Preamble
In Chronicle 749, I noted the strange fact that the publications over thirty years apart containing what I considered my two most original ideas—an “originary hypothesis” of the origin of language (The Origin of Language, UC Press, 1981), and a theory of antisemitism (with Adam Katz: The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism (Brill, 2015)—were neither adopted nor refuted by specialists in their respective fields, but simply avoided. I interpreted this not as a personal rejection, but as the result of having in both cases infringed taboos by dealing too insistently with subjects that could, for very different reasons, not be attacked in such a positive manner.
Human language has generally been understood as not having a distinct origin, but as emerging gradually from animal signals—this despite Terrence Deacon’s assertion in his The Symbolic Species (Norton, 1997) that human language is located in a different part of the brain from such signals.
As for antisemitism, the “oldest hatred,” it is certainly acceptable to deplore it, and to describe in detail its many historical manifestations, but, as I discovered, seeking to explain it made its specialists uncomfortable, as though suggesting that there were reasons for it were a step toward finding it acceptable.
Language origin, the origin of the indubitably human, is, or should be, the ground of anthropology, whence these Chronicles’ attempts to sustain the field of Generative Anthropology. But following Hamas’ barbaric pogrom in Israel on October 7, 2023, antisemitism, from a matter of largely theoretical interest in the generations after the Holocaust, has abruptly revived and spread throughout the “free world,” shocking those of us who naively thought that such a repulsive spectacle of massacres and rapes proudly recorded and disseminated by the perpetrators themselves would outrage the citizens of Western-style nations, only to discover that the reaction in virtually all of them, even before Israel began its counter-offensive, was to sympathize with the Palestinians, the barbarity of whose actions was taken as proof of the cruelty of their oppression by the Israelis in the Gaza “open-air prison”—where, as seldom pointed out, previous to the pogrom there were no Israelis at all.
Thus explaining antisemitism had suddenly become an urgent necessity.
Given that in the decades during which I reached adulthood, the horrors of the Holocaust had apparently reduced antisemitism to irrelevancy—I can recall, as a small child just after the war, viewing Hitler as a comic figure—my generation experienced the largely sympathetic reaction to Hamas’ barbaric incursion as a wholly unexpected lesson in this “oldest hatred’s” persistence. As a supplementary personal irony, since the pogrom, Columbia and UCLA, my first and last university homes—both formerly particularly welcoming to Jews—commonly top the lists of schools where antisemitism has been the most egregious.
The difference between the academic taboo on claims to have discovered the origin of language—one that goes back at least to 1866, when the Paris Société de Linguistique declared the subject off limits—and the visceral reluctance to explain, and thereby risk appearing to justify, the “oldest hatred,” reflects the vast difference between our relationships to human prehistory and to history itself. When- and wherever it first appeared, human language was able to evolve as an increasingly effective communication system selecting for improvements in human intelligence as a result of its original success in restraining mimetic aggression. No doubt some languages are more prestigious than others, but that difference is understood as reflecting the historical prestige of their users, not as intrinsic to the languages themselves.
Whereas the firstness of the Hebrews in bringing the One God to the West is a civilizational fact, one granted maximal salience by the worldwide success of Christianity which, while claiming to supersede Judaism, never denied its Jewish origin, nor that of human/divine Jesus himself.
And thus, whenever we cite a date, we measure the time before or after the birth of a Jew; whenever we mention a day of the week, we honor the Hebrews’ six days of creation and one of rest. Today, partly in reaction to the Holocaust, the Catholic Church has come to accept the Jews as its “elder brothers”—yet, on the whole, the Christians of the West were far less repelled by the barbarity of the Hamas pogrom than by Israel’s response.
And thus, from the very first days of the war, the “free world’s” sympathy for Gaza’s population as the victims of Israeli “genocide” gave proof, shocking to many, that antisemitism, however suppressed during the generations that followed the Holocaust, had been in no way obliterated, nor apparently even diminished.
Clearly the idea attributed to Arnold Toynbee that once the Jews had their own state, they would be seen as a “normal” people like all the others, has been amply disproved. Nearly 80 years after its founding, Israel’s legitimacy remains eternally—and uniquely—subject to contestation, while recognition is lovingly granted the non-existent “state of Palestine.”
