Hello. I’m having trouble understanding several things related to antisemitism (such as anti-communism, Nazism, Zionism…) and it’s because I don’t actually understand how antisemitism itself functions. The explanations I can find online tend to be idealist.
I think it’s gotta do with the renaissance in Jewish social mobility and acceptance into secular society in 19th century western capitalist society
To summarize, the framework of antisemitism is essentially based around the reactionary preconception that their social mobility would lead to the ‘subversion’ of the imperialist and capitalist West, by these historically disenfranchised peoples, with not only their newfound ‘surreptitiously acquired power’ but its foreign values that justify it.
Consequently, this preconception acts as not just a justification of discrimination, but a violent movement against them. And this logic is then extrapolated to other peoples of the world, especially and purposefully revolutionaries, who were challenging those same ruling classes.
Sourced from:
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/#george-orwells-very-british-antisemitism
(Edit: I prolly didn’t summarize and write this, as succinctly as I could, maybe later I will)
Thanks. I think I read that Red Sails article a while ago but found it hard to understand. I will try to reread that section.
The confusion I have is about how this conspiratorial thinking needs to target a “marked” (for example, racialized) group of outsiders (as I understand it, this group doesn’t have to be Jewish people but often is). I think there is an elemental form of this reasoning you can see when defenders of capitalism blame “corporatism” or “crony capitalism” for capitalism’s woes. For those to exist, “corporatists” and “crony capitalists” and perhaps “speculators” or “usurers” — as the Nazis liked to call them — also need to exist, but in this basic form it hasn’t crystallized into a defined group of people. How does that group of people end up being Jewish people?
When Marxists talk about other forms of discrimination we can always pinpoint an economic relation that generates it like colonialism or the gendered division of labor. What, then, is the material basis of 21st-century antisemitism? The destruction of Europe’s Jewish community and the creation of a Jewish settler colony seem to me like the main contributors today, but how specifically do they contribute? Is it that Israel helps reify Jews’ status as “non-European”?
Is it correct to understand that antisemitism itself is one possible manifestation of the logic of antisemitism and the logic should not be viewed as exclusive to Jewish people?
Well, I’m a bit confused on that too and it’s weighin’ on my conscience
Yes…
Now on the first question, regarding their role in political economy, take my info with a grain of salt as I try my best to explain the origins of medieval judenhass:
The role of Jews in medieval political economy (taking England for an example) was to do the employment that Christians weren’t specialized in, religiously forbidden to do, etc. due to the fact that Jews were originally outsiders, both in faith and foreign nature.
In this case, the initial role of merchant and the later role of moneylender seemed to define them, as they evolved to fit the necessary economic niches to be filled during those times. {not that they had much choice, since medieval society barred them from others}
Also, regarding England:
Nonetheless, they were kept as a necessary economic ‘evil’
It was only when the contemporary rise of proper international banking from Italy competed with their role as moneylenders, that the European kingdoms in the 1300s finally started to exile the Jews, alongside the increasing local judenhass (often encouraged), which made the Jews economically obsolete in their political economy.