There is a well-known curse, supposedly Chinese, that goes: May you live in interesting times! In my childhood I lived in a New York City that snowed in winter. We schoolkids built snowmen and went sledding in the park. Life in the Big City was unexciting, but it felt safe and solid.

The American philosopher William James (1842-1910) wrote an essay with the title, “What Makes a Life Significant?” In it, he tells of a week he spent at “a center for the arts and education in upstate New York.” Everyone attending this center was wonderfully well behaved. All kinds of instructive and edifying activities were offered for every age group. “And yet” James writes, “what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: ‘Ouf! What a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as …[he cites a well-known massacre] to set the balance straight again.’”

Speaking of real-life’s brutalities, this morning I spoke by Skype to an English friend and philosophic colleague. We were talking about the tidal wave of anti-semitism in universities and other cultivated circles over there. Possibly a bit worse than here in America. By this time, it’s no longer half-concealed or merely implied. On the other hand, if you’re Jewish, you can still get by socially if you can be heard loudly scourging “racist” Israel. You know the drill: “Zionism is racism.”

Jews are a people – not a race. You can convert to Judaism, which you can’t do to a race different from your own. Adolf Hitler employed pseudo-Darwinian evolutionary language to classify different groups along a Nazi scale of higher to lower. Jews, however, Hitler put in a category of his own devising: he deemed Jews a toxic “race,” one that had to be entirely eliminated from planet earth, deliberately and systematically.

When in November of 1975, the UN passed a resolution which claimed that “Zionism is Racism,” it echoed Hitler’s system of classification. First, it made Jews into a race. Then it transformed Israel’s purpose – which was first of all to provide a national home for the victims of the longest hatred in recorded history, a hatred which, most recently under the Nazis, had taken the form of denominating Jews a toxic race – by terming that very refuge “racist”!

Incidentally, not only are Jews not a race, but Israel’s May, 1948 Declaration of Independence includes, as one of its constituted purposes, to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex ….”

Anyway, I wondered what was psychologically accomplished by the rampant anti-semitism of which my English colleague was speaking. I had in mind my personal experience of a friend or two who had turned anti-semitic. In the case of such former friends, I’d been able to predict that this turn would happen, at least a month or two before it actually did happen. There would be some event or challenge in the person’s life – not involving Jews – which would be construed as insurmountable. The person would take that defeat or unresolved issue and erase it from chronological memory. As a result, there would be a hole in the person’s remembered timeline. Antisemitism would come in to fill the hole. After all, anti-semitism is the hatred of the people who continuously remember their history and, in the Hebrew Bible, have given the world the formative record of that history.

Is there, I asked my English friend, any equivalent erasure in current English experience? Here is what he conjectured. When the English defeated Napoleon, they enjoyed a hundred years of peace, safety and cultural flourishing. World War I ended that and devastated the youth of England. It killed, maimed, drained, and demoralized a generation. Dreading another war, many resisted as long as they could the war that Hitler would nevertheless bring down on them. When that war was finally over, they had no more heart for further tests of will or valor. They can’t fight the jihadis. They can’t fight Russia or China. 

Civilizations have cycles of birth, growth, maturity and decay. At present, the English don’t seem preponderantly to feel that they have another cycle in them. So, to fill the void, they join the jackal-baying around a Jewish state that can and will defend itself to its last breath.

So after all, and like it or not,

we live in interesting times.

Related Content: Anti-Semitism’s Secret Springs | Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower