Antisemitism

 Well, the day we all feared has come. The Democratic Party officially has its equivalent to a Marjorie Taylor Greene—as in, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist with a host of loony beliefs. I am referring to Maureen Galindo, who was unfortunately suddenly all over the news yesterday as a contender in the Democratic primaries for a congressional seat in Texas. 

She truly sounds like MTG from the worst point of the latter's QAnon period—except that Galindo is if anything even more overtly antisemitic than MTG ever was. She has reportedly railed against what she calls "the Jews who own Hollywood." She has implied that Jewish people constitute the "Church of Satan" and the "synagogue of Satan." And so on. 

True, her candidacy appears to be gaining steam in part due to an infusion of cash from a Republican-aligned super-PAC that wants to delegitimize the Democratic Party by empowering its most extreme candidates. 

In short, it appears that some GOP dark money groups are turning to the same strategy Democrats pulled to unseat moderate Republicans like Peter Meijer and promote more radical MAGA politicians as GOP candidates, a few primary cycles back, in the hope they would be more likely to lose the general election. 

But that doesn't meant that we can solely blame the other party for this. As in the case of the Democrats' very analogous skullduggery—the strategy only works if primary voters in one's own party go along with it. Democrats' trick worked ultimately because Republicans were willing to vote for MAGA extremists. 

Likewise—if Maureen Galindo actually does win a Democratic primary, we will have only our own party's voters to blame. 

The days are long behind us, then, when we could write off antisemitism as solely a problem of the extreme right. Still less can we still depict it as merely an occasional aberration from a few "fringe" characters that is so thoroughly stigmatized among right-thinking people that it could not be a significant problem in our time. 

It's time to face reality that antisemitism has re-emerged as a major theme of our politics. And not in some particularly novel form. What has shocked me more than anything about the recent antisemitic language from both right-wing figures like Carlson and these new oddballs on the left like Galindo is how basically medieval it is in structure. 

Since we're living through a period of the revival of the classic tropes of antisemitism from the 19th century and earlier—the tropes of the Jews as "Christ-killers," as a "Satanic" cabal practicing witchcraft, etc.—which Galindo has clearly hearkened to—it makes sense to turn to a great 19th century work of debunking. 

This past week, I read The Wandering Jew (1881) by Moncure Daniel Conway—a pathbreaking investigation of the vicissitudes of the Ahasuerus legend by a religious radical, abolitionist, Unitarian, and freethinker from the 19th century.  

Conway demolishes the myths of classical antisemitism one by one, in a way that still feels fiercely modern and relevant (all too relevant indeed, to our political moment). He explores how Christian legislation first confined Jews by decree to stigmatized financial professions—then blamed the victims of this apartheid rule, calling them money-changers. 

He shows how the whole elaborate mythology of satanism, witchcraft, and the occult was infused from its earliest history with the themes of antisemitism—just as it appears to be still today, in the worldview of figures like Galindo. 

Above all, he reveals how the whole narrative of Jews as "Christ-killers" whose theology emphasizes the rigors of punishment over Christian charity is belied by the history of Christian treatment of the Jews. In the centuries in which the two religions have cohabited on the globe, it is the Jews who have been crucified, and the Christians who killed them. 

In the myth of the wandering Jew, Conway shows, Jesus was cast in the role of the unforgiving one—who utters a fatal and eternal curse that can never be remitted. Another reversal and projection has thereby taken place. 

Christian society—founded in the name of a Jewish preacher who delivered the Sermon on the Mount—slowly reshapes itself into its opposite. It becomes the persecutor and crucifier. And so Ahasuerus—the wandering Jew of legend—comes to take the place of both Cain and Christ at once—the outcast, the wanderer, society's scapegoat. 

The mark of Cain thereby becomes a crown of thorns. 

"Who art thou?"

       He answer'd not, but with a sudden hand

       Made bare his branded and ensanguin'd brow,

Which was like Cain's or Christ's [...] as Shelley wrote in "Adonais."

For Conway, the only way out of the recurrent myths of antisemitism—all of which are apparently still with us—was to escape from the delusions of theology itself. And given how closely linked the resurgent antisemitism of our time appears to be with evangelical fundamentalism—I have to say I see his point. 

He thought the foundational confusion in Christian theology was it worshipped both God the creator—the embodiment of an unforgiving, remorseless nature that can curse and damn souls for an eternity without pity—and Jesus—himself the cursed, the outcast, the unforgiven and persecuted, whose essential message was the ethical ideal of mercy. 

In the myth of the wandering Jew Ahasuerus, Conway saw a remnant of the "ancient nature-worship"—the belief in final and irredeemable curses. But in the pity with which people slowly came to regard the victim of this curse, the early signs of a more humanistic religion can be detected. He writes: 

Forgiveness is the attribute of man. We may reverse Portia’s statement, and say that, instead of Mercy dropping as the gentle rain from heaven, it is projected into heaven from compassionate human hearts beneath. And heavenly power doth then show likest man’s when mercy seasons the vengeance of nature. From the wild forces above not only droppeth gentle rain, but thunder and lightning, famine and pestilence; it is man with his lightning-rod, his sympathy, his healing art, who turns them from their path and interposes a shield from their fury. [...] 

All religions, beginning with trembling sacrifices to elemental powers personified—powers that never forgive—end with the worship of an ideal man, the human lover and Saviour. That evolution is invariable. Criticism may find this or that particular deified man limited and imperfect, and may discard him. It may take refuge in pure theism, as it is called. But it amounts to the same thing. What it worships is still a man—an invisible, vast man, but still a man. To worship eternal love, supreme wisdom, ideal moral perfection, is still to worship man, for we know such attributes only in man. Therefore the Shylock-principle is non-human nature, hard natural law moving remorselessly on its path from cause to effect; the Portia-principle, the quality of Mercy, means the purely human religion, which, albeit for a time using the terms of ancient nature-worship and alloyed with its spirit, must be steadily detached from these, and on the ruins of every sacrificial altar and dogma build the temple whose only services shall be man’s service to man.

We will only truly escape this cycle of medieval antisemitism with its ancient terrors of occultism and "Satanism," then, when theology as a whole evolves in a more humanistic direction: in place of a belief in curses and eternal torture in hellfire, which we associate with blind and indifferent nature, we must substitute the purely human ethical ideal of mercy. 

Then, perhaps—too late—Christian society will stop crucifying and persecuting the race that—for millennia—in the ultimate act of projection and psychological reversal—it has falsely libeled time and again as the crucifiers and the persecutors.