On Fri, 19 Nov 1999 12:31:39 -0500 Katha Pollitt <kpollitt at thenation.com>
writes:
>Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>> People believe, often passionately, things that seem "irrational."
>> Why is that? Why do people believe that immigrants are "stealing"
>> "our" jobs, or that finance is a conspiracy of Jews? (I picked these
>> two examples because they're persistent and powerful and because
>> Zizek has good analyses of both.) You can call these "prejudices,"
>> which they are in a sense, but where do they come from and why do
>> they persist? I think questions like that are very important for
>> understanding politics, but some people don't. For those who don't,
>> it's enough to label the phenomenon "mass hysteria," or to blame the
>> ruling class for stuffing bad ideas into the heads of the masses.
>> Even if you accept the head-stuffing argument, you have to wonder
>why
>> some ideas stick in those massy heads and others don't.
>>
>> Doug
>
>I think I would look to history for an explanation of each individual
>"irrational" belief, rather than to an underlying unified theory of
>'why
>people believe patently false things." for example,That Finance is
>controlled by Jews is an idea with a very ancient history of
>connecting
>jews with money and greed. Judas sold Christ for gold, Christ drove
>the
>moneychangers out of the Temple. Antisemitism, as Elaine Pagels shows,
>was part of the process of defining Christianity as not a jewish sect:
>the Gospels consistently move chronologically toward making Jews
>villains in the christ story: the earlier Gospels emphasize the roman
>role, the later ones the jewish mob calling for jesus's execution.
>Later, jews were connected with the devil, black magic and of course
>with "usury," which Christians were not allowed to practice and
>regarded
>as evil. Barred from owning land or farming it in many places, they
>gravitated toward cities, trade, storekeeping, knowledge-based
>professions -- modernity.
There is even more to that story. With the dawn of capitalism, and the rise of the bourgeoisie, Christians began to move into most of the occupations that had been previously reserved for Jews. Thus Christians now became merchants, traders, and with the relaxation of the Chrurch's ban on usery, moneylenders and bankers. Therefore, the dawn of capitalism was accompanied by the growth of anti-Semitism as the Christian bourgeoisie sought to eliminate the Jewish competition from occupations that had formerly been closed to Christians.
> Similarly, That Jews are an "international" cabal, not "really"
>members of the communities and nations and people "among whom they
>live," is very old also, and still has a lot of life in it. (cf. gore
>vidal accusing American Jews of being a 'fifth column" supporting
>Israeli over US interests -- he would never call other US ethnicities
>traitorous for advocating particular foreign policies, no matter how
>ill-advised those policies were.)
In fact the most cosmpolitan elements of almost any country would often include a high proportion of Jews, since Jewish communities tended to maintain some degree of solidarity across national boundaries, Jews have tended to enter occupations and professions most inclined towards a cosmpolitan outlook, and the simple fact that Jews were throughout their history often pushed from one country to another have all combined to generate the association of cosmopolitanism with the Jews. Reactionaries of all stripes saw this as a bad thing and were rarely shy about denouncing the Jews as "rootless cosmopolitans."
> Anti-semitism is one of the features
>that ethnically-based and/or Christianity-based nations define
>themselves by means of -- that's one reason there can be anti-semitism
>without jews, as in modern Poland, or for that matter, much of the US.
As I recall Hannah Arendt in her *The Origins of Totalitarianism* made much of the fact that 19th century nationalists including both German nationalists, and the Russian slavophiles amongst others sought to promote national solidarity by invoking the myth that their own nations were in some sense the "chosen people." Therefore, the widely known fact that the Jews saw themselves as God's "chosen people" was seen by these nationalists both as a threat and as providing a convenient taget in which to define themselves against.
>
> Without Christianity, I don't think anti-semitism would exist.The
>origins of the belief that immigrants will "steal" your job are
>different.
Anti-Semitism exists to some degree in the Islamic world as well, which raises the question of how much the anti-Semitism there is due to purely domestic reasons and how much of it is reflective of cultural influences from the West.
Jim Farmelant
>
>Katha
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