Hunting the Headwaters of Anti-Semitism

Headwaters: a tributary stream of a river close to or forming part of its source.

A lighthearted stroll through pogroms, boils and genocide.

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When we evaluate situations, two common errors confuse good intentions with good outcomes and divide the world into binaries: oppressor vs. oppressed, rich vs poor, caring vs. Scrooge McDuck, and victim vs. aggressor.  We get so baked on our good intentions that we forget to look at the outcomes or look at them through a lens of whataboutism, somehow forcing them to conform to our self-perception, a perception convinced of our moral superiority. And binaries are more straightforward; they simplify things to a word or two and help us fit our points on the poster board they sell at Dollar General.  

Wokeism likes to take its keywords, with all its brand-building gear and camp out on Binary Island: don’t you want to free Palestine? Freeing something is good, right?   And it’s an excellent binary, though the problem with freeing Palestine is that for most Palestinians, it means freeing Israelis of their country and freeing  Jews of their lives.  

So, what is the source of anti-semitism? If we could figure that out, could we stop its flow? 

 Where are these hidden source streams, these hidden headwater streams, coming from? Is it an enduring evil? Are babies born hating Jews? Can historical ground be covered? Can we push the foliage aside? Can we find the headwaters of this cruel and mighty river? 

Are there too many Jews? 

The Jewish people are not a race nor just a religion, ethnicity or culture.  But if we stick to religion, you know who edges out Judaism in religious popularity?  Kardecism, yes, those damn Kardecs, always stealing our children for their ceremonies and taking all the excellent banking jobs and starting world wars.  They began in France in the 19th century, are big in Brazil and like to turn tables.  

No, there are less than 16 million Jews; that can’t be the problem.  And that’s not in the US; that’s in the world—a million less than in 1933. 

So many who hate Jews have never met one.  Strangely, anti-semitic ratings by the Anti-Defamation League put many countries with negligible Jewish populations as the most anti-semitic.  Countries with the most prominent Jewish populations have the lowest rating.   But not always; Laos is the least anti-semitic country with a rating of .2, and the Philippines is very quiet at 3%.  

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However, despite diversity being our strength, Canadians don’t have much to boast about, coming in at 15%. 

We might not consistently beat the Yanks at hockey. Still, at anti-semitism, we are clearly in the lead; it’s like being up 3-1 with two minutes left in the third.   But don’t forget to put your Maple Leaf on your backpack, kids. 

While Muslim countries are the most anti-semitic, it is also based on geography as well as religion. North Africa and the Middle East average around  75%, and Iran is lower than Greece, Malaysia and Armenia.  Iraq is 92%, Lebanon is 78%, and Russia is 31%.   

Is the Jew hate due to those Jews being too rich and greedy?  

But Judaism commands adherents to give; statistically, they fill up the offering plate more than Protestants, so not that.  The more religious Muslims, Christians or Jews, the more they tend to give. And if they are rich from banking, it’s because banking and money lending were a safe space; Jews went there because the Catholic church looked down their noses at usury.  Weed the muddy garden; why did you get mud on your new sneakers? Culture shapes individuals. Maybe Jewish culture just makes good business people. 

Could it be about killing Christ?  Nobody even goes to church anymore. 

The deicide trope drips anger from a 2000-year-old murder, flaring up in outbursts of ‘Christ killer’ rage. But on the reason to hate Jews intelligence scale, this one still scrapes the bottom against some decidedly weak competition.  Christianity would not be Christianity without a resurrection, and it was more a Roman hit job anyway.  I don’t see a lot of people screaming “Christ killer!” in front of Domino’s, even though they put those ‘Genuine Italian Pizza’  posters on the glass. 

Is it just because of Israel?  

Is that getting us close to the headwaters for the anti-semitic flows?  Is it just a thing because of big bad Israel, that New Jersey-sized bully country?  

(This image is taken from @waelramadan1948’s LI; calling for eliminating Israel is not a problem at the University of Guelph-Humber; it lets you hang out with all the admin. They are fully on board).

But Jew hatred has a long history.  It had been running around the world for millennia when Hitler was filling his diaper and was well-entrenched thousands of years before you heard a lot of Zion chatter. It doesn’t explain the other 3000 years of Jew-hatred; if it was 1290 and you were living in England and the King was busy reading “Five easy ways to kick Jews out of your country,” it still looked pretty bad for the Jews. 

Examining the Jewish experience more closely isn’t always encouraging. Although there were some good years, there were more bad years than good.

So why hasn’t the binary of oppressor vs. oppressed never helped the Jews?  Shouldn’t that have got them some points? 

I mean, their history screams oppressed. 

Yes, absolutely; for the bulk of history, they have been the oppressed, the minority, the weak.  Come on, wokesters. You are not playing by the rules. 

It wasn’t always that they were simply weak; they had some excellent years, and King David took them on a good run. The Temple of Solomon was quite something.  But still, since Abraham went on his Caanan trek, Jews have not only spent a lot of time not just oppressed but in slavery.   

Oppressed.  Hello.  Oppressed.  You like us now, right?  Slavery is some hard oppression. Hello.  

Two hundred years of slavery in Egypt. But with the divine, no swimming allowed, bloody beaches, frogs, lice, flies, dead cows, festering, purulent pussy pustules, hail that today would have put any car insurance company into receivership, locusts, pre-hippie protein sources, darkness like Winnipeg in December and the killing of firstborn children  - which I guess for twins would still mean my brother, first out of the shoot - it persuaded the Egyptians to listen to Moses and create the first stat holiday that encouraged travel.

And even after that, they got chased across the Red Sea and signed up for a lousy timeshare in the desert that took them 40 years to ditch. 

The promised land brought in a good millennia, but then the Babylonians had to stir things up, and for many Jews, it was back to slavery. Still, it was a newly improved Jewish slavery because when the Persians said they could head back to Jerusulam in 586 BC, many didn’t leave.  Maybe it was just that moving was such a hassle, Stockholm syndrome, or Jerusalem’s U-Haul was out of those shitty moving chariots with the broken spokes. 

Jewish existence stayed under Persian control. Judaism evolved, the Hasmoneon Dynasty stepped up, and the Jewish people finally won a rebellion, the Maccabean Revolt, and got Hanukkah out of it. The Torah became real. The Persians exited, the Romans came, and Jesus came and went. Busy, busy. Palestine was named by some pissed-off Romans who were trying to remind the Jews of their hated Philistine neighbours. It's like Edmonton renaming Calgary Edmontonary or Real Madrid being renamed Real Marcelona.

After this, the Jews still stuck together, but the club code wasn’t followed as strictly.  It’s hard to stick together when you’re being chased.  Some moved by choice, but Jew moves often tend to be involuntary.  Plus, there were more rebellions from Jewish tribes.  They clearly wouldn’t put up with that assimilation shit. 

Still, in most of their uprisings, the Jews usually lost, the occasional massacre, or maybe they scaled down to just a pogrom, just standard Jewy history.  And a lot of the violence against Jews didn’t need any uprising; people just got the itch for recreational Jew killing.  But Jewish people were a feisty bunch; they didn’t take any guff,  and they continued the bad habit of rebelling against their overloads and losing. 

The Romans kicked their ass and sent them to Masada, where leaping to your death was thought better than Roman rule.

And we need to note that historically, “Diversity is our Strength” thinking hasn’t always been the rule. It’s more of a new 21st-century thing. At least rhetorically. 

So, Jews often got squeezed between superpowers and asked to assimilate and worship the local gods.  What happened to all those other Middle Eastern tribes?  Who says they are a Caananite now? Do you see any little Baals in Caananite coffee shops?  

It wasn’t only the Jews who got squeezed; many tribes with unique faiths, traditions and values also got crushed between ancient powerhouses, and they ended up being lost to history. Many others played the game just to get along but never left the gaming table.  But the Jews held firm; the band did not break up; they stuck together; they didn’t invite the neighbour kids to join.  

The Jews never got to live in England till 1066, and then, in about 70 years, things were already going downhill.  But kicking the Jews out wasn’t just a British thing; it has been the rage for thousands of years. Over 300 expulsions if you don’t count Abraham’s original trip.  Christians, or crusader butchers with a lot of Christian gear, started killing Jews along their noble path to Jerusalem, where they could do some diversity-based murder and start killing Muslims. Still, the Christians ultimately got their ass handed to them.  But the Muslims were no shrinking violets, spreading quickly. They dominated, and while there were some forced conversations, there was a lot of bandwagon jumping. 

Yes, Christians like to blame ‘those Muslims,” but blaming or killing the Jews wasn’t always just a game taught at a UNRWA school in Bethlehem; it goes way back and crosses religions.  Many Christians were so very much, hey, its a plague, hey, blame the Jew, hey, it was too cold, blame the Jew, dry season, stop holding off the rain Jews; hey look, your cousin Edgar says the bad harvest had nothing to do bad luck or using unaged chicken shit for fertilizer.  Blame those weird Jewy people, Edgar preached. 

Oh yes, “Blame the Jews, blame the Jews” is a jaunty tune that has never fallen off the hit parade, echoing through the ages.   A few years ago, Egyptians blamed shark attacks at one of their beaches on Jews.  

There is some debate on how Jews did under the Muslims. They were often overtaxed, but maybe not as bad as under Trudeau.  Sometimes, violence erupted against Jews in Muslim lands, especially when they seemed too successful. Doing too well, having too many Nobel prizes, debate team victories, scientific discoveries, and academic awards, all was suspicious and helped Jew hate to keep going viral. 

For instance, in Granada in 1066, a Jewish leader was killed, leading to the massacre of many Jews. Similar events happened in Fez in 1465 and other places throughout history.

Indeed, good old-fashioned jealousy might not be as sexy as blood libel, but it might have led to as many expulsions and pogroms. Synagogues were destroyed in various Muslim regions, and Jews were forced to convert or face death. 

Is it just good old-fashioned jealousy? 

(I have no shame—tip jar. Right now, I’m making .33 a day on paid subscribers. I'm Canadian. )

Despite some Jews achieving high status, they often faced persecution, confiscation of property, or forced conversions. Maimonides described the situation of the Jews after five centuries of Muslim rule.  He was not one of the it’s been a great Jew-Muslim party camp. 

‘No nation has ever done more harm to Israel,’ he noted: ‘None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have.’   Ouch.  

But if we are still picking teams on the old oppressed-oppressor binary, the Jews are still looking quite oppressed. So, still good? 

Scapegoat BBQs?

However, the early medieval period brought in a new growth industry in animal husbandry in the form of scapegoat breeding.  Blaming one person showed some binary thinking.  

But Jew scapegoats are fat and tasty.  So when, in the early medieval period, tribes or country folk had a bad harvest, and when all their relatives got gonorrhoea, they didn’t blame their cousin Fiona, the town prostitute; no, it was time for a Festivus celebration with Jew scapegoat the main course.  

Medieval Europe seemed to be a shitty time all around.  Thomas Hobbes said it was “nasty, brutish and short, " even in the late and good medieval periods. After that, Hobbes was fired from his job at the Medieval Tourism Board. 

Jump ahead 300  years, and In the middle of the 19th century, Jews in North Africa were forced into ghettos, abused, and accused of crimes they didn’t do, including bad weather, lack of rain, too much rain and toenail fungus. 

And the pogroms, there were over 100,000 Jews killed in Jewish pogroms in Ukraine from 1918-1921.  Only Jews and Armenians could be slaughtered at levels like this and have it forgotten in history and keep missing history textbook publisher’s deadlines.  And there were more pogroms in Romania and Hungary.  

Still no headwaters.

