Bernard Harrison Versus the Old-New Antisemitism

Six PAYING A DEBT: BERNARD HARRISON VERSUS THE OLD-NEW ANTISEMITISM Edward Alexander I feel a huge debt of gratitude to the Jews, going back many, many years, so it’s a pleasure that somebody feels I’m doing something to work it off. Bernard Harrison, personal correspondence to Edward Alexander, 10 October 2009 1. The Antisemitism of Liberals According to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910) “Antisemitism is a passing phase in the history of culture.” Since that san- guine declaration, antisemitism has had several very good rolls of the dice, culminating in the destruction of European Jewry. So horrendous was this event that a Jesuit priest once lamented, with touching simple-minded nostal- gia, that the Holocaust had given antisemitism a bad name. Does the tenacity of antisemitism through the ages prove that, as their enemies claim, the Jews are indeed a very bad lot, or that, as England’s chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks says: Anti-Semitism exists . whenever two contradictory factors appear in combination: the belief that Jews are so powerful that they are responsi- ble for the evils of the world, and the knowledge that they are so power- less that they can be attacked with impunity. (2003, p. 40) This combination of an enormous image (Christ-killer, conspiratorial Elder of Zion, Communist plotter, bloated capitalist plutocrat, Zionist imperialist, to name but a few examples) with ridiculously small numbers has proved irre- sistible to predators. The “new” antisemitism (flourishing in the “new” and “anti-racist” Europe) is by now the subject of at least a dozen books and scores, perhaps hundreds, of essays, published in America, England, France, Italy, Germany, and Israel. Their shared conclusion, set forth from a variety of perspectives, is that the physical violence of the new Jew-hatred, centered on Israel, is largely the work of young Muslims, but that the ideological violence 114 EDWARD ALEXANDER is the work primarily of leftists, “progressives,” battlers against racism, pro- fessed humanitarians, and liberals (including Jewish ones). Bernard Harrison’s book, The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Isra- el, and Liberal Opinion (2006) was his first major foray into the seething cauldron of controversy over the very existence of the state of Israel, and dealt almost entirely with the drift of British liberals and leftists into fascist antisemitism. He brought to the subject a new authorial identity, a different academic background from that of his predecessors, a distinctive and (despite the topic) even exhilarating voice, at once rational and passionate. It was also a courageous voice: coming to the defense of Israel, especially in Britain’s nasty climate of opinion, is not an exercise for the faint-hearted. This was not the first book on contemporary antisemitism by a gentile; it was preceded, in 2002, by Pierre-Andre Taguieff’s excellent La Nouvelle judeophobie (oddly titled in its English translation Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe [2004]). But Harrison made shrewd rhetorical use of his “gentile” perspective, which not only contradicted a major premise of the new antisemitism, i.e., that only Jews support Israel, but had made him privy to the expression of antisemitic prejudice, political as well as social, by apparently respectable academic people, “when Jews are absent” (2006, p. 80). But Harrison’s self-identification as a non-Jew is more than a rhetorical device. Rather, it expresses the extent to which he undertook both this book and his other writings, both before and after it, on Judaism and the Jewish people as payment of a debt that he believed he owed to Jewish religion and peoplehood. This was expressed as early as 1996 in “Talking Like a Jew: Re- flections on Identity and the Holocaust.” When an Israeli travel guide told him that “you talk like a Jew,” it dawned on him that “If Jewish ways of look- ing at and putting things have become recognizably a strand in my identity, have I not received parts of myself as a gift from Jews?” The essay recounts his own family background (“mixed” Catholic/Anglican) and especially his friendship in childhood with a classmate and his family, for whom he became a kind of ger toshav, a version of the stranger in Leviticus who dwells among the Hebrew people, and is the occasion for the enunciation, often repeated in the Hebrew Bible: And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 19:33–34; King James, Cambridge ed.) Harrison describes himself, early in The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism, as “a writer with little or no previous presence in the field or history of writing about public affairs” (2006, p. xiv), but only a philosopher trained in “habitual skepticism, bitterly close reading, and aggressive contentiousness contributed .

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