By any reckoning, antisemitism is back. We can argue about causes and effects, about how much nominally pro-Palestinian activism and Epstein-conspiracism is antisemitic. But the sliver of public discourse that is undeniably and openly so is much greater and much more central than it was a few years ago.
The new antisemites are largely young, and this is indicative. As others have argued, antisemitism is no longer taboo among a generation no longer fully subscribed to the central role of “the Holocaust” in the historical and moral self-understanding of the West.
Antisemitism is no longer taboo among a generation no longer fully subscribed to the central role of “the Holocaust” in the historical and moral self-understanding of the West.
I use scare quotes around “the Holocaust” above. This is not, obviously, some sly way of denying or palliating what was done by the Nazis. The term “Holocaust” does in fact make me uneasy, with its connotations of religious sacrifice: I prefer “Shoah”. But I’ve used the scare quotes to indicate that it is this specific term, “Holocaust”, which has become the emblem of the now-eroding narrative role of the Nazis’ crimes. We have Holocaust survivors, Holocaust museums, Holocaust memorial days, Holocaust education, Holocaust tours.
My Jewish grandfather liked the joke that “Hitler gave antisemitism a bad name”, and told me in his final weeks that he expected antisemitism would resurge in due course. I was skeptical in 2004, the year he died: I am less so now. However I still wonder whether antisemitism, or some other form of Jew hatred, truly has a vigorous future. Nineteenth-century antisemitism was after all an attempt to re-mould as science and democratic politics Christians’ two-thousand year quarrel with their Jewish brethren. But we are now much further from Christendom: does this original sin within the Church’s inheritance still have enough vitality for a revival? Of course, there is the separate matter of Islamic antisemitism: hardly trivial, but not, I believe, a necessary element of the future of Islam.
Accordingly, if the moral narrative of the Shoah really is due to collapse, I’m not sure that the rise of Jew hatred will be the most significant effect. After all, the Nazis’ persecution and murder of Jews, despite the special role of Jews in their cosmology, was also part of a wider project of complete population purification, through both elimination and selective breeding. And while, as stated above, the Nazi hatred of Jews had its ultimate roots in that Christendom which the West has largely put behind itself, the broader purification project was a child of the scientific age in which we still very much live.
The Nazis’ broader purification project was a child of the scientific age in which we still very much live.
Hitler gave a bad name not just to antisemitism, but to eugenics. This has meant a moratorium on public promotion of selective breeding, sterilization, and explicitly racialized science, let alone mass culling. But it has not meant an end to the fascination with genetics as a key to human nature, or with the conception of the optimization of populations as a desirable goal of governments. Are we not all expecting to be enabled by our governments to become ever healthier, more productive, more enlightened, more “functional”? Post-Nazism, certain analyses and certain means became taboo, but the project of population optimization as a whole has been attenuated, not repudiated.
These are looming nightmares, and, please God, they can be fended off. But it now seems that to do that will take more than the cultivation of the memory of this one historical crime. We will have to move beyond the horror that it inspired—for horror at the past is, in the end, always destined to fade—and build on a bedrock knowledge of what is holy and what is profane that is the best justification for that horror.
