Looking at other consequences and functions of antisemitism

Peasant Antisemitism and Yizkor

Image credit to twitter account - will update when I find

Though I had intended to introduce some of the themes covered below in future posts on group narcissism in America, focusing on Nicole Hannah Jones’s project in particular, the Jewish Tunnels event and my receipt of hostile interrogatory replies on twitter from fringe and unknown internet antisemitism communities inspired me to compose a short survey of the themes in the context of the Chabad question.

These communities insist that Chabad and related Orthodox Jews should be scrutinized by the right because of alleged illegal activity that covers everything from local nuisances to treason. While not equating Chabad with similar non-Jewish groups, I acknowledge that they engage in unsavory behaviors that are sometimes associated with other 17th- and 18th-century pietists sects, like the Amish, such as organized crime, violation of labor laws, sexual abuse, and the like. Without saying anything about the scope of such behaviors, which varies by group, we could further generalize this by saying that such unsavory behaviors are often, or have been, features of insular ethnic and religious things in general, be they Italian, Irish, Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, or Scientologist.

I’d say most of these concerns can be reformulated as legitimate concerns about the presence of clannish populations in a cosmopolitan nation-state, which nation-state is predicated upon a formal liberal constitutional framework and civil religion. Our civil religious-liberal institutional framework is easily exploited by group entities -- political machines, ideologies, religions, and ethnic groups -- because the framework’s institutions are by nature individualistic and group-neutral, and therefore inadequately control for group subordination of individuality or national loyalty to minority group loyalty (the civil rights movement is an example of Americans attempting to control for such a concern, another is the movement to reform the WASP old-boys network in the Ivies).

When a group associates with foreign interests, as in the case of Chabad with the state of Israel and other foreign satellite communities (or similarly, as in the case of Catholics and the Vatican), the urgency of these legitimate concerns will be amplified because of practical foreign policy concerns about loyalty.

In the context of Chabad, one piece of evidence suggesting that these concerns are legitimate under our civil religion is that even progressives have begun challenging Hasidim in the mainstream media, with the hilarious Ramapo school district scandal covered on This American Life being a prominent recent example.

For those who don’t recall, evidently the diverse community of Ramapo came to an informal agreement with Hasidic Jews about educational funding for non-Hasidim on the one hand and educational autonomy for Hasidim on the other. The diverse non-Hasidic Ramapo community was therefore surprised to discover that Hasidim had, through ordinary democratic procedure, taken control of the school board and begun reducing public school funding.

Public school funding is sacred for progressives so the board’s policies obviously caused a scandal. I won’t pass judgment. Based on what I know about public school funding, the Hasidic board’s reductions may have been beneficial for the non-Hasidic community in Ramapo. What’s salient here is that a clan or tribe was able to use liberal-democratic procedure to install itself in public leadership positions, creating the potential for group self-dealing against the common good.

No apologia by Jews or supporters can reduce the significance of this fact and justify censure of public suspicion. Americans are entitled to suspicions of ethnic and religious “Things” when those Things participate in matters of public concern, regardless of whether the Thing is Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, WASP, Black, southern Italian, or Scientologist. Such suspicions sometimes uncover legitimate problems and catalyze policy changes benefiting the common good, while at other times the suspicions produce undesirable consequences, which in the context of Jews I’ll label Peasant Antisemitism.

I define Peasant Antisemitism as a negative orientation toward the abstraction Jews and individual Jews based on crude overgeneralizations, extreme paranoia, apocalyptic conspiracy theories, and resentment. Though Peasant Antisemitism may skew middle- and lower-class, I don’t use the predicate Peasant to connote anything about socioeconomic status but only to create an association with the motivations of European peasants who engaged in violent pogroms against European Jews in the past. European Christian peasants may in some cases have had good reason to be hostile toward Jews in their midst, but the ideological manifestation of this hostility was characterized by the constellation of irrational beliefs and attitudes I define as Peasant Antisemitism, often with tragic consequences.

What’s interesting to me is the tendency for legitimate suspicions about Jewish “things” to be heavily censored in public, with any high-profile criticism tending to either be Peasant Antisemitism or be portrayed as such. In contrast, suspicions about, for example, Catholic disloyalty or subversion have enjoyed mainstream coverage and are often (though not always) expressed in less “Peasant” terms. For instance, as recently as the early 2000s, Gore Vidal was able to write freely in Vanity Fair about his suspicions of an Opus Dei conspiracy in the FBI and on SCOTUS.

