Monika Schwarz-Friesel and Jehuda Reinharz INSIDE THE ANTISEMITIC MIND The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry Jehuda Reinharz, General Editor | ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Associate Editor Sylvia Fuks Fried, Associate Editor | Eugene R. Sheppard, Associate Editor The Tauber Institute Series is dedicated to publishing compelling and innovative approaches to the study of modern European Jewish history, thought, culture, and society. The series features scholarly works related to the Enlightenment, modern Judaism and the struggle for emancipation, the rise of nationalism and the spread of antisemitism, the Holocaust and its aftermath, as well as the contemporary Jewish experience. The series is published under the auspices of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry—established by a gift to Brandeis University from Dr. Laszlo N. Tauber—and is supported, in part, by the Tauber Foundation and the Valya and Robert Shapiro Endowment. For the complete list of books that are available in this series, please see www.upne.com *Monika Schwarz-Friesel Federica K. Clementi and Jehuda Reinharz Holocaust Mothers and Daughters: Inside the Antisemitic Mind: Family, History, and Trauma The Language of Jew-Hatred in *Ulrich Sieg Contemporary Germany Germany’s Prophet: Paul de Lagarde Elana Shapira and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant Architecture, and Design in Fin de Holocaust Literature: Siècle Vienna A History and Guide ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Sylvia Fuks Fried, *Mordechai Altshuler and Eugene R. Sheppard, editors Religion and Jewish Identity in the The Individual in History: Essays in Soviet Union, 1941–1964 Honor of Jehuda Reinharz Robert Liberles Immanuel Etkes Jews Welcome Coffee: Tradition and Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady: The Innovation in Early Modern Germany Origins of Chabad Hasidism Sharon Faye Koren *Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky, Forsaken: The Menstruant in Medieval editors Jewish Mysticism Sites of European Antisemitism in the Nils Roemer Age of Mass Politics: 1880–1918 German City, Jewish Memory: The Story Sven-Erik Rose of Worms Jewish Philosophical Politics David Assaf in Germany, 1789–1848 Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and ChaeRan Y. Freeze and Discontent in the History of Hasidism Jay M. Harris, editors Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia: Select Documents, 1772–1914 Glorious, Accursed Europe: An Essay on Jewish Ambivalence David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye, editors Eugene M. Avrutin, Valerii Dymshits, Alexander Ivanov, Alexander Lvov, The Faith of Fallen Jews: Harriet Murav, and Alla Sokolova, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the editors Writing of Jewish History Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions * A Sarnat Library Book MONIKA SCHWARZ-FRIESEL AND JEHUDA REINHARZ A Sarnat Library Book | Brandeis University Press Waltham, Massachusetts Brandeis University Press An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2017 Brandeis University This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. All rights reserved For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61168-983-9 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61168-984-6 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61168-985-3 This publication was made possible by the generous support of Brandeis University’s Bernard G. and Rhoda G. Sarnat Center for the Study of Anti-Jewishness, which aims to promote a deeper understanding of anti-Jewish prejudice, as well as Jewish and non-Jewish responses to this phenomenon, from both a historical and contemporary perspective. CONTENTS Preface to the English Edition (2016) xi Preface to the German Edition (2013) xix Notational Conventions xxiii 1 Introduction The eedN for This Book 1 2 Hostility toward Jews and Language Verbal Imposition of Power and Violence 7 Language as a Cognitive System and Communicative Instrument for Action 7 The owerP of Language as Violence through Language 12 The Reconstruction of Antisemitic Conceptualizations: Linguistic Utterances as Traces of Cultural, Cognitive, and Emotional Processes 16 Conceptual and Verbal Antisemitism 18 Conclusion 26 3 Hostile Stereotypes of Jews and Their Historical Roots 28 On the Genesis of Resentment toward Jews: Why the Jews? 28 Survival and Resistance of Judeophobic Stereotypes in Modern Times 39 Antisemitism as State Doctrine: The “Final Solution” as the Ultimate Consequence of Judeophobia 49 Hostility toward Jews after 1945: Minimization of the Caesura in Civilization and Withholding of Empathy 54 Present-Day Hostility toward Jews: The “New” Antisemitism of the Twenty-First Century 60 Conclusion 65 4 Present-Day Verbalization of Stereotypes 67 Stereotypes, Mental Models, Prejudices, Clichés, and Stock Phrases: Terminological and Conceptual Clarifications 67 Current Stereotypes and Their Verbal Manifestations 75 Conclusion 125 5 Echo of the Past “The insolent Jew is harassing Germans once again!” 