People have always been envious, prejudiced and holding grudges. Human nature has not changed. Yet, what sheds light on the timing of such sentiments resulting in persecutions, rationalized by new jargons and “isms”?
Since World War II, Western societies came to believe that that they had built back institutional and legal barriers to prevent hate and prejudices from turning into savagery that brought havoc to Western Europe between the two World Wars. Recent events show that these barriers have weakened, as reflected in daily anti-Semitic and anti-Israel outbursts in both the U.S. and Western Europe, already before the October 7, 2023 massacre. What weakened the barriers?
There are altogether 15 million Jews in the world, half residing in Israel. There are 8 billion people on the planet, 2 billion Muslims among them, living in 53 countries, mainly poor and failed states, and fighting among themselves along sectarian lines (Sunnis, Shias, Sufis), though most are united against both Jews and Israel’s mere existence. The Houthis’ slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, [and] a Curse on the Jews,” no different from Islamists’ and anti-Semites.’
Another 3 billion people live in India and China, and the rest in Africa and Latin America, which, with few exceptions, live with atavistic, theocratic, tribal institutions. Another roughly 1 billion live in Western-style welfare states. This demographic explosion started about a century ago, when there were 2 billion people in the world, and even by the 1960s, only 4 billion.
The 7.5 million Israelis, many roughly 3 generations removed from the Holocaust and persecution under communism, turned Israel into a “start-up nation,” having had only 800,000 citizens in 1948 fighting for the new country’s survival, and notwithstanding wars, terror and threats of annihilation from neighbouring countries since. They became prominent in technology, science, business and arts – and military too. So did the other 7.5 million Jews in Western Europe and the U.S., receiving a vastly disproportionate number of Nobel prizes, and becoming prominent in finance, media and cultural institutions too. Anti-Semites, and anti-Israel mobs believing in conspiracies have never raised the question of how 15 million can bamboozle billions?
What does shed light on the outstanding achievements? The facts are that now, as throughout centuries, whenever a large number of people are leapfrogged, Jewish communities, minuscule in number, and, as such, lacking political clout and already disliked and envied, have seen prejudices and envy turn into persecution. Human nature invariably intervenes.
For millennia, Jews found themselves pursuing skills that the rest of the world started acquiring centuries later. Jewish religion was based on a book, demanding literacy and a belief in an abstract deity rather than local, geography- and weather- deities of illiterate societies, many still illiterate in the 20th century. Laws prevented Jews owning land, when for centuries farming was the world’s population’s main occupation. The Vatican allowed Jews to practice finance while prohibiting Christians to do so, until it rationalized the charging of “interest,” but not “usury” – a distinction without meaning. By the 17th century though, with Europe’s population growing fast, literacy and expertise in finance were in much demand, and Jews having an early start, benefitted.
Persecutions forced Jews to disperse, creating networks around the world further enhancing their advantage in the art of pricing, finance and writing contracts. With this came legal know-how, necessary to enforce contracts, and also an understanding of insurance and the stabilizing impact of law and order. The abstract feature of the religion – the Second of the Ten Commandments prohibits making “graven images,” which is why synagogues have no Michelangelo-kind Moses statues - complemented the above skills and paved the path toward mathematical, scientific and musical expertise too – all based on abstract languages.
Briefly, Jews’ outstanding traits and performance, that have provoked much persecution over centuries, have easily documented explanations. The misfortune has been that when large groups were leapfrogged, demagogues ceased upon the latent, simmering envy and hatred, facts ceased to matter, and prejudices turned into persecutions.
Education and legal institutions did not prevent lapses into barbarism: Western Europe had the most “educated” population between the two World Wars. However, hyperinflation in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Russia destroyed the middle classes’ savings, their financial markets, and with the destruction drastically diminishing options for hopes and recovery. Governments became the dominant “financial intermediary,” and politicians seized on academic “isms” rationalizing both centralization of powers and conspiracies, appealing to the worst instincts of all leapfrogged groups. All of which manifested itself in massive savagery toward the Jews in Germany.
These days, in addition to past prejudices and hatred still lingering against Jews, the idea of “globalization” and “multiculturalism” came to dominate Western Europe and U.S. politics, perceived as being keys to prosperity and world peace. These abstract ideas did not take into account either the massive demographic changes and the largely expanded welfare state since the 1960s, starting with Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and pursued under other slogans in Western Europe.
The combination brought about massive movements of population, the “nomads” (legal and illegal), significant numbers coming from Muslim countries with a fraction sharing radical Islamist ideas captured, in part, in the Houthis' slogan, no different from all terrorist groups “constitutions.” The demographic changes, combined with the background among this leapfrogged group, weakened the West’s and the U.S.’s institutions that mitigated before lapses into violence. The instant communication technologies revolution and financial help from certain countries (Australia just expelled Iranian diplomats for assisting terror there), facilitated the creation of mobs by shouting “Fire” in this now densely crowded world.
What are the remedies? Education, drawing on experience – is not and has never been, as the 1930s events have so clearly shown, a solution. Recent changes in France and the U.S. point to ways, namely by strengthening institutions that have been keys to their success.
France has just passed several laws requiring all nomads applying for citizenship to first pass courses to master not only French, but France’s history, institution and culture – and to be rigorously tested on having absorbed what this means. Briefly, if you want to live and vote in France, first absorb what it means to become “French.” The U.S. has been trying to strengthen its institutions with this same goal in mind.
Time will tell if Western laws and institutions will preserve what's very much worth preserving. It's a question worth asking when billions still live in countries with atavistic models of society and thought are ready to export both to the U.S., and the West more broadly.
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