My recent post, “Homosexuality Is a Humiliation Fetish,” has gotten a lot of attention. It tackles a controversial topic that many fear to address or about which they have nothing new to say. I discovered a clever arbitrage in the whole matter: I don’t have a reputation to save, and I’ve read René Girard. This same arbitrage opportunity in the ideas market is what I will try to sneakily exploit again in tackling another topic that’s as hot as it is controversial: the Jews.

With homosexuality, Girard didn’t develop a full-fledged theory, but he laid down this parenthetical hypothesis that it’s a form of obsession with sexual rivals, leaving it to a future acolyte like me to till that fecund field to its full bloom.

With the Jews, he went further than the gays. Besides the obvious mentions Jews must get in any Christian apologetics, including Girard’s Christian apologetics, Girard often wrote about them as a prime example of scapegoats, not in the fluffy sense the term is used in popular discourse, but in the nuanced and multifaceted sense of his mimetic theory. Still, there was so much left unsaid on that scapegoat role, so many corollaries and lemmas to his theories that can be drawn regarding the Jews!

So, let’s jump right into it all. Or let’s see how far we can get in one post, at least.

The Universality of the Scapegoat

The central idea of Girard’s anthropology, for those of you who still don’t know, is that human culture originates and runs on the scapegoating mechanism, or the victimary mechanism. This was there since early homo sapiens established cohesion and cooperation by channeling collective aggression against the aurochs and the woolly mammoth. It was there, in a more sophisticated form, when they sacrificed humans and later animals at the altars of their gods to appease them and procure peace for the community. And it is still here all around us in our inability to build group cohesion and identity without waging a literal or a “cultural” war against some enemy outsider.

The sacrificial victim heals the community by absorbing all the negativity, aggression, sin, or what have you, of the individuals of the community onto itself. It’s a complex but very real process. For it to work, the victim needs to check off some basic requirements. He must be an outsider so that he can be perceived as someone bringing a curse into the community. He must bring in that exotic factor of otherness to be convincing in the role of the nefarious evildoer. It may be his odd dress or physique, a physical deformity perhaps, that makes him appear somehow magical. But he also must be somewhat of an insider to have the opportunity to spread the curse, to rub it in, so to speak. Finally, he cannot have the power to reciprocate or avenge collective violence – he must be too weak for that.

All this might sound a bit too far-fetched until you start looking at old indigenous cultures and start realizing that many of their oddest and most inexplicably brutal rituals can be explained as methods for producing precisely the type of ideal scapegoat that Girard describes.

In his book Violence and the Sacred, Girard gives one example of such a culture and such a ritual in the indigenous Tupinamba people of colonial-era Amazon. These cannibalistic warriors had a strange custom. They would take a captured enemy combatant to their village and treat him like a king, shower him with all sorts of privileges, and even encourage him to break the rules. But this only lasted for a certain extended period. Suddenly, the villagers would make a one-eighty: they would begin mistreating the captive, eventually bind him up, and finally kill and devour him in a communal ritual. Here is Girard:

The Tupinamba occupy a prominent place in the intellectual history of modern Europe. The two Indians whom Montaigne met in Rouen and referred to in his Essays were members of this tribe. They thus served as models for the most famous pre-eighteenth-century portrait of the “noble savage,” who was shortly to play a great role in the history of Western humanism.

War was endemic among this people, who made it a practice to devour all the enemies they could lay their hands on. However, their cannibalism assumed two distinct forms. An enemy killed in the course of battle was eaten on the spot without further ado. Outside the community and its laws, there was no place for ritual; undifferentiated violence held sway.

The ritual form of cannibalism was reserved for enemies who were brought alive to the village. These prisoners lived for months and sometimes years on intimate terms with the men who would one day devour them. They participated in their captors’ daily activities and married into their families; much the same relationship existed for a while between themselves and their sacrificers (for, as we shall see, we are dealing with sacrifice here) as their sacrificers maintained among themselves.

The prisoner was subjected to two apparently contradictory modes of treatment. Sometimes his sexual favors were sought after, and he was treated with respect and even veneration. At other times he was the object of abuse, showered with insults and blows.

