Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

A study by the non-partisan wealth research firm New World Wealth found that 56.2 per cent of the 13.1 million millionaires in the world were Christian, while 6.5 per cent were Muslim, 3.9 per cent were Hindu and 1.7 per cent were Jewish. In the US, 48 per cent of Hindus have a yearly household income of $100,000 or more, and 70 per cent have at least $75,000, which makes them the highest-earning ethnic group.

But either way – and this is very un-Marxist of me – fuck off about money. Because money doesn’t protect you from racism.

It doesn’t matter how rich you are, because the racists will smash in the door of your big house that they know you don’t deserve anyway and only own because you’re Jews.

Significantly, one of the things that marks Jewishness out as different from other ethnicities is that it can be hidden. One of the many contradictory beliefs held by anti-Semites is that Jews are incredibly, obviously Jewish – because they all have big noses and swarthy skin and dark hair and are fattened up with their own greed – and simultaneously difficult to spot, which is what allows them to get under the radar of non-Jews and work their despicable secret doings.

This ability to hide is important in the omission of Jews from identity politics, because most identities, sexual ones aside, are fairly impossible to hide. Jews can hide; they can pass as non-Jews. So the assumption appears to be that because they are not immediately visible, they don’t suffer racism.

talked-about. It is a progressive article of faith – much heightened during the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 – that those who do not experience racism need to listen, to learn, to accept and not challenge, when others speak about their experiences. Except, it seems, when Jews do. Non-Jews, including progressive non-Jews, are still very happy to tell Jews whether or not the utterance about them was in fact racist.

Except anti-Semitism has very little to do with religion. As I have often said, I’m an atheist and yet the Gestapo would shoot me tomorrow.

To understand this, you need to reconsider what I said earlier about Jews being the only objects of racism to whom a double status is applied, both high and low. In the Great Replacement, Jews are not white – they can’t be, as they are operating against the white races and they are the whites’ main enemy – but they are not brown or black either, because they are utilising those races for their secret, world-conquering purposes. Jews, for the racists, don’t have a skin colour. That’s part of their dastardly power.

Indeed, from some progressive quarters I perceive in recent times not just that anti-Semitism doesn’t matter very much, but that, as a concern, it’s been tainted; that it’s become, as it were, their – the other side’s – racism, the one they care about.

Now that anti-Semitism can sometimes seem like a right and left issue, I perceive the emergence of a particularly modern form of anti-Semitism, which is an association of anti-anti-Semitism with Establishment values. Saying ‘this is anti-Semitic’ for some, puts you firmly into the camp of the oppressor. People who think this, however, forget that the notion that Jews control the hand of the oppressor puts them in the Kevin Strom camp.

For those who might be wondering, my position on Israel is: I don’t care about it more than any other country, and to assume I do is racist. To assume that I have to have a strong position either way on Israel is racist.

conversation, make some kind of supplicant-like statement to that effect. I think, by the way, that a lot of Jews on the left are ashamed of Israel, and so they go out of their way to say so. Fine. I’m not suggesting that the state of Israel hasn’t done many things to be ashamed of. But here’s the thing: I am not responsible for those actions and expecting that I should feel so is racist. If a non-Israeli Jew does feel responsible, it is internalised racism.

One of the things about being a non-Zionist is it puts you in an interesting position with left-wing anti-Semites. Most left-wing anti-Semites assume that you’re only using the cry ‘anti-Semitism!’ because you’re a Zionist. Since I’m not a Zionist, this is confusing. Although it shouldn’t be, of course, if what I’m doing is crying ‘anti-Semitism!’ because I’ve seen something anti-Semitic.

I didn’t feel white when, loving T. S. Eliot as a teenager, I discovered that he considered Jews to be lower than rats.