Blood libel used to be the thing, going back to medieval times, but hitting big time when the Russians wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book that pretended to be historical.  It was like a bundled plan for anti-semites,  giving users the basic charge that Jews were using the blood of Christians in rituals and adding in such hits as the Jews also poisoning wells, starting plagues and looking to take out the Christians.  In 1900, there were 56 Christians for every single Jew, so they must have been looking at doing some killer Krav Maga.  

And then came the Holocaust; six million out of a total of 15 million Jews were murdered in addition to Roma, the handicapped and those who didn’t like goose-stepping.  The Nazis, though, had a lot of help from Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Hungarians, and others—the international division of the SS was one of the most diverse organizations in the world. Diversity was their strength. In occupied territory, the German government could execute orders without restrictions.

The Jews had won all the good citizen awards, and they thought that protected them from the Nazis—a big mistake.  Neighbours who had lived by a neighbour for generations would turn the neighbour in to get a bigger apartment. Many ethnic enthusiasts trying to impress the new kids in their Hugo Boss uniforms just signed up to kill Jews because they, well, liked killing Jews. 

And after the Holocaust, the Jews should have been maxing out on their popular woke oppressed loyalty program. 

Waves of Jewish immigrants had started in the 1890s.  But today, many forget them and claim that the creation of Israel was a pity post-Holocaust gift; Jews had been pining for Zion since the late 1890s, and it has been on the table for longer.  And all those Jews that had been chased all over the world as the diaspora expanded after Babylonian captivity now were deemed to have left Palestine hundreds of years ago because they liked British winters.  It rivalled the intelligence of asking the descendants of a captured African slave in America what they were doing in America.  I mean, sorry about buying your great, great, great, great, great grandfather from an African or Arab slavery superstore, putting him on a ship where half the people died from starvation and the rest had flesh ripped off their back with a whip, and sorry about the unpaid labour and the hundreds of years of slavery - but we think you should go back. 

As far as the oppressed bonus point system, one might have hoped that there would be some empathy for a cultural group that had just lost half its population. 

One might have hoped that such compassion lasted more than a few hours after Israel declared independence.  But no.  After 1200 were massacred on Oct. 7 in Israel, history’s record skipped, and we heard it again, and the sympathy for Jews and any measure of empathy lasted about 15 minutes.  Even my mother-in-law gave my daughter a day off from nagging her about making her bed the day Ozzie, her hamster, met his maker at the hand of Masha, the cat.  

So still, where are the headwaters for this river of anti-Semitism?  Are folks still mad about Lenin and Trotsky being Jews?  Not over it? 

But Trotsky and Lenin are still popular and famous on the left, so that can’t be it.  

It’s only sixteen million people, but they have overachieved.  Why all the hate?  Is it the food? It started a few thousand years too early to bring up Palestine; it seems that anti-semitism lives like the cicadas; you don’t always see it, but it’s been resurrected by a war that started when 1200 innocents were butchered in Israel, where a New Jersey-sized country is the world’s first country given the role of the acquiescence Jews.  But they have refused, no longer apologising to the world for not cowering and cringing, no, sorry, not giving their neighbour butcher a mulligan after he just wrapped his driver around their neck on the neighbourhood golf course.  

The headwaters, those streams, what streams form the headwater for this rushing torrent that is anti-Semitism? What streams form that hate for those who, after sixteen years of education, the last four studying enlightenment values, now can twist their consciences to align themselves with a group so consumed by hatred that one of them calls home, ebullient with joy to brag to his proud parents about the crying woman and baby in the corner that he has just shot and burned?  

When you follow the river back to the streams, what mighty river flows in 2024 Toronto to the modern diversity is our strength Trudeau style university where a boy screams “Fuck Zionists!” at the top of his lungs in the atrium during the afternoon class? 

 A Jewish girl sits in my office, stuffing her track jacket from the Maccabiah Games in her backpack. 

Does eliminating sources bring us closer to discovery, or does it just leave us more perplexed, wet and cold, now getting lost, the night falling, and a fierce storm gathering to drench us, the rain so fierce it fills the air and scarcely lets us breathe?  

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