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

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