Antisemitism

[afleitch]

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.

Part of that European experience has been an 'arc' that all this is 'wrong', which 'liberal' minded people and institutions were able to face, tentatively, long before other 'matter of fact' discriminations based on race, sex etc and before other post industrial social tensions. And long before other minority cultures and religions formed their own diaspora in Europe and faced their own discrimination.

But The Holocaust, still within living memory, is a wound, a void. The very worst mechanised slaughter and annihilation as a cumulation of centuries of both action and thought.

That gives anti-Semitism a distinction in that it gives that particular prejudice an 'end point'. Because we (the West) reached it.

What's contentious, though perhaps that's too strong a word, is that our European/Western/Christian/Secular experience isn't a global experience.

The 'whataboutery' that flows from the personal experience or cultural consciousness of other nations and people's subject to imperialism, mass killings, displacement etc which Western powers haven't truly been made accountable for isn't necessarily coming from a bad place. It's coming from not being heard. History not being heard, discrimination not being heard or addressed.

The distinctiveness which we place on anti-Semitism comes from those who perpetuated it (and can still do so). It was foundational to Europe. It broke us and divided us for fifty years after the the 'end point'.

The rest of the world faced it's own, different, horrors that we perpetuated in imperial nation building. Collectively, but as part of nation building. We've not addressed that appropriately. We also still engage in it, both at home with discrimination against diaspora, and abroad through economic means.

[afleitch]

^^

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.

[afleitch]

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?

There's something to that. If we take the Welsh case as it is more extreme in its range than the others, on the one hand you have a society that has had a not even undeserved reputation for several centuries as one of the most philosemitic* on Earth, yet one that has also seen incidents from time to time. The Tredegar riots (which certainly had an element that felt a little pogrom-y) would be an example: they came out of a clear sky, were never repeated and were so strangely out of character that the precise details of what actually happened were a point of severe contestation within the Jewish community in Wales even half a century later. It is also the case that one cause of much of the hostility towards Welsh Nationalism from Welsh intellectuals of other political traditions was the sense that Saunders Lewis's strident antisemitism was, on some level, un-Welsh; that it was a sign of the foreign and perhaps Continental nature of his views and those of his followers, much like his Catholicism. And you will find, in certain circles, people who continue to think this way.

_{*Using this to mean the opposite of antisemitic rather than the other usage.}

The 1919 Riots were equally as 'out of character' when and where they happened but with a different target. Which makes it all the more unusual. It's why it's often helpful (now, as well as then) to centre such things less around visceral eruptions of violence and it's 'you got lifted and you got beaten' outcomes and more around institutional structures and the targeting of marginalised communities. Which is hard because when you do 'fight back' those are defining moments for those communities.

While I can't speak for the Jewish experience, I would think as a short hand Jews were 'othered' but not 'Othered'; Britain's blinkered obsession (and it really was the national past time) with the 'Irish Question' on one side of a global war and then it's obsession with migration from the (initially) Commonwealth the other side. Not to detract from real and personal experiences of lazy or confrontational anti-Semitism that people experienced.

I've only had very limited contact with Glasgow based Jewish history societies and resources and it was some time ago, but even with some nostalgia, the story is not one that's really contemporaneous with the experience of Jews in many other parts of the world at that time. There are similar accounts from elsewhere in Britain. The accounts of an amazing community historian, Harvey Kaplan, looking back at the Gorbals after it had been effectively demolished and it's 14,000 strong Jewish community dispersed is a positive one, to the point that it 'feels' that it has to have been sanitised, but that undercurrent just isn't there.

[afleitch]

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.