Recognise that there is Paganphobia deeply entwined in the worldview of some who are fighting anti-Semitism today, and all the internet bonhomie between Israel and India will not wash it away automatically. – Prof. Vamsee Juluri
A few years ago, it was customary for newspapers to report after a terrorist attack that members of a community had “rushed to donate blood for the victims.”
Today, after the single most egregious act of mass slaughter in recent history against Israelis, such courtesies are no longer even deemed necessary. A wall of noise has erupted in real life, social media and college campuses to drown out the voices of the victims. From Australia to England, thousands of zombified propagandists have taken to the streets to scream for the extermination of Jews and the annihilation of Israel.
Israel is widely seen among young Americans as just an irredeemably imperialist “White” country, and worthy of full condemnation. It is as if thousands of angry “Woke” youth see in Israel the burden of every sin European Whites have done in the past; colonisation of the Americas and Native American genocide, African slavery, Islamophobia, and so on.
Is this some ancient Jew-hate among Christians and Muslims that has resurfaced? Or is it simply a legitimate critique of “Zionism” and “Western settler colonialism” as even some liberal Jews insist? And if the US “Jewish lobby” is as influential as people assume, why are so many Jewish people afraid?
Finally, what are the lessons that Indians in general and Hindus particularly in the diaspora might take from this tragic situation? Clearly, no community outside the Jews seems to feel as much sympathy for Jews at this moment as Hindus. But is this sympathy understood or reciprocated in the Jewish diaspora? If not, why not? And who will suffer as a result?
Two views on anti-Semitism
I find that there are two views of the history of anti-Jew hatred at play at the moment. The dominant one, built in academia and normalised in media over the past few decades, uses a convenient, selective frame. It admits that anti-Semitism is real, but only when it comes from the Western “Right Wing,” “White Supremacists,” or Trump supporters. In this view, progressive Whites, Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians, stand up for principled opposition to bigotry which is embodied, in their eyes, exclusively by White Supremacists, Zionists, and Hindu Nationalists in the world today. This view is also held perhaps by many progressive Jews, although some of them are somewhat “mugged by reality” in recent times. Naturally, people and institutions who uphold this view do not believe that anti-Semitism can exist among the Left, or among Muslims or Arabs. Whatever they say or do, is only “anti-Zionism,” and not anti-Semitism or bigotry against Jews. That is their belief.
The second view, which used to be a common one in the Jewish community but seems to have become slightly complicated with generational change, centres on the long, relentless religious persecution of their ancestors. Ancient Egyptians, Romans, early Christians, the Catholic Church in Spain and Italy, Martin Luther and the Protestant revolution in Germany, all reproduced hatred against Jews generation after generation. The religious bias then entered supposedly secular and (pseudo) scientific discourse through racism and eugenics in the early 20th century, culminating in the monstrous industrial-scale propaganda, dehumanisation and genocide by the Nazis. The Catholic Church is often criticised for its silence and failure to help the Jews, so the overlap of religious and modern elements in anti-Jew prejudice was clearly not forgotten.
This part of the history is commonly known among Jews and others, but in the past few decades something seems to have changed in how younger Jewish Americans, especially progressives, understand the growing propaganda against them in universities especially.
How to fight anti-Semitism
Former New York Times writer and The Free Press creator Bari Weiss has written insightfully on this issue in her book How to Fight Anti-Semitism. Her book is a good guide to understanding how liberal Jews are beginning to make sense of the existence of anti-Semitism on the Left, but also shows some limits in the (progressive) Jewish understanding of current civilisational threats to them in comparison to how Hindus, who have been supporting Jews unhesitatingly, see these threats.
Weiss correctly identifies that anti-Semitism comes from both the Right and the Left in the United States. She also expresses concern about the impact of the latter particularly on progressive Jews, who, she says, “are being asked to erase more and more of themselves to remain inside the fold (and) some don’t even know they are making this choice, having grown up with little Jewish education or understanding of Jewish history.”
However, as Hindus sympathetic to Israel might have noticed, there is something relentless about the propaganda against Jews calling out anti-Semitism on the Left today, and something perhaps ineffective about Jewish critique of the same (they are effective in only tactical ways, like cutting funding or securing dismissals of anti-Semites, but less so in getting minds to change).
Despite the horrors of 7 October, and the brave efforts of many writers and activists, I do not know how many of the 18-24-year-olds polled in the Harvard CAPS Harris survey who said that the Hamas attacks were justifiable by Palestinian grievances have changed their minds (an alarming 51 per cent of them and 48 per cent of 25-34 year olds, compared to much smaller fractions among older Americans say Hamas was justified). The dominant worldview that youth around the world are being trained in from school to college to workplace has a simple binary of good and bad people. Good people are victims; Blacks, Muslims, Trans, to name a few. Bad people are oppressors and colonisers; Whites, Jews / “Zionists,”, Hindus / “Hindutva / Sanatana Dharmis” and “Terfs,” for example.
The causes of this worldview that is clearly biased and designed to harm certain communities are starting to be understood. A new report just published by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), for example, finds that US colleges have been awash with billions of dollars in donations from countries like Qatar, and there is a marked rise in anti=Semitism in campuses which have been heavily accepting of such funds.
But then is an understanding of these causes leading to a collective narrative of bias against, say, Hindus, Jews, and others, or is the push-back against the dominant narrative of today doomed to remain divided, and on the back foot? – Firstpost, November 8, 22023
Fight against anti-Semitism stuck in insularity
I think the challenge in persuading the mainstream about present-day anti-Semitism can be understood in terms of the “vertical” and “horizontal” framework of propaganda and generational survival I have proposed in some of my earlier columns.
I have written in the past about how Sanatana Dharma or Hinduism broadly is mostly a “vertical” or inter-generational phenomenon rather than a horizontal, or congregational, or group, or mass religion. Its integrity lies in inter-generational preservation of micro traditions, and its existential challenges lie in the “horizontalising” forces at work in breaking these inter-generational ties, beginning with the colonial-era missionaries and armies, and taking the form today of the secular Indian state, media, corporations, and so on.
When the horizontal fully succeeds, what we find is a generation disconnected and often even severely (and irrationally) hostile to elders and the past, and indifferent to its own future and the possibility of raising descendants of any sort even.
In the case of the Jewish community, it is dependent not only on the vertical (inter-generational continuity in its story about itself) but is also more “horizontal” than Hindus, in the sense that it has a strong sense of itself as a people. Such an awareness should make for effective organisation and push back against hatred, but clearly something has gone wrong, at least in the past few decades.
Despite the legendary “Jewish lobby” in American politics and cultural life, it is clear that their story has lost some persuasive ground in the new global propaganda battlefield. Some of it, as I will show below, is due to its own limitations in understanding, and story-telling, which I point out in a spirit of compassion and respect.
For decades, the Jewish community kept alive the memory of the Holocaust not only in its own “vertical” traditions, but also, very effectively, in the mainstream culture through advertising, education, museums and so on. Movies like Schindler’s List, enabled by the presence of talented creative voices in the Jewish community, ensured that the world never forgot their pain.
But somewhere along the way, by the late 1990s or early 2000s, the narrative of Jewish pain simply slipped. It was not for lack of funding (unlike the Hindu case) but because of a lack of clarity in managing the “vertical” and “horizontal” in the communication front.
To put it more concretely, throughout the 1990s, I would see classmates and friends from Israel in American campuses who came in with a strong sense of “vertical,” a story of Jewish persecution and struggle and survival inculcated since childhood, including a sense of sacred destiny about Israel, which would simply fold when confronted by the tale of Palestinian suffering by their peers and professors on campus.
I have seen this happen numerous times, and usually, it seemed like one of the reasons was that Jewish students had received only a strong, in-house, “vertical” story about their past persecution, which had left them unprepared for the new challenges posed to them in diverse or “horizontal” contexts (sometimes even by progressive Jewish professors rooting for Palestine).
