by Peter Bailey
Any attempt to define antiSemitism must fail. The phrase itself derives from the German word Judenhass, translated to English means Jew Hatred, while the term anti-Semitism was introduced as a quasi scientific explanation of the dislike of Jews in 1879. And has stuck since that time.
There are a number of truisms about anti-Semites and anti-Semitism. Let me stress that most anti-Semites will be quite adamant that they don’t dislike or hate Jews in general, but rather specific types or classes of Jews. These same people will tell you that they are not anti-semites as an anti-Semite hates all Jews, which they don’t.
For a large part of the 20th century, even after the Holocaust, many Jews were kept out of so called exclusive sports and social clubs, never because they were Jewish, but because they were different. This happened in countries such as the United States, Britain and Australia, but was considered protecting their own culture against the so called foreign Jewish culture, but anti-Semitic, never.
During the days of the Soviet Union, many Jews were persecuted for being capitalists, while at the same time people like US Senator Joseph McCarthy investigated more Jews in his witch hunt for communists than any other grouping. During 1953 his committee questioned 124 people, 79 of them Jews, suspected to being communist sympathisers. So to the communists, Jews were hated right wing capitalists while the right wing hated them for being communist. The common denominator, anti-Semitism.
During the Apartheid years in South Africa, there is no doubt that Jews played a prominent, if not dominant white role as members and supporters of the resistance movement. Those who actively did so, were however, a very small minority of the Jewish population of South Africa. This did not stop many right wing whites from accusing all Jews of being communists, which was considered synonymous with supporting the liberation movements. Concurrent with this, and encouraged by the Muslim minority, there was a deep seated hatred for Jews among the black population. Reasons ranged from the simplistic “the Jews killed Jesus” to the more sophisticated labour movement view that the black labour force was exploited by Jewish employers. Being white in those days automatically attracted dislike by the black community, while the addition of being Jewish ended with hatred and extreme anti-Semitism. Here again both sectors of the population, black and white, hated the Jews for diametrically opposed reasons. The modern antipathy to Jews in South Africa is very much a continuation, albeit more blatantly, of a long tradition.
The modern era and the advent of the State of Israel on the global scene resulted in a new euphemism for anti-Semitism, this time called anti-Zionism. We don’t hate Jews, is the chant, we only hate Zionists. The reality is that being Jewish from a religious perspective, implies being a Zionist, The vast majority of Jews worldwide, have for 2,000 celebrated the Festival of Passover which ends with the words “Next year in Jerusalem” and still do so right up to the present time. The noun Zion is defined in the Oxford Dictionary “as the Hill of Jerusalem on which the City of David was built”. Every Jew who utters the words “next year in Jerusalem” thus expresses a yearning to return to the eternal city of the Jewish people, Zion, or the hill of Jerusalem, and is by definition a believer in Zion or simply a Zionist. Anti-Zionist means anti-Jewish and of this I have no doubt.
The very reasons given for anti-Semitism are irrational and contradictory, while the actions and utterances of anti-Semites are indefensible. Attempting to understand the irrational is a futile exercise, while trying to attack the indefensible is equally an exercise in futility. I would like end by emphasising the following to all anti-Semites ; while we Jews might have our differences, be they political, religious or for any other reason, the cement that binds us and keeps us united as a people, is the very anti-Semitism and hatred with which you are trying to destroy us. To those so called Jews who try to ally with and to defend the anti-Semites, I want to remind you, when the chips were down during the Holocaust, a Jew was a Jew, irrespective of his or her political utterances.
