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 there was a club from a part of London that was thought of as predominantly Black, and the mainly white fanbase of that club decided to call themselves the N-words, or the N-word army, and that led to opposing fans chanting racist hate songs based around the N-word back at them, it would be stopped and the club shut down immediately.

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.

So it’s interesting that those concerned about offence tend to say ‘Jewish people’ rather than ‘Jew’. Because even though it is the correct word, and not a slang word coined by racists, the deep burial of it in a bad place in the Christian unconscious means that it feels insulting anyway.

The problem is that Jews occupy a socio-cultural grey area. Jews, although marginal, are not thought of as marginalised. Which means Jews can’t be seen as representative of a modern Britain that is intent on shifting marginalised experiences into the mainstream. Jews, therefore, as far as progressives are concerned, don’t represent anything outside of themselves. No victory is claimed by championing their experience, and this leads to a subtle – and unconscious – exclusion.

We live in a culture now where impact is more important than intent; where how things are taken is more significant than how they are meant. You have to listen to the people being talked about rather than the talker – and the power, throughout history, has tended to be with the talker, the person with the platform, rather than the talked-about, who are usually the ones affected. I do not know whether or not this is a good thing. But it is a thing.

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 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.

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.

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, and must, before they are allowed into any kind of public conversation, make some kind of supplicant-like statement to that effect.

Jews, in general, are not now having their assets stripped from them in the way they were during the 1930s in Germany. But that is to imagine that history does not live both in the memory and in the culture. I was born nineteen years after the war ended. As I grow older, nineteen years feels like yesterday. The dispossession and trauma experienced by my grandparents didn’t end with them. My grandfather was in and out of a mental hospital for the rest of his life with clinical depression. My mother was an amazing woman, but deeply damaged. And as for me … well, that’s another book. The point is, history is not past. Its effects live in the present.