This Chronicle is dedicated to the memory of the martyrs of last October 7 and of the sufferings they endured and continue to endure.
A long-time Girardian once called me the group’s “elder brother,” clearly thinking of John Paul II’s use of that term to designate the Jews, but primarily of the fact that I was, according to Benoît Chantre’s definitive biography (René Girard: Biographie, Grasset, 2023; p. 417) Girard’s “premier étudiant sérieux.” It has always been a point of pride that I am almost certainly the only one of Girard’s doctoral students who had never heard of him before I arrived in Baltimore. It was during my first year there, in 1960-61, that he published the book that remains his masterpiece—and surely his best-seller—Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque, a study of the modern novel from Cervantes to Proust—a title whose English translation, “Deceit, Desire, and the Novel” is far from doing it justice.
Girard’s fundamental intuition was that the human is defined even prior to language and culture by the fundamental role of mimetic desire. It is remarkable that he was the first to understand the foundational significance of something familiar to everyone, but whose uniquely destructive potential, while recognized by religion, had never been the central element of an anthropology, a theory of the human. All of Girard’s succeeding works were attempts to develop this intuition by focusing on religious, ethnological, and cultural texts, while elaborating his theory of human origin based on “emissary murder.”
Whatever differences I may have had with Girard, I have always remained faithful to his central idea that desire as he describes it is the basis of what Christians call “original sin,” and accordingly, the root of the culture humanity has erected as a means to counter its potential for inciting conflict—a never-ending project, and one increasingly fraught with danger given our ever-growing capacity for violence.
I raise these points here in order to examine the link between mimetic desire and the hatred of the “elder brother” that we have come to call antisemitism, an example of mimetic violence not long ago thought a relic of another age, but which with the waning of the memory of the Holocaust over the last decades has become increasingly important, and whose unexpectedly crucial role in world civilization has been sharply underlined since the pogrom of last October 7 by a shocking proliferation of antisemitic violence in the US as well as Europe and the Middle East.
Although Jewish by birth and never tempted by conversion or denial, I have a very limited background in what Jews find uncomfortable in calling their “theology”: the detailed study of the Hebrew Bible and the many volumes of commentaries beginning with the Talmud. But as I am convinced that the future of generative anthropology lies in breaking down the barrier between religious thought and other forms of human self-reflection, given the seminal role of Hebrew religion in the formation of the West and consequently of the modern world that was its invention, the persistence of this seemingly medieval hatred, like mimetic desire itself, seems to be of far more profound anthropological significance than we are accustomed to give it, a significance that I do not feel that I or anyone else has yet fully succeeded in explaining.
Although we do not lack excellent histories of antisemitism, when asked to explain its remarkable persistence, the most learned scholars can do little better than to speak of it as a “prejudice,” a “disease,” a form of folly. Let me repeat once more the Great War joke Hannah Arendt tells at the start of The Origins of Totalitarianism:
An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.
We are reminded that all the studies of antisemitism throughout the ages have failed to provide a really convincing explanation for its millennial persistence, all the more now that the world’s immense potential for Jew-hatred has once again been demonstrated in no uncertain terms.
Adam Katz’s and my The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism (Brill, 2015) was a preliminary attempt at focusing on this question, although these loosely connected essays are far from providing a structured articulation of the significance of antisemitism in Western and world civilization. But now that Jew-hatred has so strikingly demonstrated its continued ability to renew itself after the Holocaust, it should be clear that we must persevere in our attempt to understand its amazingly tenacious link to Western culture—and through it, to the “post-colonial” world of the “global South” that sees in Israel the last and presumably the “true” archetype of the colonial state. It is as a result of this new focus that the population of local Arabs have baptized themselves “Palestinians”—a term at first used for the Jewish settlers from Europe—and that Israel’s attempts to defend itself against their “anticolonial” violence have been shamelessly characterized by a majority of the world’s nations as “genocide.”
I believe that we should take this not as just one historical quandary among others, but as an, even the exemplary problem for generative anthropology in bringing together the question of the social organization of the sacred, that is, religion, with the basic “triangular” structure of mimetic desire as defined by Girard. The rivalry, in this case, is over the nature of the sacred will that the Hebrews were first not merely to conceive in the context of “monotheism” but to both define as unique for all humanity and provide in support of this definition a coherent document of sacred chronology connecting the Creation to their people’s worldly history down to the present. The Phoenician invention of the alphabet quickly adapted to the Hebrew language, the high level of literacy among the Hebrews at the time, as well as the growth of literacy in the surrounding cultures, gave the Hebrew Bible its unique status among the world’s holy books—a status that Judaism’s “successor religions” could choose either to supplement or deny, but not ignore.
As a point of comparison, we should keep in mind the wholly different reaction of this same proto-Western world to the Greeks, whose influence over its cultural, political, and intellectual institutions was far greater than the Hebrews’. Mimetic rivalry was a phenomenon of which Greek culture itself was anything but ignorant, yet the cultural priority of the Classical world was and remains simply unquestioned, and the very idea that other cultures could be obsessed by such rivalry to the point of hating the Greeks seems inconceivable.