128 Components of Nazi Speech in Contemporary Discourse Hostile toward Jews 128 Lexical Analyses of Insolence/Insolent and Harass/ Harassment 138 Conclusion 142 6 Anti-Israelism as a Modern Variant of Verbal Antisemitism The Modern Conceptualization of the Collective Jew 145 Criticism of Israel versus Anti-Israelism: Two Different Speech Acts 145 Characteristics of Antisemitic Anti-Israelism 157 “As I just read in my paper . .” —Intertextual Allusions and Verbal Convergences: On the Potential Effects of One-Sided Reports on the Middle East Conflict 187 Conclusion 192 7 A Comparison with Other Countries in Europe Results of a Contrastive Analysis 194 Austria 194 Switzerland 195 The etherlandsN 197 Spain 198 Belgium 199 England 199 Ireland 201 Sweden 202 Conclusion 203 8 The Emotional Basis of Modern Hostility toward Jews 205 On the Relevance of Emotions to the Analysis of Antisemitism 205 The motionalE Potential of Antisemitic Texts: Expression of Emotions and Description of Feelings 208 The Obsessive Dimension 216 Contrary to Reason: On the Dominance of the Irrational Dimension in Antisemitic Texts 222 Hate without a Real Object: Jew as an Abstract Notion 231 Conclusion 234 9 Acts of Verbal Violence 235 Abuse, Insults, Threats, Curses 236 Hostility toward Jews as a Missionary Urge: Moral Appeals and Advice 255 Suggestions for Solving the “Jewish Problem”: “Exterminate them for good!” and “Dissolve the state of Israel” 266 Conclusion 274 10 Textual Strategies and Patterns of Argumentation 276 Communicative Strategies and Argumentative Elaboration 276 Strategies of Legitimation and Self-Aggrandizement: “I am a humanist through and through!” 280 Strategies of Avoidance and Self-Defense: “I am no antisemite!” 285 Strategies of Justification: You“ provoke that!” 296 Relativizing Strategies: “After all, it’s 2007!” 309 Strategies of Differentiation: You“ are one team” 316 Conclusion 321 Appendix The asicB Corpus—Letters to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli Embassy in Berlin, 2002–2012 325 Notes 347 Bibliography 391 Index 417 For an additional appendix of selected complete texts included in the corpus, visit http://bir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/26034 PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION (2016) The roadb public and academic reaction to the German edition of this book, published early in 2013, was bewilderment, almost shock. In spite of people’s knowledge of the Holocaust and what consequences a rhetoric of hate and hostility might have, Jews are frequently attacked verbally in contemporary discourse. The experience of the lethal worldview that led to Auschwitz did not bring the strategies of verbally dehumanizing and demon- izing the Jews to an end. Such strategies prevail and are frequently used in modern discourse, even by highly educated people from mainstream society. Further, in the twenty-first century, the official ban on antisemitic utterances has lost its influence, and the articulation of traditional antisemitic stereotypes by projecting them on Israel has increased significantly. How is it possible that in the seventy years since the end of the Holocaust, years of coping with the past, years of remembrance and education, of making antisemitic utterances socially taboo and legally banned from public discourse, Judeophobic thought and feeling have not been driven from the heart of society? Why has the hatred of Jews not been erased from the collective and communicative memory? The rich body of empirical data this book is based on shows that the old resentment is still very much alive, not only on the edges of society, but also in the mainstream of German and European society. In fact, antisemitism turns out to be a worldwide phenomenon on the rise, as recent years have shown: In Hungary, the Jobbik party is part of the government and openly antisemitic. In Sweden, the Jewish community is under pressure because of the growing hatred of Jews stemming mainly from the Muslim community. Jews have been attacked and killed in Belgium and in France, spit upon in Rome and in London, and more. In Berlin, a rabbi was knocked down on the street in front of his little daughter. Jewish cemeteries and synagogues have been desecrated. Jewish institutions in Germany have to be kept under constant police supervision. International polls show that the attitude toward the Jewish state of Israel has become extremely hostile and aggressive everywhere; this hostility is based on Judeophobic stereotypes and an age-old bias in new garb. All over the world, frantic and obsessive anti-Israel boycott movements have spread, gaining influence especially in left-wing circles, but also in parts of the Christian Church. There is a virulent campus antisemitism in both U.S. and British colleges and universities that claims to be critical of Israel but in fact is based on hostility toward Jews and uses the same demonizing verbal strategies as do right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis. Hatred of the Jewish state of Israel is at the center of the activities of antisemites no matter whether from the right, left, or mainstream.