Shortly before the date of his execution, the prisoner’s “escape” was ritually staged. Invariably, of course, he was quickly recaptured and — for the first time — bound with a heavy rope around his ankles. His master now stopped giving him food, and he was forced to resort to stealing. One of the early travelers cited by Métraux reports that the prisoner was “permitted during this period to lay about him with his fists, to steal fowl and geese and other things, and to do his utmost to avenge his coming death.” In short, the future victim was encouraged to violate the laws. Most modern observers agree that the purpose of these indulgences was to transform the prisoner into a “scapegoat.”

My exploration of the Jewish Question will be based on the idea that the role of Jews as scapegoats aligns neatly, though with some unique twists, with the nuanced and multifaced scapegoat role revealed to us repressed moderns in this wonderfully forthright Tupinamba manifestation.

Over the centuries and millennia of prehistory, humans developed a universal intuition of the ambivalence of the sacred. This means that they saw sacred as both the worst and the best possible thing, as that which brings both dreadful chaos and blessed harmony. The ambivalence stems directly from its origin in the victimary mechanism. The archaic victim, the scapegoat, is viewed as responsible for bringing chaos upon the community, but also as bringing divine blessing to it through his expulsion and death. Victims later became gods, and all archaic gods had this ambivalence, and for the same reason. To Greeks, the god Apollo shot darts of plague but also healed the community. Dionysius was the god of homicidal mania as well as fertility. And so on.

(It was only after the original cults of Greek gods faded, in the classical era, and after the original nature of these cults was criticized and swept under the rug with not a little embarrassment by philosophers like Plato, that the Greek Gods could be confused by modern philosophers like Nietzsche for avatars of different aspects of human experience – formality in the case of Apollo, and ecstasy in the case of Dionysius.)

The Ancient Greek word pharmakon, the origin of “pharmacy,” means both the poison and the cure. The chief principle of Greek medicine was that a little injection of poison brings about the remedy. Equivalent principles can be found in traditional medicine and spirituality of China (see Du毒), Eurasian shamanism, and I would guess everywhere else. This principle still operates in modern medicine, with vaccines – inject a bit of the disease to prevent the full disease. It is represented in the caduceus, the universal symbol of medicine (two snakes spinning around a staff, sometimes spraying poison from their mouths into a cup on top).

And it obviously corresponds to that first form of healing: the expulsion of the toxic human scapegoat from the community in order to heal it. Well into the classical period, various Greek city-states kept vagabonds or cripples to play the role of the pharmakos: the victim that would be ritualistically murdered or exiled in a time of crisis.

The intuition that the poison and the cure are the same things is still all around us. To give one example, I think a lot of people think of drugs or alcohol as pharmakoi. They are bad for you, but in small doses, they are good for you. A little bit of the devil chases out the devil.

The ambivalence necessary for an effective scapegoat is obviously the aim of the Tupinamba custom. Girard brings about another similar example with the Ainu people indigenous to northern Japan. The Ainu did essentially the same thing to bear cubs that the Tupinamba did to war captives. They would capture a baby cub and raise it with as much affection as they would a human baby for a year or two, only to end its life by ritually killing and devouring it.

It is commonplace to say today that Jews have been blamed for social ills throughout centuries. That is true (I mean, that they were blamed), and that makes them scapegoats par excellence. But what is never explored are all the implications of their long historical role as the pharmakoi, and specifically its double-sided aspect – its ambivalence.

