ROBERT S. WISTRICH
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subjugated its indigenous inhabitants. Indians and Iranians were "Aryans"
but Germans and North Europeans certainly were
not,
any more than
European Jews, who no longer spoke Hebrew, could be meaningfully
described as "Semites."
Nevertheless, in the late nineteenth century this pseudo-scientific
nonsense became eminently respectable even among the European intel–
lectual elites, so that the distinction between "Aryan" and "Semite" was
easily grafted on to the much older distinction between Christian and
Jew. As a result, for the last hundred years, the illogical term "anti–
Semitism," which never really meant hatred of "Semites" (for example,
Arabs) at all, but rather hatred ofJews, has come to be accepted in gen–
eral usage as denoting
all
forms of hostility towards Jews and Judaism
throughout history.
There is clearly a danger in using anti-Semitism in this overly gener–
alized way, extending it to all times and places regardless of specific cir–
cumstances, differences between historical epochs and cultures, or other
factors that might give the term more specificity and critical sharpness.
Anti-Semitism is
not
a natural, metahistorical or a metaphysical phe–
nomenon whose essence has remained unchanged throughout all its
manifestations over the centuries. Nor is it an intrinsic part of the psychic
structure of Gentiles, a kind of microbe or virus which invariably attacks
non-Jews, provoking the "eternal hatred" for the "eternal people." Such
a theory, which has some roots in the Jewish tradition ("Esau hates
Jacob," the legacy of Amalek, etc.) and was adopted by early Zionists in
Eastern Europe such as Pinsker, Lilienblum and Sokolow, is quite
unhistorical.
It
ignores the fact that Jews have often been welcomed by the sur–
rounding society; that their equality of status and integration was ac–
cepted as a binding legal and social principle in many countries during
the modern period; and it crucially forgets that Jewish participation in
cultural, scientific, economic and political life since the Western Enlight–
enment has in many respects been a remarkable success story. If anti–
Semitism had really been a "hereditary disease of the Gentiles," or been
based on an instinctive racial aversion to Jews (as anti-Semites sometimes
claim), such a development would have been impossible . Admittedly,
there has also been a backlash to Jewish integration, influence or success
at
some points in time - whether in first-century Alexandria and Rome,
in
medieval Muslim or Christian Spain, in
fin-de-siecle
Paris and Vienna or
in
Weimar Germany - but this pattern has definite historical causes and
bas
nothing to do with any theory of innate Gentile anti-Semitism.
Any empirically valid discussion of anti-Semitism or hatred of Jews
must, in my opinion, first of all come to terms with the problem of its
