The More Things Change

 In Bernard Malamud's classic novel The Fixer—a searing indictment of antisemitism told from the perspective of a Jewish man living in the autocratic Russian empire around 1905 who is falsely accused of ritual murder for political reasons—this persecuted protagonist in one scene meets in secret with a Russian official, who reveals himself to be an unexpected ally. Despite working for the czarist state, it turns out that this official is a closet liberal: attempting within the confines of the autocratic system to make what incremental progress he can toward greater legality and justice. 

This official admits, after recounting the recent resurgence of antisemitic persecution and political repression in this czar's government, that these events call into question his belief in human progress. He asks the fixer if he is familiar with the expression "the more things change, the more they stay the same," and says it applies amply to the Russia of 1905. On the one hand, he like many other members of the liberal intelligentsia had believed up till then that the country was on an inevitable path toward greater modernization. On the other, he was living to witness the resurgence of some of the darkest forms of reaction in his own time—the return of the medieval superstition of blood libel, for instance; the threat of murderous pogroms. 

Reading Malamud's novel, in the context of recent events, and especially the global resurgence of antisemitism, one feels the same way about our current world. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

On the one hand, Malamud's book is full of tales of antisemitic persecution that seem like a remnant of the darkest ages of ignorance and superstition. Surely, such things could never be repeated now! Malamud's protagonist, for instance, is arrested (and his persecution in this regard is based on a real-life incident from the early twentieth century) on bogus accusations of having stabbed a Christian child and drained his blood to make matzo. The resulting public witch-hunt risks precipitating another pogrom against the Russian Empire's Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement. 

At one point, a character describes one such pogrom he had witnessed in the recent past: Cossack soldiers raided a Jewish village and massacred every last man, woman, and child they could find. Having located a group of villagers hiding in a cellar, for instance, the Cossacks forced them to come outside one by one. They clubbed to death those who surrendered with the butt of their rifles, then warned the remaining villagers that they would be butchered even more sadistically. They burned some of them alive; then threw others down wells to drown. 

Horrible! Barbaric! Medieval! Unrecognizable! And yet, even as one feels a profound historical distance from these blood-curdling events, one is simultaneously reminded of incidents happening now, to which they bear a chilling family resemblance. To far too great an extent, we are still living in that world of vicious antisemitism and medieval superstition. 

Take the appearance of the QAnon conspiracy theory for one, which trafficked in antisemitic tropes and dog-whistles and effectively revived the age-old "blood libel" in contemporary dress. At the time of this conspiracy theory's greatest popularity, many commentators pointed out and denounced its resemblance to the blood libel. But one really ought to read Malamud's novel to understand just how freely QAnon borrowed from this medieval canard. 

The central QAnon belief, recall, was that a secret cabal of pedophile celebrities and liberal politicians was supposedly kidnapping children and harvesting their blood to create "adrenochrome" (which is a real chemical, but which is not in fact synthesized from the blood of children—the urban legend that it is owes its origin to a single passage from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—a work that one probably shouldn't take too literally). 

Why would the celebrity cabal want to make and consume this "adrenochrome"? Because, according to the conspiracy theory, it keeps them artificially young. The QAnon myth was then invoked to explain things like an unexpectedly haggard-looking photo of Tom Hanks or other famous people who, like other mortals, are indeed subject to the natural process of aging—"See!" the conspiracy theorists would then say—"this proves that their supply of adrenochrome must be running low because of the pandemic!" (Read Will Sommer for more on this, if you're curious about the ins-and-outs of this most fascinatingly elaborate—and all too dangerous—quasi-religious QAnon belief system). 

Now, read the version of the blood libel myth, delivered by a defrocked charlatan priest in Malamud's novel, which is used to build the czarist state's preposterous case against the fixer: "It is written that all Jews require some Christian blood for the prolongation of their lives else they die young. And in those days they considered our blood to be [...] the most effective therapeutic for the cure for their diseases." Does it take much imagination to see how the "adrenochrome" myth is just an updated version of this same trope—the revival in modern garb of a medieval superstition? The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Then there is Malamud's description—through the recollection of a different czarist official—of the horrors of the pogroms described above. Defenseless civilians dragged out of hiding one by one and butchered, clubbed to death, or thrown down wells to drown—a mass murder committed deliberately, systematically, ensuring that not a single innocent soul could escape. It sounds like an episode out of a distant and inaccessible time. 

Yet, was this not precisely what Hamas did in Southern Israel just a few short weeks ago? Not only did the armed group indiscriminately murder civilians. They also went about their massacre with the mad, unreasoning, almost compulsive thoroughness of the cossacks in Malamud's novel. In perhaps the most notorious mass killing of the attack, Hamas gunmen shot to death hundreds of civilians at an outdoor music festival. In a piece of verified footage from the attack—filmed with apparent pride by the Hamas attackers themselves—a gunman went down a line of outdoor toilets at the festival, shooting every one, so that not a single person hiding within could escape. 