While I was reflecting on this disturbing revelation, my ex-wife Michèle Hausser, who has lived in Israel for several decades, brought to my attention Belgian-Israeli businessman and Jewish leader Roby Spiegl’s particularly insightful analysis of the frustrating circumstances of the seemingly unending Gaza war. This French text of almost exactly 1000 words is available on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/roby.spiegel/posts/mon-analyse-sur-la-situation-du-conflit-isra%C3%A9lo-palestinien-isra%C3%ABl-se-trouve-auj/10163867718238991/ The author has kindly permitted me to make it available here to English speakers (courtesy of Google Translate, with a few corrections):
Israel finds itself today in a war from which it can neither emerge victorious nor withdraw unscathed. Not because it lacks military power—but because this war was carefully designed to be lost, whatever the outcome. October 7th was more than an attack. It was a trap. A shock designed to lock Israel into an impasse. By massacring civilians and kidnapping hostages, Hamas did not launch an offensive to extract concessions. It implemented a strategy of decay. A war without end, without a winner, without a horizon.
Hamas seeks neither a state nor a military victory. It seeks the disappearance of Israel, and for that, it is prepared to lose everything. Gaza can burn, its children die, its infrastructure collapse—it doesn’t care, so long as Israel bleeds. It is a sacrificial, nihilistic strategy, almost religious in its logic. And it rests on two pillars: military stalemate and the emotional manipulation of Western public opinion.
For the real battlefield is not the ruins of Gaza. It is television studios, social media, American and European universities, and the demonstrations in the streets of major cities. Hamas has understood what many Israeli strategists have underestimated: in a world governed by images, war is no longer won with tanks, but with narratives. Its strength is dramatic, not military.
By holding hostages, Hamas makes compromise impossible. By hiding in hospitals and schools, it makes any response unacceptable. Each Israeli action is twisted to appear as a moral failing. In this asymmetrical war, every military victory becomes a media defeat. And the world, saturated with images but deprived of context, reacts to emotions more than to facts.
This trap would not have worked without the collaboration of the Western democracies. By exerting pressure on the attacked country rather than the hostage-takers, they invert moral logic. By recognizing a Palestinian state without forcing Hamas to disarm, they offer a political reward to terrorism. And in doing so, they encourage its repetition.
We must also mention those whom Lenin called useful idiots. Some of them are, alas, found within the Jewish people or Israel themselves. Driven by almost sacrificial moral scruples, they seek at all costs to embody a form of ethical purity. Their demand is sincere—but so detached from reality that it has become blind. They analyze this war as if they were dealing with a European democracy, whereas they are facing a terrorist organization fundamentally alien to their mental framework. Added to this is sometimes a more subtle, less avowed motivation: the need to be perceived as “good Jews” in the eyes of their non-Jewish circles, to continue to be invited, congratulated, and listened to—on the condition, of course, that they show that they are not like the others, that they know how to distance themselves from Israel. This concern for social acceptability, however understandable, becomes politically dangerous when it endorses, even indirectly, the discourse of those who seek Israel’s disappearance. For Hamas does not need to be supported. It is enough for Israel to be weakened, delegitimized, isolated. And in this endeavor, any Jewish or Israeli voice that publicly doubts Israel’s right to defend itself becomes, in spite of itself, a lever for this strategy.
Let us be clear: a ceasefire accompanied by the release of all hostages, without Hamas’s surrender, is a mirage. Hamas has no interest in ending this war. The hostages are its weapons, its spotlights, its guarantees of survival. It will retain them, because their existence maintains the conflict. They were not taken to be freed. They are there to endure, to serve. And while this war of narratives rages, its effects do not stop at Israel’s borders. All over the world, and particularly blatantly in recent days, anti-Semitic acts are exploding: insults, attacks, boycotts of Israeli artists, intimidation of tourists, pressure within universities, attacks on Jewish businesses and schools. Radical anti-Zionism, staged by Hamas and relayed unfiltered by certain media outlets and activists, is being transformed into a palpable, concrete, daily hatred.
