The Poison Pill of Philosemitism

Chosen, but for what exactly?

Last week I wrote that antisemitism, “will do its part, with other forces, to further poison the political atmosphere and degrade public discourse; it will be used to alarm, menace, and, one fears, to organize public sentiment.” Well, sure enough former President Trump has done almost exactly what I was talking about!

Of course, Trump is trying to activate here a particularly American strain of antisemitism, one that can even appear friendly to the Jews, so long as they behave in the way they are supposed to: Evangelical dispensationalist beliefs that takes the Jews’ return to Israel as a sign of the Second Coming. Now you might object, following Trump, “Well actually these people like Jews, they want to help Israel, right? What’s the problem here?” Let’s recall that antisemitism is not mere prejudice against Jewish people, it is a totalizing ideology that assigns the Jews the central role in world affairs. For dispensationalists, “Israel” in the Bible is not a metaphor for the community of believers as other Christians believes, it refers to the Jews as an ethnicity (a race, maybe?) that has a special role: to bring about the apocalypse. But what if Jews don’t behave in the role assigned for them? Well…

As I’ve mentioned a few times here, I recently wrote a chapter for my book on the Weavers, the family of survivalists involved in an infamous stand off with the Federal government in Idaho. It’s worth noting that the Weavers journey to the racist Christian Identity faith, essentially Nazi church, passed through dispensationalism. A key text on their path to the fringe was the highly popular book of Biblical prophecy The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. Released in the 1970s, it introduced millions of Americans that the idea that the formation of the State of Israel and its wars were signs of the coming apocalypse. In short, it posited an entire worldview with the Jews at its center. Along with its excitement about Israel it combined a lot of negative feeling against the Jews themselves. As “evidence” for the truth of Bible prophecy, it gave Jewish hostility and the deicide:

If there is one thing that guarantees the historical accuracy of what the New Testament authors wrote is the animosity of the Jewish people who crucified Jesus…If those who crucified Jesus could have disproved any of the historical realities of these events they would have done so and destroyed the whole movement from the beginning. But they didn’t bring up any refutation of the facts of fulfilled prophecy; instead they put to death the persons who were proclaiming the facts.

(Note how this is structurally similar to the argument, recently echoed by Kanye West, that Jews’ efforts to fight antisemitism in public proves that they are self-interested cabal trying to suppress the truth. As if, objecting to murderous libel about you was further evidence of your guilt.)

The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called this “radical ambivalence” combining philosemitic and antisemitic themes, which gives the Jews a special, Other role “allosemitism.” It’s not hard to see the various ways allosemitism can quickly tip into full-on antisemitism.

Many American Jews never understood that Evangelical allosemitism and their steadfast support of Israel was actually perilous, putting them apart, shunting them into a kind of ideological ghetto existence as a Jew with a particular function to fulfill. I must say I’m not hopeful that American Jews, particularly conservative and Zionist ones, will recognize the danger now. A lot of them will prefer instead to hug closer to the apparent safety of powerful false friends like Trump.