Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

182 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:181
tory power, stemmed from his judgment that Jews as a collective were the
“enemy” of the resurgent German nation.
Comprehended in this way, antisemitism is a theory—clumsy and bigoted,
but a theory nonetheless—of the decisive influence of Jewish power
in the world, along with a set of normative prescriptions for combating it.
The very term “antisemite” was coined not as a descriptor for a troubling
social trend, but as the positive organizing principle of a novel,
emancipatory political movement.
As a result, the successful communication of antisemitic discourse has
always depended upon the absence of a corresponding moral rancor. While
the Jews and their allies regard antisemites as propelled by hatred,
antisemites regard themselves as a fraternity bound by a message of universalist
love. “This book is above all a book for friends, a book that is written
for those who love us,” wrote Edouard Drumont, one of the founders of
France’s Ligue Antisemitique, and an especially shrill voice behind the false
allegations of treason against Alfred Dreyfus, in Le Testament d’un
antisemite.
Dreyfus trial headlines from Drumont’s antisemitic newspaper
La Libre Parole. It reads: “The Traitor Convicted, Ten Years of
Detention and Degradation, Down with the Jews!”
Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli-born antisemitic agitator who has abandoned
both his Jewish identity and his Israeli nationality, has expressed himself in
a similarly vainglorious manner: “When you talk about humanity, you talk
about a universal system of values promoting love for one another.” Rather
than being anti-moral, therefore, the moral sensibility of antisemitism
resides in its presentation of the Jews or Jewishness as a collective barrier to