Paganphobia: Why fight against anti-Semitism seems stuck in insularity

I think the challenge in persuading the mainstream about present-day anti-Semitism can be understood in terms of the “Vertical” and “Horizontal” framework of propaganda and generational survival I have proposed in some of my earlier columns. I have written in the past about how Sanatana Dharma or Hinduism broadly is mostly a “Vertical” or intergenerational phenomenon rather than a horizontal, or congregational, or group, or mass religion. Its integrity lies in intergenerational preservation of micro traditions, and its existential challenges lie in the “Horizontalising” forces at work in breaking these intergenerational ties, beginning with the colonial-era missionaries and armies, and taking the form today of the secular Indian state, media, corporations, and so on. When the Horizontal fully succeeds, what we find is a generation disconnected and often even severely (and irrationally) hostile to elders and the past, and indifferent to its own future and the possibility of raising descendants of any sort even. In the case of the Jewish community, it is dependent not only on the Vertical (intergenerational continuity in its story about itself) but is also more “Horizontal” than Hindus, in the sense that it has a strong sense of itself as a people. Such an awareness should make for effective organisation and push back against hatred, but clearly something has gone wrong, at least in the past few decades. Despite the legendary “Jewish lobby” in American politics and cultural life, it is clear that their story has lost some persuasive ground in the new global propaganda battlefield. Some of it, as I will show below, is due to its own limitations in understanding, and story-telling, which I point out in a spirit of compassion and respect. For decades, the Jewish community kept alive the memory of the Holocaust not only in its own “vertical” traditions, but also, very effectively, in the mainstream culture through advertising, education, museums and so on. Movies like Schindler’s List, enabled by the presence of talented creative voices in the Jewish community, ensured that the world never forgot their pain. But somewhere along the way, by the late 1990s or early 2000s, the narrative of Jewish pain simply slipped. It was not for lack of funding (unlike the Hindu case) but because of a lack of clarity in managing the “Vertical” and “Horizontal” in the communication front. To put it more concretely, throughout the 1990s, I would see classmates and friends from Israel in American campuses who came in with a strong sense of “Vertical,” a story of Jewish persecution and struggle and survival inculcated since childhood, including a sense of sacred destiny about Israel, which would simply fold when confronted by the tale of Palestinian suffering by their peers and professors on campus. I have seen this happen numerous times, and usually, it seemed like one of the reasons was that Jewish students had received only a strong, in-house, “vertical” story about their past persecution, which had left them unprepared for the new challenges posed to them in diverse or “horizontal” contexts (sometimes even by progressive Jewish professors rooting for Palestine). To illustrate, the way in which Jewish suffering (and the case for Israel) was made in everyday conversations, often seemed oblivious to the global (“horizontal”) human rights idiom of “oppressors and underdogs” that emerged in recent times. Instead, the case for Israel was made by its defenders in a tone similar to that of Christian missionaries; as if somehow people who did not know about the Holocaust, like Jesus’s sacrifice, were guilty of sin (interestingly, Weiss quotes an ADL survey which finds that only about half the people in the world have heard of the Holocaust, which indicates an expectation of global alignment emanating from a lack of “horizontal” self-reflexivity). Swastika/Hakenkreuz Once, I was in a discussion about the Swastika (Hindu, Buddhist, Indigenous) versus Hakenkreuz (Nazi) issue, following a news report on an American official’s visit to India which digitally erased a swastika on a temple wall in the background of a photo. Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu perspectives were all considered. Yet, I was told that Buddhists and Hindus should simply stop using their ancestral symbol because Hitler had tainted it now for everybody. (This, of course, is not the view of all modern Jews, and many Jewish leaders have commendably stood by Hindus on this and other matters, duly acknowledged). I said how on earth would you even begin to do that? Send thousands of missionaries into tiny Indian villages to teach one billion oblivious farmers’ families that their ancestral scrawling offended a far-off nation they did not even know about? Conversely, what if the victims of colonialism and slavery made the same demand to anyone displaying a cross? These examples indicate that perhaps the learning experience in the Jewish community, at least in the United States, has been largely in-house, and indifferent to the growing “horizontal” context. It is not set up to dialogue, grow, and still hold its own with outsiders – even sympathetic outsiders. I say this after over twenty years of teaching, and growing, to see the alarming reality facing many of us now. Finally, I would like to point out what I think is a core limitation in the “vertical” Jewish view of its history of persecution especially when it comes to a Hindu view of our increasingly shared concerns and interests. To do so, I would like to return to the question of the history of antisemitism that I started with earlier. The dominant view in academia and the “liberal” establishment is that antisemitism is real, but only when the “Right” does it. When the Left, or Hamas, do it, it can only be anti-Zionism, or even “decolonisation.” I suspect even progressive Jews who support Palestine are now refusing this lie. The emerging view, being asserted by Bari Weiss, and others, takes a bold, both-sides view, calling out antisemitism on Left and Right. ‘Pagans’ in History of