Identifying Antisemitism – The “Nirenberg Test”
Professor David Nirenberg’s magisterial book Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013) tracks the ways societies founded on Christianity and Islam conceptualized Jews and Judaism over the millennia. In writing what he calls a history of a way of thinking, Nirenberg’s book is about how opposition to beliefs and behaviors described as “Jewish” became tools those societies used to understand themselves in the world. So anti-Judaism is not only about opposing the beliefs of Judaism, the religion and culture of a specific people. It is a critical approach to making sense of the world that uses often fictitious constructs of what constitute “Jews” and “Judaism” to make sense of the world.
Nirenberg differentiates between anti-Judaism and antisemitism. “I do not use anti-Semitism (sic), a word that captures only a small portion, historically and conceptually, of what this book is about.”(Nirenberg, p. 3). Antisemitism, in Nirenberg’s persuasive analysis, is a subset within the larger category of anti-Judaism. Yet it remains a powerful threat to Jews and to the integrity of the societies where they live. Nirenberg’s precision of thought, along with his talent for clear explanation, hand us an intellectual tool we urgently need if we are to meet the challenge.
This is because Jews face the battle against antisemitism on two fronts. The first and most visible will always be confrontation with bigotry directed at Jews and Judaism and often at Israel, Israelis, and Zionism.
The second is the internal Jewish front, the battle over how to conduct productive, indispensable, accurate self-criticism while under bigoted attack. Faced with delegitimization, insult, and slander, a human response would damp down self-criticism. Who would want to lend aid and support to the hostile, hateful fanatics?
Yet, self-criticism is indispensable. It is the immune system of civilizations. Only by critically examining ourselves, our cultures, institutions, ideas, and actions, can we surface flaws to correct them. By attacking our immune system, that is, by making self-criticism harder to achieve, antisemitic bigotry strikes our ability to deal with those defects, inevitably produced from time to time in any community. Failure to recognize flaws and deal with them allows them to rot and do even more damage.
Professor David Nirenberg provides us with a conceptual tool for examining actions and statements critical of Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism. His analysis of “anti-Judaism” can help to determine whether words or actions critical of Jews are legitimate expressions of criticism or illegitimate examples of hate. His is not the only available tool, but it is handy as a preliminary test for distinguishing bigotry from legitimate criticism.
He finds that these negative anti-Jewish conceptualizations rarely relate to the thinking and actions of real Jews. Instead, they create “Jews of the mind,” constructs used to deal with issues having little to do with Jews as Jews. The role assigned to the attributes labelled “Jewish” is to provide a negative background, against which the light of the advocated principle can shine brighter. So for early Christians, the Jews are the advocates of Law against Love, material against spiritual life. Early Muslims often represented Jews as stubborn frauds, a background against which the shining integrity of Muslim foundational texts glows all the more impressively.
Nirenberg tracks the use of the tools of anti-Judaism through the development of the societies based in Europe and what today we call MENA (the Middle East North Africa). The story he tells shows how deeply embedded the tropes are, negatively casting construct Jews and Judaism to highlight some alternative seen as superior. As these societies modernized, wrestling with challenges like capitalism, and secularisation, influential thinkers reapplied the anti-Jewish tropes to make sense of the new reality. So, for Marx, perhaps the archetypal “modern philosopher,” the Jews and their religion embodied those nasty capitalist principles, and their God was Mammon. Racialists represent Jews as the antithesis and nemesis of the Aryan race, and so on.
In a nutshell, Nirenberg’s insight about the prevalence and embedded nature of anti-Judaism offers us a three-step test for examining an action or a statement to clarify its character as bigotry or legitimate criticism.
First, does it use Jews to address an issue or conflict in which constructs of “Jews,” play a role along the pattern described by Nirenberg, that of a negative “Jewish” backdrop against which some other group or idea shines brighter.
Lacking the negativity, it may be factually false, but it is hard to see as bigotry. For example, many historians teach that medieval European Jews could not work the land and access guilds governing the practice of skilled crafts. As a result, their only option was making a living as middlemen. Some historians describe their economic activity as one of the factors that contributed to the development of European capitalism. This representation of Jews and Judaism is not inherently bigoted, although it could be seen as negative by anti-capitalists. Moreover, it is subject to factual criticism. For example, some historians argue that only small numbers of Jews were present in lands that developed early versions of capitalism. Therefore, their economic activities were necessarily marginal, compared with the proto-capitalist activities of other groups. Ironically, perhaps, an idea can turn out upon examination to be incorrect, but that does not make it bigoted.
On the other hand, as alluded to above, in Karl Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question, we see an example where an author crosses the line into bigotry, using Jews to establish that dark background. He does this, portraying capitalism as negative, Jews, despite the desperate poverty of most of his contemporary Jews, as its arch-practitioners. The Jewish religion he describes as the worship of Mammon. Against this negative backdrop labeled “Jewish,” the equality and economic justice of the new post-capitalist era will shine all the brighter. This is anti-Judaism used as a tool. Its use only makes sense for expressing bigotry.
Second, does a critical statement about Jews or Judaism relate to actual actions by real Jews, or is it a negative figment of the mind? So, for example, the blood libel is a figment of the mind. It is untrue. There were never Jews who killed Christian children to use their blood for baking matzah. Another example: About a century ago, journalists proved that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book still widely used in contemporary bigoted discourse, is a baseless forgery purporting to publish leaked minutes of a secret Jewish conspiracy to run the world.
Third, does it use mental constructs labeled negatively “Jewish” as a tool to address issues where Jews are largely or entirely irrelevant? So, for example, we have the United Nations’ 1975 Zionism is Racism resolution (repealed in 1991). The UN used the distorted portrayal of the national liberation movement of the Jews as a tool with which the majority of states in the General Assembly could assault the United States and the West.
This “Nirenberg Test” is not infallible. However, it gives us an eloquent and easy-to-use tool. We can evaluate with some degree of confidence when we need to decide whether to take criticism seriously as legitimate and when we need to reject it as antisemitism.