1. The Banality Beneath Antisemitism
In the previous essay I argued that global allegiance to Palestinianism is not a product of antisemitism as such, but of something more fundamental. Palestinianism serves as a historical laboratory, supplying Christianity, Marxism and the other currents that built themselves over against Jewishness with empirical proof of their prior judgment about it. The post-colonial current I left there in the role of mediator, a fig leaf that does not see Jewishness as a constitutive factor. Here I want to go one layer deeper on both points: to name that more fundamental thing, and to show that even the current lacking genealogy needs the Jew, not as the source of sin but as proof.
The problem with antisemitism is its banality. Not the banality of evil, the kind Hannah Arendt found in the functionary who does not think, but something deeper at its foundation: a banality in which circular hatred clings, again and again, to the same archetype. And with it, a riddle: why precisely the same archetype?
This is the layer I described in the previous essay as far more fundamental than mere "antisemitism." It is not the stereotype Shmuel Ettinger wrote about, the image of the Jew formed in Christian civilization and carried into the modern era, but the archetype beneath it. The stereotype is an image; the archetype is a place in a redemptive drama.
2. The Image That Did Not Change
Yoav Ashkenazi observes:
"Modernity is a product of Christianity and of its reforms of education, conduct, administration and government from the thirteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. The image of the Jew as an other who resembles the human but betrays it and poisons it from within was formulated, from the Renaissance on, in modern language, yet it remained the same image: from the wandering Ahasuerus it became a cat and a dog, from there a dangerous virus, and finally an exploitative capitalist and a dispossessing colonialist. All the different linguistic descriptions make present the same image, which has not changed."
An other who resembles the human. A demiurge who leads astray. A demiurge embedded in the world. This is the circular banality: circles within circles around Jews. The axis of the image is always circular, because the content remains the same despite the change of form.
And the answer to the riddle already lies in the word demiurge. For Marcion, the God of Israel is an inferior creator, distinct from the good God revealed by Jesus; in some of the Gnostic systems he is the craftsman who imprisoned spirit in matter. If the redemptive ideologies of the modern era are Gnostic in structure, as Eric Voegelin argued (his notion of immanentization also served the previous essay), then every project that seeks to redeem the world from its flaw will find in the Jew the author of the flaw. The Jew is not an accidental target that the hatred happens upon; he occupies a structural place, the place of the craftsman of the flawed world. David Nirenberg has shown how deep this structure runs, describing how Western thought used the category "Judaism" to think about the flaws of the world, far beyond any actual Jews.
3. The Logic of the Circle
The logic is circular because, up to the twentieth century, it is always statistical and inductive in proving its claims: it accumulates case after case to confirm an archetype that has decided in advance which cases will count, and so it never reaches an end, nor can it. Antisemitism is thus an aesthetic mirror of a cultural paralysis, one that believes that if only it deals with the cause, the one in whose obsession the paralysis reaches its peak, it will be set free.
One can only surmise that within the Gnostic, religious and modern axis, the insistence on hating Jews is indeed a tradition, in the most self-confirming sense imaginable. And any modern theology or ideology riddled with question-begging, that is, one in which antisemitism serves as the basis of a philosophical-political or theological-political system, is in fact a repetitive circularity confirming a repetitive circularity.
In fact, all forms of antisemitism try to prove a circularity. In the ancient ones the roots are Gnostic-theological; in the modern ones the roots are a theology that has undergone secularization; and in the new ones these are internal justifications for an ideology that finds an anchoring pivot through which it can step down from earlier structures of meaning and prove the brittleness of the historical pendulum in light of the master–slave conception. It is this third form that we must dwell on.
4. A River of Image and Justification
Indeed, a river of image and justification separates the archetypal circles of the banality of antisemitic hatred up to the twentieth century from those of the twenty-first. For the post-colonialists, the Jew is not the image embedded in the ideology of the hated other (yes, despite Marx), nor is the system's justification to redeem humanity and the world from the Jews. In this they differ from the structure Saul Friedländer called "redemptive antisemitism," the belief that the world will be redeemed only when it is redeemed from the Jew. This is also what I wrote in the previous essay: that the post-colonial current does not see Jewishness as a constitutive factor.
And yet the post-colonialist's hatred is the most astonishing of all, because it is a tool for proving a thesis. Let us explain.
5. The Jew as Proof
The Jew was the absolute victim of the Holocaust. The very fact that after the Holocaust he is capable of changing his skin and becoming the absolute victimizer draws the post-colonialist, not out of a philosophical, theological or ideological motive, but out of the motive of justifying an ideology. Why? Because if the Jew who was the absolute victim can become the absolute victimizer, then the axiom of a world divided into victims and victimizers can be applied anywhere and everywhere.
