Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

Jews are the only objects of racism who are imagined – by the racists – as both low and high status. Jews are stereotyped, by the racists, in all the same ways that other minorities are – as lying, thieving, dirty, vile, stinking – but also as moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world. Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters.

if you believe, even a little bit, that Jews are moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world … well, you can’t put them into the sacred circle of the oppressed. Some might even say they belong in the damned circle of the oppressors.

The reason far-right and progressive left activists might conjoin over this idea of fighting back against mythical, sacrosanct secret rulers is that both like to see themselves as rebels, as fighters against power, and Jews, uniquely among minorities in the west, are associated with power.

He said: but the Y-word isn’t as bad as the N-word? I said: why not? He said: because Jews are rich. It still seems to me an amazing thing for an avowed anti-racist to say (not least because of its implicit assumption that Black people can never be rich). What my friend was saying is that because Jews are – come on, we all know they are – comfortable, privileged and moneyed, they don’t need, not really, the protections of anti-racism, the ones most promoted by the left.

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.

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.

Jews don’t really suffer from being considered different, because they don’t look different.

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.

When online I talk about racism against Jews, people – from both left and right – sometimes decide to object by saying that Jews are not a race and therefore cannot suffer racism.

Except antisemitism has very little to do with religion. As I have often said, I’m an atheist and yet the Gestapo would shoot me tomorrow.* Racists who don’t like Jews never ask the Jew they are abusing how often they go to synagogue. They just see the Jewish name and they know. Which is why it’s racism. One’s Jewishness, just like one’s skin colour, is an accident of birth, and as far as the racists are concerned – and they, sadly, are the people that matter as far as racism goes – you can never lose either.

Corbyn is not someone who hates Jews but someone – like most progressives, like my friend who contended that the Y-word was not as bad as the N-word – who places anti-Jewish racism lower on the hierarchy of things that truly matter.

There is, on both left and right, a very long history of capitalist power being represented as Jewish power. This developed out of an aesthetic that is far older than capitalism itself, one in which, since at least the late thirteenth century, Jews were routinely painted and sculpted as gargoyles and devils.

The left, for all its anti-racist credentials, has never balked at that – the Jew face, the Jew hair, the Jew fat banker smoking his fat cigar – imagery. It remains the primary way in which to portray the scheming, evil, capitalist enemy.

If there were no racists, there would be no anti-racists. And the racists say: Jews are not white. The Nazis said it all the time – the project of the Jews, as far as they were concerned, was to undermine the Aryan white races. And the exclusion of Jews from the category of whiteness is still key to present-day white supremacists.

a conspiracy theory, called the Great Replacement, which states that Jews are secretly masterminding the promotion of immigration and multiculturalism in order to undermine, and eventually replace, Aryan whites. Jews are not trying to replace whites with Jews. They are trying to replace whites with Browns and Blacks, and pulling the strings to do so. This conspiracy theory has deep roots in the far right.

Jews, for the racists, don’t have a skin colour. That’s part of their dastardly power. Jews are invisible, working their terrible magic behind the global scenes, and they don’t even have a visual mark.

racists say Jews aren’t white. Problem is, progressives, in general, tend to think they are white and, therefore, not really deserving of the protections progressive movements offer to non-white people facing racism.

Buried deeply inside here is a double racism: an idea that Jews are rich, something Black people are assumed not to be,

Because Jews do not have struggle and difficulty, Jews cannot be victims. Despite what two thousand years of history tells us.

To shake up privilege, you need the privileged: you need them to feel ashamed. You need the privileged, white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied to feel shame and anger on behalf of the minority that’s being in some way traduced by them. And the privileged, white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied majority never feel these things when the minority being traduced is Jews; because they think that Jews are just … them. They don’t see enough difference.

In Hunters, Al Pacino doesn’t wear any kind of obvious Jewish make-up when he plays Offerman (except a beard, and little glasses, and his costume, a black rabbinical suit). What he does instead is play the character really fucking Jewishly. His performative mannerisms are full of shrugs and schlemiel-faced tics, his intonation pitted with melancholic question marks.* That’s what Jewface is.

It’s JewVoice, JewExpression, JewStoopedandShruggingBody. It’s NebbishBeing.

Now that antisemitism can sometimes seem like a right and left issue, I perceive the emergence of a particularly modern form of antisemitism, which is an association of anti-antisemitism with Establishment values. Saying ‘this is antisemitic’ for some, puts you firmly into the camp of the oppressor.

The move to reclassify Jesus as non-white is good and historically accurate. The erasure at the same time of his Jewishness is neither. It accords in fact with centuries of the Church doing the same. Some might argue that the re-imagining of Jesus as a Brown-skinned Middle Eastern doesn’t exclude his Jewishness. Theoretically, of course, it doesn’t. But the reclaiming of Him* as non-white, in truth, bypasses that, because it has no political impact, no revolution, to reiterate Jesus’s Jewishness.

To reiterate Jesus’s Jewishness does not, to Shaun King, do anything for his blackness. In fact, in aggressively insisting that a new Jesus of colour needs to be affirmed, the identity ‘Jew’ is thrown in, as it so often is, with whiteness. It elides Jews with the generalised privileged category that this new radical Jesus needs to be prised away from.

When Wiley launched that series of anti-Jew statements on social media in the summer of 2020, he was not, in his mind, attacking a minority but, in that tradition of Malcolm, expressing a rebel yell, a shout-out against power.

What they tend to say is: we stand against antisemitism and all types of racism. As a mantra, this was heard again and again between 2015 and 2019, and continues to be in the ongoing arguments around Corbyn. It sounds good. It sounds right. But to these ears, the reflex need always to follow the phrase antisemitism with ‘and all types of racism’ is the left’s All Lives Matter.

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. Because I am a British person – a Jew, yes, but my Jewish identity is about Groucho Marx, and Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, and Philip Roth, and Seinfeld, and Saul Bellow, and pickled herring, and north London seders, and my mother being a refugee from the Nazis, and wearing a yarmulke at my Jewish primary school – and none of that has anything to do with a Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away.

the idea that I should care more about the Palestinians smacks of something weird. It smacks of an idea that somehow Jews – non-Israeli Jews – must apologise for Israel: that Jews – non-Israeli Jews – should feel a little bit ashamed of Israel,

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 singular features of this particular racism, including the way it is viewed by avowed anti-racists, is an underlying suspicion that antisemitism does not arise, like all other racisms, spontaneously from the hatred and scapegoating of the majority culture, but from something perpetrated by the minority itself: what the left in other contexts, but not in this one, calls victim-blaming. Hence when bad things happen to Jews, Jews are always, in some way, responsible.

Either way, the notion that the wellspring for antisemitism is simply the actions of the Israeli government is ahistorical in the extreme. Some fairly big antisemitic events did in fact happen before 1948 – in fact, in one quite notable case, very recently before then.

(despite the fact that many Orthodox Jews refuse to believe in the state of Israel anyway).

the prevalence of Holocaust denial in Gaza and the West Bank – about 80 per cent of people there subscribe to the conspiracy theory

Huge increases in attacks on Jews – 600 per cent in incidents in the UK alone over this period – seem to be met with a shrugging sense that there’s something appropriate about that. Somewhere in the hive mind, certainly as you can hear it buzzing on Twitter, is a sense that Jews experiencing violent pushback, wherever they are, and whatever their views about this conflict with which they may have no connection, is fitting. This

The Jews must always be in some way responsible. If it’s not bankers and capitalism, it’s Israel.

the one thing I know about antisemitism is that the antisemite believes the Jew never changes, which is the reason they might be persecuted throughout history.*

what is the external reason for this throughout-history racism against Jews? To which the answer might be that all majority cultures need to have an alien hate object, and for Christian cultures, in particular, that position has long been filled by Jews.