Read Part 1 here.
Some Palestine protest actions appear more “creative” than others.
In some cases, papier-mâché figures of Netanyahu with horns are made, Israelis are depicted as Nazis, or—as at the 2022 German art show documenta fifteen—the Jew is illustrated as a rapacious bloodsucker. Those who wish to go further step into the role of the hated enemy themselves: in street theater, where Israeli soldiers mistreat women or baby dolls, or in Halloween costumes as blood-smeared, hooked-nosed Jewish caricatures, as was seen recently in Spain. “There is no antisemite in whom it does not lie in the blood to imitate what he calls Jew”, write Horkheimer and Adorno in the Elements of Antisemitism—and that also means: there is no antisemite in whom it does not lie in the blood to reproduce what he calls Jew (or: Israeli). The antisemite is compelled to concretize the incomprehensible object of his hostility: in painted images, in sculpted figures, or in the roles he enacts.
Such a drive first manifested itself on European soil in the Easter pageants or Passion plays, which staged the Jew as a bloodthirsty adversary of Christ, allied with the devil. The performances allowed the Christianized pagans to playfully act out what their imposed religion forbade them: human sacrifice. At the center of the Passion dramaturgy—which over time increasingly diverged from the biblical source—was the blood of Christ, which was to be driven from his body through whipping, the crown of thorns, and ultimately crucifixion.
The antisemite is compelled to concretize the incomprehensible object of his hostility: in painted images, in sculpted figures, or in the roles he enacts.
Parallel to the Passion plays, anti-Jewish ritual murder legends spread in writing and image: “For the Jews, the legends attribute what is demanded of them: the continual repetition of the Passion of Jesus as a human sacrifice” (Gerhard Scheit). The story was always the same: the Jews were said to have brutally desecrated the bodies of Christian children—or, alternatively, the body of Christ, in the form of hosts. And the Jews were often supposed to have gained possession of their victims by buying them with “blood money,” just as the sacrifice of Christ was said to have begun with Judas’ treacherous act of exchange. In the nexus of money and blood, the antisemitic imagination comes into its own, according to Scheit: “The Jews”, signals the antisemitic dramaturgy, “suck out the Christians, feeding on their ‘blood’”—just as they exploit “honest labor” with their (monetary) power, dry up the “blood community of the nation”, or squeeze the “blood of the martyrs”.
The persistence of this fantasy beyond its Christian-medieval context is shown by the blood cult of the relatively un-Christian Nazis and the ritual murder legends that spread into the Arab-Islamic world. One of countless recent examples was provided by the Palestinian “performance artist” Khaled Jarrar, who in 2018, in his performance Blood for Sale, sold vials filled with his own blood on New York’s Wall Street.
Antisemitism, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is based on “false projection”: “Impulses that the subject does not allow as his own, yet which are nonetheless his, are attributed to the object: the prospective victim”. In other words: in the antisemitic image of the Jew, something from one’s own inner self is externalized, something that is forbidden to oneself. These can be taboo desires, such as the longing for a happy life without toil, which is then inverted into resentment against the Jew as a grasping parasite who earns his wealth without work. Or repressed aggressive wishes, to which one’s own psychic apparatus responds with persecution anxiety. Projected outward, the Jew appears as an aggressive persecutor, against whom the innocent self acts in apparent self-defense. Only now, against the Jew as enemy image, can one act out one’s own aggressions with a clear conscience: “One may indulge the proscribed drive when there is no doubt that it is directed at its own extermination”.
In the antisemitic image of the Jew, something from one’s own inner self is externalized, something that is forbidden to oneself.
The Passion plays, which portrayed the Jews as grotesque, bloodthirsty “sacrificial priests”, once incited the mob audience to attacks on Jewish quarters. The unresolved sense of guilt that accompanied the enjoyment of the sadistically staged sufferings of Christ dissipated when the punishment fell on the Jews, who had just—on stage—acted as stand-ins for the audience’s own denied murderous impulses. The identification of the spectators was always double: with Christ, the innocent sacrificial lamb, and with the bloodthirsty Jewish figures, who performed the forbidden sacrifice, whose acting out of violence was envied, and who were to be punished for it.
The images of the Gaza war operate according to the same scheme: Hamas is practically invisible; what is visible are the Palestinian victims of military actions, actual or alleged civilians, preferably women and children. The demand for emotionally charged images of victims is so great that, in addition to authentic photographs, staged or AI-generated images augment the supply. The point of greatest viral success went to a fabricated image of the evacuation zone in Rafah, showing a sea of white refugee tents stretching to the horizon (bounded by snow-covered mountains): “All Eyes on Rafah”, a grotesquely manipulated ideal image of innocent and defenseless victims.
In the mass and over time, however, it is (oftentimes staged or propagandistically prepared) images of the wounded and dead that generate the highest resonance. Thus, an algorithmically amplified war-pornography blends into the everyday media stream. The eagerly consumed graphics of “martyr” victims correspond to perpetrator images, usually monstrous caricatures of Israeli soldiers and politicians, attributed devilish intentions in line with what antisemitic “resistance” does actually desire: bloody land grabs, genocide, and rape.
In the mass and over time, however, it is (oftentimes staged or propagandistically prepared) images of the wounded and dead that generate the highest resonance. Thus, an algorithmically amplified war-pornography blends into the everyday media stream.
What unites the friends of terror against Israel with the Jew-haters of earlier times is less a shared root in Christianity than the common need to regress behind the level of civilization achieved by Western monotheism. The archaic appearance of today’s protest rituals, in which noise is made almost hypnotically, also betrays their true purpose, which was already present in the marches of the fascist era. Adorno and Horkheimer: “The elaborate symbols characteristic of every counterrevolutionary movement—the skulls and masks, the barbaric drumbeat, the monotonous repetition of words and gestures—are all organized imitations of magical practices, the mimesis of mimesis”.
As a modern cult, antisemitism saves isolated, mutually competitive individuals, threatened by downward mobility panic, from clinical paranoia by welding them into a collective and allowing them to act out archaic aggressions. According to an observation by Freud, joining sects and communities performs “misguided cures for manifold neuroses”. In this sense, what Detlev Claussen calls antisemitic “everyday religion” functions as follows: it “mixes the rubble of the old but no longer binding religion with conformist elements of consciousness, sparing individuals the pain of asocialization”. In the political group, the activist artist collective, and the social media following, paranoia becomes capable of satisfaction, and the projective enactment of violent fantasies becomes normalized.
“One may indulge the proscribed drive when there is no doubt that it is directed at its own extermination” today means: in the fight against Israel’s “child murderers”, Hamas is allowed to murder children. And: in the artistically creative struggle against the “bloodshed” in Gaza, one may freely splatter red paint. When the art students at the University of the Arts Berlin protest with “blood-stained” hands, when the entrance of Berlin’s Senator for Cultural Affairs, Joe Chialo, is doused with buckets of red paint, or when the foyer at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts is decorated with symbolic pools of blood, it is obvious that a repressed and aggressively acted-out pleasure in smearing is at work—one intended simultaneously to instill fear.
Of course, none of the responsible artists will admit that these actions are preparations for actual bloodbaths, to be carried out against the supposed perpetrators of blood. To make this connection explicit, one must invite “authentic voices from the Global South” who unabashedly stage the Jew with bloodshot eyes and vampiric fangs poised to suck blood. This occurred at documenta fifteen, one of the most high-profile art exhibitions in the world, whose organizers are now guest professors at the Hamburg art academy, where the pools of were displayed. That the image they presented in Germany’s Kassel was neither promptly removed nor subjected to critical scrutiny, but instead was spectacularly veiled like a forbidden shrine with a black curtain, perhaps illustrates best that antisemitism is indeed the great open secret: in plain sight and yet invisible—tabooed and yet monstrously present.
