How the pandemic feeds another age-old disease
V IN ORDER to deal with the current wave of Jew-hatred, it is crucial to analyse the situation and ask: Why? Why today? And what can be done?
There seem to be two main trends that largely explain it.
One is the age-old development of anti-Jewish animosity, which starts before Christianity, in the Hellenistic period, in an age in which there was an attempt to unite all pagan civilizations under a Hellenistic umbrella.
Gods represented supernatural forces that could be named differently but were identical in their meaning. A Hellenistic king was divine, and had to be worshipped as such; and all that was unacceptable to the developing Jewish civilization.
With the advent of Christianity, and much later of Islam, these differences, and their economic, political, and cultural consequences, became unbridgeable.
From early modern times, ethnicity – later nationality – developed as a result of socio-economic and political developments, and Jews were, again, strangers within a different culture. Many of them, however — and in the West, most — tried to accommodate themselves to the developing selfunderstanding of the national communities in which they lived.
Ethnic and national self-consciousness of non-Jews developed into nationalism, and that was the basis for racism (though there are no races, because all humanity originates from East Africa; should a tribal chief in Papua win the heart of a lady professor at Oxford, they would produce healthy children, because we are one race).
Traditional antisemitism, based on religious ideologies, mutated into Nazism, which turned Jew-hatred into a central basis of its ideology and politics. Nazism is not dead. Contemporary Radical Islam — not Islam, but Radical Islam (and Western white supremacist racism) — repeats Nazi concepts literally daily, and today repeats the accusations against the Jews for causing mass deaths that were levelled against Jews in the past.
White supremacists, and Radical Islamists, are accusing Jews of having caused the coronavirus pandemic. Out of a huge number of examples provided by Memri (Middle East Media Research Institute), the following is just one quote of many: “This virus is surely the outcome of the Jews’ concealed hatred for the entire world…
Edict expelling Jews from Spain being presented, painted 1889
When the Jews ignited the conflagration of World War I, they won the Balfour Declaration, and when they started the conflagration of World War II, they won the establishment of their Khazar colony in Palestine [antisemites claim that Israeli Jews are not Jews but descendants of the Tartar Khazars]. Now they want to start the conflagration of a third world war, in order to declare the establishment of the greater kingdom of Israel” This was written
by As’ad al-Zouni, a well-known Jordanian journalist, on Dunya el-Watan website, posted on March 16, 2020.
The very fact that this is a repetition of the anti-Jewish accusation in 1348 of having caused the terrible plague that hit Europe at the time shows a clear continuation.
Antisemitism became a part of Christian and Muslim civilization in a way that was not really related to facts or even to the presence of Jews.
In Tsarist Russia no Jews were allowed because they were seen as the representatives of Satan — until 1772, when Russia acquired parts of Poland with a large Jewish population. Today, Malaysia foments anti-Jewish myths, although there is not a single Jew there.
Antisemitism is limited to monotheistic cultures — there is practically no anti-Jewishness in China or India, and antisemitism in Japan was a marginal phenomenon limited to some of the small Christian minority (whereas other Japanese Christians were and are markedly pro-Jewish).
One of the basic reasons for presentday antisemitism is, therefore, its historic latency in monotheistic cultures.
The other central reason is actually not connected to Jews at all: the falling birthrate in First World countries. The minimum birthrate that maintains a population is 2.1 children per woman, whereas in China, Japan, North America, Europe and Russia the rate is mostly between 1.6 and 1.9 (the exception is Israel, with 3.1 among Jews. The number of children in strictly Orthodox families is falling, but it is rising among secular and traditional Jews).
In the UK it is 1.8, but England and Wales reported 1.7. That means that the population is ageing, and in order