Charles Moore reviews 'Trials of the Diaspora’ by Anthony
Julius and finds the author's vigilance justified.
England can make the dubious boast of being the first
country to have expelled the Jews en masse, in 1290. It also invented one of
the strangest types of anti-Semitism, the blood libel. In the Middle Ages, Jews
were massacred in York, Lincoln and elsewhere because of claims that they had
kidnapped and killed Christian children for the blood of ritual sacrifice. This
image of horror is still used against Jews. Modern newspaper cartoons – it is
often in cartoons that the underlying visceral feeling appears most clearly –
quite often depict Israeli leaders as deliberately killing children, and
sometimes as vampiric. By a peculiar twist in our politics, such cartoons are
now much more likely to appear in grand Leftish papers – such as the Guardian
and the Independent – than in Right-wing popular ones.
There never was any evidence for the blood libel. But total
lies can be surprisingly effective. In our time, the more important
anti-Semitic lie is the denial of the Holocaust. You would think that its
blatant untruth would kill it, but it turns out that the sheer scale of the lie
has a curious power. Holocaust denial is a frequent feature of modern Muslim
anti-Semitism, assiduously promoted by President Ahmedinejad of Iran. In this
country, the Muslim Council of Britain, while not actually denying the events
of the Second World War, objects to what it sees as the privileged status the
words "the Holocaust" confer on Jews. It will only mark the Holocaust
if other genocides are commemorated too, and many extreme Muslims pretend that
Israel is itself genocidal.
Holocaust denial helps resolve a dilemma in the minds of
anti-Semites. They believe that Jews secretly rule the world. But if this is
true, how can it be that they allowed six million of their number to be
murdered? Answer: it didn't happen! The Jews pretended they had been killed in
order to win unique sympathy, set up their own state, and advance their power.
The same mind-warp is applied to more recent events. Polls suggest that large
minorities of Muslims believe that "the Jews" blew up the World Trade
Center on September 11, 2001. Such madness is not confined to ignorant Muslim
masses stirred up by fanatics: I have heard it seriously advanced by
non-Muslims at a respectable dinner party.
What is distinctive about English anti-Semitism today?
Anthony Julius says that it is different from Continental anti-Semitism,
because it is based more on contempt than on fear. This makes it less virulent.
There is no widespread English theory of Jewish world domination, and no
persecution. Some will argue, therefore, that Julius makes heavy weather of the
subject.
Occasionally, he does. In his introduction, he gives the
example of his father's Gentile business associate, "Arthur". Arthur
told Julius's father that his young daughter had just had a "special
little friend", who was Jewish, round to tea: "I must say the child
has the most beautiful manners." Julius bristles at this, because of its
ingratiating quality and its implication that it was surprising that a Jewish
child would have good manners. But Julius does not imagine the situation from
the Gentile point of view. Even today, let alone 40 years ago when the
conversation described took place, there are many people in England who have
very little close experience of Jews, or of other ethnic or religious minorities.
They want to be nice, but they do not quite know how to be. They are aware that
many Jews feel a strong identity, but they are vague about what that identity
is, and they fear they might say the wrong thing. All they can do is try,
rather uneasily, to be pleasant. As a child in rural England, I remember that
if a black person turned up (a rare event), people tended to refer to him as
"that nice black person". Silly, in a way – he might or might not
have been nice – but well-intentioned. Julius's father's associate may well
have been creepy and maladroit, but he was not necessarily anti-Semitic.
On the whole, however, Julius's vigilance is justified. He
meticulously shows how anti-Semitism, as well as being what he well describes
as "a false alarm", is also a permanent temptation. Like Jews in its
own fevered imaginings, it is sly. It knows how to reinforce a feeling of
superiority, or relieve a feeling of inferiority, or seem to provide an
explanation for what is puzzling. It endlessly reinvents what it sees as a
"problem", for which it can offer a "solution" – even a
Final Solution.
And because we English see ourselves as tolerant, we may be
too lazy to notice when the mood changes. Julius establishes that it has
changed greatly from when the critic John Gross, in 1963, felt able to write
that anti-Semitism was now "little more than a minor nuisance". In
the psycho-drama of Muslim dispossession, Israel fills a central role. In a
weird ideological alliance with Islamism, the secular Left now tries to argue
that Israel is an "apartheid" state. There are many criticisms that
can justly be made of Israeli policy, but criticism of Israel is often quite
different from that of other countries involved in violent political conflict.
It is existential criticism. It is against the Jews – seeing them, yet again,
as the problem. This is anti-Semitic, and it is growing here, like litter, as
Julius puts it, on our English lawns.
Anti-Semitism