I suspect there are multiple reasons for this discrepancy and will focus on a few of my suspected reasons in this article. The reasons I highlight here generally focus upon the secondary functions or effects of Peasant Antisemitism for different groups. Specifically, I’ll focus on incentives for progressives, non-Jews, and rabbinic/Zionist Jews to promote or at least embrace Peasant Antisemitism. Some of these reasons are highly speculative, bordering on conspiratorial, while others are innocuous and grounded in uncontroversial research.

Progressives, Never-Trumpers, and Peasant Antisemitism

The first reason is that there is a long history of elites exploiting Peasant Antisemitism for cynical ends; and I suspect this tradition continues today for a variety of reasons, though I’ll only focus on a few. So long as elites have an incentive to promote Peasant Antisemitism, we’ll continue to see it in public.

Historically, there have been incentives for European elites to promote Peasant Antisemitism, because of its extreme emotional content and ability to catalyze predictable mob behavior. Peasant Antisemitism was often intentionally exploited by European elites who otherwise enjoyed beneficial symbiotic relationships with Jews, upon whom Christian nobility relied for tax collection services, multiregional trade, and the essential taboo of lending at interest.

A byproduct of outsourcing financial literacy so that they could focus on hunting and conquest was that European aristocrats often risked bankruptcy. Luckily for them, they could clandestinely agitate their peasant subjects into destroying Jewish tax collectors and lenders without angering the clergy (who often opposed such persecution), thereby cancelling debts and enlarging their own coffers with confiscated Jewish property. Indeed, many European pogrom stories involve cynical nobility promoting or allowing peasant pogroms not just against Jews but against other insular groups like the various Knight orders and breakaway Christian sects.

In progressive America the democratic power of the mob is in some ways an even more important political tool than the medieval peasant mob, especially so in the realm of presidential politics and foreign policy.

In general, I suspect but cannot prove that progressive groups, including historically Jewish civil rights organizations like the ADL and SPLC, prefer to launder their hostility toward radical and fundamentalist Jews (and the movements with which they’re allied) through the right, in part because progressives have lost the capacity to speak critically of groups designated as vulnerable victims, which they often view as grandiose abstractions incapable of wrongdoing on account of their lachrymose group narratives of persecution.

In contrast with blanket attacks upon wHite people, criticizing a victim group like Jews is declasse and taboo to progressives, being the exclusive domain of the superstitious peasantry and conspiratorial far-right; and being perceived as anti-Semitic is a form of social death, meaning that Peasant Antisemitism is off the table for them.

Nonetheless, progressives do harbor grievances about certain groups of Jews and there is evidence that they generally are careful about acting on these grievances. Indeed, despite crafting their public messaging around “Hasidim” instead of “Jews”, the Ramapo community and progressives were harshly (and wrongly) denounced for antisemitism. Furthermore, progressives engage in morally suspect political marketing strategies which could conceivably rely upon Peasant Antisemitism. The recent presidential elections are worthy of focus here.

President Trump is a moderately anti-Progressive politician with blood ties to Chabad who relies upon Orthodox Jewish and Zionist support to promote his policies. From the standpoint of progressive political strategy, there are multiple reasons to target Trump’s Jewish connections. The most obvious reason would be to drive a wedge between elements of his base by emboldening antisemitic supporters on the one hand and alienating powerful Orthodox/Zionist Jews and Christian Zionists on the other, and vice-versa. If Trump is successfully portrayed in the media simultaneously as the puppet of Chabad Zionism and the candidate of Peasant Antisemitism, it stands to reason that Trump will struggle to maintain his coalition.

Whether the goal is merely to sow distrust toward, and discord within, the Trump coalition or something more sinister like provoking an exploitable civil rights crisis, such as a “Goyim Defense League” spamming Jewish retiree-donors with antisemitic leaflets and graffiti in Florida (discussed more below), I find it difficult to believe that progressive elites and their nevertrumper allies would refrain from encouraging or at least tolerating Peasant Antisemitism. In either case they would be political beneficiaries of the public reactions to Peasant Antisemitism.

