An atheist Jew distinguishes between religious and racial anti-Semitism

The Times Literary Supplement has an excerpt from David Baddiel’s new book The God Desire, which was just published. I’d previously criticized one of his ideas raised in that book: a criticism of the New Atheists who, he says, can’t really comprehend the comforts of religion because they’re all goys. (Well, he admits Sam Harris is half Jewish, as was Christopher Hitchens, and I’m 100% full-blooded Ashkenazi. And of course there’s David Silverman.)  Baddiel is an atheist, and, like many of us secular Jews, is proud to belong to the tribe. (He’s a lot prouder of it than I am.) He argues that being a cultural Jew absolutely depends on the religion, which itself is a kind of cushion that, though we reject it, confers on us membership in the tribe.  Goyische atheists like Dawkins, he asserts, don’t have that comfort. (I would disagree, for Dawkins has written eloquently about the awe he feels before stuff like evensongs and cathedrals.)

And I’ve also praised Baddiel’s movie on “progressive” anti-Semitism, “Jews Don’t Count,” which I saw.

But now, after reading this lovely extract from the TLS, I have to back off on criticizing the book, which of course I haven’t yet read. For the long extract contains a percipient analysis of the difference between anti-Semites who hate Jews because of their religion, and anti-Semites who hate Jews because of their “race” (i.e., just because they’re Jews).

Unless you have a subscription, or make a judicious inquiry, you won’t be able to read it, as the TLS is paywalled. If you want to try, click below:

Apparently Tom Stoppard, who himself is Jewish but doesn’t make a big megillah out of it, just wrote a play, “Leopoldstadt” about being Jewish, a play that brought Baddiel, the atheist, to tears. It also got him thinking about the nature of anti-Semitism. I’m going to give a long quote from his piece, but if you can, do read the whole excerpt—or better yet, the book. Baddiel’s decided that racial anti-Semitism has always been inextricably connected with religious anti-Semitism, though the latter form was more dominant in earlier days, the days when Jews were despised as Christ-killers.  I love the bit below about his stroll to Clifford’s Tower:

Because, in a way that I’m not sure is entirely graspable to the majority, being in a minority will always be part of your identity. In a TV interview that I did recently with Miriam Margolyes, she talked about her need publicly to condemn the actions of the State of Israel, and about how that urge arises partly from her sense of connection to that country, because she is Jewish. A sense, that is, that she needs to say, “Not in my name”. I pointed out that when a white Christian man in America goes on a gun rampage, I never see white Christians – even if they may express horror about the atrocity itself – feeling any need to express that horror as white Christians. It would not occur to them, because the shooter’s actions, or, say, Putin’s, do not, it seems, reflect on them. The majority is felt as a vast sea, whereas minorities are a series of islands on which all members of each minority are felt to live, and each individual’s behaviour threatens the possibility of judgement, a judgement that will be cast on the entire island.

In my writings about antisemitism, I have always made it clear that I believe antisemitism is racism, rather than simply religious intolerance. This is a cornerstone of my argument about what modern antisemitism is.

But I have inserted an adjective there that I don’t – and didn’t in Jews Don’t Count– normally apply to the word antisemitism: modern. It is arguable that the idea of racial antisemitism only really began in the late nineteenth century, when the word antisemitism was coined by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, and various fashionable ideas of racial stratification coincided with the theory of eugenics, creating a host of really very bad philosophies and movements. Obviously, it – racial antisemitism, as opposed to religious – became dominant in the twentieth century, culminating in the Holocaust, and similarly I have no doubt that antisemitism is now predominantly racial.

However, sometimes, when I’m talking about the way in which antisemitism is overlooked or demoted in the present high-trigger awareness of discrimination in general, I do say, “Despite, y’know, two thousand years of persecution.” So if I was to force myself under my own linguistic microscope, I’d point out that there is a flaw in my argument here, or at least a bifurcation. Because Jews, you might say, have not been subjected to two thousand years of racial persecution. Most of that time, it would have been religious. Most of it was entirely about them praying to the wrong God.

Or was it, in truth? I played York Opera House in 2021 with my comedy show about trolls (a fair bit of which is about antisemitism). Before the show, I walked, as I have done before, to Clifford’s Tower, where, in 1190, 150 Jews – fathers, mothers and children – committed suicide rather than convert to Christianity, as a baying mob outside were demanding. The tower was set on fire. (The one I was looking at – described, interestingly, as a “beloved” monument – was built on the same site soon afterwards.)