To begin demonstrating this ambivalence of Jews as scapegoats, I will use an example from Girard’s book The Scapegoat. Once again, the example is from an era different than ours, which is helpful in reducing cultural biases that can skew our judgment. The example is that of Queen Elizabeth’s Jewish doctor, a certain Lopez, who ended up executed after being accused of magic and of planning to poison the queen. Girard writes:

Queen Elizabeth of England’s Jewish doctor, Lopez, was executed at the height of his influence for his attempts at poisoning and for his practice of magic. The slightest failure or denunciation can cause a newcomer to fall far lower than the heights he has climbed…

The supernatural aspect of the offense is coupled with a crime in the modern sense, in response to the demand for rationality that is characteristic of a time in which belief in magic is dwindling. The important detail is the fact that it is poisoning, a crime that deprives the accused of any legal protection just as bluntly as any accusation directly involving magic. Poisoning is so easy to conceal, especially for a doctor, that it is impossible to prove the crime and therefore there is no need to prove it…

Because of the historical context we automatically demystify it with a psychosociological interpretation. We sense a cabal organized by jealous rivals, and we immediately lose awareness of those aspects that remind us of the sacred in mythology.

Wikipedia gives some more details on the Lopez case. His primary accuser was Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who sought revenge on the doctor after the latter told a Spanish stateman details about the earl’s venereal diseases.

However, Girard sees significance beyond a simple soap opera involving a cabal of “jealous rivals,” including perhaps antisemitic ones, that would satisfy a modern interpreter. Rather, multiple pieces of textual evidence point to the same narrative structure that we saw with the Tupinamba captive. For the Earl’s unprovable accusations to be believed, people around him would have to retain some remnants of the archaic mindset that we see in the Tupinamba and that carries that ambivalent fascination with outsiders.

Lopez, a double-outsider on account of being an ethnic Jew who had converted to Christianity as well as an Iberian, is at first showered with privilege, including authority over the physical health of the monarch herself. He is widely respected and becomes wealthy. But the same charisma that gives him success at first suddenly turns against him; it now makes him capable of plotting the highest treason and practicing magic. In the words of his legal prosecutor, Sir Edward Coke, he becomes “a perjured, murdering villain and a Jewish doctor worse than Judas himself, not a new Christian but a very Jew.”

Jews As the Ultimate Archaic Scapegoats

There is a general sense, and not only among Jews, that there is something special and something especially virulent about antisemitism as a type of hatred. I share that sense. I think that it is due to Jews checking off by far the most of those requirements that make the perfect archaic scapegoat.

For one, Jews are, or at least have been for centuries, wandering outsiders. This is often enough to attract a fair share of scapegoating. Gypsies also fit that description, and on the European continent, they have been subjected to centuries of scapegoating as well as fascination. Stereotypical accusations against gypsies involve them casting spells or stealing children. Meanwhile, they are also widely thought of as having supreme talents in music or the more entertaining forms of wit and “trickery,” like sales pitches, parlor tricks, or petty robbery. There are equivalent stereotypes about American blacks: Girard mentions the Magic Negro trope in this connection.

Second, the fact that Jews often blend into the local culture to a far greater degree than Gypsies or other more visible minorities might increase their potential as scapegoats. Remember, the ideal scapegoat is not only an outsider, but also an insider.

But by far the biggest factor that makes Jews such a powerful candidate for the scapegoat is their absolutely unique and prodigious role in modern religion. They are most intimately linked to the sacred as the chosen people who produced the prophets and the scriptures and, through flesh, the Christ as God incarnate. What’s more, their connection to the sacred seems to be imbued with the ultimate, boss-level manifestation of that ambivalence characteristic of all archaic gods and scapegoats: Jews, the people of God, are also the people who killed God. This ambivalence is enshrined in the most influential narrative ever – that of the Gospels. And whether one is religious or not today, that narrative holds sway.

Gypsies and Blacks can never hope to gather that level of archaic sacred stardust.

“Vulgar Antisemitism”: The Black Magic Jew

Christianity and the two other “religions of the book” are not archaic; all three of them are supposed to be an overcoming of the archaic mindset. I will not launch here on an extended apologetic of Christianity or an explanation of the difference between the Biblical religion and archaic scapegoating. But the fact remains that the archaic mindset lives on in a form that is more or less attenuated, depending on how evil the times are. I’ve written a lot about Girard’s distinction between “sacrificial” and “non-sacrificial” Christianity, the former being still beholden to archaic interference while the latter is free from it (see The Modern Malaise).

The sacrificial mindset is a regression to the archaic mindset. Among Christians, it processes the story of the Passion as an archaic myth. Yes, God is lynched to produce a blessing. But God is innocent, and the culprit – the Jews – are still around. If the blessings are not felt, the archaic mindset resorts to seeking the culprit, the pharmakos, to expel. God himself seems to command this course of action – archaic gods certainly did. And who could be a better candidate for the role of the pollutant causing all the trouble than the group who killed Christ and who, even in times of most threatening crises, still refuse to bow and pray to him?

Girard wrote at length about how the sacrificial interpretations of the Passion of Christ generate “vulgar antisemitism,” which, desiring to “sacrifice” Jews as culprits responsible for deicide and for present social ills, repeats not only the error of the Pharisees that condemned Christ but the error of all human culture up to that point, all of which operated on the same sacrificial principle. But again, let’s not digress into apologetics.

There have been countless antisemitic narratives in the West, from various Medieval accusations with a mythological bend – Jewish women giving birth to pigs, Jews sacrificing Christian children, etc. – to modern Nazi ideologies revolving around higher and lower races. But I believe that the common driving force behind all those myths is a surviving archaic subconscious that always seeks a certain type of ambivalent, sacred outsider as the culprit that needs to be sacrificed to appease the gods. And Jews are by far the best candidates for such an outsider.

As for the scapegoating of the Jews among Muslims, antisemitism among them is certainly more open and widespread than in Western democracies, at least since the creation of the state of Israel. Verses in the Quran are cited as endorsing persecution of Jews, but I am not sure exactly how much of the Muslim antisemitism comes from the Quran as opposed to the archaic subconscious common to all humanity. Anyway, my focus here is on Jews in the West, so Islamic cultures are quite off-topic.

The vulgar antisemites can today be found all over the dark internet forums and not-so-dark comment sections, if not among your friends and acquaintances. Whether or not they are Christian, they are likely to see the crucifixion of Christ as exhibit A in their case against the Jews. While most of them might not believe in the Bible, much less in magic, curiously enough they tend to see Jews as possessed with a preternatural ability to control the now global society. These are the type of people reading the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (imagine the mind of the person who wrote that forgery), justifying or identifying with Nazis, denying the Holocaust, etc. Such people surely terrify the Jews, and since they are invariably right-wing, their existence explains the knee-jerk Jewish antagonism towards any sort of nationalism (except Israeli nationalism, of course).

The vulgar antisemites then, and perhaps many of the non-vulgar ones, whoever they may be, see the Jews as the magical pharmakos that needs to be expelled. They are mesmerized by the dark side of the double-sidedness of the sacred victim – the black magic side. Their archaic, ignorant mind, stressed by some personal or social crisis, precipitates the belief that the source of the poison causing all the trouble is the accursed Jews.

The narratives of how exactly Jews cause all the social ills are of a great variety and creativity, and a lot of contradiction. They are couched in the language of what I’ve called “esoteric” conspiracy theories, which is the genre of the attenuated sacrificial or archaic mindset surviving into our times. The conspiratorial cabals of such theories are analogs to archaic monsters and scapegoats. But for my purposes, there isn’t really anything interesting left to say about the black magic of the Jews, at least not anything that the reader is not likely to already have heard.

“A Good Jewish Doctor”: The White Magic Jew

The less explored and therefore more interesting side of the Jewish scapegoat role is its white-magic side. Modern culture has long ago distanced itself from any hairy notions of moral ambivalence and insisted on keeping the good and the sublime strictly separate from the base and the vile. Something is either good or bad; it can’t be both. This attitude makes us blind, I think, to the reality that people are often fascinated by the same thing that they find repulsive. Jews are a great example of such a thing.

It would not be unusual for a vulgar antisemite, someone who might enjoy bashing Jews online, to seek out a Jewish lawyer if they get into legal trouble or a Jewish doctor if they suffer a health crisis. If you stop to think about it, it makes sense. After all, someone who has the black magic powers to control politics ought also to have the white magic powers to win you a case or heal your illness. This is no different from a superstitious Balkan grandma who likes to gossip about Gypsies kidnapping children buying a good-luck talisman from a Gypsy fortune teller.