We should also factor in the growing animosity of mainstream media and progressive politicians toward Elon Musk. Progressives would have an incentive to amplify hysterical, conspiratorial narratives about Chabad Tunnels on Musk’s X platform, which the billionaire wrenched from progressive public relations control through his acquisition. That progressives pursue such strategies was proved through the email leaks published by Wikileaks, from which we learned that promoting Trump (the alleged antisemite) and other “extremist candidates” was part of the Clinton campaign’s strategy for painting Hillary as the only reasonable option for voters.

Another reason is that progressives are likely hostile to the foreign policy goals of Chabad Zionists, some of whom have sought rapprochement between Israel and the Sunni Oil monarchs, the creation of a Greater Israel, ethnoreligious cleansing (including of rival Jewish sects), and the construction of a third temple. Critically, it may also be that the faction of Chabad that progressives perceive to be supportive of Trump also support Putin’s Russia, a key American progressive geostrategic antagonist notwithstanding Russia’s own very cosmopolitan (Puritan?) civil religion.

This last point likely explains the merger of Trump-Russia conspiracy pundits with putatively far-right, anti-semitic conspiracy pundits, who are now working on a grand unified theory of Russian-Jewish subversion.

In sum, there is reason to believe that Peasant Antisemitism persists in part because progressive elites are both hesitant to reasonably criticize Jewish groups in public, and simultaneously willing to surreptitiously promote unsavory extremist positions to effectuate short-term political goals.

Potential Benefits of Peasant Antisemitism for Ordinary Non-Jewish Americans

This post isn’t just a conspiratorial screed against progressive and nevertrumper strategists. It’s a conspiratorial screed about everyone (except for me). We can speculate, for example, that conservatives and the Israel lobby have cynically promoted Peasant Islamophobia or racism for similar reasons.

Another reason for the persistence of Peasant Antisemitism is that such collective attitudes can perform multiple conflicting sociological functions. In addition to being catalyzed by legitimate concerns about clannishness, bringing to light censored or unknown truths, and occasionally uncovering actual criminal activity, Peasant Antisemitism, like any grandiose and paranoid ideology, can perform important positive social functions for ordinary non-Jewish people, even if it often devolves into destructive ressentiment.

Feeling persecuted by an omnipotent cabal and imagining yourself to be part of an ongoing clash of tribes and civilizations can be energizing and productive. Compulsively remembering and emoting over historical wrongs perpetrated against your tribe, like Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, can promote solidarity and direct energy toward defensive and vengeful goals. Being subject to unprovoked attacks can be beneficial in an age that legitimizes everything done in defense of the innocent, as the Islamic terror attacks catalyzing Trump’s election demonstrated. Finally, the feeling of insecurity resulting from being challenged by someone claiming superiority over you can be motivating.

In short, paranoid generalizations and ritualized, repetitive recollections of communal wrongs can lead to fanatical hatred of an abstraction, which in turn can foster group solidarity and boost emotional and creative energy, which means a successful survival strategy for a group identity. That the American establishment willfully promoted such animosity toward the abstraction “whites” among ordinary Americans suggests that they’re aware of the secondary social benefits of peasant bigotry.

However, given the functions performed by Peasant Antisemitism for those who control the means of production of belief, and given the extreme taboos surrounding its subject-matter, Peasant Antisemitism is unlikely to benefit true believers outside of small, isolated pockets of disaffected and powerless individuals. This could of course change if those in charge of messaging became true believing Peasant Antisemites, but this seems unlikely to me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are the cosmopolitan demands of running a Pax Americana.

Potential Benefits of Peasant Antisemitism for Rabbinic Jews

It’s a trivial folk psychological observation that hostility toward a group of people based on their cultural or innate traits can foster solidarity among that group. It goes without saying then that anti-semitism can foster Jewish solidarity among self-identified Jews, though it’s not a necessary consequence. For example, the antisemitism inherent to our secular modern world incents assimilating behavior among Jews, producing effects similar to those produced by the anti-Semitism of Greek and Roman Hellenism (I discussed apologia here and here). In a similar sense, one could even say that Zionist Israel is inherently antisemitic in its relative secularism, liberalism, and subjection of rabbinical influence to state power.

