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

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-