"These enemies of the Jew will define anti-Semitism as persecution of the Jew because he is a Jew. They will hold that because, to their anti-Jewish attacks, they affix a rider saying that they exempt good Jews, therefore, they are automatically absolved of anti-Semitism."
When you define antisemitism as "persecution of the Jew because he is a Jew" you are saying that it is only antisemitism when it has no logical excuse. But when Jews are accused of controlling the government, running Wall Street or dominating the media, that is not hatred of Jews as Jews - that could be a valid reason for antisemitism!
Where have we heard the definition of antisemitism as hating "Jews as Jews" before? Oh yes, just last month. And it was argued by the exact "good Jews" in their roles Rice was referring to.
Australia's Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion invited submissions, and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network answered with 259 pages built toward a single demand: reject the IHRA definition of antisemitism, because anti-Zionists must not be called antisemitic no matter what they say about the Jewish state. To make that case, APAN enlisted three Jewish anti-Zionist scholars, and all three converged on the same highly restricted definition of antisemitism Charles Owen Rice identified that excludes nearly all antisemites.
Shaul Magid called antisemitism "the unmitigated and unwarranted hatred of, or animus against, the Jew qua Jew." Ilan Pappe called it "hatred of Jews because of who they are." Neve Gordon called it hatred "understood as hatred of Jews per se." All of these are restatements of "antisemitism is persecution of the Jew because he is a Jew" - in other words, for no valid reason. Apply that definition honestly and even the people accusing Jews of poisoning wells are exonerated, because they didn't hate Jews qua Jews - they only hated the poisoners! A reason is a warrant, and under Magid's, Pappe's, and Gordon's own test, a warrant is an alibi.
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, written specifically to counter the IHRA definition, runs the identical maneuver. Its core definition turns on hostility to Jews "as Jews," the same restriction Rice's antisemites used and the same one Magid, Pappe, and Gordon rediscovered ninety years later. That framing lets the JDA wave off the ugliest charges against Israel: the genocide accusation, the apartheid libel, and the blood-soaked conspiracy theories about Zionist power, because none of it counts as hatred of the Jew as such. It's hatred of the Jew as an Israeli, an occupier, a colonizer, always with a warrant attached, which by the JDA's own logic means it's never really antisemitism at all.
JDA does contradict itself by giving examples of hating Jews for various reasons, but their examples are arbitrary: why should saying that Jews secretly spread COVID antisemitic but saying that Jews try to hide their genocide against Palestinians is not? Adding specific exceptions to "Jews as Jews" does not make the definition much better.
"Jews as Jews" describes one narrow slice of Jew-hatred, not the whole of it. Rice knew that in 1939, back when the warrants were finance and Bolshevism and a blood libel over Christian children. The same shrinking maneuver keeps resurfacing every time someone needs to excuse a particular hatred while condemning the rest, decade after decade, because it works: define real antisemitism as reasonless, and any hatred with a stated reason, however manufactured, gets to walk out the door labeled something else.
Here's the entire JTA article.
"Assail Those Who Mask Anti-Semitism" (Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, Sept. 15, 1939, p.7)
Minister Scores Purveyors of Intolerance Who Disavow Hate of "Good Jews"
Pittsburgh — (JTA) — Those who mask their anti-Semitism with the assertion that they are not opposed to "good Jews" were assailed by the Rev. Charles Owen Rice in an address here.
"One of the features connected with the present wave of anti-Semitism that is being stirred up is that some of the leading purveyors of anti-Semitism hotly deny that they employ a clever sophistry in their attempts to escape the stigma. They define anti-Semitism in a certain restricted sense and then they claim that their teachings and utterances do not bring them under the term.
"For instance, these enemies of the Jew will define anti-Semitism as persecution of the Jew because he is a Jew. They will hold that because, to their anti-Jewish attacks, they affix a rider saying that they exempt good Jews, therefore, they are automatically absolved of anti-Semitism. As a matter of fact the unctuous employment of the 'good Jews' qualifier generally intensifies the anti-Semitism of the statements as a whole. Also we can have attacks upon Jews, as Jews, without direct statements. The brutal crude, direct anti-Semitic utterances, are far less harmful than the subtle ones.
"Off hand I can give a partial list of some of the more commonly used anti-Semitic statements and inferences.
"It is anti-Semitism to exaggerate the power of Jews, whether it be power in finance, in industry, in newspaper publishing, in radio or anything else.
"It is anti-Semitism to say or hint that there is a mysterious central controlling Jewish, national or international, leadership.
"It is anti-Semitic to exaggerate the clanishness of Jews.
"It is anti-Semitism to speak of deliberate controlled Jewish campaigns against Christianity.
"It is anti-Semitic to exaggerate Jewish participation in Communism and similar movements.
"It is anti-Semitic to hint at, or charge, a tie-up between 'International Jewry' and International Masonry. The very term 'International Jewry' has definite anti-Semitic implications.
"You will note that these effective types of anti-Semitism consist of lies and exaggerations. Their harmfulness consists in their engendering a feeling of mixed fear and anger in the breasts of non-Jews. All of them have been proved false. They are damnably un-American, un-Christian and anti-social."
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