Given its extremely hostile, paranoid content, and given its sometimes persecutory consequences, Peasant Antisemitism is more likely to strengthen Jewish solidarity. In fact, there is at least one piece of evidence from early-modern Europe suggesting that Peasant Antisemitism not only strengthens Jewish solidarity, but even forms an essential part of rabbinic Jewish identity as such. I’ll turn to that example now.

By the dawn of the middle ages, God had established dominion over Christians, Muslims, and of course Jews. As a corporate entity, Jews enjoyed not only an original and unique relationship with God but also a chronologically superior tradition, which was largely accepted by Christians and Muslims. This gave Jews a new sense of ethnic uniqueness and specialness upon which they could focus in a world where everyone, including their gentile neighbors and competitors, was a God worshiper.

“By the time of the crusades,” writes the historian Robert Drews, “the central focus of Judaism” had transitioned away from a relationship with God and his laws toward “Judaism itself.” That is, the religion of Judaism was becoming more of an ethnic “thing.” One consequence of this transformation was that focus on the contemporary fate of the community became central to Judaean worship.

In the wake of the first crusade, during which Judaeans suffered atrocities but also fought valiantly, Judaeans began composing and disseminating narratives of the atrocities, known as Yizkor, aspects of which eventually made their way into the worship rituals of rabbinic Jews. The effectiveness of this liturgy in achieving certain practical communal effects, which I’ll detail below, evidently inspired more Yizkor style texts, some of which are regarded today by secular historians as fabulous exaggerations.

Perhaps the most important event inspiring such texts was the Khmelnytsky Uprising or Cossack-Polish War, which took place between 1648-1657. While the rest of continental Europe was undergoing a legal and political revolution giving rise to limited religious tolerance, Cossacks, Tatars and local peasants in Ukraine and elsewhere embarked upon a war of conquest involving atrocities against civilians, Christian clergy, and Jews.

Shaul Stampfer, professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, summarizes how the Khmelnytsky remembrance narratives, often entitled books of despair, were disseminated in the wake of the carnage, giving rise to the word “pogrom”:

Its impact on the collective memory of Ukrainian and Polish Jews was enormous.2 Especially in the first years of the uprising, many Jewish communities in the Ukrainian lands, in Lithuania, and in Poland were destroyed. In subsequent generations, East European Jews "remembered" vividly how Khmel'nyts'kyi's forces massacred the helpless Jewish communities wherever they could be found. This image was preserved and transmitted in a number of ways. Chronicles were read, stories were told, and for centuries many Jews in the Ukraine observed a fast day in memory of the victims. – “What actually happened to the Jews of Ukraine in 1648?”, Jewish History 17.

Importantly, the dissemination and incorporation of these narratives into rabbinic liturgy contributed, in Stampfer’s words, both to Jewish “self-stereotypes and to their view of others, notably of the Ukrainians and Poles.” Jews were instructed to remember that, because of an antisemitic conspiracy by the rebels, as many as 500,000 Jews had been slaughtered, countless synagogues had been destroyed, and that gentiles had engaged in forms of sacrilege against their sacred objects, allegedly using copies of the Torah as sandals.

Stampfer observes that, “oddly enough,” although these stories are often studied, the uprising was never “carefully examined” to determine what “actually happened” from an objective perspective. I speculate the reason for this is that the stories were incorporated into rabbinic worship.

Stampfer’s article goes on to examine population numbers, the historical record, and the characteristics of Jews in Ukraine, ultimately concluding that large portions of the narratives were fabricated. While the atrocities against Jews (mostly poor and middle-class) were enormous (Stampfer estimates 20,000 dead with thousands more converted to Orthodoxy or sold into slavery, though all slaves were eventually redeemed), he concludes that there is little evidence of any planned eradication of Jews by the Cossacks and that gentile atrocities were significantly embellished by Jewish chroniclers, both in terms of scope and intent.

