Antisemitism as a Specific Phenomenon - Journal for the Study of ...

JOURNAL for the
STUDY of
ANTISEMITISM
Volume 1 Issue #1 2009

JOURNAL for the
STUDY of
ANTISEMITISM
Guest Editor: Michael Berenbaum
Volume 1, Issue no. 1, 2009

This first issue is dedicated to Officer
Stephen Tyrone Johns, who gave his life
fighting an antisemitic attack at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington
D.C. on June 10, 2009.

Advisory Board Members
Shimon Samuels, Simon Weisenthal Center, Chair
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, AHA Foundation, AEI, Washington DC
Michael Berenbaum, Sigi Ziering Institute, Los Angeles
Israel W. Charny, Encyclopedia of Genocide, Jerusalem
Manfred Gerstenfeld, JCPA, Jerusalem
Sander Gilman, Humanities, Emory University, Atlanta
Bernard Harrison, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Berel Lang, Philosophy, Wesleyan University, CT
Walter Laqueur, Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University
John Pawlikowski, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago
Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, Philadelphia
Dina Porat, Stephen Roth Institute, Tel Aviv University
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, University of Illinois
Richard Rubenstein, President Emeritus, University of Bridgeport, CT
Pierre-André Taguieff, NRS (Sciences Po), Paris
Robert Wistrich, SICSA, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Editorial Board Members
Steven K. Baum & Neal E. Rosenberg, Editors
Joanie Eppinga, Copy Editor
Paul Bartrop, History, Bialik College, Melbourne
C. Heni, German Middle Eastern Studies—Radical Islam (Funded MEF), Berlin
Dennis L. Jackson, Statistics, University of Windsor, Canada
Günther Jikeli, Sociology, IIBSA, Berlin
Murray Kohn, Holocaust Studies, Stockton College of New Jersey
Kenneth Lasson, Law, University of Baltimore
Andrei Oişteanu, Ethnologist, Institute History of Religions, Bucharest
Paul Lawrence Rose, Judaic Studies, Pennsylvania State University
Richard Rubenstein, Religion, University of Bridgeport
Milton Shain, History, University of Cape Town
Marcia Sokolowski, Ethics, Baycrest/University of Toronto
Executive Committee
Jeff Diamond, Esq., Chair
Philip Kirschner, Esq.
John G. Nettleton

JSA Submission Guidelines
The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA) is the work of a select
group of independent scholars who examine antisemitism in traditional and
emerging forms. This group is not affiliated with any institution or
financially dependent on a single source of funding. We have in common an
understanding of antisemitism as a social pathology that must be
eradicated. We are an educationally-based concern.
Email submissions should be original, either one hard copy or an electronic
copy in MS Word format. Citation should be in Chicago Manual of Style
format. Submissions and questions can be sent to the editors of JSA via
mail, telephone, or email.
Mailing address:
Editors, JSA
P.O. Box 726
Marlton, NJ 08053
Telephone (856) 983-3247
Electronic Journal Submissions: jsantisemitism@gmail.com
Electronic Book Reviews: Book reviews between 500-1000 words should
be sent c/o Book Review Editor: jsantisemitism@gmail.com
The ideas expressed in JSA are those of the contributing authors, and not
reflective of JSA, its board members, or the author’s institution. JSA
welcomes unsolicited manuscripts.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Volume 1 Number 1
A Welcome from the Chair ......................Shimon Samuels 1
A New Journal on Antisemitism .............. Michael Berenbaum 5
Why the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism
Is Needed Now! ................................. Steven K. Baum 9
& Neal E. Rosenberg
Antisemitic Incidents around the World:
2009, A Partial List.............................................. 11
Articles
The Jewish Genocide of Armenian
Christians and Other Outrageous
Claims of Christopher Jon Bjerkness .......Steven Leonard Jacobs 13
Antisemitism as a Specific Phenomenon ............ Clemens Heni 29
Antisemitic Beliefs: Formation and
Transmission of a Superstition ................... Steven K. Baum 39
Durban II Geneva — Once Again
into the Breach ..................................Shimon Samuels 59
Essays
An Open Letter to Antisemites ................... Murray J. Kohn 67
The Basic Difference ...................... Richard L. Rubenstein 71
Book Reviews
Susan Gubar’s Judas: A Biography .............Neal E. Rosenberg 75
Andrei Oişteanu’s Inventing the Jew ................Günther Jikeli 79
Antisemitica
The Jew as Israeli Cartoons ...................................... 85

A Welcome from the Chair
Shimon Samuels
As an amateur dabbling in the hybrid realm of political psychology, I
am honored to be asked by my friends, Steve Baum and Neal Rosenberg, to
be Chair of this long-needed journal. Steve is a clinical psychologist who
contributed a path-breaking essay entitled “Antisemitism as a Mental Disease”
to the award-winning Simon Wiesenthal Center/UNESCO collection,
Antisemitism–The Generic Hatred: Essays in Memory of Simon Wiesenthal.
Neal is an attorney with a graduate degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Both have a passion to fight the good fight, and I share this with them.
As a professional “antisemitologist” (my concoction for political and
psychological interaction with both racists and anti-racists as daily bread), I
may be excused–in my European habitat–for a warped and paranoid perception
of a world divided between “them” and “us.”
Yet, my political instinct is informed by the dynamic, shifting configuration
of interests whereby yesterday’s foes can be mortgaged into
tomorrow’s allies. What could be more compelling than history’s fastest
rapprochement between a genocidal nation and its victim-survivor people
The political mortgage: the 1945-1948 interdependence between post-War
Germany and the emergent Jewish State—the image of rehabilitation for
the German Federal Republic—survival for Israel. Though painful, this
sequence obliged a rapid normalization, that, in succeeding years, evolved
into reconciliation.
An overwhelmingly encyclopedic panorama of the ever-evolving manifestations
of over 2,000 years of Jew-hatred can be distilled into the everpresent
myth of Jewish power and domination—whether framed as medieval
religious images of the devil, political manipulation as presented in the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the Russian Czarist forgery that never dies),
or the economic menace of the thieving capitalist and the subversive
communist.
The counterevidence of the Nazi death camp photos and the miles of
Holocaust-period archives serve a cognitive dissonance that is caught in a
limbo, where the hatemonger constructs the atrocity to blame the victim for
the bystanders’ discomfiture. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of Communism,
and the reunification of Germany occasioned a secondary cognitive
dissonance in the 1990s. Opened KGB, Stasi, and Western archives
shattered national myths: Austria as “Hitler’s first victim of invasion,”
“France the resistant” vs. “France the collaborator,” and Swiss, Swedish,
Spanish, and Irish neutrality. A positive impact led to a reformulation of
1

2 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:1
collective memory, as could be seen in President Jacques Chirac’s 1995
volte-face in accepting “French responsibility for the crimes of Vichy.” A
negative response was retrenchment, denial–especially denial of the Holocaust–and
an exacerbation of latent anti-Jewish prejudice.
Thus has Western Europe sought solace for its two greatest crimes:
colonialism and the Holocaust. (Since 1982, the Western media has
employed Holocaust metaphors when Israel retaliates.) West Beirut = Warsaw
Ghetto, southern Lebanon = Sudetenland, Israeli “Luftwaffe,” and so
on. This was summed up by a caricaturist’s treatment of the photo of the
Warsaw Ghetto surrender, of the child, arms upraised, facing the Nazis’
guns. The cartoonist placed a keffiyeh on the Jewish child’s head and Stars
of David on the Nazis’ helmets.
Voilà, in two strokes, a subliminal role reversal: the Palestinian victim
“native” Judaized, the Israeli “settler colonialist” as the perpetrator Nazified.
By a simple relief mechanism, the citizens of the Nazi collaborator or
occupied countries could now sigh: “We were not so bad!”
In Eastern European countries where the Holocaust succeeded and
which are now largely “Judenrein,” antisemitism persists as a “phantom
pain syndrome” in which the body politic still seeks to scratch the amputated
limb. There are no Jews, but a platonic “antisemitism without Jews”
applies Judeophobic terms as atavistic cues to target such threatening phenomena
as Western values, human rights, and the pain of moving to the
market economy.
The so-called “new antisemitism” is characterized by the undulating
crests and troughs of anti-Jewish violent incidents as a function of Intifadainspired
Middle East blowback. Each crest, however, sets a new threshold
in defining the acceptability of targeting the Jewish citizen. Indeed, the perception
of Middle East causality renders the phenomenon as imported, thus
denaturalizing the victim.
Arab satellite television and Jihadist websites exhort diaspora Muslim
youth, particularly in Western Europe, to incitement against their Jewish
neighbors. Focusing on the most convenient and vulnerable scapegoat for
their own social alienation, they play out a “Palestinians and Jews” transplant
of the Intifada.
Each threshold is often accompanied by a numbing effect on the part
of the authorities and media. When the perpetrator becomes too dangerous
(e.g. through violent demonstrations, riots, or car arson), the victim can be
deemed the problem. Thus the demonization of the Jewish state can result
in the delegitimization of the Jew in Diaspora.
This numbing effect is evident in the diminishing reaction to
Ahmadinejad’s series of provocations as he probes Western reticence and

2009] A WELCOME FROM THE CHAIR 3
timidity: His “Holocaust is a lie” was met with outrage; “Wipe Israel off the
map” with more muted protest; “Jews are a tumor, virus, bacilli” with an
increasing Jew-fatigue.
Abraham Joshua Heschel is reputed to have said, “Auschwitz was
built, not with bricks or stones, but with words.”
We well know that words can kill!
May the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism serve to deconstruct this
ever-mutating retrovirus that structurally endangers the sociopolitical
immune system, wherever it is incubated.
Shimon Samuels, Paris
Summer 2009

A New Journal on Antisemitism
Michael Berenbaum
“Say it ain’t so, Joe.” When the 1919 White Sox scandal broke, fans
pleaded with Shoeless Joe Jackson to assure them that he had not been
involved in the betting scandal. In more formal terms: “Would that it were
not so!”
Would that it were not so that the manifestations of antisemitism are as
prevalent as ever.
Would that it were not so that the study of antisemitism is woefully
diffuse.
For those of us raised in the post-World War II generation, it seemed
that unexpectedly antisemitism could be regarded as a thing of the past.
In the United States barriers were being lifted. Legal progress was
made–often in consort with African Americans–and there were fewer and
fewer obstacles to where Jews could vacation and live, to industries in
which Jews could work and colleges at which they could study or teach, to
choices of hospitals in which they could serve. Even social discrimination
was on the decline. Indeed, by 1990, there were some who feared that the
absence of antisemitism was detrimental to Jewish survival. With no external
enemy to keep us together, was there enough internal cohesion in the
community, excitement, and commitment to keep Jews as Jews
Israel had been founded on Theodore Herzl’s vision that the Jews
could become a normal people, a people like any other people with an army
and a flag, a land of their own, and a government of their own. Israel could
be a source of pride and inspiration. We learned that Israel could protect the
Jews–witness Entebbe–and we learned that from time to time Israel could
fuel the fires of antisemitism–witness the UN resolution declaring that
Zionism is racism and the signs in 1973 and 1979, “Burn Jews not oil.” In
the days after 1993 it even seemed that Israel could achieve peace with its
neighbors. It sacrificed oil fields for the promise of “normalization” of relations
with Egypt in 1982.
In Europe, where Jews had so recently been systematically murdered,
it was impolite and unwise to be antisemitic because it linked one with the
Nazis and their collaborators. With the fall of Communism, there was a
dramatic decline in governmental support for antisemitism. The Roman
Catholic Church, and with it much of Christianity, was refashioning its
teaching to be less anti-Jewish, even changing liturgical readings and catechism
to accept the ongoing life of the Jewish people. Bishops were apologizing;
the American Lutheran Church was renouncing Martin Luther’s
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6 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:5
writing on the Jews. Popes were visiting Israel–not “the Holy Land”–and
praying at the Western Wall and in the synagogue in Rome.
Jews had left the Arab world, and if that world was anti-Israel, it was
less consequential to Jews than the inspiration that Israel had provided for
Jews worldwide.
Still, reports of the demise of antisemitism were greatly exaggerated.
Hence the need for this Journal; hence also the need for more research,
more study, and more clarity.
Permit me to but survey the situation.
Roman Catholicism is entering the post-post Nostra Aetate age. The
generation that was shaped by the transformations of Vatican II is passing
from the scene, and conservative traditionalists, like Pope Benedict XVI,
have come to the fore, exemplified by the return to the Latin Mass, to more
fundamentalist teachings. A sensitivity to Jewish concerns has receded in
importance.
In Europe, which for centuries had been a net exporter of populations
to settle the new world or to colonize the third world, immigrants have been
imported who make their home in Europe but are not of Europe. They have
not assimilated its values and they are not accepted fully in its midst. These
Middle Eastern populations respond to the events of the Middle
East–Intifada II, Passover killings in Israel, Jenin, the Wars in Lebanon of
2006 and in Gaza of 2008. They regard criticism of Israel as license to
attack Jews with whom they live in proximity. And their crimes are not
treated as an assault on the larger society. They are joined by the left, where
it is fashionable to vilify Israel, but also by the extreme right, which has
traditionally been antisemitic.
The Muslim world has imported the discredited myths that post-Holocaust
Europe rejected, from the Protocols to the blood libel, from conspiracy
theories to the picture of the all powerful and all-controlling Jews. Even
Holocaust denial, which is outlawed in many European countries, is
embraced in the Muslim world, as if to rewrite the past would undo the
presence of Israel. The blood libel makes sense in Christianity, where the
sacrifice of the innocent is central to atonement. It should not resonate
within Islam, which has no counterpart to the Eucharist. The Europeans
who perpetrated the Holocaust should be denying it; it is a stain on their
self-image. Instead, the Chancellor of Germany visits Buchenwald with an
American President and iconic survivor Elie Wiesel as their guide, while
the Iranian president, in whose country no Jews were injured during the
Holocaust, denies it.
And Israel, once envisioned as a solution to the problem of antisemitism,
now can serve as its trigger. Antisemitism has morphed into anti-Zion-

2009] NEW JOURNAL ON ANTISEMITISM 7
ism, and while criticism of the policies of the State of Israel is fully
legitimate and warranted, Natan Sharansky has identified its transformation
into antisemitism as the “three Ds”: double standards, delegitimation, and
demonization.
Political opposition has become religious, and the neat distinction
between opposing Israel but not Jews has yielded to a lack of distinctions
between Jews and Israelis. The threat of a nuclearized Iran bent on the annihilation
of Israel is taken seriously by almost all Israelis without regard to
their policies on the settlements and the two-state solution–as well it should
be.
I belong to a school of thought that still regards antisemitism in the
United States as less serious than elsewhere. There are very few obstacles to
Jewish advancement and complete participation in American society. Jews
are regarded by many as a successful and privileged part of the White
majority. Even African American-Jewish tension has receded. Events that
could have triggered a dramatic increase in antisemitism, such as the Gibson
film The Passion of the Christ, the scandals on Wall Street, the collapse
of banking, and the economic crisis, have not–or not yet. And support from
the political class for Israel is strong and bipartisan, despite the efforts of
some to make it a partisan issue. Still, Leon Wieseltier, one of the true sages
of this generation, who correctly wrote that Hitler is dead and spoke of
ethnic anxiety regarding a second Holocaust, could not dismiss as outright
paranoia that there is evidence that “they”—without identifying quite
who—are out to get the Jews.
Suffice it to say that there will be much to discuss in this journal, much
to research.
Would that the issue of antisemitism were irrelevant and confined to
the dustbin of history, but it is not.
Michael Berenbaum is a rabbi, scholar, and author of several books, including The
World Must Know. He has served on the President’s Commission on the Holocaust
and directed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Research
Institute. He headed the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and
currently directs the Sigi Ziering Institute at the American Jewish University (Los
Angeles).

Why the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism
Is Needed Now!
Steven K. Baum & Neal E. Rosenberg
Conor Cruise O’Brien once said that antisemitism is always a light
sleeper. Lately, it has been something of an insomniac. The listing of
antisemitic events for the first six months of 2009 is just a fraction of what
goes on every day across the planet. We could say that the antisemitic
events occur wherever Jews exist, but we know that is not true. According
to a recent Pew survey, the highest rates of antisemitism occur in nations
where Jewish people do not reside, for example in Jordan.
So if antisemitism is not based on reality, what is its basis To attempt
to answer that question, we have created a forum for the latest scholarship
on the subject to be published. Who are we We are independent scholars,
students, and concerned others dedicated to understanding how antisemitism
is evoked and maintained. We are philosemitic, pro-Western, and pro-
Israel. We are not institutionally based or subject to policies that may run
counter to our stand. To that end, we encourage the contrasting perspective
toward the dominating European/Muslim perspective. In the current political
climate, European-based journal articles and books will rarely publish a
pro-Israeli perspective. Often it is the case that a Palestinian perspective is
presented even if erroneous or antisemitic. As well, the Journal will publish
articles critical of political bias, religious fundamentalism related to any
creed, and politically correct statements when those statements are linked to
antisemitic beliefs.
With increased Muslim immigration into Western nations and the
advent of the Internet, whole social networks of antisemitic and anti-Israeli
and anti-Western cultures have emerged. For the first time in recent history,
the political Left has joined the political Right co-opted by Muslim fundamentalist
politics to first criticize and next defame with inevitable calls for
Israel’s destruction. Such venom then spills over into the Jewish community
around the world. Jewish houses of worship now need increased security.
Jewish university students have sometimes been under siege on campus.
Holocaust denial continues in new forms; for example, British Muslim
Council representatives would not attend Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies
unless equal time was made for the Palestinian holocaust.
It is now fashionable to be pro-Palestinian under the banner of human
rights. But missing from the view is the antisemitism and sanitizing of ideology.
To wit, the first antisemitism report from the FRA/EUMC was initially
suppressed until labels for the perpetrators of antisemitic acts were
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10 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:9
changed from “Muslim youth” to “youth from neighborhoods sensitive to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” to those of “North African origin.”
As well, antisemitic themes remain alive in speaking truth to “Jewish
power”—for example, Sanhedrin, neo-cons, AIPAC. While no substantive
examples of compromised American foreign policy are provided, few seem
to recall what happened in Damascus in 1974. At that time, Arab parliamentarians
demanded that Europe agree to 1) unconditional Israeli withdrawal
to the 1949 armistice lines, 2) Arab sovereignty over Jerusalem, 3)
PLO participation in all negotiations, and 4) EEC pressure to detach Israel
from the U.S. and bring its policies closer to those of the Arab states. 1 It’s
been there all along.
The latest BBC polls and UN reports suggest that the demonizing of
Israel is working. Never in recent UN history has one country been so criticized—through
primarily through the machinations of the 57-nation based
Organization of Islamic States. A popular BBC poll finds Israel ranking
with Iran and other militaristic fascist states as one of the least-liked nation
in the world. The phenomenon is unique as well as effective—an anti-
Israeli narrative from Arab media bias is now co-opting Western media.
Recall the Gaza incursion of 2009 with ’round-the-clock reports on SkyTV,
the BBC, and, to a lesser extent, CNN, and the focus on the 300-400 civilian
lost lives. Few news reports asked whether that number of civilian casualties
is typical of this level of war. No news reports asked the Palestinian
leaders whether the repeated rocket firing on Israel for the previous year
was worth it. No reports provided context by referencing the Muslim-led
Darfur conflict, where genocide has claimed 400,000 lives.
The attack on the Jew and Israel is at the forefront of the attack of
fundamentalist Islam on modernity. We believe that if Israel did not exist,
fundamentalist Islam would be attacking other forms of modernity. Virulent
antisemitism has to do with a perpetrator culture that is out of control
directed at civil society.
We are scholars. We think about antisemitism and hope to come up
with new ways of approaching the problem. Perhaps as scholars, we can
provide something constructive for those who travel our same path.
Steven K. Baum
Neal E. Rosenberg
Editors, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism
1. See Europe Arab World: From Clashing on Petroleum to Cooperating for a
New Economic Order (Forli, Italy: Pio Manzu International Centre, Dec. 1979), 77-
79. Also see Richard L. Rubenstein’s (in press) Jihad and Genocide (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield).