To illustrate, the way in which Jewish suffering (and the case for Israel) was made in everyday conversations, often seemed oblivious to the global (“horizontal”) human rights idiom of “oppressors and underdogs” that emerged in recent times. Instead, the case for Israel was made by its defenders in a tone similar to that of Christian missionaries; as if somehow people who did not know about the Holocaust, like Jesus’s sacrifice, were guilty of sin (interestingly, Weiss quotes an ADL survey which finds that only about half the people in the world have heard of the Holocaust, which indicates an expectation of global alignment emanating from a lack of “horizontal” self-reflexivity).
Swastika / Hakenkreuz
Once, I was in a discussion about the Swastika (Hindu, Buddhist, Indigenous) versus Hakenkreuz (Nazi) issue, following a news report on an American official’s visit to India which digitally erased a swastika on a temple wall in the background of a photo.
Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu perspectives were all considered. Yet, I was told that Buddhists and Hindus should simply stop using their ancestral symbol because Hitler had tainted it now for everybody. (This, of course, is not the view of all modern Jews, and many Jewish leaders have commendably stood by Hindus on this and other matters, duly acknowledged). I said how on earth would you even begin to do that? Send thousands of missionaries into tiny Indian villages to teach one billion oblivious farmers’ families that their ancestral scrawling offended a far-off nation they did not even know about?
Conversely, what if the victims of colonialism and slavery made the same demand to anyone displaying a Christian cross?
These examples indicate that perhaps the learning experience in the Jewish community, at least in the United States, has been largely in-house, and indifferent to the growing “horizontal” context. It is not set up to dialogue, grow, and still hold its own with outsiders—even sympathetic outsiders. I say this after over twenty years of teaching, and growing, to see the alarming reality facing many of us now.
Finally, I would like to point out what I think is a core limitation in the “vertical” Jewish view of its history of persecution especially when it comes to a Hindu view of our increasingly shared concerns and interests.
To do so, I would like to return to the question of the history of anti-Semitism that I started with earlier. The dominant view in academia and the “liberal” establishment is that anti-Semitism is real, but only when the “Right” does it. When the Left, or Hamas, do it, it can only be anti-Zionism, or even “decolonisation”. I suspect even progressive Jews who support Palestine are now refusing this lie. The emerging view, being asserted by Bari Weiss, and others, takes a bold, both-sides view, calling out anti-Semitism on Left and Right.
Pagans in the history of anti-Semitism
However, there is an unspoken bias even in this emerging view, and one that is evident perhaps only to Hindu activists and scholars. This bias is present in how Weiss narrates the history of anti-Semitism.
For Weiss, the origins of anti-Semitism lie not in Christianity, but in something even older. “Scholars place much of the blame on a Pagan,” she writes, “an Egyptian priest by the name of Manetho … (who) insisted that the Jews of Egypt were actually lepers who had taken control of Egypt”.
Another scholar she quotes takes the history back even further, and blames Egyptian priests who were offended by Jewish customs of animal sacrifice.
And in yet another version of this Pagan-blaming historiography, a recent Indian news video located the origins of anti-Semitism in the Roman Pagan religion! Allegedly, the Romans were so insular and old-fashioned unlike our modern, liberal, cosmopolitan citizens, that they took offence to mere cultural difference (specifically, the matter of circumcision) and began hating the Jews!
What is common in all these examples, from Weiss and others, is the unexamined replication of the tactic of blaming the (mostly extinct) Pagan for something that is clearly very alive and well exclusively in non-Pagan religions to this day.
How do we know exactly how the Egyptian or Roman Pagan religion originated anti-Semitism for sure? Given how strongly the Middle Eastern religions broke with their Pagan pasts and razed their temples and burnt their libraries, how come this Pagan culture had this one overwhelming magical effect on Christians and Muslims for generations to come in turning them anti-Semitic?
