Andrei Cornea, Dilemma: The Simplifying Excess (II)

"Antisemitism is actually a simple ideology: you hate the smarter and wealthier ones, you destroy them and steal their money" – Andrei Caramitru said in a text about two weeks ago on FB. (Mr. A. Caramitru reiterated the "universal theory of envy" in a newer post. It explains the entire history of persecutions: from the mythical conflict in Miorița to the pogrom in Bucharest, and from the horrors of communism to Călin Georgescu!) I admit that I envy (although I do not admire at all) some of those with the ability for excessive simplifications. What a safe and comfortable world they live in! How clear everything is for them! How quickly, especially, they find the solution to all problems and the Universe itself!

Andrei Caramitru (otherwise declared favorable to combating antisemitism) has thus found the definitive explanation of antisemitism (anti-Judaism). A miracle! It should be noted, in the initial sentence, that "actually". He wants to say that the several thousand articles and books on the subject, the dozens or hundreds of authors who have dealt with the hatred towards Jews for decades (I recently read the exceptional book by David Nirenberg, Antijudaism. A History of a Way of Thinking) have pretty much beaten water in a mortar. Also, all the angles and perspectives that have been used in the last hundred years to understand the phenomenon – theological, social, political, economic, psychoanalytic, naturalistic – have been superfluous or almost: in fact, Mr. Caramitru tells us, things are very simple: envy towards the smart and wealthy. That's it!

There has been and exists, of course, envy towards the wealth of some Jews, and the desire to expropriate them. To plunder the Jews has not been absent from the plans of some kings and princes of the past. But this only explains some aspects – and perhaps not even the essential ones – of anti-Judaism over time. Why, for example (to evoke old things), did the philosopher Seneca (ultra-rich and smart) hate the Jews? Because, he says himself, they, a defeated people, allow their laws to be given to Romans who, paradoxically, convert to Judaism ("Victi victoribus leges dederunt"). Where does Christian anti-Judaism come from? From envy for wealth? Not at all! The motives are theological and relate to the Church's self-definition as the "New Israel," which substitutes and marginalizes historical Israel. For hundreds of years, official Christianity resorts to Augustine's formula: Jews must be humiliated and persecuted because they rejected Christ, but they must not be killed, so that their sufferings serve as a permanent lesson for Christians. Does this have anything to do with money or book knowledge? No.

Why did Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon expel the Jews from Spain, even though they offered to pay to be allowed to remain on the peninsula? Because, it seems, they feared the attraction that Judaism would exert on Christians, especially "new ones" (converts), willing to secretly Judaize. Also, what connection do the accusations of ritual murder or deicide, the famous accusations always brought against Jews, whether they are poor or rich, scholars or ignorant, have with book knowledge and money? Hard to see. Later, in the modern era, how does the "theory of envy" explain the pogroms in Russia? The vast majority of the Jewish population in the "Pale of Settlement" was extremely poor.

Jews were persecuted where they were ghettoized or lived in autonomous communities (shtetls), but also where assimilation was strong. The Dreyfus Affair, for example, how do we explain it if we resort to Mr. Caramitru's simplifications? Or what can we say about antisemitism in Christianity at the beginning of the 19th century in Germany and Austria, where Jews were very well assimilated and devoted to their national states? Jews were accused of having "brought" or invented capitalism (Werner Sombart). False theory; but how is it that they were also accused of having "brought communism"? There is an antisemitic component in traditional leftism, just as there is in traditional rightism (and which sharpens at the extremes). It should be explained how Jews serve as "figures of the enemy" in both ideologies, but the "theory of envy" regarding wealth and intelligence only explains, at most, a few particular cases.

That in some Arab and Palestinian circles economic envy towards Israel could be cultivated, this can be accepted. But the entire phenomenon of anti-Zionism (usually a camouflage for antisemitism) is far too complex and widespread, including in Europe and in leftist movements, to admit a single and simple explanation. Someone can hate Israel for various reasons – from theological to nationalist-Arab, even to so-called "anti-imperialist" in leftist circles; however, hostility towards Israel (not justified criticism of the current Israeli government), going so far as to deny its right to exist, coming from some Europeans, not at all poor, from the West, but also from some from the East, how can it be brutally reduced to economic envy? And what does the genocidal hatred of the ayatollahs have to do with Israel's prosperity?

But the hardest thing is to explain, through a simplistic theory, the Holocaust. Jews were killed by the Nazis, without discrimination, wealthy Jews from Central and Western Europe and masses of poor Jews from Poland and Hungary. Both capitalists and communists, bourgeois and proletarians perished. Lawyers, professors, doctors, rabbis were killed, but also merchants, craftsmen, tailors. Women and children, the elderly and teenagers, geniuses and idiots, honest people and thieves, musicians and deaf people, Zionists and anti-Zionists perished. Nothing mattered, no characteristic – poverty, wealth, sex, virtue, age. Only those who did not manage to be gassed and were liberated by the advance of the Soviets or Anglo-Americans escaped. In no case can the "final solution" (which made some, like Primo Levi, doubt the existence of God) be "resolved" expediently in the ridiculously definitive terms of Caramitru: "...(the fascists) after they annihilated the Jews, stole everything they had, that was the goal" (my emphasis). It is also an illegitimate logical conclusion: the confusion between consequence and purpose.

Conceptual simplism and excessive reductionism are dangerous, whatever their intentions. Neither history, nor sociology, nor political analysis should resort to overly great epistemic simplifications except with maximum caution. Otherwise, ideologies are born, especially radical ones; this is how conspiracy theories arise that support the rise of extremism. And, ultimately, antisemitism cannot be combated by resorting to a caricature of a theory, which even makes a title of glory out of the fact that it actually indulges in a sufficient arrogance.

https://www.dilema.ro/situatiunea/excesul-simplificator-ii