Antisemitic Incidents Around the World:
2009, A Partial List
Denmark, January 1, 2009: A gunman shot and wounded two Israelis working
in a shopping mall on Wednesday, the police said. A police spokesman,
Lars Thede, said it was not clear whether the victims had been singled out
because of their nationality. The attack took place at the Rosengaard mall in
Odense, 105 miles west of Copenhagen, in midafternoon. The Israelis were
selling hair care products and in recent days had been harassed by a group
of youths, the Ritzau news agency said. The victims’ wounds were not lifethreatening,
the police said. No one was arrested.
France, January 12, 2009: Vandals hurled petrol bombs at Jewish places of
worship in Paris and eastern France on Sunday night, the latest of a string of
antisemitic attacks since the start of Israel’s Gaza offensive.
South Africa, January 29, 2009: South Africa’s Jewish community on
Wednesday lodged a complaint of hate speech against the country’s deputy
foreign minister, who earlier this month said that “Jewish money controls
America and most Western countries.”
United Kingdom, February 1, 2009: UK students are refusing to leave until
the universities meet demands including a statement denouncing Israeli
attacks in Gaza. Occupations are currently ongoing at London’s Queen
Mary College and King’s College, Cambridge, Oxford, Birmingham, Nottingham,
Sheffield, Leeds, Coventry, and Manchester.
Spain, February 11, 2009: The Anti-Defamation League said yesterday that
a survey it commissioned found nearly a third of Europeans polled blame
Jews for the global economic meltdown and that a greater number think
Jews have too much power. For example in Spain, 74 percent said they felt
it was “probably true” that Jews held too much sway over the global financial
markets.
Venezuela, March 27, 2009: Venezuelan prosecutors have charged eight
police officers and three other people in connection with a break-in and
vandalism in January of Caracas’s largest synagogue, prosecutors said
Thursday. . . Investigators believe that the assailants had planned to steal a
large amount of money they thought was inside.
Argentina, May 18, 2009: A day after police arrested five people in what
authorities described as an antisemitic demonstration that turned violent,
Jews expressed concern Monday over the attack.
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12 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:11
New York, May 20, 2009: The FBI busted a homegrown New York terror
cell late Wednesday night as the men sneaked around a Jewish temple in
Riverdale planting what they thought were explosives.
Washington, June 10, 2009: An elderly Maryland man with a long history
of ties to neo-Nazi organizations walked into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum on Wednesday and opened fire, killing a security guard, law
enforcement officials said.

ARTICLES
The Jewish Genocide of Armenian Christians
and Other Outrageous Claims of
Christopher Jon Bjerkness
Steven Leonard Jacobs
Christopher Jon Bjerkness is the author of Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible
Plagiarist and The Jewish Genocide of Armenian Christians. He
maintains the website www.jewishracism.com, a site “dedicated to protecting
all Jews from the antisemitism and inhumanity of racist Jews.”
His work is indicative of a new generation of genocide exploitation.
It is a mainstay tenet of antisemitism and antisemites 1 that a manipulation
by Jewish elites and world-wide Jewish power exist. The origin of
these notions seems to have come from the nineteenth-century publication
of the Russian forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (hereafter
Protocols). The Protocols purports to be the revealing of a supposed
secret midnight cemetery meeting of a group of rabbis at which their leader
spelled out the plans for world take-over in twenty-four “protocols.” While
the Protocols has been successfully refuted in 1917 in Great Britain, 1934
in Switzerland, and 1993 in Russia, it seems to have generated a life of its
own on websites and in print. Automobile magnate Henry Ford introduced
America to the Protocols with reprints made available in his The Dearborn
Independent and later republished it as a four-volume text entitled The
International Jew, copies of which are still available at these same sites. 2
1. Herein simply defined as “hatred and haters of Judaism and Jews,” a careful
distinction being drawn between this and anti-Zionism and anti-Zionists,
defined, in this context, as “hatred and haters of the State of Israel and Israelis,”
though such intellectual subtleties are far removed from the mindsets of the haters
who consistently lump them together
2. See, for example, Hadassa Ben-Itto, The Lie That Wouldn’t Die: The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion (London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005); Bronner,
Stephen Eric, A Rumor about the Jews: Reflections on Antisemitism and the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000);
Susan Cohen et al., ed. “The Protocols of the Sages of Zion:” A Selected Bibliography
(Jerusalem: Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism/
Hebrew University, 2006); Will Eisner, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion (New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005);
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With the advent of the Internet and the ease of constructing websites,
the haters have proliferated and continue to spew their filth through slick
and professional-looking sites, including streaming video, PDF books and
documents, and the like. Indeed, a case could be made that the international
community of haters has become “unionized,” or, if not unionized, then, at
the very least, networked. One finds much of the same material, including
conspiracy screeds and downloadable and printable copies of the Protocols,
available on many of these sites, for example, www.radioislam.org,
www.biblebelievers.org, and www.aztlan.org. (And, despite direct protest,
printed copies of the translation of the Protocols by Victor Marsden [1866-
1920] are available for purchase at key online bookstores.)
One such site— www.jewishracism.com –is that run by Chicagobased
Christopher Jon Bjerkness (b. 1967), who, according to Winnipegbased
colleague Henry Makow (author of Illumnati: The Cult that Hijacked
the World, Winnipeg: Silas Green, 2008), “is a scholar . . . who thinks he
knows what plagues mankind and believes his knowledge is necessary to
stop Armegeddon,” 3 and whose site is “dedicated to protecting all Jews
from the antisemitism and inhumanity of racist Jews.” 4 Makow goes on to
note that:
He [Bjerkness] says a heretical cult, the “Shabbatian Frankists,” controls
organized Jewry, including Zionism and Freemasonry. . . According to
their messianic system, Redemption requires that the Rothschilds become
God, i.e. king of the world. They will see the sacrifice of 2/3 of all Jews
Steven Leonard Jacobs and Mark Weitzman, Dismantling the Big Lie: The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion (Los Angeles & Jersey City: Simon Wiesenthal Center &
KTAV Publishing House, 2003); Binjamin W. Segel, A Lie and a Libel: The History
of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 2005).
3. Taken from his own website (http://www.savethemales.ca/002089.html) and
column of July 22, 2007, “What Every Jew (and Non-Jew) Should Know” and
accessed August 17, 2009. Makow (b. 1949), who received his PhD in English
Literature from the University of Toronto, is himself a well-known conspiracy theorist
who sees the world controlled by a secretive and hidden hand (read “Jews”
and “Freemasons”) whereby the media stifle information, democracy is a means of
social control, and a central banking cartel based in London (read ““Rothschild”) is
pulling the strings. Makow made his money from the sale and translation of his
board game Scruples, which sold several million copies worldwide.
4. Bjerkness, who claims pride in his Norwegian and Jewish heritage, attempts
to legitimate himself somewhat in the eyes of his readers by arguing that he has a
“Jewish connection” because his maternal grandfather, a famous Norwegian musician,
was Jewish. Having such a relative, however, does not give him credibility
either in the eyes of the organized Jewish community or among the network of
haters.

2009] OUTRAGEOUS CLAIMS OF CHRISTOPHER JON BJERKNESS 15
and the destruction and enslavement of the rest of mankind. Bjerkness
believes this demented creed actually is the motive force behind history,
including all wars and “world government”. . . I [Makow] think he exaggerates
the importance of Jewish messianism but I may be wrong. His
message is compelling and consistent with the Protocols of Zion where
the author (whom I believe is Lionel Rothschild) talks about coming into
his “kingdom.” 5
Makow then cites the central argument from Bjerkness’ 574-PDF
downloadable (2006, 2007, Enlarged Second Edition) text The Jewish
Genocide of Armenian Christians:
The ruin of the Turkish Empire and the mass murder of the Armenian
Christians were one step on the long and tumultuous Jewish march
toward the death of mankind. The ruin of the Russian empire was
another, followed by the repeated destruction of Europe, particularly Germany
in the World Wars this Jewish cult [Sabbatian Frankists] created in
an attempt to artificially fulfill Messianic prophecy and force the Jews of
Europe against their will to flee to Palestine. (p. 66)
It is to this text, then, that we now turn. Another conspiracy theorist,
however, Eric Hufschmid (www.erichufschmid.net), long a proponent of
the notion that the tragedy of September 11, 2001 (9/11) in the United
States was a Zionist plot, contradicting Makow, says of Bjerkness in an
audio file and transcript dated 23 October 2007: 6
One man who has been trying for the past year to become known as an
expert on the Armenian genocide is Chris Bjerkness. Bjerkness claims
5. www.savethemales.ca
6. In a speech made in Italy on September 17, 2006, and available at http://
www.erichufschmid.net/mp3/Hufschmid-Speech-To-Italians-17Sep2006.mp3
Hufschmid said:
There are also reports of Israelis operating a moving company
near the World Trade Center. Some of those Israelis may have been
involved in installing explosives in the towers. After they were finished,
they went back to Israel. . . But the evidence is overwhelming
that the attack was conducted by Larry Silverstein, top Israeli officials,
and other Zionists . . . Nobody has yet figured out who planned and
executed the September 11 attack, but there is overwhelming evidence
that Americans did not do this by themselves. The connection to Israel
and Zionism cannot be overlooked. Actually the Zionists appear to
have been the masterminds. . . The September 11 attack appears to have
been designed by Zionists in order to create anger towards Arabs. It is
similar to their bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, in which
they tried to make the British angry at Arabs.

16 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:13
that he’s a good Jew who opposes Zionism, but as I’ve mentioned in
some of my documents and audio files, the evidence suggests that he is
actually a bad Jew who is secretly supporting some faction within the
Zionist movement. He provides a lot of information about the Armenian
genocide, but he may be doing so only to lure us over to his side and
away from other, honest researchers. He may also be mixing in a little
deception with his information.
He wrote a book about that genocide, and it’s available for free at his
website, [http.]jewishracism.com. His audio interviews about this genocide
are also available for free at his site. 7
There’s nothing wrong with looking at his information, but you should
not trust him. . . .
If you think you can trust him, Bjerkness, ask yourself why he has such a
fascination with this Armenian genocide. Why is he struggling so hard to
expose this genocide Why is he writing such extensive books, doing so
many interviews, and even traveling at his own expense from his home in
Chicago to Glendale, California to give a speech about the genocide to a
group of Armenians 8
He’s spending a lot of his time and money to educate the Armenian people.
He appears to be, as he says, a good Jew who wants to expose the
bad Jews.
THE JEWISH GENOCIDE OF ARMENIAN CHRISTIANS CHAPTER ONE—“PRE-
HISTORY OF THE 1915 GENOCIDE”
As noted previously, The Jewish Genocide of the Armenian Christian
is a massive 574-page PDF document available for downloading and printing
from Bjerkness’ website (www.jewishracism.com), along with his even
more massive Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist (2,826 pages!).
The text itself consists of four chapters with copious endnotes. 9
7. One of those interviewers who appear to support Bjerkness’ view of the
Armenian Genocide is Armenian clergyperson Rev. Bedross Hajian, who has conducted
several interviews with him.
8. The speech was given on 30 July 2007 at the Hye Club Forum in Glendale,
CA, according to the site http://hyeclubforum.com.
9. The text is available at http://www.jewishracism.com/Jewish_Genocide_
Enlarged.pdf
1. Prehistory of the 1915 Genocide (pages 4-183; notes 1-168)
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Jews, Crypto-Jews and Freemasons—The Means
1.3 The Armenian Holocaust and the Battle of Armageddon—
The Opportunity
1.4 From Herzl to Malcolm, Zionists Betray the Armenians
1.5 Blotting Out the Armenian Amakites—The Motive

2009] OUTRAGEOUS CLAIMS OF CHRISTOPHER JON BJERKNESS 17
In his first chapter, Bjerkness opens with an affirmation of the validity
of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, argues that the Committee
of Union and Progress (CUP) in Turkey was dominated by crypto-Jews
whose agenda was “to establish a segregated ‘Jewish state’ in Palestine”
and to “instigate World War I, slaughter entire Christian populations, and
destroy the Turkish empire and supplant Islamic religion and culture” (p. 4).
In support of his theses, he quotes any number of documents, including
newspaper articles, primarily from the 1800s, without attributed authorship,
as well as a lengthy memorandum from Sir Gerard Lowther (1858-1916),
who served as Ambassador to Turkey and who used his position to spread
antisemitic texts throughout the Ottoman Empire. Additionally, again without
attribution, he references, for example, “well-intentioned people” (p.
14), “many people” (p. 14), and “many persons” (p. 15). He also employs
such rhetorical devices as “it is a well-known fact that” (p. 16) and “it
2. The Genocidal “Young Turks” were Zionist Crypto-Jews (pages
184-230; notes 169-188)
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Jews Foment Wars of Extermination and Genocidal
Revolutions
2.3 Jewish Bankers Destroyed the Turkish Empire
2.4 Talaat Pasha, Djavid Bey, Atatürk, Etc. Were Jews
3. Rothschild, King of the Jews (pages 231-440; notes 189-346)
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The Rothschild Plan to Take Palestine
3.3 Cabalistic Jews Calling Themselves Christian Condition the
British to Assist in Their Own Demise—Rothschild Makes
an Open Bid to Become the Messiah
3.4 The “British-Israel” Deceit
3.5 For Centuries, England is Flooded with Warmongering Zionist
Propaganda
3.6 As a Good Cabalist Jew, David Hartley Conditions Christians
to Welcome Martyrdom for the Sake of the Jews
3.7 Jewish Revolutionaries and Napoleon the Messiah Emancipate
the Jews
3.8 Hitler Accomplishes for the Zionists What Napoleon Could
Not
3.9 Zionists Develop a Strategy Which Culminates in the Nazis
and the Holocaust as Means to Attain the “Jewish State”
4. Mordecai Manual Noah (pages 441-526; notes 347-352)
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Noah in 1818
4.3 Noah in 1837
4.4 Noah in 1844
Notes

18 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:13
appears unquestionable that” (p. 17) without any source citation whatsoever.
Early on, he makes the following claim (without any supportive evidence)
that appears throughout the text: “Jewish leaders then placed Adolf
Hitler in power in the hopes that he would chase the Jews of Europe into
Palestine.” (p. 20) 10 Not content with this absurdity, he also rails against
“the Jewish controlled book publishing industry . . . Jewish controlled
academia . . . Jewish control of the press” (p. 24), tropes which are also
included in the Protocols.
Fifty pages into this chapter, Bjerkness argues that
the genocide of the Armenians the Jews committed through the Turkish
Empire was also intended to create a casus belli [justification/rationalization
for war] in the western world against Islam. The Jews are to this day
using the genocide of the Armenians as a weapon to agitate tensions
between Europe and Turkey so that they can kill off still more Christians
and Moslems. (p. 50)
To be sure, there were Jews involved in the Committee of Union and
Progress and the Young Turk movement (among them the lawyer Emmanuel
Carasso [1862-1934] of Salonika). They were far fewer in numbers than
others, those who were descendants of the original Jewish followers of
Shabbati Zevi who converted to Islam, the Dönmeh.
But for antisemites such as Bjerkness, their numbers are irrelevant, as
he suggests that (1) Talaat Bey (1874-1921), (2) Djavid Bey (b.-d.), and
(3) Atatüruk (Mustafa Kemal, 1881-1938) were so-called crypto-Jews and
that their influence far outweighed their actual numbers. There were also
some among that same population who did participate in genocidal activities
against the Armenian people as members of the Turkish military. However,
they were a decided minority and unrepresentative of the overall
Turkish Jewish community, despite Bjerkness’ claims.
Without evidence, he argues that there were six reasons why the Jews
of Turkey were “motivated” to murder Assyrians:
1. Jews consider the Armenians to be the Amalekites of the Hebrew
Bible, and in Jewish mythology, the Jewish God commands the Jews
to utterly exterminate the Amalekites down to the last man, woman
and child.
2. The Hebrew Bible, Jewish Talmud and Jewish Cabalistic writings
10. Not only was Hitler a dupe of the Jews, according to Bjerkness, but so were
Josef Stalin and George W. Bush (p. 97), as well as the President of Iran, Mahmoud
Amadinejad (p. 169)! Historically as well, so were Napoleon (p. 372), American
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (p. 430), and British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill (p. 430), who were either crypto-Jews, Zionists, or manipulated dupes.

2009] OUTRAGEOUS CLAIMS OF CHRISTOPHER JON BJERKNESS 19
instruct Jews to murder Christians and to impose the “Noahide
Laws” in the “End Times,” which laws forbid Christianity on pain of
death, because Jews consider Jesus to be an idol, and the Noahide
Laws forbid idol worship. 11
3. Jews wanted to discredit and ruin the Turkish Empire and the religion
of Islam in order to create a secure environment for the formation
of a Jewish colony in the Land of Palestine.
4. Jews wanted to remove an ancient enemy from the region—an
enemy which would oppose the anointment of a Jewish King in Jerusalem
as the crowning of the Anti-Christ.
5. Jews wanted to eliminate a skilled business and political competitor.
6. Jewish wanted to foment a war between Christians and Moslems,
which would start in the Balkans and grow into a world war which
would destroy many of the empires and monarchies, and which
would artificially pit Moslems and Christians, Slavs and Teutons
against one another and leave the Jews standing in Jerusalem. (p. 66)
In his usual fashion, Bjerkness supplies no supporting evidence for any of
these claims.
Such was the supposed power of the Turkish Jewish community at the
turn of the twentieth century, according to Bjerkness, that they manipulated
and corrupted the Armenian leadership into accepting their own extermination
and further convinced the Kurds of Turkey, some of whom were complicit
in the Armenian Genocide, that they would be rewarded for their
participation in the genocide (pp. 93-95). 12
Spread through this first chapter, and a staple of Bjerkness’ website
(www.jewishracism.com), is his frontal assault on the religion of Judaism,
nowhere more apparent than in the following excerpt:
Judaism creates and perpetuates a culture of racism, war, genocide, segregation,
deceit, theft, exploitation, supremacism, 13 human sacrifice, etc.
11. Jews do not consider Jesus an idol, but, historically, a false or failed messianic
pretender. The laws themselves, according to Talmudic tradition, were given
by God to Noah to re-establish human communities after the Great Flood. They
included prohibitions against idolatry, murder, theft, adultery, and blasphemy, as
well as dietary restrictions (specifically, eating flesh taken from a living animal)
and the establishment of a judicial system.
12. Bjerkness also argues that contemporary Jews have manipulated the Kurds
to destroy not only present-day Iraq, but also Iran, Turkey, and Syria, with an ultimate
goal in the Middle East of “nuclear massacres” (p. 177).
13. Significantly and interestingly enough, fellow traveler, antisemite and neo-
Nazi David Duke of Louisiana entitled his second book, published in 2005, Jewish
Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question. It was both a rewrite and an
expanded edition of his earlier text, My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding
(Covington: Free Speech Press, 1998/1999).