This climate of hostility is generating a deep unease within Jewish communities around the world. Many no longer dare to say they are Israeli. Others remain silent about their Jewish identity. This is no longer a debate about ideas: it’s about security. Symbolic, media-driven, and diplomatic violence against Israel fuels an unashamed anti-Semitism that endangers millions of Jews who have nothing to do with the armed conflict. It’s not just Israel that is being targeted. It is what it represents. And all those linked to it.
Henceforth, two paths—both tragic—present themselves:
– Continue the operation, at all costs, to dismantle Hamas down to the last tunnel, at the cost of countless lives, an increasing isolation, and with no guarantee of success.
– Or withdraw, leaving Hamas standing, and implicitly accepting that another October 7th is brewing.
It’s no longer a question of victory. It’s a question of form: which form of defeat is the least dangerous? Which loss is the least irreversible? In this trap where every move has been anticipated by the enemy, even courage becomes vulnerable. And perhaps the most tragic thing is this: Hamas’s strategy is working. Not because it’s brilliant, but because it’s allowed to work. Because we continue to judge Israel according to the criteria of a conventional war, when what it is facing is a machine for manipulating emotions, subverting morality, and exploiting compassion.
In this cruel theater, it’s not reality that matters. It’s the image of reality.
I yearn with all my strength for the return of all the hostages, of all our soldiers, and for the end of this conflict, which will allow an entire nation to rebuild and live as it has always desired since its creation: in peace and security.
Roby Spiegl
The dilemma so eloquently described here reflects the paradoxical role Israel has been forced to play in international relations by its embodiment of historical firstness with respect to what we can call the world’s transnational sacred.
And if the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust was that of the fantasy of the diaspora’s “great Jewish conspiracy,” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as we see today, such imaginary scandals are as nothing compared to the scandalous existence of the restored “first nation” of Israel. All the points that Spiegl makes about Israel’s need to negate its “privilege” in showing the greatest care for its enemies, treating its prisoners’ maladies with maximum concern, are ironically confirmed by the viciousness with which such care and concern are responded to by its “victims,” by the shameless boastfulness of the perpetrators of October 7—in contrast to the Nazis who had sought to hide the evidence of their acts, which they considered, as made clear in Himmler’s famous Posen speech to the SS on October 4, 1943, as grim necessities rather than pretexts for ego-trips.
It is no accident that today’s rejuvenated antisemites obsessively describe Israel’s military operations as “genocide,” repeating this wholly inaccurate term far more insistently than a propos of any other post-Holocaust conflict, even the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda. We should understand this as reflecting the ultimate immaturity of the resentment inspired by “the first shall be the last.” For it is not ironic to accuse of genocide the descendants of the victims of the event for which the word itself was invented. It is to utter a schoolyard insult, as though hyperbolically mirroring the other kid’s accusation.
And Spiegl’s frustration reflects his understanding that having to explain such insults is already a sign of defeat. To accuse the Jews of genocide is to taunt them with their victimhood by turning it against them, by saying that it is the reality of the Holocaust itself that gives their enemies the right to use it against them—ultimately because it demonstrates that if they are indeed so much hated, it is because their firstness is in itself the greatest possible violation of the principle of human equality.
In a word, Hitler’s Final Solution was the definitive confirmation of Jesus’ words: the first shall be the last. How then dare the Jews resuscitate this firstness after the slaughter by achieving their millennial ambition of return! And the clearest guarantee of the verity of this accusation is that it is echoed less by the Palestinians’ fellow Arabs than by the enlightened leaders of European democracies, and confirmed by the fabricated images and distorted statistics published by the (Jewish-owned) New York Times.
In short, once the “free world” reacted to the horrors of October 7 with revulsion, not at its perpetrators, but at Israel for having driven its enemies to the point where this was their only possible cry of distress, the die was cast, and all the consequences so sharply observed by Spiegl might have been foretold.
And so, as Spiegl himself appears to do in his final paragraph, we must abandon the notion of finding a “solution” to the problem of antisemitism, and simply continue to battle it whenever it emerges, putting out of our minds the chimerical hope of its ultimate conquest. So long as we rest on Sunday and calculate dates from year zero, the temptation to antisemitism will remain.
Yet even if they could, would the Jews themselves end antisemitism by renouncing their historical uniqueness—their sacred mission?