The new antisemitism
Whether it comes from the right or the left, this ancient hatred always finds a way.
In his memoir Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens considered “why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring”. Many of us in the west have grown complacent, assuming that the horrors of the Holocaust would prevent this ancient prejudice from re-emerging. But as the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalates, few of us can be in any doubt that antisemitism has once again goose-stepped into the spotlight.
Of course, criticism of the Israeli government and its military strategy is entirely legitimate. So too is our profound concern for the innocents of Gaza and the many thousands of non-combatants who are losing their lives. But there is no denying the explicit anti-Jewish hatred that has accompanied these discussions in certain quarters. Criticise Israel all you like, but don’t try to tell me that Monday night’s daubing of the Shoah memorial in Paris with handprints of red paint was anything other than antisemitic.
Social media has opened our eyes to the prevalence of such sentiments. The other day I posted a link to my Substack piece about the Eurovision Song Contest on that hellsite now known as X. My focus in the article was on the narcissism of the “non-binary” performers, but one feminist activist decided to make it all about Israel. Underneath my post, she added an image of Eden Golan, the Israeli entry to the competition, with bloodstains photoshopped onto her dress. She went on to dismiss the victims of the October 7 pogrom as “silly ravers” and to blame the massacre on the IDF. Whatever else one might say about such views, it is clearly evidence of a complete absence of basic humanity.
This is sadly not uncommon. Recently we have seen protesters openly supporting Hamas, or even praising its acts of barbarism. A new poll has found that 63% of students currently protesting at US universities have at least some sympathy for Hamas. There have been overtly antisemitic statements, and Jews have been harassed on campus. It has been reported that at Columbia University, one protester cried out “We are Hamas” while another shouted at a group of Jewish students: “The 7 October is about to be every fucking day for you. You ready?” These are the very people who have spent the last few years calling anyone who dissents even slightly from their worldview a “fascist”, and yet they are blind to actual fascism when it emerges within their own ranks.
All of this has taken me by surprise, which perhaps reveals the extent of my naivety. Antisemitism is nothing new, and has assumed myriad and outlandish forms over the centuries. Our own country has not been immune; Jews were deported from England in 1290, only to be readmitted in 1656. Before then, only those who had converted to Christianity were allowed to remain; specially, they were able to reside at the Domus Conversorum in London, established by Henry III in 1232. Anti-Jewish sentiments were reignited by a plot to poison Elizabeth I in 1594, which was blamed on her physician Roderigo Lopes, a Portuguese man of Jewish ancestry who was executed for treason. This is the context in which the forced conversion of Shylock at the end of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice ought to be understood.
Unpleasant myths about Jews have abounded throughout history, some of which still linger in Islamic regimes and the darker crannies of the internet where neo-Nazis gather to wallow in their bile. The poisoning of wells by Jews was thought to have initiated the Black Death epidemic in 1348. This notion was still pervasive by the time Christopher Marlowe wrote his play The Jew of Malta in 1589 (consider Barabas’s mass extermination of an entire convent of nuns by means of “a precious powder”, or his boastful claim: “Sometimes I go about and poison wells”).
The hate-filled fantasies didn’t end there. The seventeenth-century preacher Thomas Calvert speculated that male Jews menstruated and murdered Christian infants to replenish their blood. In a 1656 pamphlet addressing the question of readmission, the puritan polemicist William Prynne stated that “Jews almost every year crucify one child, to the injury and contumely of Jesus”.
Those who have been paying attention will have noticed new forms of these blood libels recurring online in recent months, with many activists claiming that Israel is specifically targeting children in the conflict. For whatever reason, many opponents of the war cannot resist veering into antisemitic tropes. Most examples are coming from those who identify as “left-wing” and “progressive”, which just goes to show how antisemitism is not specific to any one political mindset. Its tendency to rematerialise in unexpected guises means that we ought to be eternally vigilant. I had never been able to grasp how Holocaust denial could be so widespread in the face of such unequivocal evidence. But having heard so many denials of the October 7 massacre, including scepticism from prominent left-wing commentators over whether rapes actually took place, I can see that such revisionism is more common than I assumed.