For instance, Stampfer notes that Jewish victims were allowed to convert to Orthodoxy while Polish victims were not, that large Ukrainian Jewish populations were often spared in exchange for a ransom, and that Jews and Ukrainians often enjoyed warm relations. Stampfer further notes that the local Jewish population quadrupled in size from its pre-uprising quantity within a century of the uprising, eventually giving birth to Hasidic Judaism. In short, while Peasant Antisemitism likely motivated many perpetrators, Ukrainian Jews were victims of scattered opportunistic wartime atrocities, like gentile groups, and not victims of an intentional extermination program pursued by a rebel leadership obsessed with Jews.

Stampfer considers but dismisses the suggestion that the narrative authors simply lacked access to objective sources, noting that many of them had access to the villages that were allegedly destroyed but didn’t seem to consult sources therefrom. Ultimately, Stampfer concludes that the chronicles were composed with intentions other than accurately documenting atrocities, including, critically, the goal of proving God’s anger at Jewish impiety and scaring Jews into obedience. Stampfer writes of motivations for embellishing and amplifying Peasant Antisemitism:

The authors of the Jewish chronicles were motivated by a desire to arouse emotions and to lead readers to consider the punishments God metes out to individuals.7 Their descriptions had value only if they could lead readers to repent or to maintain the sacred memory of the victims. The more moving the description, the more likely it was to achieve its goal. Chronicles also aimed at encouraging readers generously to support survivors: here, the more dramatic the story, the better. Historical accuracy plays no role in either case. Precision might, in fact, be counter-productive. The more victims reported, the greater the horror and consequent repentance and generosity. Therefore, there is no prima facie reason to assume that the Jewish chronicles are, or are intended to be, precise.

What this implies is that persecution was transformed into an effective survival strategy for European Jewish group identity. I emphasize identity because this is not a point about genetics or the survival of any individual: persecution sometimes results in economic catastrophe and death for many and perhaps even most of the group, calling into question for an average member the value of adhering to such an identity. But if stories of persecution promote group identity survival, it stands to reason that microaggressions or persecutions which can be embellished, especially cartoonish and toothless ones, will be especially advantageous to the identity, because of the comparative low cost in life and property.

I want to stress here that this isn’t a strategy unique to rabbinic Jews. As with Peasant Antisemitism, false narratives of conspiratorial persecution can promote solidarity and energize group members. It’s easy to see how this works among Peasant Antisemites in memes which spuriously identify every spree shooter as Jewish.

However, one important and relatively unique factor here is that these stories are incorporated into Jewish worship itself, such that rabbinic Jewish religion comes to be dependent in some sense upon stylized and fictional re-interpretations of recent communal histories in a way that renders the conduct and intentions of contemporary non-Jews toward Jews integral to the truth of the rabbinic religion.

In other words, Peasant Antisemitism is essential to the rabbinic religion to such an extent that, in at least one instance, Jewish writers intentionally distorted history to amplify the centrality and magnitude of Peasant Antisemitism. Peasant Antisemitism can therefore be understood as a sort of essential miracle in rabbinic liturgy.

Unintentional and Intentional Promotion of Peasant Antisemitism

Thus, another reason for the preponderance of Peasant Antisemitism is that it is essential to rabbinic Judaism, and rabbinic Judaism has a history of embellishing and re-interpreting events as Peasant Antisemitism. What this suggests to me is twofold.

First, some Jews, and especially orthodox Jews, will interpret negative events which aren’t even motivated by antisemitism as manifestations of Peasant Antisemitism, creating the impression of an omnipresent and threatening Peasant Antisemitism. Second, some Jews or gentiles whose worldviews are subsidiary to the rabbinic religion will intentionally promote Peasant Antisemitism.

An accessible example of the first phenomenon comes from recordings of the Ramapo school board meetings and illustrates how persecutory stories transform reality (how ethnonarcissism distorts reality), shore up group solidarity, and validate the group identity.

During one meeting, Hasidic board members invoke ancient instances of persecution, specifically mentioning the antisemitism of St. Augustine. Augustine’s Substitutionist view on Judaism is of course irrelevant to the concerns of the Ramapo community and NPR audience, yet remembrance of his (relatively moderate) hostile attitude allowed board members to ignore legitimate grievances from the community (in the specific case about whether Hasidic Jews should be making decisions about school funding given that their children do not use the public school system) and experience the conflict as an expression of Peasant Antisemitism.

This means that reasonable American suspicions of Jewish clannishness can be erroneously construed as Peasant Antisemitism and used as pretext to confer special treatment upon Jews (censoring Ramapo community members for antisemitism), out of legitimate concerns surrounding Jewish civil rights. In turn, the special treatment can engender more suspicions about clannishness, creating a feedback loop that reifies rabbinic myths about Peasant Antisemitism on the one hand and suspicions about Jewish self-dealing on the other.

I would go even further and suggest that this tendency to misinterpret reality bleeds over into intentional misrepresentations of reality (along the lines of Khmelnytsky chroniclers) and even the intentional promotion of Peasant Antisemitism by Jews and gentile adjuncts thereof, like Christian Zionists (Christian Zionists might not just be adjuncts but rather leaders).

If Jewish writers historically have been willing to wildly embellish atrocities to foster guilt, obedience, group cohesion and facilitate wealth transfers among Jews, it isn’t unreasonable to imagine that such authors might also promote Peasant Antisemitic micropersecutions, which could then be embellished. Given the fanaticism of many gentiles for Jewish causes, especially around prophecies about the great ingathering of Jews to the holy land, it isn’t inconceivable that non-Jewish activists might do the same.

Making Jews feel besieged regardless of whether they’re secular, orthodox, or even rabbinic undoubtedly can produce secondary effects that meet the goals of Zionists (Christian and Jewish), as well as evangelical Ultra-Orthodox sects like Chabad. It can create solidarity among the diverse members of the identity “Jew”, give them the sense that they can only feel safe with their own “kind” in Israel and that at a minimum they should unconditionally support Israel, validate the evolving paranoid atrocity liturgy of rabbinic Judaism, encourage anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox Jews to submit to secular Zionist sovereignty, and catalyze reactionary legal and corporate policy changes that confer special benefits upon the Jewish identity.

Some examples

A useful example in this context is the Goyim Defense League (GDL) mentioned above. For all I know, the GDL is an organic organization that hasn’t willfully been promoted for any of the purposes I described above. Nonetheless, I note that it bears some of the hallmarks of America’s dysfunctional countersubversion industry (another reason for the persistence of Peasant Antisemitism, in my opinion), which involves law enforcement and civil rights NGOs willfully promoting Peasant Antisemitism, possibly in consultation with Jewish religious leaders.

According to Wikipedia, the GDL has a Hispanic rapper frontman who, like many prominent Peasant Antisemites in recent history who maintained membership lists, operates a private internet platform called GoyimTV. The rapper engages in cartoonish antisemitic antics like unfurling banners over highway overpasses, spreading antisemitic leaflets, and projecting antisemitic images onto private property (recently, and perhaps related to my point here, the frontman was spotted throwing up Hitler salutes outside of a Chabad congregation).

As a result of such activism, Florida passed new civil rights-inspired laws amending criminal statutes to cover GDL activism, as I wrote about here. Thus, in this case, the secondary effect of Peasant Antisemitism was to strengthen the validity of Jewish identity in Florida and arguably restrict the rights of Floridians as a whole (although the laws were mostly toothless). An additional consequence was that internet Peasant Antisemites used the passage of these laws as evidence supporting their own conspiracy theories, notwithstanding that it was Peasant Antisemitism in the first place which catalyzed the laws.

Another example of pro-Jewish interests intentionally promoting Peasant Antisemitism involves the conspiracy theory that Zionists forced the United States to enter World War I. Ron Unz, an aggressive promoter of Peasant Antisemitic conspiracy theories himself, finds this theory dubious for reasons that I find persuasive. According to Unz, Zionists were a small and relatively uninfluential faction in the United States during WWI. However, Zionists had incentives to promote the conspiracy theory to American political representatives later during WWII, to create the impression of Zionist omnipotence and incent American political compliance with Zionist geostrategic goals.

We’ve seen how this works in a non-Jewish context with the incessant promotion of CIA omnipotence by “anti-neoliberal” activists and the deplorable consequences in public assertions made by American statesmen like Chuck Schumer, who told the American public that the CIA – an overseas intelligence Agency created by a democratically elected Congress, controlled by a democratically elected President, and bound by the Bill of Rights -- has “six ways from Sunday” to “get” American citizens, including the President. Further, as Ishmael Jones pointed out in his memoir about the CIA, the CIA has incentives to cover up its blunders and weakness with conspiracy-style rationales.

A recent example that comes to mind, and which could reflect such a propagandistic effort, is the (excellent) journalist Whitney Webb claiming that the CIA intended for the withdrawal from Afghanistan to appear dysfunctional. In the context of Israel, the proliferation of conspiracy theories that Israel’s various intelligence agencies allowed October 7 to happen could reflect similar damage control efforts, such as covering up Israeli intelligence incompetence, or minimizing Palestinian claims to have dealt a humiliating blow to Israel.

Finally, I’d note that many of the general assumptions of Peasant Antisemitism about Jews mirror the general assumptions of more ethnonarcissistic Jews about their group identity, causing me to suspect some sort of intentional overlap.

For example, Chabad, like Zionism, is an evangelical sect of Judaism that strives to minimize ethnoreligious differences among Jews and forge ingroup solidarity. Analogously, Peasant Antisemitism strives to minimize ethnoreligious differences among Jews to prove Jewish ingroup solidarity. Further, Chabad and Zionism both seek an ingathering of the Jews to Israel, while Peasant Antisemites often seek to purge Jews from their territories. These similarities are so striking that Peasant Antisemite discourse online sounds like the evangelical discourse a passerby might hear from a Hasidic community center, complete with inquiries as to whether the passerby is Jewish.

Furthermore, many Jews believe in the superiority of Jews to non-Jews (like most ethnic and religious groups believe about their own groups), pointing to the recent and undeniable achievements of Jews in business, finance, politics, science, and the arts. However, it is often the case that such Jewish supremacists elide that these achievements largely are the province of secular, assimilated, and mixed Ashkenazi Jews descending from certain elite rabbinic lines, many of which come from mixed European-Levantine ancestry. This elided point suggests that neither rabbinic Jewish piety nor Jewish ancestry is a sufficient condition to produce an individual self-identifying Jew’s superiority, which in turn exposes the historic (impious?) breeding compromises made by rabbinic Judaism, as well as the religion’s internal biological caste and class distinctions.

This poses a problem for evangelical and democratic branches of Judaism like Zionism and Chabad because they don’t want average and below-average Jews to be disgruntled with the identity, and because they want outsiders to agree with their group self-image. However, Peasant Antisemites eagerly embrace these claimed achievements, often as evidence of conspiracy and omnipotence, while simultaneously eliding the same nuance about ancestry and secularism, and in so doing benefit Zionism and Chabad while deluding Peasant Antisemites.

Conclusion

It should be perplexing to objective observers that reasonable criticism of Jewish clannishness remains frozen in time and attached to superstitions and virulent dogma, unlike reasonable criticisms of other forms of human clannishness.

While I suspect Peasant Antisemitism is sometimes intentionally promoted by pro-Jewish interests, it is not at all necessary that any such conspiracies or marketing strategies exist. All of this could be the result of the unintentional dynamics I’ve described, and will continue to describe, in the context of the metaphor of group narcissism.

Peasant Antisemites conspicuously miss the heterogeneity, factionalism, and distrust –- the fundamentally non-unique, all-too-human features -- of the abstract identity “Jew,” much to the same extent as Jewish ethnonarcissists themselves. This could be the result of ordinary social-psychological dynamics, conspiracy, or both. We can see similar neuroses emerging in the American Black identity and reactions thereto.

As with most religions, deracinated, areligious American man is an actor in rabbinic Judaism whether he likes it or not. In a cosmopolitan empire, sometimes you’re unrepentant, sometimes you’re the infidel, and sometimes you’re the omnipotent antisemitic persecutor used by God to punish the Jews for their impiety. But if representations of your conduct and intentions by members of the religion are essential to confirming the truth of the religion, it’s difficult to say that the religion in question is purely a private matter. Our civil religion’s ongoing struggle with this and many other contradictions inspired me to start this blog in the first place.

Regarding Peasant Antisemitism, though I have no desire to play a part in paranoid and narcissistic ethnoreligious dramas, I can’t say that simple disengagement is an option. For this reason, I believe dispassionate exposure of group identities and intergoup dynamics to sunlight and fresh air remains an essential civic duty. Trolling is good, too.