In addition to faith in the state, the other axiom of the Western Jew was belief in education, the certainty that it was not only his passport into a wider world but also that the educated classes were his unshakable allies. He had chosen to believe this, despite the growing Jew-hatred among the intelligentsia in the second half of the nineteenth century, and before 1881 the intellectuals of Russian Jewry followed him in that faith. But university students had joined in the making of pogroms and the outbursts of violence had been defended in respectable newspapers as valid expressions of popular discontent.
—Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, 1959
History is haunted by ghosts of which the anti-Jewish spirit is one of the oldest and most alluring. The quote above, as applicable to the situation in the United States today as it was to the 19th-century Russian milieu it describes, comes from the introductory essay to Arthur Hertzberg’s seminal 1959 book The Zionist Idea, a compilation of writings by leading figures from the various schools of Zionist thought. The enlightened bourgeois faith that Hertzberg describes began to collapse in the wake of the vicious anti-Jewish pogroms that began in Russia in 1881 and sent millions of Jews fleeing for the United States, and smaller numbers for Mandatory Palestine. The promise of modernity as a emancipatory universalism was further discredited by the Dreyfus Affair in France, which began in the decade after the pogroms and seemed to prove once and for all that secularism and liberal civilization were, by themselves, no guarantee against the spirit of Jew-mad ghost hunting, which possessed the rational people as fully as it had their orthodox Medieval progenitors, if not more so.
Judeophobia is a variety of demonopathy with the distinction that it is not peculiar to particular races but is common to the whole of mankind, and that this ghost is not disembodied like other ghosts but partakes of flesh and blood, must endure pain inflicted by the fearful mob who imagines itself endangered.
—Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, 1882
And yet ... And yet! Here we are again. Respectable party-loyalist fools like Paul Krugman and the leaders of the Anti-Defamation League have spent years indoctrinating liberal Jews into the belief that any signs of concern about the normalization of a progressive racial caste system in the United States is itself racist. The greatest threat to Jews, they claimed, came from angry “white men” in Middle America. For doing the party’s bidding in this way, Krugman and his ilk were well paid and rewarded with invitations to dinner parties and other markers of social prestige. All the while, a pathological, revolutionary Jew-hatred was being taught openly by government-sanctioned DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) administrators and professors at the nation’s most elite universities.
Now that the festival has started and the bonfires are lit, everyone joins in. The right-wing demon chasers either excuse the pogroms as understandable reactions to the Jews’ attempts to drag the whole world down, or simply yawn in their general direction. Right or left, an agreement is found among the people who are prepared to call the Jews out for their guilt. What do the accusers have in common? They are the rational people, the bearers of civilization. It is in the name of justice that they condemn the Jews as stiff-necked, sadistic, self-satisfied, and arrogant, the cause of the very ruin they now bring down upon themselves. Perhaps it is not even so much as all that. It is only that they must be humbled.
“Glory to the martyrs” is the new slogan of the American university. When you see the students and the well-dressed young people in expensive cities chanting slogans of self-righteous bloodlust and celebrating the slaughter of Jewish babies, do not be fooled into believing that this was the result of sudden or unforeseen forces. The students are only following their teachers, who now control the ruling party of the United States.