After all, neither the Pagan religion of Egypt nor Rome exists today, whereas the institutions of Christianity and Islam still do, with varying degrees of involvement in expiation for anti-Semitism.
Weiss herself cites the Gospel of Mathew, “‘His blood is on us and our children,’ the Jews say”, and Martin Luther’s 1543 pamphlet The Jews and their Lies where he describes the Jews as “venomous, bitter, vindictive, tricky serpents, assassins, and children of the devil”. In the Islamic context, she also quotes Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World to note that “Nazism combined with a particular interpretation of Islam to produce a particularly toxic brew”. The “Arab World” still seems to carry that “particular brew of Islam” in its attitudes to Jews and Israel. Yet, Weiss, like others in the insular “vertical” story, replicates a rampant Paganphobia which manifests against Hindus to this day, frequently, as Hinduphobia.
And therefore I do have to ask: Could the “Pagan priest” business be simply like the Hakenkreuz or Hooked Cross being renamed as “Swastika” (Hitler never used the Sanskrit word “swastika” but only “hakenkreuz”)?
Or Sanskrit and Brahmin pundits being blamed by European-American scholars (some of them Jewish) for somehow influencing the Nazis into hating Jews and doing the Holocaust?
And even as I write, a video has surfaced of the Slovenian Lacanian critical theory superstar Slavoj Zizek ranting that the Bhagavad Gita was a “disgusting” book which Himmler carried in his pocket!
All of these examples show that there is clearly a continuing problem with Paganphobia here.
Without this self-reflexivity and change, the battle against anti-Semitism will remain a lonely, isolated one, failing to see the civilisational realignments taking place before our eyes as we speak.
I wonder if it is this innate bias which also led to Weiss’s seemingly unfair criticism of former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who despite being one of the bravest opponents of pan-Islamism and terrorism, is labelled by Weiss as an isolationist who is weakening US support for Israel.
It is not just American Hindus like Gabbard, but India too that seems to confuse Weiss. In a bizarre reference to the one country that Israeli diplomats are proud of saying never persecuted Jews, she complains that anti-Zionists “say that Israel was established by foreign imperial powers, but they will ignore that modern India, say, was established the same way”.
Perhaps Weiss believes in the Saudi-Qatar-Pakistan-centric “South Asia” school which sees Bharat as a terra nullius of Pagan savages until the Mughals and British “civilised” us and invented a country!
Towards hope, again
As a student of the media, and a Hindu, I sympathise with the terrible situation Jews everywhere are in today. I was profoundly moved when a few nights ago our Israeli friends who came from out of town for a prayer meeting in the Bay Area showed us their flag which had been folded and hidden in the back seat of their car. The urgency with which the parents urged the children to put it away (we were in Berkeley, after all, a scene of quite a few “anti-Zionist” demonstrations) made me very sad and wish fervently for peace, and truth, to return to the world.
And of course, I hope, that feeling is reciprocated, and the insane spectre of Hinduphobia too is recognised and understood by them.
At the moment though, the fight against anti-Semitism seems stuck in its very insular well.
As long as the world sees the issue as a binary between powerful US-Israel on one side, and small, helpless, slingshot-and-pebbles Palestinian kids on the other, the real spectre of well-armed, well-financed, brilliantly propagandised pan-Islamism as a danger to the West, Israel, and India, which is quite a big part of the world population, will not be seen.
A key step to overcoming this insularity would be to recognise that there is Paganphobia deeply entwined in the worldview of some who are fighting anti-Semitism today, and all the internet bonhomie between Israel and India will not wash it away automatically.
We are in a great civilisational flux, and only the civilisations with the clearest and longest memory can hope to survive. – Firstpost, 9 November 2023
› Prof. Vamsee Juluri teaches Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence.
See also
Filed under: india, UK, USA | Tagged: anti-semitism, hinduphobia, hindutva, paganphobia, zionism |
BHARATA BHARATI 