The unique horror of the Holocaust shows us that human civilisation might at any point collapse into the abyss. In Anthony Burgess’s novel Earthly Powers, the narrator Ken Toomey witnesses the immediate aftermath at Buchenwald, what he describes at the “lowest point in human history”. His newfound sense of humankind’s capacity for evil leads him to conclude that we cannot possibly have been created by God. This is the essence of despair.
The novelist Mervyn Peake was one of the first to see Bergen-Belsen after its liberation by allied forces. He visited the camp in the role of a war artist, and what he saw there haunted him forever. His final novel Titus Alone is a fragmentary and bleak affair, a consequence partly of his degenerative illness, but also of his psychological need to reckon with the evil he had glimpsed. It appears in the novel in the form of the “factory”, a chilling place of shadows and death, where identical faces stare out of countless windows and macabre scientific experiments are conducted within its walls.
One of Peake’s sketches from Belsen depicts a young girl, looking directly at the artist as she lies dying from consumption.
As he drew the girl, Peake was overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness and self-reproach. In the final stanza of his poem “The Consumptive. Belsen, 1945”, he tried to make sense of his feelings:
Her agony slides through me: am I glass
That grief can find no grip
Save for a moment when the quivering lip
And the coughing weaker than the broken wing
That, fluttering, shakes the life from a small bird
Caught me as in a nightmare? Nightmares pass;
The image blurs and the quick razor-edge
Of anger dulls, and pity dulls. O God,
That grief so glibly slides! The little badge
On either cheek was gathered from her blood:
Those coughs were her last words. They had no weight
Save that through them was made articulate
Earth’s desolation on the alien bed.
Though I be glass, it shall not be betrayed,
That last weak cough of her small, trembling head.
As Peake sketches the girl he struggles with the sheer futility of it all. He is troubled that his pity is fleeting, that even in the moment he is too focused on his task and not on the human being who lies dying before him. But is this really a lack of empathy, or a natural human reaction to the knowledge that there is nothing he can do to remedy the cruelties of the world?
The evil of the Holocaust serves as a reminder of what can happen when fascism prevails. We cannot afford to be complacent while antisemitism is on the rise and supposed progressives are cheering on those who openly wish to eliminate an entire race of people. If nothing else, we should do our utmost to ensure that the lessons of history are not forgotten.
Too right ,Andrew Antisemitism has caused the massacres of millions of Jews in many countries and over many centuries ,and you would think that people would be more enlightened by now. The only genocidal people in this war are the antisemites who support the terrorism of Hamas and others !! Jews have every right to a safe homeland and to defend it against attack. Btw ,I'm not a Jew ,but I fully support their human rights against those who want to erase them from the planet. Thanks ,Andrew.
Another very true and perceptive piece Andrew. Very moving literary references. Thank you.
I find it very sad that Israel started off as an idealistic homeland, and is now governed by a ghastly right wing regime which is turning people like me, a supporter of a Jewish state, against the country because of the government's massacre of Gazan civilians. It does appear Netanyahu would like to erase the Palestinians.
Of course it is cruel and mindless, words are inadequate, to dredge up centuries of Jew hating and persecution because of this war. But ppl love simple solutions and good and bad sides in this very complicated world.
I think this is why conspiracy theories arise - simple solutions for those who want a quick fix, and can't bear to feel helpless.
Pro-Palestinian protesters who are antisemitic aren't thinking, or probably even aware that they've been brainwashed by centuries of culture and history. They should be aware. Antisemitism is completely unacceptable.
Anti-Israeli war crimes is a seperate issue.
If protesters realise and understand that Hamas has always wanted the anialation of Israel and of the Jews there, then I like to think they might start to think a bit more.....
And there are many Jewish people who are appalled at the massacre of innocent civilians in Gaza, and Israeli young people who don't support the IDF.