It's About Time: A Unified Theory of Anti-Semitism

What is the one common thread connecting all the different forms of Jew hatred that have arisen since Abraham hit the road 4,000 years ago?

Gary: My name is Gary, Son of Lugal-ezen. I was born in the city of Ur, in ancient Mesopotamia, 4,000 years ago. Which means I’ve pretty much seen it all.

Alan: You’ve been alive for 4,000 years, but until today, you’ve never given an interview. Why?

Gary: Scheduling conflicts. … No, no, I kid. Truth is, I never had anything worth sharing with the world — until now.

Alan: We’re listening….

Gary: Many people have been offering explanations for the aggressive return of anti-Semitism since October 7th. I’ve lived through every iteration and permutation of “the oldest hatred,” and I can assure you that most of the current explanations are lame. Or, at best, they are woefully incomplete.

Alan: Before we get to your explanation, I need to ask the obvious question: If you’re 4,000 years old, why do you look 65, maybe 70 years old, tops?

Gary: I have a rare condition called CTD. Chronosynthetic Telomeric Degeneration.

Alan: Meaning what?

Gary: My doctors tell me that CTD is a rare, idiopathic somatic senescence caused by aberrant telomere lengthening reinforced by self-replicating chronosynthetic enzymes. The simple explanation is that I have weird genes, so I age incredibly slowly.

Alan: Can you prove that you’ve been alive for 4,000 years?

Gary: Well, I have pictures.

Alan: What are we looking at here?

Gary: Snapshots from my Instagram. At the top left, that’s my best friend Abe and me back in Ur after we smashed all the idols in his father’s workshop.

Alan: Wait. You knew Abraham the patriarch?

Gary: Sure did. I met him in first grade at King Shulgi Elementary School, and we immediately became best friends. We were so close that when he dropped out of high school and left Ur for what he kept calling “the land that I will show you,” I went with him.

Alan: Where did you guys go?

Gary: Everywhere, it seemed. But when he died at the age of 175, I was still 15 years old, so I kept moving around with his extended family, which had effectively become my family. For instance, here’s a pic of me with Moses and our whole mishpacha at Mt. Sinai, after we escaped from Pharaoh.

Gary: Hundreds of years later, I studied with Socrates in Athens. That guy was all questions and no answers. He drove us crazy. I bet he could have been a great rabbi. … During the Roman era in Judea, I saw more than my share of crucifixions. They were everywhere. Incredibly gruesome. I can still hear the screams. Those crosses lined the roads, like billboards from Caesar, shouting: DO NOT F**K WITH ME AND MY EMPIRE!

Alan: Did you ever meet Jesus?

Gary: I did. I took two of his seminars at Nazareth Community College. All the students loved him, partly because he was young and charismatic, but mostly because he challenged the authorities. All of them. And my G*d, he was fearless, but he never published anything himself, so the faculty denied him tenure.

Alan: I can’t imagine that verdict was well received.

Gary: His students were furious. They protested, saying the school put too much emphasis on research and not enough on teaching and mentoring. We organized rallies, sit-ins, hunger strikes, and had a few confrontations with the campus police. Unfortunately, the situation got ugly fast, and because the Romans had zero patience with Jewish infighting, they burned down the entire school and dragged away the campus ringleaders. To teach us a lesson, I guess.

Alan: What about this photo?

Gary: That’s me with Emperor Romulus Augustulus at the Battle of Ravenna in 476, which was pretty much the end of the Roman Empire.

Alan: You look happy.

Gary: I was. The Romans were ingenious and ambitious, and successful in their own way, but they were also insanely cruel. … Later, I interned with Gutenberg, the year he invented the printing press. … I served as a marketing consultant in Philadelphia during the signing of the Declaration of Independence. … I could go on, but let’s just say it’s been an interesting life.

The oldest hatred

Alan: So, let’s talk about your unified theory of anti-Semitism. You said earlier that most of the usual explanations of Jew hatred are woefully incomplete. What do you mean?

Gary: Consider the explanation that was frequently offered by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (ז״ל). He said that anti-Semitism is a virus that mutates, one generation to the next. During the Middle Ages, he said, the cause of Jew hatred was religious: we were evil because we rejected and killed Christ — or so says the Christian Story. During the Nazi era, the cause of anti-Semitism was racial: the Jews were mongrels, an enemy within who would pollute and destroy the genetic purity and superiority of the Aryan people and the unity of the German Volk. Now anti-Semitism has mutated again, this time into anti-Zionism: We don’t hate Jews, just Israel, which is a racist, anti-colonial, apartheid, capitalist, communist, nationalist, globalist, fascist, and _______ regime.

Alan: And your problem with these explanations is… what?

Gary: I don’t disagree with the details, but his virus metaphor — that’s the problem.

Alan: Why?

Gary: It’s too broad. The “mutating virus” idea is so flexible and expansive that almost anything can fit inside. As a result, many people have lost patience with accusations of anti-Semitism because they think it’s an easy and all-purpose way to stifle any criticisms of Jews and Israel.

Alan: Not sure I’m following you…

Gary: Think about the various “mutations” of anti-Semitism:

• The Christ-Killer Mutation: See above.

• The Shylock/Rothschild Mutation: Jews control the banks and the economy. This lie enables rich people to tell poor people that the real enemy is The Joos.

• The Conspiracy Mutation: Jews secretly control everyone and everything, including the government, the media, the weather, and the space lasers. This one is all-purpose, timeless, and endlessly adaptable.

• The Blood Libel Mutation: Jews murder Christian children (and sometimes adults) to use their blood to make Passover matzah! Another all-purpose accusation to rile up the mob.

• The Racial Mutation: See above.

• The Great Replacement Mutation: “Jews will not replace us!” screamed the tiki-torchers in Charlottesville. … Who is behind the rising tide of non-white immigrants in the Western world? Those global puppetmasters — the Joos!

• The Jealousy Mutation: Jews (choose one or more) make too much money, win too many Nobel Prizes, suck up too much attention, blah blah blah. This one exhausts me. If you’re still trotting out this explanation, please stop.

• The Otherness Mutation (aka the Nomad Mutation): The “wandering Jew” is a rootless cosmopolitan who insists on standing apart from the dominant society, leading to suspicion, fear, and exclusion of the stranger. If you’re a nationalist or a universalist, then Jewish particularity is a thorn in your side.

• The Zionism Mutation: The Jews stole the land from the “indigenous” Palestinians. Jews should go back to wherever the hell they came from. This is a modern mutation, which enables bullies of all stripes (e.g., Islamists, pan-Arab nationalists, economic and cultural Marxists, anti-colonial activists, transgender theorists, UN bureaucrats) to focus their rage on the Jewish state as the source and embodiment of all the world’s evils.

Alan: Do you think these descriptions are wrong?

Gary: Wrong, no. Fragmented, yes. Almost random. That’s because the viral metaphor works almost like a MadLib:

I hate the Jews of [place name] — all [number] of them — because they destroy [valued institution], corrupt [group of people], steal [local commodity], and intentionally aggravate [current local or national problem] for their own benefit.

I’ve never heard a single unified theory that can explain the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and the Soviets and the Arabs and the Islamists and the Spanish Inquisition and the Romans and all the other Jew haters. What’s the thread that ties them all together?

Alan: And you think you’ve discovered this thread, this common denominator?

Gary: Yes.

« END OF PART 1 »

Coming soon: Gary shares his unified theory….