That’s religious antisemitism, right? Well. Not exactly. Because a few Jews did decide, rather than die, to go outside and accept conversion. (I would’ve been one of those Jews.) They were immediately murdered by the mob. Which expresses the same point I’ve made before, many times: that I’m an atheist, but the Gestapo would shoot me tomorrow. The issue for the mob was not really that these Jews inside the tower didn’t believe in Jesus. The issue was that they were Jews – a race portrayed as devils on every church wall, resented as moneylenders and suspected of the blood libel. I would contend that Jews have always been positioned as alien and monstrous and vampiric by the various majority cultures they have tried to live within.

Even before the nineteenth century, religious antisemitism had always contained elements of racial antisemitism. Which might partly explain why I responded as I did to watching Leopoldstadt. I don’t believe in God. That perhaps is clear by now. But it is simplistic to imagine that because I don’t believe in God, my Jewish identity can be easily excised from Judaism.

Jews are not, of course a “race” in any sense, for what unites them is not genetic similarity (which is the basis of ethnicity) but an association with religious belief, even if you don’t share that belief. “Race” is just a shorthand for “being Jewish”.

As I’ve said before, it’s not just that you’re in a minority that makes being Jewish—regardless of whether you’re religious—like being a member of a club. It’s also the history of that minority, which for Jews has been persecution everywhere they’ve ever lived. It’s the constancy of that persecution, and the feeling that the next pogrom is right around the corner, that gives you your Jewish card.  Muslims may be persecuted in some places now, but they weren’t everywhere and in every time.

That’s also the case for Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, or just about any other religion. Their history is not an unrelenting history of persecution.

And, as I think about it, yes, it’s the religious trappings that also make you feel like you’re in the club: the feeling that you have a deeper understanding of Yiddish and especially of the guilt and pessimism, combined with dark humor, that is part of the “Jewish character”. (Why else do you think the majority of great comedians were Jews?) So I suppose that, while I completely reject Jewish religious belief, I still feel a twinge in my DNA when I see an old bearded guy with a tallis and a fur hat.

There are not cultural Catholics, Muslims, or Hindus in the way there are cultural Jews. Yes, there may be some ex-Catholics who eat fish on Fridays because it makes them feel like a member of the Vatican Club, but these people are much, much rarer than cultural, secular Jews. (Which, by the way, include most of the residents of Israel: 65% of whom are nonbelievers. It’s one of the most secular countries in the world.)

Given this, if you are an “anti-Zionist”, you must be criticizing people not because they’re religious, but because they are “racially” Jewish. It’s been clear to me for some time, though it took a while to realize it, that Baddiel is right: at bottom, most people who are opposed to Israel feel that way not because of its government policies, or because of Netanyahu (after all, there were far more liberal Prime Ministers than he , like David Ben-Gurion or Golda Meir, but Israel has remained constant as the special object of opprobrium. Now, it seems, almost all anti-Semitism is racial anti-Semitism, as the “Christ killer” trope has simply lost its force.

So why is there so much racial anti-Semitism?  There are the stereotypes of money-grubbing, power-hungry Jews, of course, but I don’t think that explains it.  Perhaps it’s because it’s simply taught from one generation to the next, as the song in South Pacific attests. But why did it get started this way?

I’m not expert on this, but I will read Baddiel’s book, and perhaps Bari Weiss’s book How to Fight Anti-Semitism has more analysis.  It’s when I see people go after Israel without knowing anything about its history or even the issue they’re discussing, and when I see academics flock to embrace the BDS movement, which is explicitly anti-Semitic, or hear people shout, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (which of course means “no more Jews in Israel”; it’s an encouragement for genocide”), that I realize that many, many people simply don’t like jews because they’re Jews. They can’t say that openly, of course, so they gussy up their bigotry with a lot of ignorant political arguments and slogans, idiotic statements about “apartheid”, and adherence to a movement whose roots they know nothing about. It is clear that, among countries of the world, Israel is held to standards much different from any other land. UN resolution after UN resolution condemns Israel, but is largely silent on North Korea or Iran. Why do you suppose that is?

In the end, I guess I don’t really understand anti-Semitism. The rationale for it changes over time: originally religious, then racial, and now morphing into issues of human rights. But the end, Jews will always be the scapegoats—even more so now that they have their own country.