Most people would condemn such antisemitic persecution in principle if asked. Yet, too often, people think of it in the past tense. What would I do, they ask, if I lived in the czar's Russia in the age of pogroms? What would I do if I lived in Hitler's Germany? But what if one does not need to wonder what one might do in a different time and a different world? What if the moment to speak out is here and now, because the antisemitism is still rife among us? 

Calling out and condemning antisemitism, including on the left, should not in any way mean becoming any less ardent in our defense of the human rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories. The far-right ultra-nationalist Israeli settlers attacking Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, for instance, in an attempt to drive them off their land, are committing a kind of pogrom in their own right. They are acting far more in the spirit of the cossacks than they are that of Malamud's persecuted fixer, and their actions must be condemned. The IDF, meanwhile, though it is fighting a just war in my view to eliminate Hamas from power, should be held to account for every decision that needlessly takes an innocent life. They, like all governments, should be held to the highest standard of protecting and safeguarding civilians, even in prosecuting a just war. 

But those who criticize only one side, while being silent on antisemitic atrocities, are in effect condoning Hamas's pogrom, and facilitating more antisemitic attacks just like them. They are in the position of a gentile in czarist Russia who reads about the fixer's case and shrugs, saying, "not my problem."

The point of Malamud's novel is to take us so deeply inside the experience of one individual's persecution and unjust suffering that it becomes impossible to retain this attitude—impossible to just shrug it off in this manner. Antisemitism is our problem. Even the fixer himself, after all, tries at first in the novel to distance himself from the fate of the Jews and not to take an interest in defending their rights. Like his personal hero Spinoza, he considers himself merely a Jew "by birth and nationality," not by religious identity, and in many ways seeks to disavow his membership in the community. Yet, by the end of the novel, he has realized that this is not an option for him. "[T]here's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew [....] You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed." 

And, elsewhere, he observes of himself, in the moment he finally gathers his strength and resolves to endure his suffering up to his trial and beyond, in order to unmask the lies of the antisemitic state and thereby save the lives of other Jews from future persecutions: "He's half a Jew himself, yet enough of one to protect them. After all, he knows the people; and he believes in their right to be Jews and live in the world like men. He is against those who are against them. He will protect them to the extent he can. This is his covenant with himself. If God's not a man he has to be."

What Malamud seems to be be saying is that, no matter one's own identity, one is implicated in the fate of others. Therefore, to be for pogroms that exterminate Jews is to be against humankind. To be for the people who want to wipe the Jews out of existence is to be against humankind. To be for Hamas, therefore, is to be against humankind. And so too, to be for the people who would seek to deny Palestinians their human rights is to be against humankind. To be for the ultra-nationalists in the West Bank is to be against humankind. To be a human being in the fullest sense means supporting Jewish people's "right to be Jews and live in the world like men." To be a human being means likewise to support Palestinian Arab people's right to be who they are and live in the world like human beings. 

The discourse around the current war on social media may make it sound impossible to do both. Everyone is expected to take a "side," as if the truth could not be more complicated than that—as if both Jews and Arabs did not have the same rights to safety and justice as anyone else. The clamor on social media seeks constantly to try to drown out one depiction of atrocity with another. Oh yeah? You show me a picture of a dead Palestinian child? I show you a picture of a dead child in Israel! Or vice versa. As if one cancelled out the other. As if both were not equally dead. As if both did not have a right to life and freedom that was taken from them. As if the killing of both were not a denial of our own humanity. 

I do not wish to do the same here. I do not take away or renounce one jot or tittle of what I've written or what others have said in the past, in condemnation of the suffering of innocent Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. It's all true; I stand by it. 

But I speak out too against the side of the equation that is all too often minimized on the left: the very real threat of genocide still facing Jewish people in Israel and around the world; the seemingly-ineradicable evil of antisemitism that keeps popping back into existence at the first opportunity—Holocaust denialism; pogroms in 1905, pogroms today; blood libels in 1905, blood libels still appearing today... If we on the left oppose these things, and any other manifestation of antisemitism, the time to say so is now. It should not be so hard. Can we not say, with Malamud's fixer, that—though we may be gentiles ourselves, when it comes to the Jews—or any other persecuted minority, we are "against those who are against them"? That to be for the people who are against the Jews—or any other persecuted group—is to be less human ourselves?

Can we not, as gentiles—yet acting in the spirit of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar," or in the spirit of Malamud's freethinking "fixer"—say that it is our humanity too that is disgraced wherever Jews are persecuted—that it is therefore our blood too that is spilled in every pogrom? That to be for Hamas—or anyone else who butchers innocents—is to be against ourselves, because it is to be against all humankind?