I can imagine the comedy when a Jewish doctor or lawyer recognizes such a client. He gets creeped out by them – “But still, why not take their money?” – or the work leads to unrealistic expectations – “Aren’t you a Jew? Don’t you have the judge in your pocket??” These are the conundrums faced by Sean Penn’s character, mafia lawyer Dave Kleinfeld, in the movie Carlito’s Way.

“Well, this behavior can be explained by the fact that such people believe the Jews to be highly intelligent and well-connected,” you might say. Choosing a doctor or lawyer based on competence or connections is indeed rational, and it may often end up in the choice of a Jewish one. But here, we are talking about people who chose a Jewish doctor or a lawyer before any evidence of competence or connections, but on the archaic notion – sorry if I overuse that term – that he has white magic powers.

In general, the race and IQ question, whatever the empirical truth behind it, is no doubt imbued with magical properties in the minds of the masses. The booby IQ curve has become a sort of a modern magical symbol, inspiring fear and awe and making those bewitched by it invoke it as the answer to every question. And the Jews are certainly imbued with IQ magic in the popular imagination, with all the talk of the mighty Ashkenazi IQ.

But the pursuit of white Jew magic is not limited only to the vulgar masses, I’m afraid. It includes attitudes that can be found at the highest levels of society. Many non-Jewish politicians may make a political show of wearing a kippah or sending out congratulations during Jewish holidays out of genuine solidarity, or to gain favors from Jewish voters and interests. But many seem to go beyond the purely political considerations to do it and to overdo it. I think that the raw archaic belief in white Jew magic is the hidden irrational factor here. The belief may be that of the politician, or the politician might play to its presence among his voters.

Javier Milei, anyone?

The same argument can be mounted regarding the Jewish obsession of many protestant sects. Of course, these sects have adamant “Biblical” arguments for why they must unconditionally support the state of Israel. But the question then becomes how, of all the different adamant Biblical arguments that have been derived by different Christian denominations, they arrived at the one that sees unconditional support for the Jews as willed by God. A hint to the answer may be in the fact that these same sects hold to strictly literal interpretations of Old Testament narratives, a decidedly un-modern attitude – archaic, you may even call it.

It is also significant, I think, that there are other protestant sects that are identical to the Jew-obsessing ones except for one point: they are obsessively antisemitic. This supports the idea that the black magic and white magic of the scapegoat are adjacent – one readily flips into the other. A closer look even at the Jew-obsessing Evangelicals will uncover a dark side to it: these people believe that support for the Jews is needed to bring about the End Times, during which the Jews will be converted to Christianity or annihilated.

This brings me to an instructive point regarding the ambivalence of the scapegoat in general, and Jews in particular. The white magic is not only adjacent to the black magic, but in a way, it produces it. In the Tupinamba custom, the captive first exists in the white magic mode – he is feted, and his favors are sought. He is spoiled; he is allowed what is forbidden to regular villagers. But when the time is ripe, all his former privileges turn into grounds of accusation. First, he was invited to sleep with someone’s daughter; later, he deserves to die for committing adultery. First, he was allowed to overindulge in food or avoid work; later, he is guilty of rapaciousness and sloth.

The white-magic treatment is, in its anthropological origin, the fattening of the calf for slaughter. There will come a time when the community will be afflicted by a crisis, and they will not know what befell them. Surely, it cannot be their own sins – they are the good guys! To deal with the issue, they will have at the ready the asshole who took advantage of everything and broke all the rules – using his magical powers! – and who thinks he is oh-so-special! Never mind that he was encouraged on the sly to break them – he broke the rules. So he is going to be the one responsible for the crisis, and he is going to be the one who must die.

The Jewish Reaction

Even less often discussed aspect of Jews as archaic scapegoats, and therefore even more interesting, is the Jewish reaction to it. This is at least true outside of the Jewish community. I don’t know what they talk about on the inside – I am not a Jew, not even fractionally (as far as I can trace my genealogy in the obscure hills of Bosnia and Herzegovina). I have had some Jewish friends, for whatever that’s worth.