20 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:13
The Jewish genocide of the Armenian Christians makes for a good case
study of classical and cultural Jewish racism and Jewish deception. It
demonstrates the highly developed Jewish arts of genocide, war, control
of public opinion to do evil while appearing to be the victim, scapegoating
others for Jewish crimes, etc. (p. 131)
Essentially, Bjerkness’ text is not only a retelling of the classical
canards of antisemitism, but also a modernizing of the Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion, using as its point of departure the fraudulent claim
of the supposed Jewish genocide of Armenian Christians without any documentation
to back up his outrageous claims.
So powerful was this tiny minority in Turkey that they manipulated the
Sultan Abdul Hamid II into believing that the Armenians were a revolutionary
counterforce out to destroy the Empire (p. 136). All this to bring about a
return of Jews, willingly or not, to Palestine.
CHAPTER 2—“THE GENOCIDAL ‘YOUNG TURKS’ WERE
ZIONIST CRYPTO-JEWS”
Chapter 2 continues with more of the same, adding even more explicitly
than in the first chapter that Jews also controlled the League of Nations
(p. 19), as well as claiming that French Emperor Napoleon (1769-1821) was
also “a Zionist put into power by the Jewish bankers” (p. 226). Again, his
standard trope appears:
Jewish leaders committed genocide against Armenian Christians, instigated
the Balkan Wars, instigated World War I and destroyed the Turkish
Empire, all so that they could steal Palestine from its inhabitants. (p.
201)
Bjerkness again reminds his readers—without documentation—that
both Talaat Bey, the primary architect of the Armenian Genocide, and
Kemal Atatürk were both “crypto-Jews” (p. 226).
CHAPTER 3—“ROTHSCHILD, KING OF THE JEWS
Chapter 3 begins with two rather nasty assertions: “The slain and
humiliated Jews of Europe were such a sacrifice to the ambitions of the
Zionists,” and “The Holocaust was created in order to justify the formation
of an apartheid and racist ‘Jewish state’” (p. 232). While blaming the victim
has a long and dishonorable history, only someone whose real agenda
couples antisemitism with anti-Zionism would dare to posit such absurdities

2009] OUTRAGEOUS CLAIMS OF CHRISTOPHER JON BJERKNESS 21
and completely deny the long history of antisemitism in Western civilization
and the historical context that ultimately led to the Holocaust.
However, Bjerkness’ true goal in this lengthy third chapter is to show
his readers the overwhelming power of the Rothschild banking family, their
“desire to divide America up between Britain and France” (p. 241), their
employment of an (erroneously labeled) “Jewish actor named John Wilkes
Booth” to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln because of Lincoln’s
opposition to their plans (p. 242), their ownership of both “the Pope and
Rome” (p. 257), and other such calumnies.
What Bjerkness does not know is how the Rothschilds came to such a
prominent position of power:
The machinations which brought them into this position remain a mystery.
It is not known who chose them or why. One could speculate that
the Jews have for a very long time perpetuated the myth that certain families
carry with them the royal messianic bloodline of King David.
Wealthy families would have an easy time creating this myth for themselves.
Since there never was a King David, it is difficult to challenge
them, though realistically speaking, Ashkenazi Jews would have a far
more difficult time linking their lineage to Judah, let alone to King David
who never existed, than would Sephardic Jews who carry with them a
stronger genetic tie to the Judeans. (p. 282)
The only proof that Bjerkness can muster to support his notion of
Rothschild power is the fact that the British Balfour Declaration of November
2, 1917 was in the form of a letter from the Foreign Secretary Arthur
James Balfour to Baron Walter Rothschild, a leader of the Jewish community
of Great Britain, declaring His Majesty’s Government’s “declaration of
sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” toward “the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” (Balfour also noted his
appreciation in the letter of its contents being shared with the Zionist
Federation.)
And while it is apparently true and accurate that the Sultan of Turkey
did put up the area known as Palestine as collateral surety for a loan
advanced by the House of Rothschild in the early 1800s, possibly amounting
to total of 100,000,000 pounds, nothing ever came of this financial
transaction as far as Palestine was concerned. The Rothschilds never called
in the loan or collected on the collateral for breach of promise.
Casting his net even wider than the Rothschilds, Bjerkness also assets
in this chapter than Christianity itself was a plot of the Jews (Shades of
Adolf Hitler, who argued that Christianity was perpetrated on German Aryans
and others by Jews as a means to subjugate them into docility!):

22 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:13
Christianity itself was probably nothing but a means to convert the
Romans to Judaism so that the Romans would then restore the Jews to
Palestine and force the Jews back to Judaism, which the Jews had largely
abandoned. After, or as, the Jews were being restored to Judaism, Jews
would then restore the Christians to Paganism. This appears to be the
plan of treacherous Paul, who was born a Jew named Saul, and who set
down this plan in Romans 9-11. 14 The fulfillment of this plan occurred in
the Twentieth Century, when Communism and Nazism largely destroyed
the religion of European Christians and forced Jews to move to Palestine
out of fear. (p. 330)
And further on, “Christianity itself was a movement to convert Gentiles
to Judaism in the guise of Liberalism, and to take the hatred and menacing
nature of the creator God of the Old Testament out of Judaism so as
to make it more palatable for Gentile consumption” (p. 344).
Again picking up his tired thread of Hitler and Nazism as a Jewish
plot, he writes:
The Zionists put Hitler into power in order to bring about an allegedly
unprecedented human sacrifice (the Jewish genocide of Christian Slavs
under the yoke of Jewish Bolshevism was far worse), which would
finally atone for the Jews’ sins against God, through their own treachery
to the Jewish People. . . The Jews killed off many of their fellow Jews in
the Holocaust in the belief that they were fulfilling Old Testament
prophecies (for example: Ezekiel 5:12 [“A third of your people will die
of the plague or perish by famine inside you; a third will fall by the sword
outside your walls; and a third I will scatter to the winds and pursue with
drawn sword”], Zechariah 13:8-9 [“In the whole land,“ declares the
LORD, ”two-thirds will be struck down and perish; yet one-third will be
left in it. This third I will bring into the fire; I will refine them like silver
and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer
them; I will say, ‘They are my people,’ and they will say, ‘The LORD is
our God’”] ). Their Jewish campaign is not over and will not end until
all assimilated Jews and all Gentiles are dead. (p. 338)
Continuing in this vein, Bjerkness notes that “the numbing pain
inspired by the shocking images of the victimization of the Jews in the
Holocaust has been abused by racist Jews to shield themselves from criticism,
such that their arrogance makes them an open menace which tarnishes
14. Throughout this volume, there are many places where Bjerkness piles on
passages from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as supposed supportive
evidence for his claims. In doing so, however, he shows nothing of their historical
contexts, or of how such material was understood either historically or
contemporarily by their religious communities.

2009] OUTRAGEOUS CLAIMS OF CHRISTOPHER JON BJERKNESS 23
the image of all Jews.” (p. 341) 15
Likewise, the perpetuation of antisemitism itself is part of the Jewish
political agenda toward world take-over:
These Sabbatian/Frankist Cabalistic Dualistic sects among Jews—including
the Dönmeh who committed genocide against the Armenian Christians—even
promoted antisemitism—even Blood Libel 16 accusations—
in order to promote their political agendas in an unbroken chain of revolutionaries
from the Frankists to the Marxists to the political Zionists. (p.
371)
These Dönmeh who ultimately were responsible for the overthrow of
the Turkish Empire and the genocide of the Armenians, according to Bjerkness,
arose in response to the failure of the Jewish false messiah Sabbatai
Zevi:
Many had predicted that the year 1666 would mark the arrival of the
Messiah. For Christians, this meant the second coming of Christ, for the
Jews, the long awaited arrival of the Jewish King. After the Chmielnicki
holocaust 17 which some saw as the sacrifice of masses of Jewish lives as
an act of atonement, Shabbatai Zevi declared himself to be the Jewish
15. That some Jews, both individually and collectively organizationally, have
abused the memory of the Holocaust and its Jewish victims remains an ongoing
source of both sadness and debate within the organized Jewish communities and
the State of Israel. And, yes, some have exploited the Holocaust as moral capital to
justify their actions or the actions of others as being above reproach. Such thinking
and behavior, however, is not above critique. See, for example, specifically with
regard to the State of Israel, Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise
from Its Ashes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Tom Segev, The Seventh
Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Idith
Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Israel Studies, 14, no.1: Spring 2009
Special Volume “Israelis and the Holocaust: Scars Cry Out for Healing.”
16. Among the most insidious of all the antisemitic charges of long standing in
European history, and now making its way into the Middle East, has been the lie
that prior to Passover, Jews will kidnap innocent Christian children, murder them,
drain their blood, and use it in the making of the matzot, the flat unleavened cakes
associated with the festival. See, for example, Alan Dundees, ed. The Blood Libel
Legend: A Casebook in Antisemitic Folklore (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1991); Saul S. Friedman, The Incident at Massena: Antisemitic Hysteria in a
Typical American Town (New York: Stein and Day, 1978); and Po-chia R. Hsia,
The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1988).
17. The Chmielnitzki massacres of as many as 100,000 Polish Jews in 1648-
1649 at the instigation of Bogdan Chmielnitzki, Hetman (Leader) of the Ukrainian

24 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:13
Messiah and a large Messianic sect followed him. He traveled to Palestine,
as a good Jewish Messiah would, and attracted a large Jewish following.
While traveling through Turkey, Shabbatai Zevi was taken
prisoner and was forced to feign conversion to Islam in order to save his
life.
A branch of the sabbataian sect of crypto-Jews, called the Dönmeh,
formed in Turkey. They pretended to convert to Islam, but practiced
Judaism in secret. For centuries this sect of crypto-Jewish Turks have
bred subversive crypto-Jewish agents, who have been sent around the
world to prepare the way for Jewish world domination. They created a
secret society in Paris and eventually led a revolt from Salonika. They
were the hidden masters of the “Young Turks” and flooded Turkey with
revolutionary propaganda defaming the Sultan. Their reach extended
across the globe.
The Sabbataians believed that Shabbatai Zevi’s Messianic spirit passed
from one Jewish King to the next in a process of Metempsychosis. 18
They argued that the line of David was a dynasty, which would not end
when any given King of the Jews died, but rather the spirit of the Messiah
would leave one body of the Jewish King and enter the next, sort of like a
kosher Dali [sic] Lama. In the form of the “Young Turks,” the Dönmeh
eventually succeeded in overthrowing the Sultan, whose ancestors had
shamed Shabbatai Zevi. They also destroyed Turkish culture and committed
genocide against the Armenian Christians. (pp. 419-420)
CHAPTER 4—“MORDECAI MANUAL NOAH”
This final chapter is the reproduction of three of Noah’s discourses: (1)
“Discourse Delivered at the Consecration of the Synagogue [K.K. She’erit
Yisra’el) in the City of New York on Friday, the 10th Day of Nisan, 5578,
Corresponding with the 17th of April, 1818” (pp. 451-474); (2) “Discourse
on the Evidences of the American Indians being the Descendants of the
Lost Tribes of Israel, Delivered before the Mercantile Library Association,
Clinton Hall, 1837” (pp. 475-499); and (3) “Discourse on the Restoration of
the Jews; Delivered at the Tabernacle, Oct. 28 and Dec. 2, 1844” (pp. 500-
526).
Bjerkness does, however, introduce the chapter with the following italicized
comment:
Cossacks, occurred during the revolution against the Polish Catholic nobility. Jews
were its indirect victims.
18. Metempsychosis is a philosophical term in Greek referring to the transmigration
of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death.

2009] OUTRAGEOUS CLAIMS OF CHRISTOPHER JON BJERKNESS 25
In the Nineteenth Century, an influential American Jew, Mordecai Manual
Noah, spelled out a plan to take Palestine from the Turkish Empire.
Then, as today, well-connected Jews used their money and influence to
corrupt Christian Americans and the American Government in the hopes
that American Gentiles would soldier and slave for the sake of the Jews.
Noah’s plans were successful. (p. 441)
That Noah himself was personally unsuccessful in his dreams of a
return of Jews to Palestine and his inability to bring the American government
to use its influence to further his plan is of no consequence whatsoever
to Bjerkness. What matters is that Noah wrote about it more than 150
years ago, and, subsequent to him, wealthy and powerful Jews continue to
manipulate America to do Jewish bidding, and, as always, without concrete
reference but always with speculation, innuendo, and distortion.
A NOTE ON BJERKNESS’ “NOTES”
Bjerkness’ 352 endnotes (Chapter 1, #1-#168; Chapter 2, #169-#188;
Chapter 3, #189-#346; Chapter 4, #347-352) are a continuous “piling on” of
various bibliographic citations, many of which were written more than 150
years ago. Several are anonymous journalistic accounts and letters to the
editors of various newspapers without identification other than the names
themselves. Even more, many of the citations, as well as large amounts of
the actual text, bear no relation whatsoever to Bjerkness’ central thesis: that
the Jews were responsible for the genocide of the Armenians both at the end
of the nineteenth century and early on in the twentieth century by both the
Ottoman regime and its successors.
Given the preposterousness of Bjerkness’ claims, one can only assume
that his intent is to inform his readers of his vast erudition and his intellectual
and analytical prowess, especially those far less informed. Perhaps his
fellow conspiracist Eric Hufschmid is correct after all: “I suspect that he is
exposing Einstein and the Armenian genocide only to lure you over to his
site and put himself into the position of ‘Einstein expert’ and ‘Armenian
genocide expert.’”
Other than Henry Makow’s reference to his Norwegian Jewish maternal
grandfather, and his (unlisted) Chicago residence, it is almost impossible
to find solid biographic data on Bjerkness. He does not appear in the
databases of the Anti-Defamation League or the American Jewish
Committee.
Who is he, and why does he writes antisemitic revisionist history
These remain open-ended questions. Parenthetically, his website offers no
counter of “hits.” Consequently there is no way of knowing how many may

26 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:13
have read all or part of these texts. Nor do we know in what circles Bjerkness
travels.
CONCLUSIONS
Fundamentally, The Jewish Genocide of Armenian Christians is a
repackaging of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion with a greater
antisemitic and anti-Zionist animus, if such is, indeed, possible. It presents
further pseudo-arguments, without supporting evidence, of supposed “Jewish
power,” as well as of Jewish political machinations that resulted in historical
events that post-date the original: World War I (1914-1918), the
Armenian Genocide (1915-1917), the Russian Revolution (1917), World
War II (1939-1945), and the birth of the modern State of Israel (1948). As
is the case with all such prejudicial stereotyping, it bases itself upon relatively
small kernels of truthful data and then plays fast and loose with historical
facts, contextualizes nothing, and returns again and again to the
kinds of conspiracist thinking that relies on myths, lies, and supposed
“secrets” that have long been the mainstays of haters.
That Bjerkness has not in any way proven his case is close to irrelevant.
His intended audiences are those already committed to antisemitism
and anti-Zionism and those who simply do not know but tend to be easily
swayed by what looks and sounds like solid argumentation. 19 According to
all recent surveys, the numbers of such persons are growing. Bjerkness’
website is slick and professional-looking; his documents print out easily
and well; his audio files load quickly and can be listened to easily.
As should now become increasingly apparent, not only in Jewish circles
but in larger venues as well, the audiences for such antisemitic and
other hate-filled agendas (racism, anti-Americanism, anti-women, etc.) continue
to grow. The advent of technology and the increasingly sophisticated
use of the Internet by the haters has played, and continues to play, an everlarger
role in the internationalization of such agendas. Jewish and non-Jewish
communal defensive organizations will increasingly have to rely on
their own increasing sophistication to combat these individuals and groups.
Whether they will prove up to the challenge is, at this moment, uncertain.
Among the real tragedies of Bjerkness’ claims is not that Jews find
themselves having to confront one more enemy due to modern technology.
19. A classic example of which would be the Holocaust denial text by Arthur
Butz, engineering professor formerly of Northwestern University, Evanston, IL,
whose book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed
Extermination of European Jewry (Capstone: Theses & Dissertations Press, 2003.
Reprint) is replete with extensive foot/endnotes.

2009] OUTRAGEOUS CLAIMS OF CHRISTOPHER JON BJERKNESS 27
It is that some in the Armenian community, at least on the radio and in
person in California, are willing to provide him forums from which to spew
his filth. For two communities who have both been the victims of genocide,
and who should be far more actively working to build bridges of trust and
mutual cooperation, Christopher Jon Bjerkness remains a discomforting and
disturbing presence. 20
Steven Leonard Jacobs is Associate Professor, Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair in
Judaic Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL. He may be contacted
at sjacobs@bama.ua.edu
20. The recent reluctance of the American Jewish communities, and in particular
the Anti-Defamation League and its Executive Director and Holocaust survivor
Abraham Foxman, to support the passage of US House Resolution 106 affirming
the historical validity of the Armenian Genocide out of a genuine concern about
alienating the State of Israel’s only Middle Eastern and Muslim ally, Turkey, which
continues to deny this tragedy as genocidal, is a further case in point, one in which
realpolitik takes precedence over morality. For a people who continue to insist on
the world’s affirmation of the historicity of the Holocaust and who continue to
argue that antisemitism and Nazism (and neo-Nazism) are far from dead—and correctly
so—such recalcitrance is disturbing, to say the least.

Antisemitism as a Specific Phenomenon
Clemens Heni
In January of 2009, several disturbing, aggressive, and offensive
antisemitic rallies were held in the Federal Republic of Germany. German
Muslims and their supporters chanted, “Death to the Jews,” “No Holocaust
in Gaza,” “Boycott Israel,” and so on. Most disturbing was an incident in
the city of Duisburg. Spurred on by the crowd of Muslim agitators, German
police illegally entered a student apartment and confiscated two Israeli flags
displayed in the windows and at the balcony. At a rally in Berlin the crowd
shouted, “Death to the Jews” and “Olmert is son of a dog.” No authorities
there stopped it.
Muslim extremists are looking to shoot. Jews and Israelis are the main
target. As the appeal of such extremism grows, a larger question is begged:
Has political Islam, protected by charges of Islamophobia leveled against its
detractors, become fashionable
Politics makes strange bedfellows, but one would expect leading
antisemitism researcher centers to support Israeli Jews. It is not necessarily
so.
The Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) of the Technical University
in Berlin is a very influential institution. The ZfA consists of two
eminent professors, historian Wolfgang Benz and sociologist Werner Bergmann.
The Center employs three assistants, one academic co-worker, fifty
doctoral candidates, and fifteen employees working on projects. There are
an additional seven fellows engaged in a project on European antisemitism
(1879-1914). 1
Benz is best known for key works on FRG Nazism and right-wing
extremism. He has been co-editor of an encyclopedia of National Social-
1. The Berlin center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University
of Berlin was established in 1982. In the same year, the Vidal Sassoon International
Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism (SICSA) at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem was established. In 1991, the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of
Contemporary Racism and Anti-Semitism was established at Tel Aviv University.
Finally, in 2006, the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism
(YIISA) was created at Yale University. I was a Felix Posen Fellow at SICSA
in 2003/2004 and was among the first Post-Doctoral Researchers at YIISA since its
inception in September 2008.
29

30 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:29
ism. 23 For instance, after the airing of television’s (1979) Holocaust, Benz
argued vehemently against equating the Jewish genocide with the Native
American genocide. 4
The magnitude of these key works and Benz’s criticism of National
Socialism and Right-wing extremism after 1945 might explain the Left’s
blind eye to antisemitic tendencies. Scholars have to consider criticism of
Right and Left and the Muslim world. As well, they cannot forget Christian
and pre-Christian (Greek-Roman) antisemitism. 5
To focus exclusively on the Right is limited. Previously I have tried to
avoid any downplaying of other forms of antisemitism and anti-Americanism,
and nationalism. In contrast, anti-Israeli rhetoric is not neo-Nazi based,
but is organized by the political Left and Muslim groups. 6 Meanwhile,
mainstream Europe is appeasing Islamic Jihad.
On December 8, 2008, the ZfA held a conference entitled “Concept of
the Enemy Muslim–Concept of the Enemy Jew.” The conference brochure
itself was interesting in that it equated Islamophobia with antisemitism.
Then there were the speakers (many of the speeches were published in
2. See Clemens Heni, “Salonfähigkeit der Neuen Rechten. ‘Nationale Identität,’
Antisemitismus und Antiamerikanismus in der politischen Kultur der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1970-2005: Henning Eichberg als Exempel” (Marburg:
Tectum Verlag, 2007), 37, footnote 53.
3. Heni 2007, 265-266; cf. ibid. footnote 1100; the article by Benz is entitled:
“Die Blockadebrecher: Rechtsextreme Schüler- und Jugendzeitschriften.”
4. See footnote 3.
5. For an analysis of ancient antisemitism see Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Schäfer is head of the Department
of Jewish Studies at Princeton University. He was the first and only scholar
who received the two most prestigious awards in the humanities (“Geisteswissenschaften”)
in Germany and the United States of America, the German Leibniz Price
(in 1994) and the US Mellon Award (in 2007). For the purposes of my article, most
important is his criticism of an essay on ancient antisemitism that was co-written by
Werner Bergmann, one of the two professors at the ZfA. Schäfer wrote, for example:
“In a recent article called ‘Kalkül oder “Massenwahn” Eine soziologische
Interpretation der antijüdischen Unruhen in Alexandria 38 n.Chr.,’ Werner Bergmann
and Christhard Hoffmann have taken precisely this view against almost all
the relevant scholarly literature. Over and again they insist that we are confronted
in Alexandria with ‘real conflicts of interest,’ ‘concrete political competition’ . . ..
Anti-Semitism figures in this scenario as the effect of the ‘real conflicts of interest’
and not as their cause” (p. 157). For more criticism of Bergmann/Hoffmann,
including their highly problematic distinction between “politics” and “culture/religion”
in ancient times, see ibid., 157-159.
6. See a big rally against Israel and the Jews in San Francisco on January 10,
2009. Posters at that rally read “Gaza = Auschwitz.”

2009] ANTISEMITISM AS A SPECIFIC PHENOMENON 31
advance in the ZfA yearbook). 7 Recall the Danish cartoon controversy of
2005/2006 ZfA member Angelika Königseder described the motives of
Danish cartoonists as pure “hatred,” justifying the Muslim rage that resulted
in the murders of 200+ people 8 and torched embassies around the world for
the next six months. 9 Jewish journalist Henryk M. Broder was then accused
of being a stooge or “discourse strategist of the Right” because he is critical
of extremist Islam. 10 Another contributor, Yasemin Shooman, argued that
the Web is Islamophobic, citing mostly just one German homepage as a
case in point. 11
Not to be outdone, commentator Sabine Schiffer was also included.
Schiffer is best known for downplaying Muslim threat while fueling anti-
Israeli rhetoric, as can be seen at anis-online.de. 12 She also parallels
Europe’s Muslims and Holocaust Jewry, accusing writers who disagree
7. Wolfgang Benz, ed., Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 17 (Berlin:
Metropol Verlag, 2008).
8. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_and_social_
consequences_of_the_Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy (accessed
September 1, 2009).
9. Angelika Königseder, “Feindbild Islam,” in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung,
ed. Wolfgang Benz (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2008), 17-44, here 32.
In German she describes those cartoons as “Hetzwerk.”
10. Peter Widmann, “Der Feind kommt aus dem Morgenland. Rechtspopulistissche
‘Islamkritiker’ um den Publizisten Hans-Peter Raddatz suchen die
Opfergemeinschaft mit den Juden,” in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung, ed.
Wolfgang Benz (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2008), 45-68, here 67-68.
11. Yasemin Shooman, “Islamfeindschaft im World Wide Web,” in Jahrbuch
für Antisemitismusforschung, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2008),
69-96.
12. http://www.anis-online.de/1/rooms/_index.htm (accessed July 17, 2009).
The founder of this homepage, German-Palestinian Anis Hamadeh, spoke in the
city of Erlangen in July of 2008 (http://www.anis-online.de/1/pressearchiv/
Erlangen18072008.pdf (accessed April 30, 2009); Schiffer was moderator. He trivialized
and even denied the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust. The German
reads: “An dieser Stelle greift ein mächtiges Dogma, das besagt, dass nichts in der
Geschichte des Universums so schlimm gewesen sei wie der Genozid an den Juden
und nichts damit irgendwie vergleichbar sei.” In his view, the Holocaust is a
“dogma”; he rejects the view that “that no other crime can be compared with the
Holocaust.” The rejection of the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust is fashionable
in the Western academic world. For a Palestinian like Hamadeh, this is nothing
special, of course; he takes this kind of antisemitism for granted. Again: why does
an outstanding scholar like Professor Benz invite a person like Sabine Schiffer,
someone who allows the denial of the Holocaust as an unprecedented crime The
fact that Schiffer is part of Anis’ homepage is even more scandalous.

32 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:29
with her as “demonizing” lsam. 13 Later in the article Schiffer indicts Broder
for describing the Iranian nuclear program as motivated by preparing a
“nuclear Holocaust.”
Other concerns abound. In his Conference introduction, Benz focused
not on the victims of Islamic extremism, but on European Islamophobia. 14
He began,
Since September 11, 2001, anti-Islam resentment is fashionable on a
worldwide scale. The killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in
November 2004 activated emotional reactions, which grew to what we
now call Islamophobia. 15
A further look into ZfA publications reveals a similar trend. Previously
Benz had equated Germany’s 1990s “foreigners” (asylum-seeking people as
well as residents) with the plight of fin de siècle nineteenth century Jews. 16
Downplaying Nazi antisemitic ideology per se, for example Daniel
Goldhagen’s criticism of German eliminationist anti-Semitism, 17 Benz likens
antisemitism to all “prejudices,” like the situation of Native Americans
13. http://www.medienverantwortung.de/imv/pdf/zukunft_28_sschiffer.pdf
(accessed April 30, 2009).
14. At the conference the ZfA was asked about the origin of the term
Islamophobia. The ZfA responded that the term antisemitism in their view is also
“controversial.” What a response!
15. Wolfgang Benz, Vorwort, in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 17
(Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2008), 9-14, here 9.
16. Wolfgang Benz, “Antisemitismusforschung als Vorurteilsforschung,” in
Judenfeindschaft als Paradigma: Studien zur Vorurteilsforschung, eds. Wolfgang
Benz and Angelika Königseder (Berlin: Metropol, 2002), 15-21, here 18-19.
17. Wolfgang Benz and Werner Bergmann, “Einleitung: Antisemitismus –
Vorgeschichte des Völkermordes” in Vorurteil und Völkermord: Entwicklungslinien
des Antisemitismus, eds. Wolfgang Benz and Werner Bergmann (Freiburg/
Basel/Wien: Herder, 1997), 10-31, here 11. Benz and Bergmann go so far as to
claim (without proof) that even the success of the NSDAP in the late Weimar
Republic was no result of the antisemitism of that Nazi party, see ibid., p. 13.
Martin Ulmer from the University of Tübingen most recently finished his PhD in
Cultural Studies, proving that antisemitic agitation was very important for the
NSDAP at that time. Ulmer points out in his case study that the NSDAP clearly
showed their antisemitic worldview by proclaiming at every single party event
between 1930 and 1933 on their posters, “Jews are not welcome”; see Martin
Ulmer, “Antisemitismus im öffentlichen Diskurs und im Alltag in Stuttgart 1871-
1933. Eine Lokal- und Regionalstudie,” (PhD diss., Fakultät für Sozial- und
Verhaltenswissenschaften der Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, 2008), 451.
See also the following chapter in Ulmer’s dissertation on antisemitic codes during
the campaign for the election of the mayor of Stuttgart in the spring of 1931.

2009] ANTISEMITISM AS A SPECIFIC PHENOMENON 33
in Bolivia, or socially deprived people. 18 Benz himself had previously criticized
equating the situation of Native Americans with the Holocaust. 19 The
ZfA appears to consider antisemitism as a paradigm for all stigmatization,
prejudice, and discrimination. 20
HATE BY ANY OTHER NAME
As early as 1543, Martin Luther blamed the Jews for almost every evil
on earth. By 1602, the first story about “Ahasver” appeared. Ahasver is a
fable of the Wandering Jew and describes a Jew who denied Jesus a place to
rest. For his punishment, Ahasver was sent to walk around endlessly.
This Ahasver myth is an essential component of hatred for Jews, but
many others persist. Blaming Jews for capitalism, the worship of money or
“mammon,” is another one. “Mammon” became a symbol for “Jewish”
power centuries ago, and since the middle of the nineteenth century, the
image of Mammon has been an essential part of anti-Jewish resentments.
Another myth is the blood libel, which evokes fear among non-Jews of
being killed. Perhaps the most famous example is the 1840 blood libel in
which Damascus Jews were accused of the blood libel and retaliated against
their accusers, which resulted in several deaths. 21 By the early 1900s, the
Russian forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion had appeared. Though dismissed
by courts in a number of Western nations, this myth is enjoying a
resurgence at a State level throughout the Muslim world.
In the early twentieth century, it was not uncommon to know of
“Antisemitenparteien”—parties dedicated to spreading Jew-hatred. As well,
there had been a “Judenzählung” (counting of the Jewish soldiers) in the
German army during World War One. After 1933 the situation became
18. See Benz and Königseder, eds., 273-279, resp. 250-264.
19. See footnote 3.
20. Wolfgang Benz, “Feindbild und Vorurteil: Beiträge über Ausgrenzung und
Verfolgung” (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), 19. Benz explicitly
notes that “antisemitism” is the same as “Fremdenfeindlichkeit” (“xenophobia”),
and that instead of “the Jews,” other “minorities” or “people” (“Volksgruppen”)
could be singled out.
21. Clemens Heni, “Ahasver, Moloch und Mammon. Der ‘ewige Jude’ und die
deutsche Spezifik in antisemitischen Bildern seit dem 19. Jahrhundert,” in Die kulturelle
Seite des Antisemitismus zwischen Aufklärung und Shoah, eds. Andrea Hoffmann
et al. (Tübingen: TVV, 2006), 51-79; see also Clemens Heni (2009),
“Antisemitism and Germany: Anti-Jewish images from 1602 to 9/11,” about
Ahasver (the “eternal Jew”), anti-capitalist antisemitism (“Mammon”) and blood
libel (“Moloch”), at http://clemensheni.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/ahasvermammon-and-moloch-anti-jewish-images-1602-to-911/
(accessed August 18,
2009).

34 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:29
much worse. On December 13, 1934, a new law was passed precluding
Jews from attaining a super Ph.D., the degree required to become a professor
at university in Germany. 22 These exclusionary policies against German
Jews are too numerous to mention here. 23 Today, everyone can be awarded
a Ph.D. or super Ph.D. at a German university. Thus, to equate the plight of
post-9/11 Muslims with that of the pre-Holocaust Jews is spurious and a
denial of the concrete policies of Nazi Germany. Such a representation trivializes
the events occurring in the German Empire (1871-1918), including
the First World War, and the Weimar Republic.
Antisemitism is similar to and different from various forms of racism.
Jew-hatred is based on significant images and ways of thinking. It is different
from racism in that Jews are not always seen as being below “us” (as the
Blacks have been from this racist point of view); rather, they are involved
in a conspiracy to rule the world.
Antisemitism was the motif of the Holocaust. Those unprecedented
crimes combined religious Jew-hatred, race-theories about “the Jew,” and
modern antisemitism in all its forms, including a comprehensive worldview.
This antisemitic worldview distinguishes antisemitism from racism.
German antisemitism is based on a worldview, an ideology, that considers
Jews to be an evil that must be eradicated from the earth. Antisemitism
has an extremely irrational dimension—it is genocidal. To equate
antisemitism with racism or even to use the term Islamophobia, an invention
of the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1979, is the dangerous and somewhat
inaccurate notion that the other is less worthy. As well, Islamist ideas
(or political Islam as such) advocate take-over of Europe and the West. 24
There have been no parallels in the Jewish history; for example, Zionism
advocates for a secure Jewish homeland. It is problematic, though, to suggest
that all Muslims are a threat to democracy, or that all Muslims are
spreading Islamic Jihad. However, most critics of Muslim antisemitism in
the form of Islamic Jihad are well aware of this.
Antisemitism is a specific topic. Important research on antisemitism
concludes that racism, prejudice, and antisemitism are not equivalent (see
22. Cf. Heni 2007, 295.
23. In the years 1933 and 1934 alone, 61 laws, many of them against Jews,
passed in Nazi Germany. See Bruno Blau, Das Ausnahmerecht für die Juden in
Deutschland 1933-1945, 3rd ed. (Düsseldorf: Verlag Allgemeine Wochenzeitung
der Juden in Deutschland, 1965) (first edition 1952 in New York City).
24. For evidence of this take-over of Europe fantasy cherished by Islamist
Jihadists, see the movie Obsession (released in 2006), with Professor Robert Wistrich
as scholarly advisor. This film was sent by mail to a hundred million people in
the US alone; see a private discussion with Professor Wistrich in New Haven,
USA, February 21, 2009.

2009] ANTISEMITISM AS A SPECIFIC PHENOMENON 35
Lévy for arguments on the irrationality of antisemitism). 25
No group of people but the Jews has ever been singled out and blamed
even for opposite developments, such as both capitalism and communism,
and being weak-willed but powerful enough to take over the planet.
Antisemitism is a specific ideology that requires serious scholarly
research. The equating of antisemitism with “Islamophobia” is wrong, and a
sign of the growing of what Tel Aviv University’s Dina Porat called the
“struggle of victimhood.” 26 It is the worst “answer” to the threat of Islamic
Jihad, which is a threat first to the Jews and Israel, and second to the entire
Western world.
Consider as well the following:
No single Muslim country is singled out.
There are no Protocols of the Elders of Berlin-Kreuzberg (a borough
with many Muslims).
There is no accusation of Muslims being responsible for capitalism or
the economic crisis.
There is no blood libel against the Muslims accusing them of using the
blood of innocent children for religious purposes.
In contrast, the history of antisemitism demonstrates:
Jews and Israel (the “Zionists”) are singled out as a people and as a
country (see UN speech of Iran on September 23, 2008, for example).
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is being reprinted today in the
entire Muslim world, including Turkey, Iran, and the Arab world.
Jews have been blamed for the economic crisis of today.
Jews are accused of the blood libel, for example on Egyptian television
during Ramadan in 2007.
25. For example, consider the uniqueness of the Holocaust as exemplified by
the gas chamber and the pointlessness of killing Jews when doing so had no military
value. See Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times (New York: Random
House, 2008), 159.
26. Clemens Heni, “Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism,” Israelisches
Aussenministerium, Jerusalem, 24.-25.2. 2008. In: Pardes. Zeitschrift der Vereinigung
für Jüdische Studien e.V., 183-187, here 186: “Porat betonte, dass der
französische Intellektuelle Alain Finkielkraut schon vor über 20 Jahren auf die
Verbindung von Antisemitismus, der Linken und Antirassismus eingegangen sei.
Heute würde das u.a. im (israelischen) Post-Zionismus ein Echo erfahren. Sehr
interessant und für die kommenden Jahre und Jahrzehnte wegweisend dürfte Porats
These sein, es gebe bezüglich des Holocaust einen regelrechten ‘Opferwettstreit.’
Sie macht drei Elemente dabei aus: 1.) Wer ist verantwortlich für den Holocaust
2.) Wer ist das Opfer 3.) Sind wirklich Juden die Opfer”

36 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:29
ZFA AND WHAT WE CAN LEARN
A center for the study of antisemitism should be aware of facts and not
equate antisemitism with “Islamophobia.” Postmodern relativism is yet
another way of rejecting research on antisemitism. Antisemitism is a phenomenon
in and of itself and not a result of prejudice among others, or a
byproduct of capitalism, socialism, Christianity, racism, slavery, or
exploitation.
ZfA’s response to criticism suggests something else. The Center long
ignored a Jewish journalist and accused him (a correspondent of the Jerusalem
Post in Berlin) of producing a “torrent of hatred” 27 against the Center.
As well, Dr. Benz misinformed a local newspaper, noting that both an
Israeli ambassador and the chair of the Berlin Jewish community supported
his conference on Islamophobia. In reality they had not even talked with
him regarding this topic. 28
The Western world fails to understand the genocidal threat deriving
from Islamic Jihad. Instead it opts to be trendy. The fashionable philosophy
of Giorgio Agamben is esteemed. Agamben compares imprisoned Jihad terrorists
in Guantanamo Bay with Jews in German concentration camps during
the Holocaust. 29
In Henryk M. Broder’s view, centers such as the ZfA are good at analyzing
why Jews are hated, but fall short of explaining why Jews became
the object of derision. 30 Charles Small, founder and director of the Yale
Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, has criticized the
ZfA for its silence on the matter:
The lesson of the Holocaust was that silence in the face of injustice was
immoral—especially when it comes to genocidal antisemitism. The
silence among those who understand contemporary antisemitism—from
Durban II to the Iranian regime’s threat and German economic relations
27. See the monthly newsletter of the ZfA, the January 2009 issue, no. 37 http://
zfa.kgw.tu-berlin.de/newsletter/news-09-01.pdf . Professor Benz is responsible for
the newsletter; the editor was Dr. Juliane Wetzel. See also Clemens Heni, “What Is
Considered Extremist in Today’s Germany” Jerusalem Post, February 10, 2009,
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellitecid=1233304731222&pagename=JPost%2F
JPArticle%2FShowFull.
28. http://www.lizaswelt.net/2008/12/zentrum-fr-ahnungslose.html. LizasWelt
is a well-known pro-Israel blogger in Germany.
29. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago/London: The University of
Chicago Press, 2003/2005), 3-4.
30. http://www.achgut.com/dadgdx/index.php/dadgd/article/aliens_und_anti
semiten/.

2009] ANTISEMITISM AS A SPECIFIC PHENOMENON 37
with the regime—to remain silent is most troubling.“ 31
Noah Flug, chairman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors
and president of the International Auschwitz Committee, notes that
Germany “must examine and analyze whether it is important to support the
center.” 32
The ZfA provides an example of the stance of today’s academic world
in being disinclined to address Muslim antisemitism with the seriousness
that the situation deserves. It can also be argued that the group does not
devote enough attention to antisemitism as a whole, and that within the
ranks of the organization the ramifications of the ideology are
minimized. 3334
There is one positive outcome of the ZfA conference. It has created an
opportunity for several scholars to change their research framework regarding
the “longest hatred.” 35 Antisemitism cannot be equated with “simple”
prejudice, racism, or even “Islamophobia.”
Antisemitism is a dangerous ideology and worldview. It has singled
out Jews for several thousand years. Its irrational nature leads to genocide.
To prevent a “second Holocaust,” 36 research on antisemitism has to be
strengthened.
To remain silent during the Gaza war in the face of extreme
antisemitic rallies, or to downplay the antisemitic rallies in Germany, 37 or to
31. Benjamin Weinthal, “Antisemitism Research Center in Germany Criticized
for Failing to Urge Boycott of Durban II,” Jerusalem Post, March 11, 2009, http:
//www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellitecid=1236764158749&pagename=JPost%2FJP
Article%2FPrinter.
32. Weinthal, 2009.
33. See footnote 5.
34. Cf. footnote 17.
35. Robert Wistrich mentioned at his speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in
New York City, Manhattan, on February 26, 2009, that he would today be a millionaire
if he had asked for a certificate for his term “longest hatred,” title of a film
and partial title of his book Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (London: Methuen,
1991).
36. Dr. Charles Small mentioned this “pathetic” moment when Wiesel spoke at
the Yale Law School a few years ago, at a lecture Small gave at the conference of
the Canadian Academic Friends of Israel (CAFI) in Toronto, March 9, 2009. I
myself attended a big rally of some 10.000 people in Manhattan/New York City on
September 22, 2008, one day before Iranian President Ahamdinejad gave one of the
most anti-Zionist anti-Semitic speeches in the history of the United Nations. Wiesel
spoke at this rally and urged the world to act against Iran.
37. See Interview with Prof. Bergmann in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 9,
2009. He claims that Muslims just were in fear for their relatives in Gaza, etc. He

38 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:29
equalize antisemitism with “Islamophobia” is more than inappropriate. It
smacks of intimidation and surrendering to Islam under the guise of political
correctness and fear of being accused of Islamophobia. It is a trivialization
of the Holocaust, a form of “secondary antisemitism.” 38
Clemens Heni has worked as a post-doctoral researcher at theYale Initiative for the
Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), Yale University. He is the author
(in process) of Middle Eastern Studies and Radical Islam (Philadelphia: Middle
East Forum).
does not explain what the slogans “Death to the Jews” and “Olmert is a son of a
dog” have to do with worry about family in Gaza. In consequence, he says, it is
something totally different if German leftist or right-wingers are against Israel,
compared to anti-Israel hatred of Muslims! The German original reads: “Question:
‘Sie verharmlosen den Hass der Demonstranten. Bergmann: Keineswegs.’ Aber
wenn Palästinenser, die um ihre Angehörigen und Freunde im Gazastreifen
fürchten und vielleicht Familienmitglieder im Konflikt mit Israel verloren haben,
ihre Wut und Angst artikulieren, dann ist das erst einmal eine Reaktion auf einen
aktuellen Konflikt. Man muss das anders bewerten, als wenn deutsche Rechte oder
Linke aus ideologischen Gründen so etwas tun.”
38. See Clemens Heni (2008a), “Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-core to
Soft-core Denial of the Shoah,” Jewish Political Studies Review, 20, no. 3-4 (Fall
2008): 73-92. Available online at http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.
aspDBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=625&PID=0&IID=2675 (accessed
September 1, 2009).

Antisemitic Beliefs:
Formation and Transmission of a Superstition
Steven K. Baum
This is a two-part article addressing the formation of antisemitic beliefs
and the social transmission of such beliefs. A review of the antisemitic
myth research is followed by a tentative model describing the transmission
of key social beliefs. In Part 1, the author contends that “The Jew” is
synonymous with a Judas-like betrayer and undermining social force.
PART I: THE JEW AS SUPERSTITION
Antisemitism or disdain for Jews 1 can be blatant or benign (Wilson
1996; Villano 1999). It can be implicit or conscious. However we define it,
there has been a dramatic increase in antisemitic incidents since 2002 (ADL
2007; U.S. Department of State 2008; Simon & Schaler 2007).
As well, there has been a noticeable rise in the number of publications
regarding antisemitism and anti-Israeli sentiment (Benz 2008; Bergmann
1987, 1992; Bergmann and Korte 2004; Katz and Braly 1933; Zick and
Kupper 2005). For the most part, Muslim antisemitism been not been well
researched—the studies are just now emerging (e.g. Baum 2009; EU/FRA
2002/2009; Kaplan and Small 2006; Mayer 2007; Pew 2006, 2008; Silverstein
2008) with findings that suggest Muslim antisemitism is based on
folkloric Christian antisemitic themes combined with anti-Israeli sentiment.
Some theorists have written extensively warning of the genocidal-level
language linking Israel with antisemitism (Wistrich 2002, 2007). Such
linkage is most virulent on European and North American college campuses
(Marcus 2007) and in Muslim media, where sentiments such as “Zionism is
racism” and “death to the Jews” are presented alongside Palestinian human
rights concerns. Some studies have found a correlational link between anti-
Israeli sentiment and antisemitism (Baum 2009; Kaplan and Small 2006),
while others have not (Mayer 2007).
1. Helen Fein offers the most complete definition of antisemitism: “a persisting
latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collective manifested in
individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore and imagery, and
in action–social or legal discrimination, political mobilization against the Jews, and
collective or state violence–which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace,
or destroy Jews as Jews.“ Helen Fein, ed., The Persisting Question (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1987), 3.
39

40 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:39
For the most part, antisemitism data is gleaned from survey and poll
research designed to monitor the extent of antisemitic sentiment, such as
that done by the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League,
and Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute. These surveys and polls
are rarely critiqued (Dawidowicz 1970; Smith 1993, 1999). Theoretical
papers explaining antisemitism’s persistence are also rare (see Wistrich),
with a preponderance of papers emerging from Hebrew University’s Vidal
Sassoon International Center (SICSA), Berlin Technical University Center
for Antisemitism(ZfA), Stephen Roth, and Yale University (YIISA).
Prevalence
Estimates by Allport (1954), as well as by Flowerman and Johoda
(1946), suggest that 5-10% of the population is strongly prejudiced and
another 45% mildly bigoted. In a general Western population, approximately
a third endorses statements that are directly antisemitic (25%), while
32% are found to be moderately antisemitic and a third (29%) to be nonantisemitic
(Kovacs 1999, 2006).
The prevalence of antisemitism appears to vary from culture to culture.
Consistently, the lowest levels of antisemitism are reported in Holland
(10%), the U.S. (10-20%), and the UK (10-20%). Within the US, some
ethnic groups, for example African-Americans and Hispanic Americans,
got higher antisemitism scores (ADL 2009), as did some Asian-Americans
(Dunbar 1995). Levels of antisemitic beliefs rise in Western European
nations (30-45%) and were notably higher in Eastern Europe and Russia
(40-60%) (e.g. Paniotto 1999). The highest antisemitism levels appear in
Arab Muslim nations (80-95%), with Jordan, a nation devoid of Jewish citizens,
having a 98-100% “unfavorability rating” (ADL 2007, 2009; EU/FRA
2002/2009; Pew 2006, 2008).
In the United States, 25% of an American public says that they are not
presently acquainted with Jews, while 36% report that they do not know
any really well. An additional 8% report never having contact (Glock and
Stark 1966).
Research
Research into antisemitic beliefs began in the 1930s and reached its
peak post-WWII, with only a handful of North American studies performed
each decade thereafter. Yet a number of polls had been conducted by the
mid-1960s 2 (Rosenfield 1982), netting findings that are fairly consistent
2. A review of online North American doctoral dissertations is telling. When

2009] ANTISEMITIC BELIEFS: FORMATION AND TRANSMISSION 41
over time—though antisemitic sentiments vary with worldly events. For
example, in 1938, one poll found that 41% of Americans felt that Jews had
“too much power” and by the end of the war, the percentage had increased
to 58%. Along similar lines, when the ADL asked Spaniards a variation of
the question after the 2009 post-Gaza conflict, the figure jumped to 74%
(ADL 2009).
Historically, survey data has been revealing. Recall that during the
1930s, it was not uncommon for Jewish quotas and restrictions to be
applied at graduate schools in North America. Hotel accommodations were
involved as well. As depicted in the film Gentleman’s Agreement,
antisemitism was tacitly accepted, and some North American hotels would
restrict their locations to be “near churches” (read: far away from synagogues).
In one Toronto study, those seeking a hotel accommodation used a
Christian surname when applying for reservations (Mr. Lockwood). They
were guaranteed a room 90% of the time. But when a Jewish surname (Mr.
Greenberg) was employed, the number of reservations dropped precipitously
to 40% (Wax 1948).
Some headway was being made via public opinion survey research.
Utilizing a large New York sample (Flowerman and Jahoda 1946; Robinson
and Rohde 1949), multiple researchers began their focus on epidemiology
(Morse and Allport 1952), while others’ findings pointed toward a lower
social status and having less education, as well as the absorption of popular
beliefs, as being correlative (Gough 1951). Measurement of antisemitism
remains a focus though to this day; yet no consistent measure exists
(Cahalan and Trager 1949; Dawidowicz 1970; Evans 1950; Flowerman and
Jahoda 1946; Gough 1951; Rosenfeld 1982). The eleven-item Anti-Semitic
Belief Scale is utilized more than others (Selznick and Steinberg 1969).
The first major study of antisemitism began with German Jewish
émigrés’ seeking an understanding of the Holocaust. Struck by the inflexibility
within German culture, researchers examined rigidity. Utilizing psychological
tests and a Freudian model, they examined the realm of
personality factors as the next foray into antisemitism research (Frenkel-
Brunswick and Sanford 1945) This initial study was part of the larger study
(N=2,500)(Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, and Sanford 1950) that
focused on the authoritarian components of personality.
In terms of personality, rigidity rules. Constitutionally rigid authoritarian
persons were found to be more prejudiced (Adorno et al. 1950). Several
studies since that time have linked antisemitism with a rigid and rightthe
term antisemitism is entered, there are 109 “hits” of dissertations from the arts,
literature, history, social science over the last fifty years. By comparison, the term
racism pulls 3,106 selections.

42 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:39
wing authority orientation (Bergmann and Erb 2003; Dunbar and Simonova
2003; Martire and Clark 1982). Extremists appear to harbor greater authoritarian
tendencies (Frindte, Wettig, and Wammetsberger 2005).
While antisemitism and authoritarianism do not always yield high correlations
(Raden 1993, 1999), the vast majority of studies implicate rigidity
in personality (Ackerman and Jahoda 1950); FrenklBrunswick and Sanford
1945), right-wing authority orientation, and ethnocentrism (Gibson and
Duch 1992; Himmelhough 1950; Jahoda 1947; Konig, Eisinga, and
Scheepers 2000; Radke and Yarrow 1950; Sanford and Comstock, 1971).
Depending on whether researchers are examining old or new antisemitism,
authoritarianism or social dominance findings emerge strongly. University
of Jena (Germany) researchers studied a large sample (n=2130) of 14-18-
year-olds and noted differences between old and new antisemitism. The
older or traditional antisemitic views tended to be held by authoritarians,
while the new antisemitism (anti-Israeli sentiment) is social group-dominance
(SDO)-based (Frindte et al. 2005). Yet, such findings are only part of
a larger picture of who hates Jews.
Demographics may also shed some light on antisemitic belief formation.
Researchers in general find that those lower in education, lower in
income, and lower in social status are more antisemitic (Gibson and Duch
1992; Gibson 1994; Lindzey and Rogolsky 1950). Czech men who were
antisemitic were also anti-Roma (Dunbar and Simonova 2003). Gender may
or may not play a part. Specific to that study, as in several others, men tend
to be more prejudiced and antisemitic than women (Brym and Lenton 1991;
Dunbar and Simonova 2003), but education may also enter into the mix
(Raden 1999; Weil 1985). Teens and older adults appear to be prone to
having antisemitic beliefs (Glock et al. 1975).
Having disdain for another’s social group (Halperin, Canetti-Nisim,
and Hirsch-Hoefler 2009) and feeling a threat to one’s group identity
appear to be key components of antisemitism (Baum unpublished ms; Bergmann
2008; King and Weiner 2007; Saroglou and Galand 2004; Saroglou
and Hanique 2006), with the newest findings implicating ethnocentrism,
xenophobia (Kovacs 1999), and social dominance (Frindte et al. 2004)
again and again. Berlin Technical University sociologist Werner Bergmann’s
most recent study focuses on the non-identity aspect of Jews—those
who are not part of the national collective. As outsiders of the nation, Jews
can undermine a society’s religious and cultural cohesion via secularization
and their support of universal values, and
a) They can harm a society economically through financial exploitation
or manipulating international financial markets;
b) They can destabilize and threaten politically by acts of betrayal to

2009] ANTISEMITIC BELIEFS: FORMATION AND TRANSMISSION 43
ones country, by acting as a revolutionary force or by controlling a
country’s political system; and
c) They can damage a society morally by utilizing their role of victim in
the Holocaust to portray a negative image of the country or to demand
restitution payment. (2008, 346)
Given the antisemitic history, Christianity and Christian folklore have
been the primary focus of investigators (Cala 1995; Glock and Stark 1966;
Krzeminski 1996; Ward 1973; Zanicky 1997), though there are some who
disagree with the inference that Christian theology was directly involved
(Lotz 1977; Konig, Eisinga, and Scheepers 2000). Researchers even
examined the effects of Vatican II, hoping that it had resulted in a decline in
antisemitism, but they found no evidence that such was the case (Ward
1973).
One Dutch study found that it was not Christianity per se, but a more
secular version or indirect version that promoted antisemitic beliefs (Konig,
Sheepers, and Felling 2001). Christianity and Christian folklore, for example
deicide and ritual murder, are cited as reasons for antisemitic beliefs,
but in older subjects (Herzog 1994). A most compelling research has identified
Jews as underminers, betrayers, or “desecrators of Christian values,”
and those Judas-like descriptors correlated strongly with antisemitic beliefs.
Desecrator perceptions were highest in authoritarian and religious conservative
individuals and in those who received more exposure to messages of
desecration (Pargament, Trevino, Mahoney, and Silberman 2007). “Desecrator”
in this sense was equivalent to “social group threat” (Bergmann
2008) or “underminer” elsewhere (Baum unpublished ms). All the studies
were conducted prior to Islam’s being investigated. It now appears that
Islam as currently practiced is a key source of antisemitic sentiment as well
(Baum 2009; Tossavainen 2008).
Overall, mental health explanations of antisemitism have not been
offered, though in the 1950s it was fashionable to use Freudian concepts
such as immature ego and mass (Ackerman and Johoda 1950; Simmel
1946). Stress clearly exacerbates antisemitic prejudice (Fischer and Rule
1967), though for the most part Jews do not appear to incorporate the negative
stereotypes of Jews (Guimond 2000). Superstitious persons appear to
be prone to holding antisemitic beliefs, although in one study Arab respondents
endorsed more New Age beliefs, while non-Arab Muslims endorsed
more traditional superstitious beliefs (Baum and Rudski 2008), complicating
that relationship. More compelling is the research on Jewish identity.
Those who identify themselves as Jewish appear to hold mentally
healthier traits. One study found that Jewish identity was positive strongly
associated with traits such as trans- or post-nationalism (as opposed to

44 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:39
nationalistic) individualism, universalism, low levels of religiosity, and low
levels of conformity (Saroglou and Hanique 2006). Along similar lines, personal
identity trumped social identity in Jewish teens (Anisfeld, Munoz, and
Lambert 1963).
Psychology appears to be better at asking questions than at providing
answers. The laboratory research on reversing antisemitism contributes
minimally. When Christians read Jewish-based literature for months, they
showed no appreciable difference in their antisemitic sentiment. However,
showing philosemitic films in a classroom may help (Middleton 1960),
though the effects may not be long-lasting. Diffusing negative mood also
seemed to decrease antisemitic beliefs in ten-year-olds (Lukaszewski 1995).
Physical contact with Jews seemed to reduce teen antisemitism (Glock
et al. 1975), and social distance decreased once Jews and non-Jews actually
spoke to one another (Kweller 1985). When there is actual contact,
antisemitic beliefs decrease (Kweller). Villano (1999) observed that physical
contact lessened blatant antisemitism, but not the implicit or unconscious
aspects of antisemitism. However, when bombarded with many
examples contradicting the stereotype, people gradually modified their
beliefs, for example antisemitic beliefs (Webber and Crocker 1993). Unfortunately,
most people will not submit themselves to such conditions out of
the laboratory.
Nature of “The Jew”
Antisemitic traits are based on superstition (Lowenstein 1987), myth
(Finklekraut 1994; Rosenthal 2001), social constructions (Smith 1996;
Tractenberg 1966), and chimerical fantasies (Langmuir 1990; Wistrich
1991; Volovici 1991). Superstition is defined as an irrational belief arising
from ignorance or fear. In that sense, “the Jew” that is identified by most
people is a superstition.
When characteristics are used to identify ethnic groups, Jewish traits
are more readily identified than those of other social groups (Katz and
Braly 1933), though Irish traits have at times also stood out (Meens 1943).
Part of the problem may be that people think of Jewish traits as more biologically
determined and real. When essentialism and entitiativity were
examined in a recent study, Jewish people were believed to have high likelihood
of both (Kofta and Sedek 2005).
The term “Jew” itself is telling. Several of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy
tales portray the Jew readying himself for a Judas-like betrayal of the peasant
(Baum 2008). In some studies the term “Jew” describes a) somebody
who is disliked—for example the word might be shouted by sports fans at
the opposing team as an epithet; for children, it might mean a disliked class-

2009] ANTISEMITIC BELIEFS: FORMATION AND TRANSMISSION 45
mate or colleague; b) a crank, one who is strangely dressed, a person behaving
in a peculiar way; or c) a crypto—a prominent person who is publicly
active and does not openly declare his/her antisemitism (Kinastowski
1996). In other studies, the term “Jew” is used interchangeably with “alien,”
“polluter,” “power hungry,” and “economic parasite” (Michlic 2006). In
another study, terms such as “Christkiller,” “wandering Jew,” “scab swindler,”
“richer,” “smarter,” “descended from swine,” and “strange” are used
interchangeably with “Jew” (Cala 1995).
Slovokian Jews are depicted as “strange,” guilty, or outsiders
(Krekovicova 1997). For Austrians, the Jews were “other” or “foreign.”
Herzog (1994) concluded that Jews were thought of as anders als wir (“different
than we”), indicating a permanent otherness. In Japan, the Jews are
thought of as “sinister and suspect” (Kowner 1997). In Romania, Jews are
either “good” or “bad” Jews. The bad Jews were the respository of all negative
stereotypes, but were not directly known (Rosenthal 2001). Many peasants
believed that Jewish ritual murder was committed by big-city Jews, but
not by the familiar Jews of their locality (Bartoszewski 1984). Surprisingly,
“money” was not cited in many European studies, though a variation of this
theme as Jewish “planetary takeover” or “having too much power/business
power” was rated consistently high globally (ADL 2009), including in California
(Oliner and Krause 2001).
Jikeli (2009) examined German and French use of the term “Jew” and
concluded that there was a close relationship between antisemitic language,
and verbal and physical violence within the French and the German context,
to the point that the words Jude, Juif, and Feuj cannot be separated from
antisemitic attitudes.
The most recent ADL study is also revealing. The survey of 3,500
adults–500 in each of the seven European countries Austria, France, Hungary,
Poland, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom—found that 31%
of the respondents across Europe blame Jews in the financial industry for
the current global economic crisis. Overall, 40% of Europeans in the countries
polled believe that Jews have “too much power in the business world,”
with more than half of those in Hungary, Spain, and Poland agreeing with
that statement. European respondents still adhere to the notion that “Jews
have too much power in international financial markets.” In general, 41% of
those surveyed cling to the traditional stereotype (ADL 2009).
Persistent perceptions of Jews included their being more “ambitious”
(76%), more “eminent” (35%), and often “pushing their children to get better
grades” (17%) (Glock and Stark 1966). One ADL survey found additional
concern regarding “media control” (47%); “international banking”
(26%); “different ethics e.g. cheat” (17%); “flashier clothes” (18%); and
“capitalists, intellectuals, communists” (Glock and Stark 1966/1979). Jew-

