A-Lister Antisemitism Explanations
I’ve already written about Herbert Pagani (https://kingchill.com/jude/repost-pagani) and Emma Goldman (https://kingchill.com/jude/on-zionism, so I will not cover them again. But I want to give more explanations for antisemitism from four extremely influential people. A theme here is that antisemitism shifts shape between its subscribers to capture whatever someone doesn’t like.
Because antisemitism is lazy in nature, searching for patterns by way of dismissing the bigger picture, antisemites are usually dumb people. They turn to stories of the occult rather than pragmatic explanation. The people who hate Jews make Jews evoke Voltaire, famed French writer and advocate of freedom of religion:
“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”
Note: In several quotes, the misnomyr “anti-semite” was replaced with “antisemite.”
1) Jean-Paul Sartre
Who he was: French existentialist philosopher and novelist, Nobel laureate who declined the prize because of how principled he was. Known for Being and Nothingness, Nausea, and No Exit.
Context: From Antisemite and Jew (1946), in the section “Portrait of the Antisemite,” where he analyzes the antisemite’s bad-faith stance in argument. Sartre says antisemites play with discourse in bad faith to humiliate and disconcert opponents rather than to persuade. He argued that antisemitism is not about Jews at all, but about the antisemite’s need for an enemy. By imagining a monolithic “Jew,” the antisemite absolves himself of responsibility for his own failures and projects all contradictions onto an external scapegoat. This makes antisemitism self-sustaining: it doesn’t require real Jews or real Jewish behavior, only the idea of “the Jew” as a useful fiction. Sartre’s key insight is that antisemitism is not ignorance waiting to be corrected, but bad faith embraced for its own convenience.
Quote 1 (short):
“Never believe that Antisemites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.”
Extended passage:
“Never believe that antisemites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The antisemites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. Not that they are afraid of being convinced: they fear only lest they should look ridiculous or be forced to adopt a serious tone. They want arguments only if they can be amusing, and their amusement consists in not taking seriously the seriousness of others.
For the antisemite, reason itself is a trap. He has chosen once and for all to hate, and he wants his words to reflect his choice. He has no need to be sincere, because his faith in antisemitism does not depend on proofs. His arguments may change, contradict, or collapse, but his conviction remains intact. That is why he so often ridicules the very people who try to reason with him.”
Quote 2 (short):
“If the Jew did not exist, the anti‐Semite would invent him.”
Extended passage:
“To understand my classmate’s indignation we must recognize that he had adopted in advance a certain idea of the Jew, of his nature and of his role in society. And to be able to decide that among twenty‐six competitors who were more successful than himself, it was the Jew who robbed him of his place, he must a priori have given preference in the conduct of his life to reasoning based on passion.
Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience. He has chosen to find in the Jew the cause of his failure, and he interprets facts in such a way that they prove his thesis. Experience, instead of modifying his conception, receives from it its meaning. If the Jew did not exist, the anti‐Semite would invent him. He needs the Jew. Without him, his explanation of the world would collapse.
Antisemitism is thus not an opinion but a passion. The antisemite has chosen to live in a world where the Jew is everywhere and explains everything. It is a way of organizing reality, a way of refusing responsibility, a way of refusing freedom.”
2) Christopher Hitchens
Who he was: British-American writer and polemicist, famed for sharp debate and books like God Is Not Great.
Context: Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture (UCLA, 2010), where he argued that antisemitism is the template for other conspiratorial hatreds and a danger to everyone. He traced how the myth of a hidden cabal becomes a master key for conspiracy thinking, feeding authoritarianism and war. Therefore, even if ineradicable, it must be fought tenaciously by all.
Short quote:
“Antisemitism… has great appeal to pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-aesthetes, because it has great gossipy power and can draw on history and mythology and concepts like blood and gold. It can seem to explain a lot.”
Extended passage:
“Antisemitism is a prejudice that may sometimes be, but usually is not, lightly worn. It has great appeal to pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-aesthetes, because it has great gossipy power and can draw on history and mythology and concepts like blood and gold. It can seem to explain a lot.
And it can form a bond between upper-crust types and the plebeians, a bond of sturdy race and nation against the clever and the tricky and the ‘hard to place’: the very ‘socialism of fools’ that August Bebel identified and that the Mosleys tried to carry into practice.
A dead giveaway, in distinguishing the obsessive or morbid antisemite from the garden variety, is an inability to stay off the subject. It has a very important, and very often overlooked, relation to the history of totalitarianism and of tyranny. It is not just the hatred of a people—it is the hatred that propels systems, that creates scapegoats, and that licenses persecution.
That is why antisemitism is not just a Jewish problem. It is everybody’s problem, because once it is unleashed it corrodes reason, it empowers demagogues, and it opens the door to repression for all.”
3) Primo Levi
Who he was: Italian Jewish chemist, Auschwitz survivor, and author of If This Is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved.
Context: In The Drowned and the Saved (1986), Levi reflects on memory and the permanent possibility of recurrence. He explains that the very fact of the Shoah proves the possibility.
Short quote:
“It happened, therefore it can happen again.”
Extended passage:
“We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.
It is important to add: it can happen, and it can happen to everyone. Whoever despises his neighbor, whoever discriminates against him, whoever persecutes him because of his race, his religion, or his political opinions, is preparing the ground for persecution directed against himself.
We survivors are not the true witnesses. We are but a sample, an anomalous minority: those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it, or have returned mute. That is why it is essential that the memory we bear, however imperfect, be heard and transmitted.
Forgetting extermination is part of extermination itself. If the story is not passed on, if the signs are ignored, then the possibility of recurrence is guaranteed. The duty of memory is therefore not only to honor the dead, but to protect the living.”
4) Vasily Grossman
Who he was: Soviet Jewish writer and journalist, best known for his novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows. He was also a war correspondent at the Battle of Stalingrad, and his reporting helped document the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Grossman’s work was heavily censored in the USSR, but posthumously he has been recognized as one of the greatest chroniclers of both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism.
Context: From Life and Fate (written 1960, published posthumously in 1980). In his reflections on antisemitism, Grossman argued that it is always projection: the accusations made against Jews are confessions of what the accusers themselves are guilty of.
Short quote:
“Tell me what you accuse the Jews of—I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”
Extended passage:
“Antisemitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures, and State systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of—I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.
Accuse the Jews of worshiping gold—you are already corrupted by money. Say they are rootless cosmopolitans—you have betrayed your own homeland. Call them cowards—you have already thrown down your arms. Denounce them as cruel—you have sown cruelty in your own soil.
It is not the Jew who is the cause; it is your own sins that cry out, and you dress them up as accusations. Antisemitism is the device of those who cannot face themselves, who prefer to shatter the mirror rather than see their own reflection.
And so, generation after generation, the Jew is made to stand trial for the crimes of others. His presence is demanded not because he is guilty, but because his accusers cannot bear to look inward. They need him, as a screen, as a target, as a lie that explains their own collapse. That is why antisemitism never dies—it renews itself with every failure of conscience.”
From Sartre’s exposure of absurd bad faith, to Hitchens’s warning about antisemitism as the seedbed of tyranny, to Levi’s stark reminder of recurrence, and Grossman’s piercing mirror held up to society, these voices converge on one truth: antisemitism is never about Jews.
