In 1998, on the initiative of Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, an International Alliance was created in memory of the Holocaust, which today includes the 31 state. By 2004, the alliance developed the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism - it took 12 more years to approve it. Now this definition is officially used in the internal documents of the governments of eight countries - Great Britain, Israel, Austria, Romania, Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Macedonia. He was also supported by the European Parliament.
Anti-Semitism is understood as “a certain attitude towards the Jews, which can be described as hatred. The verbal and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are aimed at Jews or non-Jews and (or) their property, Jewish institutions and religious organizations. ” The same document lists the main examples of anti-Semitism in the modern world:
- killing of Jews or appeals to them;
- spread false, inhuman, denigrating or stereotypical judgments about Jews as such or about Jewish collective power. One of these is the myth of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy or of Jews who control the media, the economy, governments, and other institutions of society and government;
- attributing responsibility to Jews for the real or contrived misconduct of individuals or groups. Or even for acts committed by non-Jews;
- various forms of Holocaust denial and the statement that the Jews, as a people and Israel as a state, “invented” it or exaggerated its scale;
- blaming Jewish citizens for greater loyalty to the state of Israel than for their own country. Attributing to the Jews collective responsibility for the policies of Israel;
- the denial of the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, such as the characterization of the State of Israel as a racist project;
- the use of symbols and associations associated with classical anti-Semitism (for example, blaming the Jews for the murder of Christ or ) to characterize Israel or Israelis;
- equating modern Israel with Nazi Germany;
- the requirement that Israel "conduct a policy that is not demanded or expected from any other democratic state." For example, that he was more "peace-loving" to terrorists than any other country in similar circumstances.
Five points that are directly related to Israel, categorically do not like some experts. So, in their opinion, the wording of the latter is too vague and in fact prohibits any criticism of the government of this country. In February, 2017 of the year 244 British scientists signed a protest petition: in their opinion, the Working Definition threatens academic freedom of speech because it declares any negative assessment of Israel by anti-Semitism.
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Those who criticize Israel are not always anti-Semites. But often
Since the beginning of 1970, the term “new anti-Semitism” has appeared in the social sciences. Canadian lawyer, human rights activist and former Minister of Justice of Canada Irvin Kotler believes that traditional anti-Semitism denied the equal rights of Jews in the societies where they lived, and the new one rejects the right of Jews to their own state.
Anglo-American historian Bernard Lewis called this phenomenon the “third wave” of anti-Semitism. The first was based on religious prejudices ("the Jews crucified Christ"), the second was racial ("the Jews pollute the blood"), the current - the ideological ("the Jews stole the land under their state"). One of the clearest manifestations of the new anti-Semitism, according to supporters of this concept, is the comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany.
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As American scientist Jack Fishel notes, not only extreme right-wing radicals - the usual "old" anti-Semites - but also left-wing activists and Islamists are among the supporters of the new anti-Semitism. According to the researcher, the Islamists consider themselves and their co-religionists to be the collective victims of Israel; the left declares itself to be the defenders of the rights of the oppressed Arabs and deny the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. Some scholars believe that the traditional anti-Semitic clichés were borrowed by the anti-globalization movement, but their opponents are convinced that such statements are merely a political device.
Opponents of the concept of new anti-Semitism believe that it makes impossible a rational conversation about the policy of Israel, actually equating the criticism of this policy with medieval prejudice. In their opinion, the comparison of Israeli politics with Nazism cannot be considered deliberately anti-Semitic, since a similar rhetorical device is often used in relation to many other countries and regimes.
An Israeli politician of Soviet origin, Natan Sharansky, proposed the “3D test” to test a critical attitude towards Israel on the subject of anti-Semitism. According to this view, Israel’s criticism becomes anti-Semitic if it includes at least one of “D”:
- Delegitimization i.e the idea that the Jewish people has no right to self-determination, and Israel, in turn, has the right to exist (at least in its current form).
- Demonization - the image of the Jews and Israel as the main source of world evil or the organizer and beneficiary of the negative processes taking place in other countries and with other nations.