46 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:39
ish teens were perceived as “conceited, powerful, sly, vain, [and] bossy”
(Glock et al. 1975).
A Princeton University student study addressed how consistent and
malleable “Jewish traits” were in the public mind over time. Polling in
1933, 1951, and 1969, Karlins, Coffman, and Walters (1969) found that
traits such as “shrewd/intelligent/industrious” stayed consistent, while more
extreme negative traits such as “mercenary, grasping” fell off over time,
replaced by “ambitious” and “materialistic”—traits the students endorsed as
“American.” When asked in 1945, “Do the Jews have too much influence
and power in this country” 67% answered in the affirmative. By 1962,
17% of Americans endorsed that item (Stember 1966).
In sum, Jews in the minds of many non-Jews are a superstition, a
myth, and a fantasy. The term Jew itself connotes a Judas-like betrayal
believed to be inherent in the Jewish nature.
PART II: SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF NOTIONS ABOUT “THE JEW”
In this second part of the article, the social transmission of the concept
of “The Jew” will be addressed. A model is proposed describing the transmission
of key social beliefs. The author concludes that transmission of
beliefs about “The Jew” follows the same social pathways as do superstition,
legend, and myth.
Determining Social Truth
There appear to be two kinds of beliefs: personal and social. Personal
beliefs have to do with what we experience first-hand in our lives. By contrast,
social beliefs are those that we have learned from the social world,
through, for example, education and social norms.
Almost any belief can become a social belief. In general, people accept
a social belief by way of social consensus and then assign it a value of high
or low credibility (DeRivera and Sarbin 1998). In some cultures, the likelihood
of the existence of UFOs and Loch Ness monsters may be ranked low,
but the likelihood of the existence of menacing Jews is ranked high. In such
cultures, people may not have seen a UFO, but know of someone who
knows a Jew. Other communications theories make it even simpler. Popular
beliefs are spread not because they are true, but because they are popular
(Kapferer 1990).
Social truth is determined by repetition and multiple sources. If an idea
is to stick in the mind of the public, observed Joseph Goebbels, “it must
confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” Whether it be
Nazi propaganda or public opinion, social truth is an agreed-upon idea

2009] ANTISEMITIC BELIEFS: FORMATION AND TRANSMISSION 47
repeated by multiple sources. Repeated often enough, the social belief
achieves sedimentation (Aho 1994). Like scientists who confirm experiments
by way of reliability (repetition) and validity (variation), people
determine social reality by way of multiple sources and repetition.
Once acquired, even the most erroneous social beliefs enjoy an undeserved
degree of protection from rejection and revision. People merely seek
evidence that confirms whichever hypothesis they may be entertaining
(Fine 2001).
Social truth is invariably subject to distortion. Kimberlee Weaver
(2006) and her colleagues at Virginia Polytechnic Institute have observed
that hearing something from one source can have the same effect as hearing
that thing from many different people; the brain gets tricked into thinking it
has heard a piece of information from multiple, independent sources, even
when it has not.
Age may factor into the distortion equation as well. In another experiment,
the scientist presented a flier from the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited
various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.”
Among those identified as false were statements such as, “The side effects
are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine.” When
University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz and his colleagues
(2005) had volunteers read the CDC flier, they found that within 30
minutes, older people distorted 28% of the false statements and recalled
them as true. Three days later, they recalled 40% of the myths as factual.
Younger people fared better at first, but after three days made as many
errors as older people did. Most troubling was that people of all ages now
felt that the source of their false beliefs was the CDC. Once a social belief
becomes represented (Moscovici 1987), it can become popular and widespread
(Bar-Tal 2000; Sperber 1990, 1996). Social excitement appears to be
the lubricant that helps spread such beliefs.
Transmission
Let me provide an example of how such transmission takes place.
Sebastian Haffner (2000) recalled a poignant scene he witnessed while
growing up in Nazi Germany.
In the middle of five or six passersby, I glimpsed the poor madman
who once used to wander with a switch and whistle from one streetcar to
the next, giving imaginary signals for it to stop or start. Well, that stuttering
half-wit was telling how “a yid woman fired with a revolver last night
from the roof of that building over there—and a trooper was hit.” “A yid

48 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:39
woman you say” asked an elderly gentleman, quite well dressed, quite
unruffled.
“Yeah, one of them yid bitches!”
“And didn’t they do anything to her”
“You bet they did. They arrested her, took her away.”
He continued:
I looked closely at the people listening. No one had the least doubt about
the truth of this absurd story. . . Did they not know that the soldier fell in
a real street battle in which hundreds of bullets were fired But what was
the point of asking Who would have listened Isn’t it easier and quicker
to believe what others tell you “A yid woman opened fire.”
As Haffner observed, it is easier to believe what others tell you—but
why When rumor transmission theories (Bar-Tal 2000; Buckner 1965) are
integrated into antisemitism research, a new model of communication
emerges (Boyd and Richerson 1985).
Rumor has three key components: source, message, and audience.
These elements will be elaborated upon below.
To promote effective communications, the source should offer authority
of some kind. Regarding antisemitic beliefs, the religious authority and
the State were used to foment such beliefs, as was popular culture, which
offers the authority of “common sense.” Sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani
(1966) first observed that the source should act as a messenger creating the
rumor and then returning it to the social group in a closed-loop fashion.
The message must be simple, sufficiently provocative, and consistent
with what is well known (concise and consistent). The message should be
sufficiently anxiety-provoking (crazy).
Finally, the audience must be receptive to the message. Audiences
tending toward conspiracy thinking are more receptive due to heightened
states of anxiety. The audience is ready or primed to become threatened by
the message regarding “The Jews” and then blame them for their anxietyinducing
ways.
The Jews Are News
Washington Post journalist Charles Krauthammer once quipped that
“the Jews are news.” An analysis of rumor transmission may explain why
that is so.
In general, when a rumor is “hot,” it circulates quickly. Consequently,
topics that make us anxious, envious, or threatened range from movie stars
to conspiracy. Whole epidemics have been traced to UFOs, penis panics,

2009] ANTISEMITIC BELIEFS: FORMATION AND TRANSMISSION 49
conspiracy theories, and terrorism (Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1994;
Hatfield and Rapson 2004).
Transmission speed is advanced by prior exposure and the construction
of simple, interesting communications. A cognitively optimal narrative
soon evolves (Norenzayan and Atran 2004)—one that is just strange
enough to move the message to the next receiver. Rumors about distant
events persist longer than local rumors (Noymer 2001). Tales that contain a
memorable plot, bright imagery, or a slightly bizarre superstition or supernatural
theme are passed on most efficiently (Ruscher 2001; Ryu 1998).
Frequent use, history, unobtrusiveness, diversity, generativity, and endurance
all figure into the survival of rumors or expressions. Emotionality provides
the “stickiness” for antisemitic stereotypes (Schul and Zukier 1999).
Word (emotional) potency is often involved (Edelman 2001; Metcalf 2002).
For this reason, hot anti-Israeli terms—for example, “apartheid,” “Nazi,”
and “Zionist”—are often employed in propaganda.
The transmission patterns of urban legends (Heath, Bell, and Sternberg
2001; Noymer 2001) and paranormal beliefs (Markovsky and Thye 2001)
are only now being investigated, and the results are telling. Stanford and
Duke University researchers found that people tended to pass along urban
legends more quickly when the stories contained both a clear idea and a
strong negative emotion, particularly disgust.
In that same study, researchers varied several urban legends and
presented them to forty-two Duke University undergrads. They asked them
to estimate how likely they were to pass the tale along. Some were lowdisgust
examples (saw a dead rat in a bottle when about to drink) and some
were high-disgust (felt something lumpy in throat after drinking). Not surprisingly,
the high-disgust tale was most likely to be repeated (Heath Bell
and Sternberg 2001). Additionally, University of California at Irvine
neuroscientists Larry Cahill and James McGraugh (1998) found that a boost
in memory occurs if livelier stories are read, a process called sympathetic
stimulation. Higher emotionality helps imprint memory. So if we retain the
revolting much better than the mundane, the implications for the “dirty
Jews” are clear. (For a review of stereotypes, see Bauer, Judd, and Thompson
2004.)
The rumor then spreads quickly by reaching hubs (people who are
well-connected) who then disperse it widely (Gladwell 2002). Most people
then “tell a small number of people in their circle” (DiFonzo 2008, 106). If
it is consistently repeated and retold via multiple sources, such as friends,
newspapers, and clergy members, then, like scientific truth, the message
achieves reliability and validity.
Invariably, Jewish traits are thought of as more real and unchangeable
than those of other social groups. Jewish traits are also held to be more

50 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:39
threatening (Kofta and Sedak 2006). Sedimentation, or an establishing of
the belief, occurs with further repetition (Aho 1994), and a saturation level
or tipping point results, priming people to see and know the ways of “The
Jew.” The court of public opinion soon weighs in: “The Jews did it.” A
social truth is now established—one that “everyone knows.” (See Fig. 1).
SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF ANTISEMITIC BELIEFS
SOURCE
Religion/State/
Popular Culture
I
SOCIAL
“TRUTH”
MESSAGE
Implicit/Explicit
TIPPING
POINT
AUDIENCE
Hears Threat/
Blames
I
Said Aloud
“EVERYBODY KNOWS”/“THEY DESERVE IT”
(Essentialism/essence cannot change)
(Entitativity/real) Threat
Fig. 1. See Benoit and Benoit (2008) for a complete model of belief
transmission.
Modes of Social Transmission
To date, no studies have linked the influence of antisemitic beliefs and
what is now becoming mass communication, that is, the Internet. Word-ofmouth
appears to be a most effective and popular form of belief transmission
(Bauer and Gleicher 1953). Antisemitic iconography can be found
throughout European churches and is still visible on some municipal structures
as graffiti or on posters, as well as on trinkets and souvenirs.
For instance, during WWII, the Serbian government issued four
antisemitic, anti-Masonic, anticommunist stamps commemorating the
Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition of October 22, 1941. The stamps depicted a
strong Serbia victorious over the plot for world domination. Each time you
mailed a letter, you were reminded of the second enemy—specifically,
Jews, communists, and Masons.
For less literate cultures, cartoons are an effective means of transporting
antisemitic messages well (see Antisemitica).
Books seem best at lending themselves to antisemitic theory, such as
that involving alleged Jewish planetary takeover. Books on such conspiracies
have been runaway bestsellers in Japan and throughout the Muslim

2009] ANTISEMITIC BELIEFS: FORMATION AND TRANSMISSION 51
world; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became a legal document as
Article 32 of Hamas’s constitution.
In sum, cultural messages that are simple, consistent with established
beliefs, and “just strange enough” transmit most effectively (Brauer, Judd,
and Thompson 2004; Lyons and Kashima 2003; McIntyre, Lyons, Clark,
and Kashima 2004; Schaller, Conway, and Tanchuk 2002), especially when
propelled by key negative emotions, such as fear, anger, and disgust.
Whether we are addressing the wicked Jews from the Passion Play, the
myths such as those depicted in the Protocols, the Wandering Jew, the
Shakespearian or Henry James versions, or the militant Islamic writing of
Sayyid Qutb or Weimar (Greenspoon & LeBeau 1996), the superstition
known as “The Jew” continues to intrigue and terrify non-Jews. The problem
for Jews is that for the most part, people are unable to separate the Jew
of social imagination, fantasy, and superstition from actual Jews.
Steven K. Baum is a psychologist residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This
paper was presented at the 32nd Annual Scientific Meeting of the International
Society of Political Psychology, Dublin, July 14 2009. Please address all correspondence
to skbaum@comast.net.
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Durban II Geneva — Once Again into the Breach
Shimon Samuels
The Israel-offensive and Islamocentric draft document drafted by the
“Durban II” Working Group (Libya, Cuba, Iran, Sudan et al.) through three
Preparatory Commissions (PrepComs) and intersessional meetings, had
been expurgated by the opening of the Durban Review Conference in
Geneva on April 20, 2009. Did the “human wrongs” champions cave in to
Western threats to bolt from the conference Were the drastic cuts bought
for short-term sweeteners culled from the West by the outstanding negotiation
skills of a Russian mediator, Yuri Boychenko, for example UN deference
to the only visiting Head of State, Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad Or was it the crafty Durban two-step, whereby the final
purged and abbreviated Declaration included all the offensiveness of the
past by simple reiteration—that is, the final document endorses unconditionally
the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action of 2001. It is
there that only one of the 197 UN member-states appears by name, the only
state charged with racism and crimes against humanity: Israel.
If the intergovernmental document on the surface seems even reasonable,
on the NGO (nongovernmental) level, Palestinocentrism and an obsessive-compulsive
singling out of Israel, often with the application of
classical antisemitic stereotypes, came back with a wallop. It was as an
NGO in Consultative Status to the United Nations that we first joined the
so-called “civil society” road to Durban.
My two years led up to the September 2001 World Conference against
Racism—Durban I—with my being the only Jew elected to the NGO
Forum International Steering Committee, ending with my designation as
“the World Jew” and summary expulsion from the actual conference. That
Committee closed shop three months later, in Geneva, where I attended the
discussion of an 8-point plan for implementation by Durban II.
That blueprint focused on Israel as “the last bastion of apartheid,” with
a series of measures based upon the campaigns against apartheid in South
Africa. Legal, educational, commercial, cultural, academic, and diplomatic
tactics to demonize and isolate the Jewish State, with mantras extolling the
Naqba as the only Holocaust, BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions), the
apartheid wall—these were to become “the Durban module.” The module
was to be disseminated via the media (especially the Internet), universities,
trade unions, churches, NGOs, and all United Nations agencies. The module
went global in 2009 through the World Social Forum (WSF) antiglobalization
movement, born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and its annual gather-
59

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ings in Europe (ESFs), Africa, and Asia. This is the “Durban behind Durban”
through the inter-Durban period, and the Durban module has
effectively blurred any distinctions between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
Marchers against racism in 2001 carried banners revering Hitler; at the
2003 WSF they proclaimed, “Nazis, Yankees, Jews—No More Chosen
Peoples”; at the Athens 2006 ESF, neo-Nazis and Hizbollah acolytes distributed
tracts calling for the rebirth of the Hitler-Mufti alliance. No wonder
that these meetings conclude with spikes of antisemitic violence. The
December 2008-January 2009 Gaza War demonstrations were not spontaneous
nor mimetic. The strategy was rehearsed in September 2008 at the
Malmo ESF. They were orchestrated by national Palestine support committees
in place to drive the Durban module. They were facilitated by the structures
of the anti-globalization alliance of extreme-left, Jihadists, and a bevy
of antisemites, including some neo-Nazis and anti-Israel Israeli and diaspora
Jews. These Durban I NGO activists, with their younger disciples present,
set out, once again, on the road to Durban II. At the Brasilia regional
Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) in 2008, I was accused by Afro-Latin
groups of generating a “Jewish campaign to stop the funding that would
have brought them to Geneva.” At the Geneva PrepCom in October 2007, I
had been publicly threatened by a radical pro-Hamas NGO in a planning
session for a renamed NGO Forum. This followed the Chair’s response to
my concern at a repeat of the 2001 violence: “The Wiesenthal Center asks
me to guarantee that there will be no antisemitism in Geneva. There may be
antisemitism or even Semitism, but we will hold an NGO Forum.” The
“Durban module” was to continue in “Durban II” - Geneva with such programs
as:
—“United against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation,” which immediately
preceded Durban II with all the usual suspects.
—A counter-“Yom Hashoah,” entitled “From Warsaw to Gaza: Memory
and Responsibility,” was led by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist
Network (IJAN).
—“United against Racism” gathered a coalition of Palestinian, African
American, indigenous, and migrant groups plus renegade Jews to campaign
for an end to US aid to Israel, support BDS, and fight
Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.
The “Durban module” war for vox populi is unremitting. It is there that
the campaigns, vectors, calendar, and drivers persist in developing the Durban
module after Geneva and, perish the thought, until “Durban III.”
Here follow three briefings from “Durban II” - Geneva, a diary of five
days that did not change the world. Yet, just as Durban I, in hindsight, set a
context for 9/11, seventy-two hours after its conclusion, so did the lead-up
to Durban II contribute to, and draw from, the rhetoric and antisemitic vio-

2009] DURBAN II GENEVA 61
lence in the wake of the Gaza War. Durban I and II were public exhibitions
of UN circus-style consequences of the distorted “democratic” mathematics
of the bloc system. The 77 so-called Non-Aligned States overlap with the
56-state Organization of the Islamic Conference and the African Union, the
Arab League plus the radicals of the Latin American and Caribbean Group
(GRULAC). The democratic Western, European and Other Group
(WEOG), with its Western-oriented Latin and few other allies, seldom has
the political will to match. But for rare champions, the line of least resistance
is the lowest common denominator: acceptance of bashing the only
UN member-state that is not a member of any UN bloc—“a people that
dwells alone”: Israel.
Hence, Durban II did not change the world, in that it is only a window
into the meetings of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. There are
the eternal agenda items: Occupation (Israel), Violations of Human Rights
in the Occupied Arab Territories (Israel), Violations of Human Rights
around the World (Israel), and so forth.
The five days of Durban II have changed nothing: Israel remains in the
dock of the international community, with inevitable consequences for
Diaspora Jewry throughout the world.
BRIEFING I
Geneva, April 19, 2009
Participated in a parallel meeting to Durban II, held in a Geneva hotel,
which was organized by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, the
International Coordinating Network on Palestine and the Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions (BDS) Committee. Entitled “The Israel Review Conference:
United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation, Dignity &
Justice for the Palestinian People,” it was attended by some 160 participants.
The Palestinian NGO Badil, accredited to Durban I and II, presented
a 300-page report on “Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
and the International Legal Prohibition on Apartheid.” Several lawyers
spoke on bringing Israel to the ICC (International Criminal Court) and the
European Court of Justice for war crimes. Workshops were held on an
“International campaign against the Jewish National Fund”; “State responsibility
and arms trade with Israel”; “Legal BDS—Popular Tribunals and
Public Petitions.”
A debate, entitled “Israeli apartheid,” paid credit to Jimmy Carter’s
book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and political experience in the trade
union movement in the combat against South Africa. The concept was
vaunted as a valuable tool for political mobilization and solidarity.

