IS THERE A CURE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM'
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punctuate Europe's long chronicle were, by and large, the work of the
most despised, the most deprived, the most oppressed. The preoccupation
of the despised and the deprived is very often the body; it may be that
the body is the only possession of the poor, and is the poor's fixation.
The Beilis case, a blood libel trial that inflamed Czarist Russia in
1911, rehearsed the old news that Jews have boils on their buttocks; that
four times a year Jewish food becomes toxic through the appearance of
droplets of contaminating blood; that annually on a certain night all
Jews go mad. Menachem Beilis himself was accused of murdering a
Christian child for the purpose of draining his body of blood for ritual
use . (This in 1911, when curmudgeonly American intellectuals were
grappling with the horrors of post-Impressionism!) The murderers were a
gang of peasant thieves, including the dead boy's mother. In the Beilis
trial, the elite and the dregs, the Czar's government and the cutthroats
at the bottom of the heap, happily embraced.
We can catch a reflection of this joining of high and low in our
own mental neighborhoods. Three and four decades ago, Arnold
Toynbee, in volume after volume, attributed all the world's barbarism to
the Jewish ingredient in Western culture; the American white middle
class turned him into a bestseller, and his themes are nowadays peddled by
Farrakhan. Currently, colleges are generously opening their auditoriums
to anti-Jewish doo-doo talk one week, to mockery of the Holocaust
the next. Gullible young editors of student newspapers, mistaking paid
advertising for a free-spee ch issue, publish the soul-freezing propositions
of the Holocaust deniers. The group-think that strangles intellect under
the fake rubric of multiculturalism blocks entrance to Jewish intellect. As
for contemporary American writers, there is not much room for Jews at
any table. The self-described mainstream instructs Jews to go sit with the
ethnics at the multiculturalists' table; the multiculturalists quite properly
see Jews as conceptually prominent among the pillars of the West, and
toil at undermining those pillars . Multiculturalism, let us remember, is
not the same as pluralism. As a rivalrous collection of accusatory injuries,
it is the antithesis of pluralism. With the emphasis everywhere given to
victimization and competitive grievance, Jews themselves begin to forget
that they are defined by the civilization they bear, not by its enemies.
Psalm 27: "False witnesses rise up against me, such as breathe out vio–
lence." But scapegoats are universal. Tribal hatred appears
to
be endemic
in human conduct. The murdered litter the soil of six bloody continents:
only the barrenness of Antarctica is exempt. In Arthur Miller's new play,
Broken Class,
a Jewish doctor, contemplating with detachment the bru–
tality of Nazi Germany in 1938, is eager to remind us that though it is
also
the Jews, it isn't
only
the Jews. "I have all kinds coming into my of-
