews are not religious, just as many Christians are not particularly devout. I hope this serves as a wake-up call to them.