62 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:59
Campaigns were proposed to launch international legal measures to
reclaim Palestinian property. An initiative was proposed regarding water by
highlighting the supposed distinction between Israeli swimming pools and
the “meager amount available for Palestinian olive trees.”
Countermeasures were discussed against those attempting to criminalize
the boycott. Concrete examples reportedly mentioned an attack in Ireland
on commercial and military suppliers to Israel: Demonstrators
apparently damaged computers, bound for Israel, at the Raytheon factory,
There was debate on construction of a European resistance movement,
based on the notion that “we are all Hizbollah, we are all Hamas. . . The
world stopped Nazism, the world stopped Apartheid, we will stop
Zionism.”
PR experts analyzed language for campaigns, recommending focus on
“population transfer” and caution in using the Nazi analogy, as this opens
the campaign to charges of antisemitism.
Badil suggested that South Africa and Israel not be presented as analogies,
but added that the Apartheid experience was applicable as it identified
“a program of racial engineering.” He continued, “Race, colour, family,
descent, are related concepts. The Jew, by virtue of descent, has taken rights
over the land that non Jews do not share. . . Jewish supremacy or Zionism
through nationality or peoplehood has been the basis for ethnic cleansing.”
Participants were eager to find ways to structure shared campaigns and
resources after the conclusion of the Durban Review Conference.
COMMENTS:
“The tragedy is that so much hate was concentrated on maximizing
harm to the Jewish State rather than focusing on issues of racism and discrimination
in the Middle East. . . Where were the women, trade unionists,
writers, homosexuals, and indeed Christians and other religious minorities
to lament the violation of their counterparts’ fundamental rights in Palestine
and Iran Why did this gathering not condemn the scheduled visit of Iranian
President Ahmadinejad in view of his genocidal statements, his patronage
of terrorism, his denial of the Holocaust, and his country’s nuclear
designs”
“This event was yet another example of Durban II’s bankruptcy and its
kowtowing to tyrants.”
The NGO Civil Society Forum March against Racism, groups of
Tamils, Kurdish victims of the Iraqi Halabja gassing, and sexual diversity
activists clustered at the demonstration edges. Dalits (Indian “Untouchables”)
were segregated across a busy intersection. At the Wiesenthal

2009] DURBAN II GENEVA 63
Center’s suggestion, they moved their banners under the main podium.
Nevertheless, the event was clearly monopolized by the Palestine issue and
by spokesmen of other groups that addressed that cause. A main speaker
was Dr. Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset), who
presented himself as a Palestinian victim of “Israeli racist apartheid.” He
ended his speech by proclaiming, “No Peace Without Justice.”
COMMENT:
“The absurdity of Zahalka’s contention is that, as an Israeli-Arab, he
enjoys a total freedom of expression denied to all other Middle East legislatures,
the Libyan-chaired Durban II Preparatory process, and, above all,
Apartheid South Africa.”
Zahalka was followed by former UN Human Rights Council Rapporteur
on Racism, Doudou Diene. He endorsed the legitimacy of the gathering
and Durban II as a political process: “Zionism is not racism, but a
political ideology, which must be confronted politically.”
At another alternative event, the Civil Society Forum for the Durban
Review Conference, Diene laid out measures for a reparations campaign on
behalf of trans-Atlantic slave trade victims.
COMMENT:
“The narrow attention [was given] to only the Western slave trade,
thus excluding African victims of Arab slavers and those targeted by the
contemporary traffic in women and children.”
BRIEFING II
Geneva, April 22, 2009
The Geneva Jewish Community welcomed visiting personalities and
Jewish organizations to mourn the victims of the Holocaust on this Yom
HaShoah commemoration day, which coincided with the 120th anniversary
of Hitler’s birth. Over 2000 gathered in prayer and outrage opposite the
United Nations, just following the speech given there by Holocaust denier,
terrorist patron, and Hitler aspirant, Iranian President Ahmadinejad. Across
town, at the Uni Mail University, some 200 pro-Palestinian activists were
invited by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), for a
counter-Yom HaShoah: “From Warsaw to Gaza—Memory and
Responsibility.”
French Jewish writer, Eric Hazan—author of Notes on the Occupation:

64 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:59
Nablus, Kalkilya, Hebron—and American professor of Jewish history,
Marc Ellis—author of Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes—reportedly
argued that the Holocaust was abused as “a Zionist defense of Israel.” Elie
Wiesel, who had been abused that afternoon as a “ZioNazi” by an
Ahmadinejad delegate, spoke emotionally at the official ceremony of his
own deportation and his despair at current antisemitism. Wiesel stated, “In
the ghettos before deportation, we married and had children—we had hope;
in the post-War internment camps, we survivors married and had children—
we had hope. . . Today, hope died as a new Hitler spoke at the UN
podium. . . I am here today in the hope for hope for the generations of our
children and grandchildren.” The Jewish anti-Zionists slammed Wiesel’s
“misuse of his Holocaust experience for Zionist ends,” and Claude
Lanzmann, Alain Finkielkraut, and Bernard-Henri Lévy as “stooges for the
United States and Israel.”
Ellis said he had been warned, as a foreigner, “not to advocate, on
Swiss soil, the end of a State with which Switzerland maintains diplomatic
relations” (ironically, Israel that same day withdrew its Ambassador from
Berne, due to the Swiss President’s welcome to Ahmadinejad). “We Jews
must combat the Americanization of the Holocaust and its instrumentalization
for empire. . . Jewish forces with their dollar millions of funding (Elie
Wiesel is at a better hotel than mine) have hijacked a UN anti-racism conference
to impose their imperialist agenda.“
IJAN claimed its Yom HaShoah as “a prophetic event,” to match the
April 19th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with the fate of resistance
in Gaza. Their failed prophets were Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and
Hannah Arendt. But even these were “misguided colonialists who believed
Jewish settlements in Palestine would profit the indigenous Arabs.” Settlements
became imperialist after “the disruption of the Holocaust” that legitimized
the Jewish State.
The public consensus was for a one-State solution “to end the ethnic
cleansing and segregation of Palestinians. . . that Jews could live therein as
a minority, just as other minorities in the region.”
The speakers attacked the Zionist Jewish left, especially Amos Oz, as
“the friendly face of Zionism.” They then turned to boycott and campaigns
to rupture diplomatic relations with Israel in praise of Venezuelan and
Bolivian Presidents Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. IJAN’s bottom line
was: “As a Jew, I do not accept Zionist crimes committed in my name.”
COMMENTS:
“After Ahmadinejad in the UN plenary, we found solace in Elie

2009] DURBAN II GENEVA 65
Wiesel’s passionate plea “for hope in the generation of our children and
children’s children.”
“To end this horrific day in the fetid atmosphere of self-hating Jews,
bent on harming the Jewish State, was a desecration of Yom HaShoah and a
nightmare scenario bereft of hope.”
BRIEFING III
Geneva, April 23, 2009
An Iranian protest against the diplomatic walkout during President
Ahmadinejad’s speech on Monday, April 20 gathered opposite the seat of
the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, the landmark Wilson Palace
in Geneva. Demonstrators waved banners proclaiming that “Zionism =
Racism,” placed candles forming a map of Israel across a gravestone, and
displayed a poster of a hand—fingers amputated Jihadi-style—marked
“Zionism = Apartheid.” They also distributed to passersby pens inscribed
with the Star of David = a Swastika and a CD-Rom produced in Tehran by
the Association of NGOs and Activists for Liberation of Holy-Quds [Jerusalem]/Iran.
This CD is replete with Holocaust-denying, antisemitic, and
even, bizarrely, anti-Indian cartoons and posters.
COMMENTS:
“This sickening demonstration of hate shows that, though
Ahmadinejad has left Geneva, his venom will continue to poison the Durban
Review Conference until its conclusion and beyond.”
“Iran’s persistent racist incitement should result in its suspension from
the UN Human Rights Council.”
CONCLUSIONS
The “Durban module” persists in boycott initiatives. Perhaps the term
“judicial Jihad” is appropriate for a spate of defamation suits brought by
Palestinian-associated charities in Europe. (My own five years defence concluded
with a French Supreme Court acquittal this past year). Escalation of
legal campaigns are inevitable, i.e. Goldstone Report.
When we were attacked in Durban, we were caught off guard. In
Geneva, we were prepared. We manned the Prep Coms, launched awareness
education for NGOs and the media. Inter alia, the pared-down final
document, the partial walkout on Ahmadinejad, the coalition-building
around the freedom of expression/blasphemy of religion issues were argua-

66 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:59
bly assisted by our work—a malignant cell in the overall DNA of evermutating
antisemitism, the lessons were learned.
Shimon Samuels, Ph.D., is the Director for International Relations at the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre, Paris, France. He is an editor of Antisemitism: The Generic
Hatred: Essays in Memory of Simon Wiesenthal (London: Vallentine Mitchell,
2007).

ESSAYS
An Open Letter to Antisemites
Murray J. Kohn
Since the Third Century B.C.E. and Manetho’s pagan anti-Judaism
campaign in Alexandria, Egypt, antisemitism has taken on a chameleon
characteristic that it has retained throughout the ages. It always succeeded
in hurting, debasing, and rejecting the incomprehensible Jewish community’s
élan vital for remaining true to its Abrahamic mission of continuous
existence. In a succinct remark by Ivan Turgenev, we read the quintessential
summary of the persistent meaning of the self-renewing, ageless
antisemitism: “I hate Jews. Every time I see one, he reminds me of the sins
I commit.”
In an essay by the late editor of the Jewish Spectator, Dr. Trude Weiss-
Rosmarin scintillatingly summarizes the character and essence of
antisemitism. In the spring of 1895 when he was writing The Jewish State,
Theodor Herzl noted in his diary: “It was erroneous on the part of the
doctrinaire libertarians to believe that men can be made equal by publishing
an edict in the Imperial Gazette.” He was referring to the various nineteenth-century
emancipation edicts, which conferred equality upon the Jews
of Western Europe, and to the Dreyfus trial, which had convinced him that
antisemitism cannot be legislated out of existence.
Herzl became a Zionist and promoted the Jewish state because he was
convinced of “the emptiness and futility of efforts to combat antisemitism.
Declamations made in writing or in closed circles do no good whatever.”
He added, “They even have a comical effect. It is true that in addition to
careerists and simpletons there may be very stalwart people serving on such
‘relief committees.’ They resemble the relief committees formed after–and
before floods and they accomplish about as much.”
With pointed intuition Herzl noted in a few sentences what sociologists
and psychologists specializing in the study of antisemitism recognize
is “a strong and unconscious force among the masses,” who react to the
Jews with prejudice and hate.
Hatred of Jews and Judaism has been universal and ubiquitous in all
societies where Jews lived as a minority and held onto their Jewish distinctiveness,
refusing to assimilate and disappear. Peretz Smolenskin (1842-
1885), a proto-Zionist ideologist of the Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) move-
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ment, succinctly described hatred of Jews as “the eternal hatred of the eternal
people.”
Antisemitism is a disease that is endemic in all countries and all societies.
It tends to turn into a virulent epidemic when economic and social
problems become so oppressive that scapegoating is snatched at as an
escape.
The current increase of antisemitism does not surprise those who know
Jewish history. They know that the slander and death of Haman, the archenemy
of the Jews of ancient Persia, has been the standard accusation of
Jew-haters for over 2,000 years.
Jacob Wassermann, the German Jewish novelist, accurately described
the Jewish plight: “Shall we seek obscurity” he asked, and concluded:
It would be in vain, for they say, “He hides himself, the coward. His
conscience must be troubling him.” Approach them, frankly, with outstretched
and open hand In vain. They will say: “What tactlessness!
How clearly you see the insensitive Jew!” Help them to shake off their
chains In vain. They will say, “How much did he make out of it” Be
faithful to them in peace, faithful in war In vain. They will say, “He
can turn his hand to anything and everything. He is protean.” Live for
them, die for them In vain. They will say, “The Jew remains a Jew, first
and last.”
It never mattered what the Jews did. They were, and are, persecuted
because, to quote Israel Zangwill, “If there were no Jews they would have
to be invented for the use of the politicians. They are indispensable, the
antithesis of a panacea; guaranteed to cause all evils. That is, to be blamed
for all evils.”
It would be a felicitous sequitur to remind the reader of one of the
great non-Jewish minds of the twentieth century. The late philosopher Jean-
Paul Sarte, himself a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, wrote in his
essay “Thoughts on the Jewish Problem” as follows:
The anti-Semite has created the Jew from his need, prejudice is not uninformed
opinion. Antisemitism is an attitude totally and freely self-chosen,
a global attitude which is adopted not only in regard to Jews, but in
regard to men in general. It is a passion and at the same time a concept
of the world. An anti-Semite is a man who is afraid, not of the Jews, of
course, but of himself, his conscience, his instincts, his responsibilities, of
attitude, of change, of society and the world, of everything except the
Jews. He is a coward who does not wish to admit his cowardice to himself,
a murderer who represses and censures his penchant for murder
without being able to restrain it and who nevertheless does not dare to kill
except in effigy or in the anonymity of a mob; a malcontent who dares

2009] AN OPEN LETTER TO ANTISEMITES 69
not revolt for fear of consequences of his rebellion. By adhering to
antisemitism, he is not only adopting an opinion, he is choosing himself
as a person. He is choosing the permanence and the impenetrability of
rock, the total irresponsibility of the warrior who obeys his leaders–and
has no leader–he chooses finally, that good be ready made, not in question,
out of reach. The Jew is a pretext: elsewhere it will be a different
ethnic or skin color; the Jew’s existence simply allows the anti-Semite to
nip his anxieties in the bud by persuading himself that his place has
always been cut out in the world. Antisemitism, in a word, is fear of
man’s fate. The anti-Semite is a man who wants to be pitiless alone,
furious torrent, devastating lightening; in short, everything but man.
In a more recent decade, the well-known novelist Cynthia Ozick wrote
in an insightful essay:
Antisemitism is: a self-administered reprimand to its perpetrators and servants
who respond by painting the Jews as they see themselves. Say that
the Jew is savage, and you confer to your own savagery; libel the Jew
with blood ritual, and you describe your own practice; declare that the
Jew suppresses your motherhood, and you admit to your enduring refusal
of Jewish sovereignty. When the Jewish state defends itself against
attack, cry aggression. Cry racism when the Jewish state opens its arms to
refugees of every color, to Vietnamese boat people, to Bosnian Muslims.
On the American campus, profess diversity and malign the Jews.
Whatever you are, maligner, reviler, aggressor, oppressor, racist,
strongman, murderer, liar, denier–to see your own face, look to what you
say of the Jews. Antisemitism is the anti-Semites’ looking glass.
Antisemitism is a kind of Platonism; it has no need of real Jews. It can
thrive where no Jews have ever lived, where all the Jews are already
dead. Antisemitism had nothing to do with the Jews; it is not about the
Jews. It is, it always has been, it always will be, about the body and soul
of the anti-Semite.
The aforecited representative excerpts need no more corroborating
support as to the tragic mendacity of the antisemites, from religious texts, to
secular socialism, to the intellectual pleiad of the prophets and leaders of
enlightenment who had disdain for their own history and, despite their glorification
of the great ideals for all humanity, nevertheless did not hesitate
to malign the Jew. This oxymoronic perception regarding the world and the
Jew has thus far proved to be incurable within Western civilization, which
attests to its own skin-deep ethos when it comes to the Jew in the world.
In this regard, notwithstanding the ideals and idealism of Western culture
and civilization which are deeply indebted to the Torahitic-prophetic
visions for an ideal world community, this intrinsic indebtedness to Judaism
is the source of its eternal awareness and thus an irritation beyond a real

70 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:67
cure. The eternal truth has yet to be digested by our Western civilization,
and herein lies its convulsing failure. In short, all of its ideals in the last two
thousand years have been veneer deep, and as long as this Western culture
fails to absorb the proper dosage of cure for its self-deception, human tragedies—from
local genocides to the enormity and extent of the “Shoah”—
will intermittently recur. The proof: The Holocaust was executed in view of
the Western world with soto-voce piously remorseful pronouncements, yet
tolerated in a most spiritually, ideologically, and morally decadent manner.
It testified bluntly that our civilization has no moral backbone. It is and
continues to be a civilization of individual rights, at best, at the expense of
collective moral responsibility for one another.
The Jew, who introduced to mankind the ideal guideposts of one God
and one human brotherhood, has been allowed to suffer and intermittently
been murdered. For, intrinsically, the Jew still represents the dreamer of a
terrestrial world where people can live and survive in peace with each other.
This ideal, which is the mainstay of a continuous existence of the Jewish
people, is incomprehensible to a predatory human race whose existence has
been based on brute power. Yes, the Jew is an irritant, an idealist of the
prophetic genre, and indigestible to a carnivorous world.
As an Auschwitz survivor, I have suffered no more and no less than
any of my brethren, yet even Auschwitz could not destroy my vision of a
world that may eventually disinfect itself from its lingering prejudices and
self-propelled arrogance. The Holocaust was the result of a bankrupt civilization
whose silence was deafening in post-Holocaust years. This civilization
has reemerged with a vengeance at the reestablishment of Jewish
political independence in the land of its fathers, roaring bitterly at any time
when Israel defends itself against her predators, a mandate granted all sovereign
nations yet begrudged when it comes to the Jewish state. Frankly, we
are not surprised at the noises of these cowardly voices.
Hitler is dead and the times have radically changed. Antisemitism’s
reemerging grating voices are sound bites of the cacophony of an idiotic
chorus, but this time there is no more fear. The Jewish people swore at the
annihilation sites: “NEVER AGAIN” will we tolerate its barking predators;
whether our enemies like it or may grind their teeth, better hear us: we are
here to stay forever. Tear your larynx. You suffer from a disease that only
idiots can continue to incubate.
Murray J. Kohn is a rabbi and professor of Holocaust Studies at Richard Stockton
College of New Jersey.

The Basic Difference
Richard L. Rubenstein
In an essay I wrote in Michael Berenbaum’s book on contemporary
antisemitism, 1 I used a psychoanalytic term, the “return of the repressed,” to
characterize current antisemitism. It was my way of saying that antisemitism
never really goes away and cannot be defeated by rational discourse.
Today there are many examples of mainstream religious, academic, and
political institutions that depict Israel as responsible for the Middle East
conflict while ignoring the genocidal intent of much of the Muslim world
toward Israel. No amount of empirical evidence will change that, because
the roots of these attitudes are emotional and religious, often at the level of
unexamined, pre-theoretical consciousness.
I believe that antisemitism is culturally indelible in both Christianity
and Islam. This does not mean that every Christian is an antisemite. It does
mean that the religious basis of hostility is imbedded in the life-cycle rituals
of Christianity and Islam. When, for example, I attend funeral masses for
Catholic trustees or faculty members, I hear words such as, “I am the way
and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father save through me”
(John 14:6).
This is part of one of the most crucial rituals of the Christian life cycle,
the funerary rites. Let us never forget that Christianity is by definition christocentric,
that its ultimate hope for humanity is centered on Jesus Christ.
But Jews deny this ultimate hope of Christians as they face the passing of a
loved one, not by what they say, but simply by continuing their non-Christian
existence and thereby rejecting the central claim of Christianity.
I am currently completing an essay on sacrificial ritual in Judaism and
Christianity. In it I deal with the fact that Judaism and Christianity have
radically different answers to the question: How can we achieve a right
relationship with God The Jewish answer is by obedience to an inherited
system of statutes and ordinances and their authoritative interpreters. The
Christian answer is by becoming one with (identification with) the only
person ever to have achieved such a relationship, Jesus Christ, and this is
achieved by the most archaic mode of identification, namely, by oral incorporation,
that is, by means of the Eucharist, which, in the words of the firstcentury
Church Father, Ignatius of Antioch, is “the medicine of immortal-
1. Rubenstein, “The Witness People Myth, Israel, and Anti-Zionism in the
Western World,” in Not Your Father’s Antisemitism: Hatred of the Jews in the
Twenty-first Century, ed. Michael Berenbaum (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House,
2008), 293-328.
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ity.” 2 Thus, what is absolutely taboo in Judaism becomes radically sacred in
Christianity. Every time a believing Catholic takes Holy Communion, he
believes he partakes of God’s very substance. That idea is a sacrilege in
Judaism. The gap between the two faiths is total at this point.
I often refer to the theory of cognitive dissonance in my analysis of
antisemitism. Simply put, the Jew is the disconfirming other in both Christianity
and Islam. Whether a society can tolerate the disconfirming other
depends on the level of stress within that society. As stress increases, the
level of toleration decreases. Elsewhere, I have written of the problem of
possession of the Land of Israel. Historically, one of the strongest proofs of
the truth of the Christian religion in its decisive foundational years was the
destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the exile of the Jews from their
ancestral homeland. The destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. was especially
important. This event was taken by Christians as confirmation that
God had rejected the Jewish system of animal sacrifices and had accepted
the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It was also taken as a sign that Christianity
was true. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Palestine came to be
regarded as “Christ’s patrimony.” Since Palestine was in non-Christian
hands, it was considered a sacred duty to enter into combat to restore to
Christ the property that was rightfully his. 3 According to Saint Augustine,
Jews might survive but not thrive and if there was any place where Jews
were not to thrive, it was in Christ’s patrimony.
Last semester, I taught a course on “The Age of the Enlightenment” at
my university. If the Enlightenment thinkers saw nonsense in anything, it
was in the religious doctrines alluded to in this communication. Yet at some
level, these ideas and the accompanying rites made sense and were believed
by millions for two thousand years. I believe that it was largely the achievement
of Freud and other psychoanalytic thinkers to perceive the inherent
logic, tragic though it might be, of religious symbols, rituals, and doctrines.
I say tragic because I see the conflicts as ineradicable at some level. I am
not surprised that the mainstream Protestant churches are so anti-Israel.
They may use the language of morality, but they are motivated, perhaps
unconsciously, by the ancient Christian doctrine that God has exiled the
Jews from their Land, their patrimony, because of their rejection of Christ.
Nor does the Muslim-Christian rivalry change things. After all, one doesn’t
have to be a Christian to destroy Israel. The Babylonians and the Romans
did it. Why not the Muslims
2. Ignatius (of Antioch), “Ignatius: Epistle to the Ephesians,” Early Christian
Writings: The Apostolic Fathers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 20.
3. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), xxviii.

