Antisemitism

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What is it? A religious prejudice, a racial prejudice, both, or a ghastly league of its own? Why does it seem so intractable? How does it relate to other ideas like religious anti-Judaism, political anti-Zionism, and the metaideas present in efforts to context or distinguish the three? Discuss in this thread, and BE CIVIL.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I think it's perniciously bound in the European experience of 'other'. The history of Europe is a tldr, but when it's supreme religion courted with anti-semitic tropes as part of its own foundational messianic story and when a Jewish diaspora was the most common form of strictly embedded 'other' that could be engaged with (distinct from the social and military interaction with Muslims/Moors etc) within Europe, anti-Semitism becomes sadly self evident.

I think this is on to something. Antisemitism at heart is rooted in a fear/hatred of the Other, but specifically the Other who lives among us. The uniqueness of the Jewish experience in medieval, early modern and modern Europe was that of a people that was distinctly its own and held strong to its cultural distinctiveness, yet at the same time tried its best to make it home wherever it could. There is something about this dynamic that appears uniquely threatening to humanity's most tribalistic instincts, and I think that explains at least part of the uniquely unhinged reaction. Religion for a long time was the main cover for it (even then it was always just a cover) until scientific racism came along and suddenly people had a lot of very rational sounding reasons why Jews deserved all the hate, but fundamentally those are all justifying mechanisms.

This exchange reminds me of this fascinating quote from Armin Shimerman (very much Jewish himself) on the Ferengi from Star Trek:

In America, people ask "Do the Ferengi represent Jews?" In England, they ask "Do the Ferengi represent the Irish?" In Australia, they ask if the Ferengi represent the Chinese. The Ferengi represent the outcast. It's the person who lives among us that we don't fully understand.

Two of these three examples are paradigmatic middleman minorities, although I don't know enough about the Irish experience in England to know if they are or have been one as well.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

^^

Well I'll run with this, because it's interesting.

I can talk of the Irish/Catholic experience in Scotland, which was one of being limited to unskilled agricultural work or mining. Discrimination was found even in the labour and trade union movement in particular into the second half of the 20th century.

My grandfather took his apprenticeship in 1932 but could only find work in the Jewish garment industry.

Various violent proto-fascist 'Protestant Action' outfits did well in local elections in Scotland (31% in Edinburgh as late as 1936) in part answering the 'call' put out formally by the Church of Scotland in 1930 to repatriate the Irish and opposition to The Catholic Education Act.

Indeed the 'legit' fascist outfit that organised in Scotland, that came from Mosley's 'New Party' wasn't initially Mosley's BUF, because the BUF wasn't anti-Catholic (and arguably had quite a healthy Catholic membership) and it folded because it wasn't anti-Catholic enough. Political fascism; the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler was feared to be effectively 'Popish'.

What's problematic is that some significant officials (and possibly voter base, but it is hard to analyse) of these Protestant outfits were Jewish. Possibly to get a foothold in municipal politics. From my own and others understanding of the Jewish experience in Glasgow (I live in a formerly heavily Jewish area) anti-Semitism of the political side (though not the social) was mild, because anti-Catholicism was a distraction.

I'm reminded of the joke in Derry Girls where they ask the Protestant RUC officer how many Catholics are on the force and he says that there are three, if they include one Jew in a town some miles away. Something about the Celtic nations' attitude towards Jews has always struck me as unusually opportunistic--intensely antisemitic when it suits, relatively non-antisemitic when it suits, seeing Jews as part of the sectarian "us" when it suits, seeing Jews as part of the sectarian "them" when it suits. Would you say there's something to that?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm curious if anyone knows why we came to call prejudice against Jews "antisemitism," but prejudice against all other groups is classified as a "phobia" (islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, etc).

I think it has to do with the history of the words and how they came into common usage in English. "Antisemitism" was first used in German in the mid-to-late nineteenth century before making the jump to other European languages, and was at first "neutral" in the sense that antisemitic public figures were just as happy to use it to describe their own views as Jewish or pro-Jewish figures were to use it to describe others. This is why the morphology of the word itself doesn't appear to cast a strong value judgment on the attitude it names; people can be "pro-" or "anti-" any number of things without it being a morally or socially unacceptable bigotry. The use of "-phobia" is generally by analogy to "xenophobia" when it appears in other constructions, and while "xenophobia" is also of late-nineteenth-century origin, it's not a loanword and it was coined to deliberately suggest that prejudice is against foreigners is a morbid fear or other kind of irrational aversion; using the same morphology in "Islamophobia," "homophobia," etc. was a choice to make the same suggestion on the part of the people who coined those words at various points in the twentieth century.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Jews were often "middleman" minorities throughout history. Armenians too. Middleman minorities are often at the forefront of envy.

A lot of other reasons as well, of course.

Armenians also parallel the Jews as they too suffered a major genocide in the 20th century. Theirs was during WWI at the hands of the Turks. The difference is the Turks never apologized and still deny it. They also built a racist museum near the Armenian border that is basically says Armenians killed Turks instead of the other way around.

The West's memoryholing or straight-up denialism of the Armenian genocide for the sake of cajoling an utterly unrepentant nationalist Turkey is one of our greatest shames.

It's very patchwork. While the US, France and Russia formally recognises it, the UK doesn't (but Scotland and Wales legislatively do) and neither does China. Israel also doesn't formally recognise it.

In some cases it's not about placating Turkey; rather a failure to allow for redress through engaging with the wider Armenian community.

Israel not recognizing it (and generally being so chummy with Turkey and Azerbaijan in this climate) is particularly damning, ngl. It's hard not to feel like to a lot of people "never again" really just means "never again to us". Not that that's in any way unique, of course.

Ironically, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria all accept that the Armenian Genocide occurred.

I mean, these countries' governments are not exactly fans of that of Turkey. Red Velvet and his ilk are right that that sort of thing is generally what dictates these kinds of double standards, rather than anything else. It's just that this fact is a very bad thing and should be advocated against whenever possible.

The Turkish position on the Armenian genocide and the allegedly-monolithic "African" position on Fiducia supplicans, which is also being semi-actively discussed on R&P right now, seem to me to have a lot in common in some ways. It's the combination of a position that is itself already extremely unsympathetic substantively to anyone who doesn't already hold it (genocide denialism; ridiculously intense homophobia) and a ludicrously high degree of issue emphasis and emotional salience that is placed on that already-unsympathetic position (allowing mostly-symbolic gestures at the position you think is "wrong" to influence or even dictate your geopolitical or religious commitments). Depressing, depressing stuff.