Down the road from where I live in Islington, the Jewish community put up a menorah in a park on the main shopping street. Islington Green seemed an appropriate spot to mark Hanukkah. It’s the home to the London borough’s memorial to the dead of the second world war who gave their lives to prevent the genocide of European Jewry reaching its conclusion.
The menorah was itself destroyed a few days ago in what the local council a ‘hate crime’ and ‘an anti-Semitic attack’. Does its destruction matter? It is easy to diminish the vandalism, just as it is easy to diminish so much of the aggression Jews have experienced since Hamas massacred Israelis on 7 October.
What sets anti-Semitism apart is that it is also a conspiracy theory of power
Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, which protects the UK’s Jews, reports that current war in the Middle East has led to graffiti on synagogues, Jewish schools, a Jewish cemetery and a Holocaust research library, alongside an unprecedented wave of verbal abuse and threats directed at Jewish people in the street. There have not been the arson attacks on Jewish buildings seen in Germany, Armenia and Canada, or Islamist suicide bombings, not yet at any rate. Instead there has been incessant harassment, with the police recording 533 anti-Semitic hate crimes in London alone in October 2023, compared to just 39 in October 2022.
No other foreign conflict triggers hate crimes against a minority. The police did not have to protect Russian orthodox churches in the UK after Putin ordered his armies into Ukraine. With Jews it’s different.
Many who ought to know better ask why they should worry about anti-Jewish racism. I find otherwise sensible people who believe that racism is a consequence of the war in Gaza. They think themselves sweetly reasonable when they say that we should blame the Israelis for the hate rather than, for instance, the British perpetrators who do the actual hating. You can point to their hypocrisy and say they would never treat attacks on Muslims with such cynical equanimity. You can repeat David Baddiel’s neat phrase that ‘Jews don’t count’.
But to my mind it is as important to emphasise that the rise in anti-Semitism is more than just an example of double standards and a threat to life and limb. The nature of anti-Jewish racism means it’s also a threat to western democracy. On the one hand, anti-Semitism is like any other prejudice: the bigoted and the stupid (the two go together) hate Jews for being Jews as they hate other minorities. What sets anti-Semitism apart is that it is also a conspiracy theory of power, which is why it has appealed to the extremes for 150 years. For every right-winger who believes with Elon Musk that Jews ‘have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them’, there is a leftist who believes Zionist money controls western foreign policy and that Israel is the tool of US imperialism. Anti-Semitism has driven tsarists, fascists, Islamists, Muslim Brothers, communists, the alt-right and the alt-left because it carries the politically useful message that all dictatorial movements want to hear: democracy is a sham that hides the power of the Jewish puppet masters.
As most people at some point in their lives believe that democracy is indeed a sham and society is rigged against them, and, since the crash of 2007 western democracies have not been delivering the goods by providing increases in real wages, there is potentially a huge market for believing that the society is run for the benefit of a shadowy elite. And once you have that belief, these conspiracy theories encourage you to take that last, small step and conclude that the shadowy elite is, in fact, Jewish. The same process works in the other direction: once you think that Jews keep you down, you are far more susceptible to all manner of extreme anti-democratic ideas.
A group of London-based academics is showing just how huge the potential for anti-democratic feeling is. In the current issue of the scientific journal Nature, they look at a subject that has nothing to do with Hamas or the Israeli Defence forces: conspiracy theories about Covid.
Not, I should add, full-blown paranoia about Bill Gates seeking to insert microchips into an unsuspecting populace. Rather people who believe that ‘reporters, scientists, and government officials are involved in a conspiracy to cover up important information’; and that we had been lied to ‘on a massive scale’. The academics, Daniel Allington, David Hirsh and Louise Katz found a ‘positive correlation’ between coronavirus conspiracy suspicions and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. The people who believed that ‘legitimate questions about coronavirus are being suppressed by the government, the media, and academia’ were more than likely to believe as well that ‘Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media’.
The London academics are doing vital work, which hardly any of their other colleagues dare touch. The infantile leftist belief that Jews are privileged whites, and therefore cannot be the victims of racism, has done its work. As has the belief that the Jewish people must be held collectively responsible for Netanyahu’s disastrous governance.
In his new book Three Faces of Antisemitism, the American historian Jeffrey Herf says a racist conspiracy theory that inspired the Nazis, the far-right, Soviet communism, the post-Marxist left, the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and suicide bombers ought to attract intense scholarly attention. But as Herf observes, ‘The polarisation of politics, intellectual life, and scholarship has meant that this simultaneity is too rarely addressed.’
If you doubt him, try to imagine an academic at Harvard, whose own president cannot unequivocally condemn calls for the genocide of the Jews, thinking that devoting energy to the study of anti-Semitism is a smart career move.
Readers might say that they already know that people who bang on about shadowy conspiracies will sooner or later wake up with Jews on the brain. Yet the London academics aren’t just saying it, they are proving it. They are doing work their colleagues will not touch and providing solid evidence that cannot be easily dismissed.
Take anti-Zionism. It is standard on the left to say that it is not the same as anti-Semitism and it is a lie put about by the Israeli far right to pretend otherwise. In theory, it might be possible to call for the destruction of Israel without simultaneously hating Jewish people. In practice, it rarely happens. The researchers found that ‘people’s attitudes to Jews living in the UK are closely related to their attitudes to the world’s only Jewish state.’ It is rare to hate one without hating the other, which is why war in the Middle East and attacks on western Jewry go together. If anti-Zionism did not produce anti-Semitism, the violence and abuse would abate and the menorah at the bottom of my high street might not have been trashed.
More tellingly for the future of western democracies, the researchers show that anti-Semitism and a belief in the destruction of freedom go together too. The people with the strongest anti-Semitic attitudes, they found, were ‘those who want to overturn the social order through possibly violent revolution’. Anti-Semitism was correlated with those who believe that cruelty and ruthlessness may be necessary in order to change the world’.
This ought to worry an audience far beyond western Jewry. Economic stagnation in the real world and propaganda and hysteria online undermine democracy as they pump up the market for conspiracy theory.
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