To sum up, Western culture is a unique configuration whose world dominance, barring a catastrophic civilizational breakdown, is effectively insuperable, since the techniques by means of which a contemporary non-Western nation such as China might attain world dominance, whatever its achievements in the past, are all of Western origin, including in the first place the Marxist political system by which it is administered. And Western civilization is indelibly marked in all its works by the originary role of the Jews in its sacred history, and concomitantly by the seemingly indelible mimetic hostility this originarity continues to arouse.
If these premises are accepted, then the first historical conception that we must discard is that of the “end of history,” except of course in the sense that a cosmic catastrophe may—indeed, probably will—put an end to human civilization. But not in our necessarily time-bound perspective on world history, which at present is obliged to contend, if not with the continued dominance of the “West” in a geographic sense, yet with the dominance of techniques and institutions whose Western provenance is far from forgotten and will no doubt remain so for some time. The very idea of the “South,” as the rivalrous successor to the presumably subordinate “Third World,” suggests that the foregrounding of this rivalry will dominate at the very least the coming decades.
This being the case, the question of antisemitism comes down to that of whether, now that the key civilizational rivalry is no longer within the West, as it was still in the Cold War, in which the two rival systems could still be cast in the mold of the Right-Left division of the 1789 French National Assembly, the sacred/scapegoat role of the Jews will continue to preoccupy the domain of international relations. We cannot know whether Israel will remain for an indefinite time a major focus of international tension, or will come to be accepted in its uniqueness—as could conceivably become the case if Iran, whose population is far from in general agreement with its rulers’ apocalyptic Shia antisemitism and anti-Americanism, rejoins the secular world.
Thus one might wish to take a quasi-optimistic view of the current conflict as an opportunity for the West finally to purge itself of its Jew-obsession and along with it, its victimary resentment/guilt, and thereby transition to a happy pluralistic future… Except that, as we have seen, with advances in technology, the danger of totalitarian domination and violence have only increased, and the unanticipated growth of a “liberal” version of antisemitism in the American Democratic party as so to speak the capstone of its increasing dependence on victimary thinking is quite the contrary of a sign that the American Left is evolving back toward what we can call traditional liberalism. Renegades such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard may reflect the liberalism of an earlier generation, but the “respectable” position of deploring Israel’s efforts to defend itself is far more characteristic of the party today.
Were Donald Trump not the Republican candidate, things might be different; the danger of electing Kamala Harris, surely the least qualified presidential candidate in memory, if not in American history, would be far less were she obliged to debate Nikki Haley, whose similar “intersectional” qualities would neutralize her own and reveal far more starkly the two ladies’ egregious difference in competence and governmental experience. The genius of what should be called the Pelosi presidential strategy of bait-and-switch has been wholly dependent on the Democrats’ ability to focus on the personal quirks that made Trump the only lucid Republican candidate in 2016, but which have by now lost much of their charm and political value. Thus one might wonder whether the Democratic strategy was planned in advance of its execution—or even whether Biden’s shocking demonstration of incompetence in his debate with Trump was something other than an inevitable result of the aging process.
Speaking merely from the point of view of the need to oppose and ultimately destroy antisemitism as a political force, the fact that one can speculate that a different Republican candidate might have made a major difference suggests that what has come to appear the inevitable return of antisemitism to the political foreground was rather a tactical than a strategic phenomenon. And had the 2020 election been conducted in the traditional manner without, at the very least, the considerably increased opportunities for irregularity, and Trump been reelected, the Middle East might today be a very different place, the “post-colonial” trend in American politics might by now have been vanquished, and public displays of antisemitism remained as rare and isolated as they were before last year…
Perhaps. No historian, amateur or professional, can tell the story with Hegelian confidence in the course of the dialectic. But one need only recall the recent lopsided UN vote declaring the illegitimacy of Israel’s post-1967 boundaries to realize that even were the US to hold firm and elect a true opponent of antisemitism, it would still need a great deal of effort to bring it to defend Israel’s position in the Middle East with sufficient energy to convince the doubters that our side is indeed the strong horse capable of ridding the world of its current disease of fanatical Jihadism.
All of which suggests, to conclude this meditation, that Israel’s current offensive against Hezbollah, which shows every sign of succeeding, and perhaps being soon followed up by success in Iran, may provide a long-term answer to the question with which we began, that of the future of antisemitism. Israel’s unfortunate prior adherence to the conceptzia of treating Hamas—and Hezbollah, and Iran…—as if they were “secular” powers open to bargaining not only emboldened them, but suggested to the world that Israel’s adherence to the West’s framework of diplomatic give and take was but a mask for cowardice—in contrast with the jihadists being undeniably willing to defend their values, however barbaric, with their lives, claiming to “love death” while the Jews, and the West, love life.
All we can hope for is that Israel will succeed in carrying out its mission at this crucial historical moment. If the Jews can go on to defeat their enemies with no more than the reluctant help of the US, the world may well come to be convinced that they have truly earned their right to Jerusalem.