2009] THE BASIC DIFFERENCE 73
Even those Christians who support Israel, the Evangelicals, are largely
religiously motivated. I have often told my wife that if Episcopalian Franklin
Delano Roosevelt had survived to the end of his term in 1948, there
would have been no US support for Israel; almost all of the WASP elite
were against it. It was only because Truman was a Southern Baptist who,
unlike Jimmy Carter, was prepared to go against George Marshall, Dean
Acheson, James V. Forrestal, George F. Kennan, Robert Lovett, John J.
McCloy, and Paul Nitze that the United States recognized the new state. 4
Richard L. Rubenstein’s latest book, Jihad and Genocide, will be published by
Rowman and Littlefield. Rubenstein is President Emeritus of the University of
Bridgeport and Lawton Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religion at Florida
State University.
4. Richard Holbrooke, “Washington’s Battle over Israel’s Birth,” Washington
Post, May 7, 2008, A21, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2008/05/06/AR2008050602447.html.

BOOK REVIEWS
Judas and Antisemitism—So Happy Together
Reviewed by Neal E. Rosenberg
Susan Gubar’s Judas: A Biography
[2009, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 453 pp., $27.75
(hardcover)]
Susan Gubar, distinguished professor of English at Indiana University,
discusses at length in her book Judas: A Biography, the Judas motif as a
personification of the vacillating attitudes of the world in regard to
antisemitism. Acknowledging that there are few references concerning
Judas in the Christian scriptures, Gubar has collected a multitude of Judas
references in literature, music, and the arts.
The author succinctly expresses the essential theme of the book when
she reports:
Indeed, Judas was vigorously deployed to differentiate Judaism from
emergent Christianity. Precisely because of his instrumentality and
because his beginnings are so rife with blanks and contradictions, gaps,
and incongruities, a multitude of thinkers and artists have been moved to
delineate his astonishingly various incarnations over twenty centuries. 1
Gubar insightfully notes that the Judas motif does not just personify
evil, but more importantly, mirrors our own individual insecurities in deal-
1. W.W. Norton & Company, 13.
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76 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:75
ing with temptation and betrayal. For example, Gubar discusses The Last
Supper by the artist Danielle Crespi. The painting depicts Jesus and Judas
gazing directly at the viewer–a point-counterpoint to one another. Judas and
Jesus’ predicament is our very own.
As well, Gubar wisely points out the role of the Judas figure as a psychological
basis for the genesis of antisemitism. She ponders:
Why, in the early years of the Church’s establishment, did Judas alone of
all the apostles become identified as Jewish The simplest explanation
relates to the mechanisms of projection and separation anxiety. Christian
Jews or Jewish Christians, inevitably unfaithful to their origins, and thus
deserters or renegades from the Jewish traditions into which they or their
families have been born, alleviate their sense of guilt by projecting
betrayal onto a Jewish Judas; Gentile converts could differentiate their
adopted Christianity by disavowing its hyphenated intimacy with a new
treacherous Judas-Judaism. Judas supplied a crucial figural means by
which a faith increasingly dominated by Gentiles managed to disclaim or
forget its Jewish roots. 2
The author introduces the bifurcated art, literature, and music of a vilified
Judas and pitied Judas. Additionally, she describes the differentiation
of the early Gospels of Matthew and Mark, which place Judas within the
“in” group of Jesus and his followers, from the later Gospel, which contains
Luke’s focus on Judas’ demonic nature. Guber reminds us that “Christianity
differentiated itself by first rejecting and later admitting and then sometimes
cherishing its Jewish roots.” 3,4
The Judas story changes continually in art, literature, and music. Vilified
by the Medieval Church, Judas as Jew poses a security threat, 5 an existential
dilemma of evil and betrayal—a dilemma that confronts us all.
In contrast, Elaine Pagels’ description of Christianity’s demonization
of the Jews and hope for reconciliation in “The Origin of Satan” is more
succinct. Paralleling Pagel’s insight, Gubar illustrates how Judas becomes
a reflection of how we perceive ourselves and those we call “others.”
Satan has, after all, made a kind of profession out of being the other and
so Satan defines negatively what we think of as human. 6
2. W.W. Norton & Company, 340.
3. W.W. Norton & Company, 346.
4. Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (Vintage Books, 1995): 184.
5. Joshua Trachtenburg J., The Devil and the Jews (Jewish Publication Society,
1983): 4.
6. Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995):
xviii.

2009] REVIEW: JUDAS AND ANTISEMITISM 77
Dr. Gubar’s effect on the reader would have been more pronounced if
she had limited her focus to Judas in scripture, history, and psychology, and
left her own explanation of the Judas motif in literature and art for another
book.
The broad scope of Dr. Gubar’s references overwhelms the reader and
the endnotes offer an unusual highlight of the book. Most of the endnotes
provide informative, detailed background that buttresses her position, but
somehow these are even more compelling.
Judas: A Biography aptly explores the Judas myth. If not so happy
together, Judas and antisemitism, reflecting more contemporary mores, at
least fit together as a dysfunctional unit.
Neal E. Rosenberg has a Master’s degree in Genocide and Holocaust Studies from
Richard Stockton College and practices law in Mount Laurel, New Jersey.

Superstitions Gone Wild
Reviewed by Günther Jikeli
Andrei Oişteanu’s Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes
in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures
[2009, Trans. Mirela Adascalitei. Lincoln & London:
University of Nebraska Press. 468 pp., $60 (hardcover)]
Andrei Oişteanu, researcher at the Institute for the History of Religions
in Bucharest, and associate professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the
University of Bucharest, presents a picture of the “imaginary Jew” in
Romanian and other Central and Eastern European cultures in five portraits,
each of them constituting a chapter of Inventing the Jew. Oişteanu draws on
an impressive body of sources revealing perceptions of Jews in legends,
fairy tales, ballads, carols, anecdotes, superstitions, and iconographic representations
and compares those to representations by journalists, poets, politicians,
and scholars. Oişteanu focuses on cultural perceptions in the
territories of today’s Romania in comparison to other Central-East European
and to Western European cultures. Inventing the Jew provides insights
into many Romanian primary sources and secondary sources on the issue.
Original documents such as poems with representations of Jews are published
(in excerpts) in translation for the first time.
The first chapter, the physical portrait of Jews, draws on cultural representations
of antisemitic stereotypes, mainly from the Middle Ages up to
the beginning of the twentieth century. Oişteanu illustrates the continued
existence of stereotypical perceptions about the look (and smell) of Jews.
One of his contemporary examples is the search for people with “faces of
Jewish profile” for the shooting of the film Schindler’s List in Cracow,
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Poland. However, examples of bluntly racist views in Romania on the physiognomy
of Jews stem mostly from the first half of the twentieth century,
expressed in antisemitic journals such as Porunca Vremii and by members
of the Iron Guard. Oişteanu observes that the representation of “the Jews”
with sidelocks and beards did not change even when, at the end of the nineteenth
century, many Jews dressed in a “European” way in the course of the
Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah). He recounts interesting historical
incidents such as the reaction in Moldavia in 1859 to an official
letter written by the minister of internal affairs to the rabbis of Moldavia in
an attempt to convince their congregations to adopt a “European” fashion.
The Christian population and members of the army then assaulted Jews,
trying to change their fashion by force. Oişteanu traces folk legends that
“explain” why “the Jews” allegedly have sidelocks, beards, red hair, and
freckles: it goes back to the legend of a rooster that came back to life with
Christ’s resurgence. These stereotypical representations and the perception
of filthy and stinking Jews can also be found in literature and politics.
The second chapter, on the occupational portrait, explores partly contradicting
images of the occupation of Jews. In many descriptions Jews are
portrayed as dishonest tradesmen, moneylenders, and tavern-keepers,
underlined by sayings such as, “The Jew won’t eat until he cheats someone.”
The image and the history of Jews as tavern-keepers are both
described at length. Oişteanu argues that in Orthodox Europe this image is
more important than that of the moneylender, particularly in comparison to
Catholic and Protestant Europe. However, both images contribute to the
demonization of Jews. The image of the Jew as a tavern-keeper is often
combined with the accusation of poisoning drinks. According to Oişteanu,
the accusation of well-poisoning was far less common in Romania and in
Christian-Orthodox Europe than in Western Europe. In folk legends, Jews
are also perceived as musicians and wagon-drivers. However, Jews in
Romania have often been craftsmen and even farmers and shepherds, but
respective images have been rare. In 1941, “Romanization”—that is the
exclusion of Jews from all economic and commercial activities—proved to
be extremely difficult for the national economy because Jewish experts and
craftsmen could not be replaced.
The moral and intellectual portrait presented in the third chapter
describes perceptions of Jews as (dangerously) intelligent and cunning but,
particularly in many folk stories, also extremely stupid. A very interesting
observation is that some perceive Jews as either very good or very bad, or
very intelligent or very stupid. Other images are those of the blind, deaf,
and dumb Jew, as well as the fearful Jew. The former are related to the
Christian accusation that Jews do not hear and see the divine message,
whereas the latter might partly be related to the observation that Jews fear

2009] REVIEW: SUPERSTITIONS GONE WILD 81
discrimination. Oişteanu traces and illustrates the sayings “He is a good
man, even if he is a Jew” and “A Jew is still a Jew,” which express a
general negative view of Jews.
The mythical and magical portrait deals with superstitious beliefs
about Jews in Romania and in Eastern Europe in general, such as Jews as
rainmakers, Jews as good omens, the confusion of “Jidovi” (giants) and
related tales with “jidani” (Yids), and perceptions of the Jewish refusal to
eat pork. The demonization of Jews and the assertion that Jews will end up
in Hell are underlying themes in these carols, icons, wall-paintings in
churches, and folk beliefs. The perception that Jews are descendants of
“Judas the traitor” can be found in folk legends, songs of the Romanian
legionaries, and works of the Romanian philosopher Nae Ionescu of the
1930s. Some representations in folk tales of “Gypsies” or “strangers” are
similar to those of Jews. The general accusation of being a traitor was lifethreatening
for Jewish soldiers in WWI, but also for other minorities. Oişteanu
even presents an example of an accusation against Ukrainians for profanation
of the Eucharistic Host. The Easter custom of burning life-sized
puppets representing Judas became popular in Moldavia and Wallachia in
the first half of the nineteenth century and often led to anti-Jewish riots.
Oişteanu provides an interesting explanation for the spread of the legend of
the “wandering Jew” in Central Europe. A booklet on the “wandering Jew”
published in the middle of sixteenth century in the northern German states
became more and more popular with the approach of the year 1666, the date
of the prognosticated second coming of Jesus, the end of the world, and the
alleged arrival in Europe of the “eternally wandering Jew.” Additionally,
from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, the Jews of Western Europe
were driven in successive waves to the center of the continent, and then
further to the east. Close cultural relations with Central Europe, in combination
with the history of Transylvania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
have led to analogies of the “wandering Jew” and self-images of
Romanians until the twentieth century, whereas the legend did not enjoy
much success in Moldavia and Wallachia.
The fifth chapter, on the religious portrait, is particularly convincing.
The impact of the allegation of deicide can hardly be underestimated. Oişteanu
argues that allegations of hagiocide (murder of saints), iconocide, and
even ritual infanticide are all forms of alleged deicide, or have their roots in
this perception. Disobedient Romanian children were threatened thus:
“Here comes the Yid with the sack.” In Moldavia in the Middle Ages legends
about the murder of St. John the New, in which the Jews were accused
of contributing to the murder, became popular. The legend was painted in
detail on frescoes (church of Voroneţ) and included in Cazania (Book of
Learning) by the Metropolitan of Moldavia in 1643. Oişteanu reveals that

82 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:79
the legend was rendered into verse in 1842 in Transylvania, and translates
excerpts of the verses that he reconstructed from the manuscript and a censured
text published under communism in 1985. However, St. John the
New became the “Patron Saint of Bukovina” and was honored through
mass pilgrimages in all neighboring regions. In Christian Orthodox Europe,
Jews were accused of profaning icons bearing images of Jesus or of Virgin
Mary. The allegation of ritual infanticide (in Eastern Europe only from the
fifteenth century and in Romanian-speaking areas from the eighteenth century)
became, according to Oişteanu, more important as the argument that
all Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus became less convincing.
The accusation of ritual murder connects the “imaginary Jew” strongly to
real Jews, often leading to violence and pogroms against Jews after such
accusations. In 1995 and 1996 several Romanian newspapers published
rumours that Israeli traffickers (“under the cover of the Mossad”) smuggled
Romanian children to Israel for adoption, transplants of vital organs, or, as
cited by Oişteanu from page 425 of the November 14, 1995 issue of the
magazine Baricada, “for blood.”
Oişteanu shows how well-known intellectuals and politicians in
Romania in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used antisemitic images.
Here, the comprehensive index of names at the end of the book proves to be
very valuable. On the other hand, Oişteanu gives examples of antiantisemites
who criticized and challenged negative and stereotypical images
of Jews, including civil and clerical authorities. In 1792, for example, the
government of Transylvania (as part of the Habsburg Empire) appealed to
the bishops to fight the belief in and accusation of Jews as ritual murderers.
The clergy often played an ambivalent role. For example, the publication of
“Arguments against the Jews upon their Law and Customs” in 1803 under
the patronage of the Metropolitan Bishop of Moldavia contributed to the
outbreak of pogroms in Bucharest and Jassy in the same year. However, the
new Bishop of Moldavia, Veniamin Costachi, gave refuge to the Jews in his
church and challenged the pogromists. The important role of antiantisemites
becomes evident in comparison to the pogrom of 1903 in
Kishiney, the capital of Bessarabia and part of the Tsarist Empire at the
time. The allegation of ritual murder was endorsed by the bishop, and the
Tsarist military did not intervene against the pogromists, resulting in a high
number of casualties. Unfortunately, some members of the clergy still
endorse antisemitic views. In the 1990s, the theological work Teologia
luptatoare (“Bellicose Theology”) from the 1930s, which includes blatant
antisemitic conspiracy theories and demonization of Jews, was republished
under the patronage of the Metropolitan Church of Huşi with the imprimatur
of His Excellency Eftimie.
Oişteanu recalls a positive example of the year 1941 in which the

2009] REVIEW: SUPERSTITIONS GONE WILD 83
mayor, Traian Popovici, convinced Romanian and German authorities that
about 20,000 Jews in Czernowitz were necessary for the provision of public
services and thus saved them from deportation. However, some of Oişteanu’s
interpretations of resistance and European history are surprising. He
praises the German soldier Ernst Jünger, who had revealed antisemitic
views as an intellectual before the war, 1 for feeling embarrassed to be in
uniform in front of three Jewish girls in Paris wearing “the yellow star” on
June 7, 1942 and for his sympathy for (supposedly) non-Jewish students
who strolled the Champs-Elysées wearing the stigmatizing symbol. Oişteanu
explains, “When everybody wears a mark of discrimination, the discrimination
itself disappears. The mechanism of discrimination and terror is
not stopped, perhaps, but diverted. Ponderous monstrous systems have a
way of becoming vulnerable when faced with the sling of simple and ingenious
ideas” (p. 113). However, the students were arrested and the transports
of French Jews from the camp of Drancy, 12 kilometers from Paris, to
the death camps in Poland had already started and intensified hugely in the
summer and autumn of 1942.
Oişteanu refutes antisemitic stereotypes, for example in highlighting
that Jews have had practices of ritual washing and thus are not filthy, and
in fact have been generally rather cleaner than the average population; and
that the number of Jewish craftsmen was much greater than that of Jewish
merchants. However, he is aware of the fact that “the vices of the “imaginary
Jew” prevailed and overshadowed the virtues of the “real Jew” (p.
256). Generally, the “imaginary Jew” says a lot about those who portray
such images, but very little about Jews. The numerous exegeses on history
of Jewish life and discrimination from the early Middle Ages onwards
prove again exactly this point. Some references to historical events and references
to the works of philosophers such as Sartre and Marx need a more
detailed discussion than this anthropological study allows in order to reflect
the scholarly debate. The short mentioning of the Wannsee Conference in
1942, for example, can allow this conference to be interpreted wrongly as
the place where the actual decision to murder the European Jews was taken,
when, in fact, the decision had already been made. In some parts Oişteanu
strings together images of Jews of different historical epochs and regions
without explaining their respective contexts.
Inventing the Jew shows through many details that antisemitic perceptions
of Jews in Romania are deeply embedded in European culture, with
some Central-Eastern European, Christian-Orthodox, Romanian, Moldavian,
Transylvanian, Wallachian, or other regional particularities. Oişteanu
1. Ernst Jünger, “Über Nationalismus und Judenfrage, ” Süddeutsche Monatshefte
27, (1930): 843-45.

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refers to the late process of modernization and the Orthodox Church (in
contrast to the Catholic and Protestant Churches) as being influential in
developing specific forms of antisemitic stereotypes. In the late nineteenth
and the twentieth centuries, antisemitism seems to have been more religious
in Romania and in Eastern and Central Europe than in Western Europe.
Many stereotypes still reverberate today in parts of the Rumanian society,
particularly in right-wing magazines and political parties such as the Partidul
România Mare (Greater Romania Party). They are present in popular
beliefs, among contemporary intellectuals, and among the clergy.
Inventing the Jew is an outstanding contribution to the study of images
of the “imaginary Jew” in Romania and an important book for those who
are interested in cultural perceptions of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe.
Günther Jikeli is completing his doctorate at the Center for Research on Antisemitism,
Technical University of Berlin, and is founder of the International Institute for
Education and Research on Antisemitism, Berlin/London.

ANTISEMITICA
Jew Cartoons
The Jew as Israeli wandering
The Jew as Israeli Blood Libel
Palestinian Authority State Information Center website posted
April 6, 2003.
85

86 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:85
The Jew as Israeli desecrating the Host Koran
Jewish arrow trying to shoot the Koran Akhbar al-Khalij, June 9, 2005
The Jew as Israeli conspiring in Planetary Takeover
The world according to Zionist Akhbar al-Khalij, May 20, 2005

2009] ANTISEMITIC CARTOONS 87
The Jew as Israeli and their Money and Influence
The American President serving Israeli/Jewish needs
The Jew as Israeli as the Devil
The devil is saying: “I don’t admit the limits of freedom of speech
except the Holocaust” Al-Wifaq, Feb 6, 2006 (Iran)
www.arabmediawatch.com/amw/Articles/BBCWatch/tabid/133/newsid476/
4768/Covering-Israel-Palestine-The-BBCs-double-standards/Default.aspx
(Also see Kotek, J. 2009. Cartoon and extremism. London:Valentine
Mitchell.)