Jewish culture places an enormous amount of emphasis on the virtue of Knowledge. We have always considered ourselves a people that values education, perhaps above all other things.
And yet, when we encounter the question of “where antisemitism comes from,” most of us avert our eyes, cover our ears, and run away. It’s like we’re allergic to the entire subject of inquiry.
It’s very weird, if you ask me.
I can imagine being hated — but I cannot imagine having no desire to know why.
And yet, most Jews seem to have no interest in learning why other people hate our people.
Is this unique to us? What if a Laotian, or a Paraguayan, or a Korean, or a Cherokee, learned that their people is one of the most hated peoples in the world? I think they’d want to know why. In fact, they’d probably set out on a quest to find the answer!
And the most effective way to find that answer is to ask the people who have it. Those would be… the people who hate them. The hated Cherokee would seek out persons who hate Cherokees, and ask them for their reasons. They wouldn’t just ask their own Cherokee relatives and Cherokee teachers and Cherokee lore. Because you can’t find out why people hate you… by asking the people who love you. The people who love you don’t know why other people hate you. To find out why people hate you… you have to ask the people who hate you.
It’s common sense.
Yet Jews don’t do this. Instead, we ask our parents, our teachers, our rabbis, our Hollywood directors, and our own history books, written by our own people. We seek the answer to why people hate us, from people who love us.
And naturally, the answers all have one thing in common:
They all place the blame on the other people — the haters — and never on ourselves.
The people who love us want to shield us from shame, from guilt, and from the notion of culpability. It’s a misguided use of love, because it perpetuates the conflict rather than leading to its resolution.
And so the answer that most of us absorbed, and never questioned, was this:
They hate us because there's something wrong with them. Never us. Always them.
For instance:
Great-Grandpa got ripped off, on a pair of pantaloons, on the Lower East Side in the 1920s, by a businessman with a "berg" or a "blatt" or a "stein" in his name, and he was so stupid he blamed all Jews for the unscrupulousness of one huckster.
Critique: This answer falls apart once we ask, "But why does this only seem to happen with Jews?" Why didn't Grandpa do that with Swedish people after that one time the Swedish guy ripped him off? Or with French people after that one time a Frenchman cheated him? Why does this phenomenon seem to happen particularly to the Jews? Why have Jews been expelled from "every single country"? Many groups have had diasporas, but what other group has been targeted with this much consistency?
It's jealousy. Jews are better than goyim, and so goyim are jealous, and from jealousy comes hate. Not complicated!
Critique: But in order to use this explanation, you have to believe that Jews are superior to others — which raises all sorts of problems I'm sure I don't need to explain. Are Jews a superior race, above the others? If the answer is no (and it should be no, because we don't do the whole "superior race" thing anymore, right guys?), then why would people who aren't Jewish be jealous of people who are? What exactly would they be jealous of?
People simply have a "need" to hate — they have to hate someone or something — so they choose Jews because Jews have small numbers and sometimes dress funny, and are therefore attractive targets for bullying.
Critique: Plenty of groups have small numbers, and plenty of groups dress funny. And yet do they have a 2,500-year history of continual persecution? Pick any small, funny-dressing minority, and ask yourself: Do they get as much hatred and pogroms and national expulsions and scathing descriptions by historians, ancient and modern, as the Jews get? If Jews have suffered hatred by multiple orders of magnitude more than other funny-dressing groups, then what explains the disparity?
Hatred is passed down from generation to generation, for no reason at all, simply by word of mouth. Mom and Dad say, "hate this group," and so the children hate.
Critique: But who originally started the hate, and why?
Ask this question, and you will come to the final response — the “explanation” into which all other explanations ultimately funnel:
Jews are God's Chosen People™, imbued with special souls, from a higher level of Heaven, with a special divinely ordained purpose to bring about the next stage in the evolution of humankind, and goyim are jealous of that. And since they didn't get "chosen" for this mission, their souls have a spiritual quarrel with Jewish souls, and are automatically predisposed to hate Jews.
In fact, certain tribes and nations were founded by Biblical characters who were the "non-chosen" brother in a sibling rivalry, who was dispossessed of his inheritance by his Jewish (and therefore "chosen") brother, and therefore passed down his hatred and resentment to his descendants, literally through their blood (or DNA in modern parlance), all the way down to the present day. The main such rivalries are those of Isaac vs. Ishmael (the source of the Jewish-Arab rivalry), and Jacob vs. Esau (the source of the Jewish-European rivalry) — the latter duo having, according to the rabbis, fought each other inside Rebecca's womb. They were "destined" to be rivals. And just as the non-Jewish brother in each duo developed deep resentments toward his Jewish brother, so too do their descendants carry intrinsic hatred in their blood, passed down from generation to generation, l'dor va'dor, ready to flare up as soon as the presence of Jacob's DNA — i.e. Jewish blood — is detected in the vicinity.
Hatred is passed down through DNA, because certain "tribes" or "nations" or "peoples" are genetically preprogrammed to hate Jews. And so, every descendant of Esau (all White people) and every descendant of Ishmael (all Arab people) contains intrinsic Jew-hate in their DNA. And while that hatred may sit dormant for many years, perhaps generations, it still remains coiled there, ready to spring as soon as it's stimulated to action.
And what stimulates it to action? Being around other people whose hatred is active. When one Goy whose Jew-hatred is active encounters another Goy whose Jew-hatred is dormant, the active Jew-hate activates the dormant Jew-hate, and the activated hatred spreads like a virus.
All that's necessary is proximity. It could be physical proximity, or it could be media proximity — either through print or film or the internet — but the common denominator is proximity. If we allow an active hater of Jews to interact with people whose hatred of Jews is currently dormant, then that's all it takes. It's a contagion!
Critique: This "contagion theory" does two important things. It allows Jews to avoid introspection, and never entertain the thought that we could have "done" anything wrong. And it gives us an excuse to suppress, censor, and hurt people who criticize us — because that's the only way to stop a "contagion." Quarantine!
And if you really dig to the bottom of it, this is the one “explanation” into which all Jewish or philosemitic attempts at explaining Jew-hate ultimately converge.
Now… a question:
Did you notice how all five of these explanations place the blame on other people — on non-Jews — and completely absolve the Jewish people of any responsibility for their conflicts?