Why are Japanese hated? Why are Gypsies hated? Why are blacks hated? Why are Nazis hated? Why are Muslims hated? Why are Seventh-Day Adventists hated? Why are whites hated? Why are Chinese hated? Why are Jews hated?
All groups are engaged in a struggle for survival and when another group threatens your group, your rational reaction is to hate it.
Jews are hated for the same reasons that other groups are hated — because they are a threat or a competition to somebody else. For instance, it would be a very weird and unhealthy Arab or Muslim who does not have some negative feelings about Jews because of the Jewish state of Israel occupying land they believe belongs to them. It would be a weird Christian who does not have some negative feelings about Jews given that Christianity came from Judaism and yet Jews resist its claims.
I love the quote at the top of my website: “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”
The more intensely you identify with your group, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about out-groups. That’s why Jews fear when non-Jews develop their racial, religious and national identities. A strongly racial or specifically Christian or nationalistic America is likely to be less friendly to Jews than a multi-cultural multi-racial America.
Are the Jews “absolutely righteous, or are they also partly to blame for the calamities they have suffered?”
This is a disturbing question, one that is at the root of Jewish existence in a world that is not always supportive. It’s a question that can be asked about Jews in general, like Talmon did, and one that can also be asked, more particularly, in reference to the state of Israel. This is so because today’s Anti-Semites do not present ‘the Jews’ as the official cause for their hatred – that designation is reserved for the state of Israel, its policies, its actions, its attitude. In that sense, Israel is a disappointing country, but there’s a certain element of relief in this disappointment. Israel is disappointing because it hasn’t solved the problem of antisemitism. On the other hand, there is some relief in that: it gives us evidence that the Jews are not to blame for antisemitism.
Like many of the anti-Semites, the early Zionist leaders had a tendency to put a lot of blame on the Jews themselves when they tried to explain the roots of the hatred they faced. Micha Josef Berdyczewski blamed their insistence on “the ethics of the book” instead of “the ethics of the sword.” Their submissiveness, their meekness, their piousness, the fact that they had become, in the words of Herzl, “unable to assimilate completely” – all of these are reasons for the hatred of the people among which they dwelled. Early Zionism hoped to cure the world of the malady of antisemitism by a chirurgical procedure – an operation that would separate between the Jews and their haters. The moment they are separated, so the theory went, the Jews will be cured of the illness of the diaspora and the non-Jews will be cured of the illness of antisemitism.