That is, if the dialectic of the slave who rebels against the master and in the end becomes master is accurate, as the Jew demonstrates, two conclusions follow. First, that a Gnostic priestly class is needed forever, to ensure that victims do not become sacrificers. Second, that it is the conditions of matter, identity and power that define the equation of victim and sacrificer, not a prior essence; essences, if they exist at all, derive only from matter and power.
This is not Hegel's own dialectic, in which the reversal takes place in consciousness rather than in positions, but the version that passed through Kojève and Marxism, in which the slave rebels and becomes master. It is this version that the post-colonial current inherited, and it is the "Hegelian framework" that the previous essay described as common to all the currents that position themselves over against Jewishness. Nietzsche is more precise, and more surprising. For him the Jews, "that priestly people," are the ones who carried out the slave revolt in morality, the reversal in which the weak became the good. Thus the Jew stands at both ends of the circle: the inventor of the morality of the victim, and its betrayer. And the Gnostic priestly class, required so that victims do not become sacrificers, is very close to Nietzsche's ascetic priest, who manages ressentiment and directs it.
Here a still deeper move takes place. The Jews, as the victims of all the previous systems, are capable of inverting their image and becoming sacrificers. In doing so they prove that the entire earlier circularity erred not only in its justifications, but also in its understanding of the Jew himself and of the historical phenomenon of the balance of power. The post-colonialist, as it were, discovers the Jew whom the modernist and the Christian never thought could exist.
The modernist and the Christian always wanted the Jew in the position of the victim, so that he would not sacrifice according to his evil nature. This is Augustine's doctrine of witness, the mark of Cain that the previous essay touched on. It rested on the verse "Slay them not, lest my people forget: scatter them by thy power; and bring them down" (Psalm 59:11), under which the Jew is a wandering, humbled witness, not to be killed and not to be allowed to rise. Here Hebrew is more precise than any translation, for *korban* means both the one who is harmed and the offering. The Jew of Christianity is the sacrificer, the father of all sacrificers, as I called him in the previous essay, and he must therefore be kept as the *korban*.
The post-colonialist, child of postmodernity, says something else. He says: the Jew was always a victim; I did not want to admit that he is a sacrificer; but now that it has turned out to be so, there is no choice but to prove that he is the ideational glue of the circular movement between sacrificer and victim, until the redemption of the Southern, the Black, the Eastern world. This is no longer redemption from the Jew but redemption through him: the Jew as proof.
6. The Mask and the Shared Evidence
And here it is worth opening the question of the banality of circular hatred, in which the object always becomes the same thing that must be gotten rid of, above all when he is the impostor.
Post-colonial antisemitism is interesting in that the impersonation and the mask are exposed in it absolutely, in the contrast between the powerlessness of the Holocaust and the power of Zionism. And this, paradoxically, breaks open the modern circularity, or more precisely redefines it. The old logic accumulated cases and therefore circled endlessly. The post-colonial one offers a single case, and it is the word "absolute" (absolute victim, absolute victimizer, absolute exposure) that turns a case into a proof. Yet this case is read through the very axiom it is supposed to prove, which is question-begging once again. The circle does not break; it moves from the evidence to the premise. This is also the closing of the circle I wrote of in the previous essay: it was not possible for Paul and Marx, who left the drama open, and political radicalism lacking genealogy makes it possible. The empirical ending that closes the drama is the very same moment, seen from its other side.
This is why post-colonial antisemitism can feed earlier forms of antisemitism so holistically. For it shares with them, in parallel, their Platonic, Gnostic and theological structures, though not necessarily the meaning of the cause of antisemitism, or what it proves in the world. The Platonic structure is that of the simulacrum: the copy that looks alike from outside and betrays the Form from within, that is, the other who resembles the human, the mask itself. The Gnostic structure is the demiurge, and the theological one is the sacrificer.
The forms differ in what they prove, but they share the evidence. The same absolute exposure proves the axiom to the post-colonialist and the archetype of the impostor to the old antisemite, and all the earlier forms receive it at once. That is the holism. It is also where the two essays meet: the Palestinian laboratory of the previous essay and the Jew-as-proof of this one are the same evidence, read from its two sides.
Hence also a criterion. Antisemitism is where the theory needs the Jew and collapses without him, not where Israel is one case among many. The currents described in the previous essay needed the Palestinian; the new current needs the Jew.
And the irony is that this is, in the end, the same banality. A theory that declared there are no essences, that everything derives from matter and power, needs a fixed Jew, a mask that never changes, and returns precisely to the oldest archetype of all: the other who resembles the human. The form is new, the function is new as well, and the content, as always, remains the same.
