Provocative title, eh? I am reproducing below a snippet of a conversation I had recently with a friend who is a PhD candidate, about his proposed thesis on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictional, fraudulent book published in Tsarist Russia which purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.
Me: What happened when you proposed that as a thesis topic?
Friend: It was rejected, pretty fast. They warned me that publishing such a thesis would kill my academic career before it started; that I would never find someone to act as my thesis advisor; that the department would not accept it. In fact I was told - in so many words - that only Jews can write about the Protocols.
Me: Is it because they thought you would claim the Protocols were true?
Friend: Yeah, in part. There's still so much effort to "prove" that it fabricated and fictional--as if that's still an open question--but my point was that even as a work of fiction, it deserves some attention beyond simply proving it to be fabricated and false. Of course it is fictional, but so what? Orwell's 1984 was also fiction, and no one argues whether it is "true" or not - yet we still study it and analyze it and write about it as a piece of literature and political metaphor.
Me: So what were you going to write about the Protocols?
Friend: I was going to analyze it not as a historical document or a piece of journalism, but as metaphorical writing, just as 1984 is a political metaphor. But that wasn't allowed.
Me: Why?
Friend: Well, I think part of it is sensitivity to charges of promoting anti-semitism, because it is in fact an anti-semitic tract, even if you treat the work purely as a fabrication and fiction. But just because it is fiction doesn't mean it can't also be treated as a piece of literature. There is an undercurrent of Jewish exceptionalism and a sense of Jewish superiority in some corners - this isn't new and occasionally you hear about it in the news when some Rabbi issues some weird ruling for example. That sort of thing is true in Judaism as well as Islam and Christianity; this belief that your religion is not only destined to take over the world but also entitled to do so because it is superior. And recognition of the fact that such thought exists in Judaism makes a lot of people uncomfortable - so much so that even purely academic studies of the subject are entirely taboo, particularly by non-Jews.
Me: What interested you in this topic?
Friend: Well, ironically, initially I wanted to write about the prevalence and basis of Islamophobia in Western societies - something that has already attracted a lot of academic attention and controversy. But in studying the issue, I was struck by the similarity between today's expressions of Islamophobia, and the classic expressions of European anti-Semitism. If you substitute the word "Jew" for "Muslim" in classic anti-semitic literature, in most cases you'll end up with the exact same thing we hear today about Muslims: those swarthy, dirty, deceitful people are multiplying, lust for our blood, are intent on taking over the world, are secretly conspiring to subjugate the enlightened West to their backward religion, etc. These are classic expressions of anti-semitism, which are now applied to Islam. And ironically, some supporters of Israel have promoted this - this is why the pro-Israel Right has started to make common cause with the anti-Semitic Right in Europe like the BNP and EDL, and CUFI in the US, against the "Muslim threat."
Me: And pointing this out makes you anti-Semitic?
Friend: Yes, supposedly. The irony is that on one had the idea of Jewish Superiority is pretty well documented - we know the concept exists and is much debated. For example the idea that Jews are intellectually superior or Jewish Exceptionalism in intellectual arenas - which can just as easily be viewed as the Jewish "sneakiness" that anti-semites promote. There is a rich and long debate about Jewish Exceptionalism in the Jewish community. But it is a debate that is restricted to Jews. Non-Jews are not supposed to enter into it. If they do, people get uncomfortable and charges of anti-Semitism go flying.
Me: Do you think this issue has particular relevance nowdays?
Friend: Yes absolutely. I think much of the Right's world view, particularly the NeoCon and Pro-Israel Right, is informed by the sense of Jewish exceptionalism. I don't think there is a big debate about that, actually. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote about it. Philip Weiss writes about it. But they're both Jewish so they can do so.
I have to agree with this view btw - I think that Iran's real threat to Israel's "existence" is not in that Iran might decided to literally destroy Israel with a nuclear weapon, but as a threat to Israel's political and psychological identity, something Haggai Ram wrote about, and which Netanyahu even implicitly acknowledged when he said that a nuclear Iran would cause Jews to emigrate out of Israel, or when Danielle Pletka conceeds that the real "threat" posed by nuclear Iran would be if it becomes an accepted regional competitor
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