Antisemitism and the Devil

The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted. -Psalm 22

 What historian Robert Wistrich has called the world’s longest hatred is also the world’s oldest sickness. Jew hatred is best construed as a universal epidemic, the emotional and intellectual equivalent of a decimating plague. The difference is that those who have contracted this septicemia of the mind do not die, except inwardly. It strikes me that the catalogue of such reprobates would fill the devil’s Rolodex. Unfortunately, the Israeli pharmaceutical firm Teva, one of the world’s largest suppliers of antibiotic medicines, has no psychic or endocrinal equivalent to treat the malady.

In "Anti-Semite and Jew," Jean-Paul Sartre argues that antisemitism is not an idea but “first of all a passion” that is akin to hysteria. This passion connects schematically with “the idea of the Jew” to which individual Jews are made to conform irrespective of their personal attributes. Sartre’s thesis is that the Jew is made responsible for the inescapable distress of being human — an excuse for failure, a means of false absolution, and a convenient repository of all the unpleasant things we are unwilling to acknowledge about ourselves. Sartre concludes that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” Unfortunately, the malediction of Isaiah has been forgotten or dismissed: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness…” Israel and its people, whom Isaiah called “a light unto the nations,” are now threatened by an encroaching darkness.

The cadastral address of the Empire of Antisemitism is located in the recorded past and the indefinite future, but it squats in the here and now so that it remains substantial, fully formed, repressive, and immutable, and refuses to be abolished. It merely creates tenement states — anti-Zionism, scholarly distaste, personal animosity, feckless alliances — renting time until the day history is annulled and the devil’s pleasure palace is erected in perpetuam. It is an evil that migrates from the meandering insincerity of our lives to the radical decline of moral sensitivity into the ninth circle of Hell where the social order turns feral and what Wistrich calls the “Judeophobic virus” once again infects the human race. We see this happening now in the wake of the Gaza embroilment as majorities side with a monstrous Islamic entity while reviling and abusing the only democratic nation in the Middle East constantly fighting for its always-threatened survival. We see it in the increasingly frequent and toxic anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement playing out on the streets, ministries, websites, and university campuses of our liberal world.

It is an evil that spares neither its victim nor its perpetrator. For antisemitism ultimately casts its stygian murk over Jews and non-Jews alike, harming the one, debasing the other. As Satan tormented Job in the Fiend’s wager with God, so the antisemite afflicts the Jew in an act of what we might call motivated malignity — not as a wager but as a form of criminal envy and resentment. What is the offense? What do untold millions begrudge? The imposition of a demanding moral code like the Ten Commandments, which underwrite all our values? The extravagant dreams, as Thomas Cahill affirms in "The Gifts of the Jews," that the Hebrew prophets articulated of universal justice and the God that sustains it? A scientific and medical benefactor whose many inventions and contributions to human welfare put much of an ungrateful world to shame? The fact that approximately 0.2 percent of the world’s population garners 20 percent of Nobel Prizes? The various blood libels are merely the standard calumnies intended to avoid confronting the genuine reasons for such groundless and arbitrary hatred. Antisemites are still doing the devil’s work. They are still “going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it.” (Job 1:7.)

“The devil, after a period of relative quiescence,” writes Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in "The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism," “has reappeared, flexes his muscles again, and stalks the world, with ever more confidence, power, and followers.” Goldhagen explains that he is speaking “not only metaphorically but conceptually.” Yet, the devil and his cohorts may be something more than a metaphor or a concept; one may imagine that we are now really living in the time of demons, as John of Patmos prophesied. 

Indeed, what is a demon but a creature without scruples, a creature who despises beauty, is impervious to truth, is oblivious to moral reciprocity, and is devoid of humor? Demons have desires, fears, and ambitions, but they are strangers to introspection. The voice within is silent. To put it bluntly, they don’t have souls. Their souls have died under a barrage of lies — the lies they have told and the lies they have uncritically received or welcomed. And such creatures proliferate among the mass of humankind. 

Jews, Goldhagen writes, are being “redemonized in the new social, cultural circumstances and opportunities of the new global age,” but it is the very demons themselves who are insidiously doing the redemonizing, who are carrying out the unholy work of “the demonic ecumenical church of antisemitism.” Goldhagen, of course, is still speaking conceptually, as a world-class scholar must, but one may wonder, however fancifully, whether demons do literally exist, circulating among the mass of humankind. Perhaps they went underground for a spell and have now re-emerged. 

The evil we are confronting is so flagrant, irrational, and diabolical that the literal hypothesis, if not demonstrably empirical, still remains persuasive. As a Jew, I am tempted to believe that the devil has once more unleashed his hordes, that demons actually do exist, and that they are really here again.