- Double standards - “exclusive” criticism of Israel and ignoring similar negative phenomena in other countries. For example, it may be the insistence that Israel was created on “alien” land, although most of the modern countries appeared as a result of conquest and the forced determination of borders.
In other words, if you criticize Israel for its domestic policies, non-observance of human rights or position in conflict with Palestinian refugees, but do not question the very right of this state to exist and do not attribute any unprecedented crimes to it, then you are not anti-Semitic.
Holocaust denial is definitely anti-Semitism.
A discussion of the Holocaust may look like a normal scientific debate, but it is not always it. None of the academic scientists professionally specializing in the history of Nazi Germany, does not question that the Nazis developed a plan for the total destruction of the Jewish people and began to implement it. The existence of this plan was confirmed, including at the Nuremberg process over the leaders of the Third Reich. There is a scientific discussion about the Holocaust, but it concerns specific details, the role of specific individuals, the place of the Jewish genocide among other crimes of the Nazi regime, and even the exact number of victims, but not their order.
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Those who question the Holocaust in principle are either genuinely mistaken and not competent in historical science, or have prejudices of an anti-Semitic sense. Often - both together. If we assume that there was no Holocaust, then it follows from this that modern Jews deceive the whole world - and anti-Semitism as a belief system does not lead to horrendous consequences like the mass extermination of people. It was precisely the desire to rehabilitate anti-Semitism, to clear it of negative connotations and to return to acceptable political discourse to explain the denial of the Holocaust by the American psychiatrist Walter Reich.
Holocaust denial is common among far-right groups of various kinds, including those for whom the main enemies are not Jews at all (one of these groups is American racists). For them, this is a way to justify xenophobia and racism as such, to prove that such ideologies do not necessarily lead to criminal practices.
Some researchers call the “secondary anti-Semitism” the views of those who do not deny the Holocaust, but blame it on the Jews themselves. The philosopher Theodore Adorno wrote that this was one of the most common strategies for the self-justification of a party that was punished for crimes but did not repent of them. To cope with a sense of shame, they blame the victims. Journalist Heinrich Broder quoted an Austrian Israeli doctor, Zvi Ricks, who said that the Germans would never forgive Auschwitz.
Another form of “secondary anti-Semitism” is an attempt to equate the Holocaust to other state crimes and thereby “normalize” it, proving that many governments have “sinned” with such. That is how the German historian Ernst Nolte argues in 1980's. In addition, he also covertly blamed the Holocaust on the Jews themselves, saying that the extermination of Jews was essentially a response to the Bolshevik repressions in the USSR, carried out by the hands of “Jewish commissars and security officers”.
With the accusations that the Holocaust is used today for political purposes, the situation is more complicated. Such accusations are quite common: for example, in 2000, an American political analyst and political activist Norman Finkelstein published the book Holocaust Industry, in which he argued that this is exactly what representatives of the American establishment of Jewish origin are doing.
The criterion may be who is considered the “beneficiary”. If this is the state of Israel, then there is no deliberate anti-Semitism in this (but also notorious objectivity, too!), Since this is a real political subject with specific interests. But if the accusation is directed against abstract “Jewry,” as in Finkelstein’s book, it is very similar to anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism in the modern world has changed - and it is more difficult to notice
The concept of aversive racism, which was described by American psychologists John Dovidio and Samuel Gartner, may be useful for understanding modern anti-Semitism. In psychology, aversive is called a stimulus (for example, food, medicine, or a sudden loud sound) that causes this or that form of disgust, say nausea.
Unlike open racists, aversives do not express their beliefs directly. Moreover, such people are not always aware of these beliefs, since this conflicts with the official value system, which they - often for conformist reasons - accepted. For example, in the United States it is democracy and equality of opportunity, in the USSR such were friendship of nations and internationalism. Moreover, if an aversive racist has the opportunity to manifest his prejudices without the risk of being "caught by the hand" and subjected to condemnation, he will most likely do so.
Thus, during one of the experiments, white students in the United States were asked to evaluate and make recommendations for hiring candidates with strong, weak and uncertain skills. In those cases when it was a question of obviously suitable or, on the contrary, unsuitable applicants, the students were quite objective. But when it came to candidates whose professional competence was harder to determine, students recommended whites more than 20% more often than African Americans.