Anti-Semitism However, there is an unspoken bias even in this emerging view, and one that is evident perhaps only to Hindu activists and scholars. This bias is present in how Weiss narrates the history of anti-Semitism. For Weiss, the origins of anti-Semitism lie not in Christianity, but in something even older. “Scholars place much of the blame on a pagan,” she writes, “an Egyptian priest by the name of Manetho … (who) insisted that the Jews of Egypt were actually lepers who had taken control of Egypt”. Another scholar she quotes takes the history back even further, and blames Egyptian priests who were offended by Jewish customs of animal sacrifice. And in yet another version of this pagan-blaming historiography, a recent Indian news video located the origins of antisemitism in the Roman pagan religion! Allegedly, the Romans were so insular and old-fashioned unlike our modern, liberal, cosmopolitan citizens, that they took offence to mere cultural difference (specifically, the matter of circumcision) and began hating the Jews! What is common in all these examples, from Weiss and others, is the unexamined replication of the tactic of blaming the (mostly extinct) pagan for something that is clearly very alive and well exclusively in non-pagan religions to this day. How do we know exactly how the Egyptian or Roman “pagan” religion originated antisemitism for sure? Given how strongly the Middle Eastern religions broke with their “pagan” pasts and razed their temples and burnt their libraries, how come this “pagan” culture had this one overwhelming magical effect on Christians and Muslims for generations to come in turning them anti-Semitic? After all, neither the “pagan” religion of Egypt nor Rome exists today, whereas the institutions of Christianity and Islam still do, with varying degrees of involvement in expiation for anti-Semitism. Weiss herself cites the book of Mathew, “‘His blood is on us and our children,’ the Jews say”, and Martin Luther’s 1543 pamphlet The Jews and their Lies where he describes the Jews as “venomous, bitter, vindictive, tricky serpents, assassins, and children of the devil”. In the Islamic context, she also quotes Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World to note that “Nazism combined with a particular interpretation of Islam to produce a particularly toxic brew”. The “Arab World” still seems to carry that “particular brew of Islam” in its attitudes to Jews and Israel. Yet, Weiss, like others in the insular “vertical” story, replicates a rampant paganphobia which manifests against Hindus to this day, frequently, as Hinduphobia. And therefore I do have to ask: Could the “pagan priest” business be simply like the Hakenkreuz or Hooked Cross being renamed as “Swastika” one (Hitler never used the Sanskrit word “Swastika” but only “hakenkreuz”)? Or Sanskrit and Brahmin pundits being blamed by European-American scholars (some of them Jewish) for somehow influencing the Nazis into hating Jews and doing the Holocaust? And even as I write, a video has surfaced of the Slovenian Lacanian critical theory superstar Slavoj Zizek ranting that the Bhagavad Gita was a “disgusting” book which Himmler carried in his pocket! All of these examples show that there is clearly a continuing problem with paganphobia here. Without this self-reflexivity and change, the battle against antisemitism will remain a lonely, isolated one, failing to see the civilisational realignments taking place before our eyes as we speak. I wonder if it is this innate bias which also led to Weiss’s seemingly unfair criticism of former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who despite being one of the bravest opponents of pan-Islamism and terrorism, is labelled by Weiss as an isolationist who is weakening US support for Israel. It is not just American Hindus like Gabbard, but India too that seems to confuse Weiss. In a bizarre reference to the one country that Israeli diplomats are proud of saying never persecuted Jews, she complains that anti-Zionists “say that Israel was established by foreign imperial powers, but they will ignore that modern India, say, was established the same way”. Perhaps Weiss believes in the Saudi-Qatar-Pakistan centric “South Asia” school which sees Bharat as a terra nullius of pagan savages until the Mughals and British “civilised” us and invented a country! Towards Hope, Again As a student of the media, and a Hindu, I sympathise with the terrible situation Jews everywhere are in today. I was profoundly moved when a few nights ago our Israeli friends who came from out of town for a prayer meeting in the Bay Area showed us their flag which had been folded and hidden in the back seat of their car. The urgency with which the parents urged the children to put it away (we were in Berkeley, after all, a scene of quite a few “anti-Zionist” demonstrations) made me very sad and wish fervently for peace, and truth, to return to the world. And of course, I hope, that feeling is reciprocated, and the insane spectre of Hinduphobia too is recognised and understood by them. At the moment though, the fight against anti-Semitism seems stuck in its very insular well. As long as the world sees the issue as a binary between powerful US-Israel on one side, and small, helpless, slingshot-and-pebbles Palestinian kids on the other, the real spectre of well-armed, well-financed, brilliantly propagandised pan-Islamism as a danger to the West, Israel, and India, which is quite a big part of the world population, will not be seen. A key step to overcoming this insularity would be to recognise that there is Paganphobia deeply entwined in the worldview of some who are fighting anti-Semitism today, and all the internet bonhomie between Israel and India will not wash it away automatically. We are in a great civilisational flux, and only the civilisations with the clearest and longest memory can hope to survive. (This is Part 2 of the two-part series) The writer is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including ‘Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence’ (Westland, 2015). Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .