The boundaries of anti-Semitism

George P. Fletcher, Professor of Jurisprudence, Columbia University, Project Syndicate

Anti-Semitism nowadays is more subtle than spray-painting swastikas and other acts of vandalism. Hundreds of European scholars are circulating a petition calling for a boycott of Israeli institutions; other academics want the European Union to deny grants to Israeli universities and scientific institutions. One British academic fired an Israeli colleague because she loathes the state of Israel.

Civilized people are loath to admit that they are racist, sexist, or anti-Semitic. But they disagree about when these taboos are violated. If they think that blacks make better athletes or that women make better caretakers, they deny that this is bias. But what about those who believe that rich Jews control, say, the media? Are they merely mistaken, or is that mistake a moral vice?

Today, drawing the boundaries of anti-Semitism is difficult, because much of the world disapproves of Israel's military crackdown in the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip. Whether criticism of Israeli policies is right or wrong, pundits and politicians who speak out on the issue should not be lumped together with those who say that Hitler should have finished the job.

Yet many Americans think that much of Europe's critique of Israeli policies expresses a zeal that cannot be explained simply by Europeans's renunciation of their own colonial past and thus their sensitivity to an Israeli occupation that looks like annexation. As one commentator put it, Europeans feel a collective guilt about the Holocaust that makes them eager to have Israel stamped as an aggressor contemptuous of Palestinian humanity.

But guilt and anger have deeper roots in Europe's image of the Jew. More than most people realize, the Gospels treat recalcitrant Jews those who refused to accept Jesus as their Messiah as perpetrators of a crime that lives on in every generation. Anti-Semites often cite a passage in Matthew in which a Jewish crowd cheers for Christ's execution and voluntarily accepts permanent guilt: His blood be on us and on our children. Matthew then attributes to the Jews a recurrent lie explaining away the resurrection and disappearance of Jesus's body: His disciples came at night and stole Him away while we slept.

Just as whites attribute extraordinary sexual powers to black men, the Christian West's instinct is to treat Jews as the masters of extraordinary forces including the power to kill deities and control world finance. A cartoon earlier this year in the Italian newspaper La Stampa captured this latent sentiment perfectly. A group of Israeli soldiers surround a manger with a baby. The caption reads: Will they kill him again?

To be sure, at the time of Jesus, Jews constituted a hegemonic majority in Jerusalem. Jews who rejected Jesus were, indeed, among the first to be intolerant toward the early Christians. But other hostilities soon took hold, and by the fourth century, Christians had more to fear from each other than from outsiders.

This is apparently the natural way for Christians to think of Jews reenacting in every generation the crime described by Matthew. It is as though a form of original sin entered a subspecies of humanity descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The belief in both the diabolical power and the permanent guilt of the Jews is, to my mind, the essence of anti-Semitism. It is when this image is invoked in politics that critics cross the line between the constructive and the vicious.

A good example pf this politicized imagery is a poster distributed by Amnesty International in Switzerland. It displayed a composite picture of an Israeli tank and a soldier taking aim at a defenseless Palestinian. The caption read: Let the killing stop. Only Palestinian victims are listed. Under protest, the poster was withdrawn.

The Catholic Church has abandoned its anti-Jewish teachings, but this does not that mean that the culture engendered by Christianity can easily redefine its premises. In fact, the Christian image of the all-powerful Jew feeds the conspiracy theories that infect the way Muslims regard Jews.

Israelis blame their critics for not shedding these irrational beliefs. They find it hard to negotiate peace in a world that approaches them armed with the hateful echoes of medieval superstition. In contrast to the Muslim world, Europeans pride themselves on being objective. But it is time that they come to grips with their inner conflicts about Jewish guilt and their own.