A test of implicit (that is, hidden, subconscious) associations is considered to be a fairly accurate criterion for aversive racism. During the course of the test, the subject must quickly assign images with various signatures to the “good” / “bad” category, for example, by pressing a button on the computer. Suppose a man is shown a black man with the signature "righteous", then an African American with the signature "murderer", and then whites with the same signatures. The faster the response to a particular stimulus, the more stable the association.
The attitude towards Jews that is widespread in modern society can be explained precisely through aversive racism. Open anti-Semitism after the 1945 year, as a rule, is not welcome, and in some countries directly violates the law; however, in hidden forms, it continues to exist.
One of its classic manifestations is the discrimination of Soviet Jews in admission to universities and to work. Here, the state itself acted as an aversive racist, which formally declared the equality of all peoples, but in practice deprived the citizens of Jewish nationality of certain rights.
Hidden anti-Semitism is clearly visible through certain judgments and language practices. For example, such:
- the meticulous calculation of the percentage of Jews - in the first Soviet government, among the KGB, the heads of the NKVD and the Gulag;
- deciphering (in parentheses, by the way or by the word) the "genuine" Jewish surname, name and patronymic of a politician, actor, and so on;
- love for anecdotes like "met Russian, Tartar and Jew ...", where it turns out that the Tartar is stupid, Russian is simple, and the Jew is cunning;
- the abundant quotation of negative utterances of famous people, in particular writers or their literary characters, about Jews;
- the obsessive underscore that mutual aid is especially strong among the Jews, among them there are almost no drunkards, drug addicts and other outcasts, their mothers are the most child-loving. It looks like a compliment, but behind it there can be a hint that the Jews “have settled down well” and that among them the clan system is especially strong.
The danger of aversive racism in principle and hidden anti-Semitism in particular is that their transition to open form depends only on external factors. If at some point the government begins to encourage discrimination, the aversive racists will be only for. That is exactly what happened in the USA, where Donald Trump’s anti-migrant and anti-Muslim initiatives found many supporters - the ultra-right ones even marched in a mass march, shouting slogans like “Jews will not force us out.” As the American researcher Claudia Kunz notes, “the Germans did not become Nazis because they were anti-Semites; they became anti-Semites because they became Nazis. ”
Old anti-Semitic stereotypes still exist.
Sociological studies confirm that open anti-Semitism is not popular in either Russia or Europe. Only 10% of respondents surveyed by CNN in seven European countries, admit to personal dislike for Jews. This number rises to 15% in Poland and to 19% in Hungary. In Russia, according to a study conducted by the Levada Center, in 2015, only 6% of citizens were hostile towards Jews (for comparison, about 30% of Russians and almost 40% of Europeans dislike Roma).
However, many traditional stereotypes are still strong. So, from 25 to 40% of Europeans are convinced that the influence of Jews in world politics, economics and the media is too strong. In turn, 39% of Russians believe that it is necessary to limit the number of Jews in leadership positions, and 67% opposes a Jew to take over as president of Russia. About a third of citizens of the Russian Federation believe that Jews occupy too large a place in the cultural life of the country. Half are convinced that there are too many Jews in the government.
According to a Pew study, 17% of Europeans are opposed to Jews becoming members of their families (25% most opponents in Italy, 3% least in the Netherlands and Norway), in Russia this number reaches 30%.
Among the negative clichés about Jews in Russia, the idea that money is more important than human relations (57%) is still popular for them; that they live richer than other people (67%); that they always defend only their own interests, and not the interests of the country where they live (49%). But the opinion that the people of this nationality are responsible for the misfortunes of Russia and it would be better for the country to avoid them at all, no more than 15% share.
Experts of the Levada Center believe that, given the positive dynamics, the Jewish question has faded into the background in Russia - but only in comparison with other types of xenophobia. Russian nationalism is also becoming more popular: in 25 years from 17 to 40%, the number of those who believe that Russians should have certain advantages over the rest has grown.
