In pursuit of anti-semitism

National Review, March 16, 1992 by William F. Buckley, Jr., Joseph Sobran, Ronald R. Stockton, Norman Podhoretz, William Pfaff, Irving Kristol, James M. Wall, A.M. Rosenthal, Alan M. Dershowitz, David Frum, Robert D. Novak, Hugh Kenner, Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., Murray Reswick, Eliot A. Cohen, Manfred Weidhorn, Murray Rothbard

WHAT FOLLOWS is material provoked by the publication of the essay "In Search of Anti-Semitism: What Christians Provoke What Jews? Why? By Doing What?--And Vice Versa." The essay was in five parts. It attempted, by examining complaints against Joseph Sobran, Patrick Buchanan, The Dartmouth Review, The Nation, and Gore Vidal, to explore the contemporary faces of anti-Semitism and of anti-anti-Semitism. The fifth part attempted to delineate some moral and political perspectives.

What is it that John Doe actually said that gave rise to the charge that he is anti-Semitic? Did it have to do with a single utterance by Mr. Doe, or is it that Mr. Doe appears to be fixated on questions that relate primarily to Jewish interests? In the context in which Mr. Doe spoke, are we enlightened as to his purposes in speaking as he did? Is it possible that in fact Mr. Doe is not anti-Semitic (three dozen people who know him well swear to it that there isn't a bigoted bone in his body) but that those who do not know him as John, but need to make judgments based on what he says and writes as John Doe, plausibly think him to be anti-Semitic? In such a situation, what can Mr. Doe do to efface the impression he has made, which impression he wishes he had not made? Or does he care?

Is one's attitude toward Israel a reliable index of one's attitude toward Jews? Many writers have complained that opposition to Israel is regularly misinterpreted as betraying anti-Semitic sentiment. Some Jewish writers and thinkers will say that to criticize policies of the government of Israel isn't anti-Semitic, but to question the right of Israel to exist may and probably is motivated by hostility to Jews. When such questions arise, the job becomes to scrutinize the way in which hostility to Israel is expressed, in an effort to reason to whether that hostility is probably motivated by generic opposition to any corporate Jewish purpose. Why should the effort be made? Because the reaches of anti-Semitism are an all but contemporary memory.

The essay brought in a great deal of commentary. We received about two hundred letters, and the ratio was 3 to 1 critical of the essay. Many of these criticisms, however, were based on the presidential candidacy of Pat Buchanan (For heaven's sakes, why get in the way of a genuine protest candidate?), not withstanding that we had made it plain that the essay was written before Mr. Buchanan announced his candicacy. Some critics seemed to be saying that because he decided to enter the race, we should therefore have put off publication of an essay in the research and writing of which almost an entire summer was spent. Some readers complained that I had not got around actually to defining anti-Semitism. That is formally correct, I did not: though I thought it pretty plain that a definition crystallized in what I said, and in the language I quoted. Anti-Semitism has different energy levels. One reader wrote that he defined anti-Semitism as a dislike or disapproval a) even of Jews one has never met and b) of any corporate objectives identifiable as of special concern to prominent and vociferous Jews--a pretty good definition, which would account for the casual anti-Semitism of someone who reacts in opposition to whatever organized Jewry is seen to be up to because organized Jewry desires that end. The manifestations are many and varied. They are sometimes signaled in that little exclamation, the single comment direct or oblique, the blurt, the cocked eyebrow, which can be the equivalent of addressing an uppity Negro in the old South as "Snowball."

WHY SHOULD we care? The subject is important for moral as well as intellectual and analytical reasons. The Holocaust is one of the great nightmares of history, and just as the Catholic Church has spent a hundred years agonizing over the Spanish Inquisition, it is inevitable that the poisoned wells that generated Auschwitz should continue under microscopic scrutiny by those who do not understand, but seek to do so, how the anti-Semitism of the Twenties and Thirties, largely social and cultural, metastasized into the Holocaust. Might such lackadaisical anti-Semitism have been the culture impregnated by the "scientific racism" of such as Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, itself an atheistic bastard child of late-nineteenth-century rationalism? The essay declares that Auschwitz has now become, so to speak, a senior citizen: Most present-day Germans were not even alive when the ovens were working. What they and others are left with is a historical memory, even as we have a historical memory of the age of slavery. That memory enjoins careful supervision of undisciplined thought and commentary. On the other hand, if we are intimidated by unreasoned or opportunistic denunciations, useful thought is impossible.

Our critics addressed these and other themes. They were columnists, editorial writers, academicians, clergymen, and of course NATIONAL REVIEW's great body of readers. We reproduce some of this material. A word about what criteria I used in deciding what to publish in space that accommodates less than one-tenth of the volume of commentary the essay generated: