A series of recent events, not just terrorist attacks but also disturbing opinion polls, have brought anti-Semitism back into the headlines. It’s not easy to distinguish opposition to Ariel Sharon’s policies—an opposition shared by many Jewish people—from anti-Israeli sentiment, and in turn from anti-Semitism, but there is a tendency for public opinion and the mass media to bundle them together. Moreover, it seems that Western public opinion rests on two consoling thoughts: that anti-Semitism is largely an Arab question, and that it’s limited in Europe to a small number of neo-Nazi skinheads.
Europe has never managed to distinguish between religious, popular, and “scientific” anti-Semitism. Religious anti-Semitism was certainly responsible for popular anti-Semitism: the claim that the Jews were a God-killing people has justified many pogroms, and a further justification was the difficulty in assimilating exiled Jews determined to keep their own traditions. As followers of a cult of the Book, therefore of reading in an illiterate world, they seemed like dangerous intellectuals speaking an unknown language. But by “scientific” anti-Semitism I mean the historic and anthropological ideas that purported to uphold the superiority of the Aryan race over the Jewish race, and the political doctrine of the Jewish conspiracy for the conquest of the Christian world, most clearly expressed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, also a product of the European secular intelligentsia.
Theological anti-Semitism doesn’t exist in the Arab world, since the Koran recognizes the great patriarchs of the Bible, from Abraham to Jesus. During the period of their expansion, Muslims were fairly tolerant toward Jews and Christians: though regarded as second-class citizens, they could follow their religion and develop their business activities as long as they paid their taxes. Islamic anti-Semitism, not being religious, is today exclusively ethnopolitical—religious motivations give it support rather than being a foundation. If nineteenth-century Zionists had established the new state of Israel in Utah, the Arabs wouldn’t be anti-Semitic. I don’t want to be misunderstood: for historic and religious reasons the Jews had every right to head for Palestine—they settled peacefully over the course of a century—and have every right to remain there. But Arab anti-Semitism is territorial, not theological.
More serious, however, is Europe’s responsibility. Popular anti-Semitism supported by religious anti-Semitism led to massacres, though localized and unprogrammed. Real “scientific” anti-Semitism began in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and not in Germany but in Legitimist France and to some extent in Italy. It is in France that racist theories, namely of the ethnic roots of civilization, were developed, and it is between France and Italy that the theory of the Jewish conspiracy evolved, a conspiracy that was responsible first for the horrors of the French Revolution and then for a plot to subjugate Christian civilization. History has shown that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was put together by Jesuit Legitimists and the French and Russian secret services, and only later was it accepted wholesale by tsarist reactionaries and by the Nazis. On the Internet, most anti-Semitic Arab websites are also based on European “scientific” anti-Semitism.
In Italy, the right-wing leader Gianfranco Fini is doing his best to detach his party from its anti-Semitic past, something he should be recognized for. But go to any specialty bookshop and, along with occult books on the Holy Grail, you’ll find the speeches of Mussolini and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a strange blend that needed a homegrown right-wing ideologue like Julius Evola, whose works can also be found in such bookshops.
There are also terrorist organizations that ignore mainstream politics and declare themselves “Communists.” But the Italian left, through the deaths of its own members, has earned the right to distance itself from these extremist fringes, supporting the state against the drift toward terrorism. The one person who doesn’t worry too much about such matters is Berlusconi, though he is hardly a reliable authority, however politically effective he might be. Has the Italian right done the same thing? Is it prepared to say that Evola, when he wasn’t being a genial nutcase, scientifically suspect but pleasantly readable, was a wild anti-Semite, and continued to be after World War II? Who is going to take responsibility, in the schools and in adult education, for dismantling the follies of “scientific” anti-Semitism with which certain members of the Italian right were associated in the frenzied rhetoric of magazines such as La Difesa della Razza (The Defense of the Race)?
It is our duty to defend ourselves against Arab terrorism. At the same time, however, we must use education as a weapon to fight the enemies at home who are fomenting Arab anti-Semitism.
2003