Outside of the Jewish community, the consensus on the Jewish reaction comes down to two different platitudes. The first one is that the Jews are hurt by the scapegoating role and try to put an end to it, like anyone else would. The second one is that Jews are not victims, at least not anymore, and that they take advantage of their victim status to gain and justify privilege.

Both these conclusions have truth in them, but they are incomplete: they ignore the rich sociological complexities of the scapegoating role, of the Jews in particular, and in particular the ambivalence of that role.

The first complexity that arises is a certain double bind related to identity. For any group, to retain one’s identity means to remain different. This may be easy enough for a nation with an exclusive territory, but for wandering or disenfranchised groups, the cost of maintaining that difference may be the cost of getting scapegoated. This aspect is, once again, greatly amplified in the case of Jews, whose identity is bound up in the notion of “chosenness,” couched in deeply sacrificial terms, even if not archaic: Israel is the living sacrifice separated out among the nations to serve God, though spared forever from immolation in the aborted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. This makes it impossible for Jews to definitively walk away from their own claims that they are somehow special, chosen, and even sacrificial (“sacred-making”).   

But even putting that particularity aside, the ambivalence of the scapegoat role has a certain magnetism to it. Yes, being a scapegoat in the ordinary sense means being a victim, and being a victim is either something you want to avoid, or if you’ve already been a victim, something for which you’d want to get recompense. But being a proper archaic scapegoat also means getting the special treatment, or at least being fascinated over, for that extended period of time before they tie you up and drag you to the chopping block. And whether you’re a Jew or not, getting special treatment is tempting.

We all know about the Biblical background regarding the Jews, but how exactly the Jews began their career as the go-to scapegoat of Europe in the archaic sense is lost to the mists of history. What we know is that at some point they emerge in Medieval Europe, let’s say the Venetian Republic, as disliked but rich bankers. Classic ambivalence: they are plying a trade that is at once seen as unclean and privileged. Whether they were pushed into this role or embraced it willingly, and to what extent – we don’t know. The answer may vary from one individual Venetian money lender to another, too.

We can reasonably assume that the Tupinamba captive would, ten times out of ten, choose not to volunteer to be the scapegoat – thanks for the sexual favors and all that – but in Medieval Europe? I don’t know; being a money lender beats being a serf, and there’s always a chance you might be able to diffuse or escape the inevitable pogrom.

We already see here the essential game to be played in the role of the archaic scapegoat. You are a Jew, and these goyim around you are suggesting ever so slightly that you can break some rules. They open the door to privileges forbidden to the locals. They may not be inviting you to screw their wives, as with the Tupinamba captives, but they seem to be inviting you to screw their financial system. It’s a tantalizing offer, even knowing that the endgame is supposed to involve some modern form of getting roasted, a prospect that, with some finesse, could perhaps be avoided. And besides, there may be no other options. The love affair on the offer may be rather in the nature of a prearranged marriage. Also, you’ve got to eat somehow.

Here, then, is how I see the distilled essence of the Jewish role as archaic scapegoats. The Jews are positioned in the middle of a ritual ground, where they are supposed to give some entertaining or risqué performance for the satisfaction of the crowd. The crowd forms a circle that stays put and watches the performance. They may applaud and laugh at times and be genuinely entertained. They might shower the performer with praise and grow to genuinely like him. They might even study the Kabbalah. But if you look closer, it’s really a circle of wolves watching a lamb, and they are licking their chops from time to time. The performance, after all, must end at some point in the night.

The Jews are not a monolithic group (we always ascribe that to the groups we hate or fear), and how they react to the proposition of the archaic sacrificial role must vary among different Jewish groups and individuals. Some might want to avoid the performance and wish the whole show gets cancelled. Others might accept it as unavoidable, embrace it even, and work on changing the nature of the whole thing, focusing, of course, on the final sacrificial act.

Let’s now explore these different approaches. As we do that, let’s keep in mind that as I consider each Jewish group, I don’t mean to say that avoiding or obsessing about scapegoating is all they do, or that it’s the main point of what they do. Rather, given the social positioning of Jews as an ethnic group, Jewish political projects must at least to some degree factor in the archaic scapegoating game.

The Haredim Reaction

The Haredi Jews attempt to avoid playing the archaic scapegoat among the nations with their strict separation from the modern society around them. They want nothing to do with the show. They are not interested in any opportunities in the banking or academic sectors. In that, they may not feel entirely safe from the outside world, but they calculate that by minimizing contact with it, they also minimize the chances of getting dragged into the scapegoating role. The strict monotheists that they are, they detect the not-so-small traces of the archaic sacred involved in the deal. They figure that the scapegoat is invited to mingle with the host for the same reason the Tupinamba captive is invited to mingle with the village – to soak up its wrath.

The Haredim nurture their sacrificial role within the narrow interpretation of their scriptures. They are very big on their sacrificial role, only not the archaic version, but the Abrahamic and Mosaic version. Their chosenness is not to play out through leadership in secular progress, as we shall see is the case with liberal Jews, but in keeping the Law and awaiting the Messiah. Everything else leads to nothing but trouble.

The Zionists Reaction

Zionists present another solution to escaping the scapegoat role. To be clear, by Zionists I mean people who fight and support the interests of the Jewish state of Israel (and not just “Jews I want to bash in public”). The solution is to become a nation with its own territory and military that can create and defend an exclusive space for the Jewish nation. They can’t scapegoat you if you keep them outside your borders.

My impression was that the early Zionists were mainly secular Jews who didn’t find answers in religion and who embraced modernity. They wanted Israel to become a nice modern nation like any other, and Jews a people like any other, with not just Jewish doctors, lawyers, professors, and bankers, but also Jewish bus drivers and janitors. They now even have Jewish football hooligans.

The few Israelis I’ve personally met over the years have all left me with the impression not only of fierce patriotism, but of a patriotism that insists that Israel is fighting to be just another modern, civilized, secular country. The image of Israel is put in contrast with the Islamic theocracies of its Middle Eastern enemies, who in that picture play the thoroughly sacrificial heel. The eternal rivals of Israel, Esau, and Ishmael, insist that they and not Jacob are the living sacrifice to the Almighty – and they got the sacrificial pyre all set up and burning for Jacob, now a queer modernist apostate.

Nevertheless, the scepter of scapegoating haunts the Zionists, too. The Zionist project started in earnest in the wake of the Holocaust, literally “burnt offering,” the monstrous scapegoating sacrifice of a secularized, industrialized Europe. Ironically, the one Jewish movement that is trying the hardest to remove itself from the scapegoating mechanism can be said to be the most directly associated with it. Secular Zionism rests on what its detractors call “Holocaustianity:” the Holocaust as a sacred, unquestionable cause and a justification for the expulsion of Palestinians. If this was not reason enough for the Zionists to dwell on victimhood more than any other Jews, the brutality of almost constant war in their country is sure to swing the mind that way.

This is how I understand Zionism in its basics. I also understand that since its inception, the Zionist project has become exceptionally complex, violent, and tragic. Since then, it has clashed against different groups of Jews that offer rival solutions, ultra-Orthodox as well as liberal ones. But it has also co-opted different Jewish movements and given birth to right-wing ideologies that include some disturbing extremes of supremacism.

The Cosmopolitan Jew Reaction

Finally, I get to talk about the main, defining Jewish movement: the liberal, cosmopolitan Jews. I am talking about Jews living outside of Israel, in the West. I didn’t choose the term “international Jews” because Henry Ford already got the dibs on that. Many still consider the Jewish “diaspora” as the natural Jewish habitat, so to speak. The cosmopolitan Jews are Jews par excellence: they are what one thinks of when one imagines a stereotypical Jew.

While the Haredim and the Zionists are trying to fence themselves from the crowd of archaic goyim, the cosmopolitan Jews dive right into it. The most progressive Jewish group, they are nevertheless the ones embracing the role of archaic scapegoats. They embrace all the white-magic stardust of the archaic scapegoat and leverage it to obtain power, which they then use to stave off black magic accusations. Jews are good with money – hell yeah, we’ll do banking! Jews are so intelligent and cunning – white collar professions, business, academia, here we come! Jews have loose morals – we’ll take Hollywood and the rest of pop culture, too!

The cosmopolitan Jews do this not because they are suicidal but because they figure that, rather than running, they will face the problem head-on. They are going to tame the violent masses to prevent them from devouring them. It’s the modern times, after all – most people don’t believe in black magic anymore, right? They don’t literally devour each other anymore, right?

The problem of taming the masses is coincidentally the central political concern of any elite minority. In a way, the cosmopolitan Jew, thanks to his archaic scapegoating credentials, gravitates naturally to high social positions. He gravitates towards “non-productive labor,” as antisemites would put it. So, what remains to be explored are the strategies by which cosmopolitan Jews attempt to manage their elite-but-precarious archaic scapegoat role.

The central component of the strategy is to embrace any and every current of modernity, which is to say, any current that is anti-sacrificial. Modernity can be defined as the culture that rejects the need for any form of sacred, archaic or Biblical, and attempts to establish man on his own terms as a free, autonomous, rational being. To cosmopolitan Jews, any whiff of the sacred carries with it the whiff of violent sacrifice, and that carries the possibility of them being that sacrifice. They reject the idea that Christianity might be an overcoming of the violent sacrifice for a whole number of reasons. For one, historical Christianity has often been violent against them. Second, cosmopolitan Jews are almost by definition not Christian, and as such they are not going to give such a recognition to the powerful rival religion.

The cosmopolitan Jewish view that all religions are inherently violent is really the modern view. It was not first popularized by Jewish intellectuals, but by culturally Christian Age of Enlightenment elites, but the Jews latched onto it with relentless gusto. Like all moderns, cosmopolitan Jews embrace all secular trends as liberation from premodern violence. But the Jews have the added motive of believing that all these projects are good for the Jews in as much as they destroy old identities and boundaries and make it that much more difficult for a sacrificial mob to form against them. To be secular is to forsake all sacrificial acts, non-violent or violent. Secular wolves are tame, defanged wolves; they might go on watching the lamb perform indefinitely and forget about the meal at the end.

Given that the Jewish cause is so closely aligned with modernity, it is not so surprising that the twentieth century, which was the century of modernity, was also in so many ways a Jewish century. It also explains why Jews are seen as catalysts for change. Moving away from the sacred and into modernity, or simply stirring the pot one way or another, are ways to delay a consolidation of group identities that might, once again, lead to mobs.

The examples of secular changes with dominant or prominent cosmopolitan Jewish involvement are easy to give. We can start with Marx’s communism and Freud’s psychoanalysis, and we can include the preeminent modern projects of science, liberal arts, and humanities. American popular culture as a secularizing force is another example. Also… ehm… porn, apparently. Well into the twenty-first century, cosmopolitan Jews back all progressive trends: immigration, identity politics, gender ideology, scientism, etc., though there are signs that they are now reconsidering whether absolutely all of these are good for the Jews.

The most contentious cosmopolitan Jewish project within the whole desacralizing campaign is surely their antagonism to ethnic national identities. The mobs that had persecuted Jews throughout the centuries were ethnic nationalist mobs, persecuting them as an ethnic group. Less ethnic nationalism should therefore mean less chance of such persecutions repeating in the future. However, the whole stance comes off as hypocritical because it is a stance taken to serve the interests of their own ethnic group. I think that today, it promotes antisemitism more than it reduces it.

One way to work around this contradiction is to establish an essential difference between some nations and others. Jews are a victim nation, and Western nations – White nations – are colonialists, racists, and fascists (identity politics don’t work outside the liberal West because no group outside of it is anywhere close to being modern enough to loosen its ethnic consciousness). The whole of identity politics fits well for this purpose. The whole purpose of identity politics is to undermine identities, either by laying blame on them or by making a mockery of them. One way to do the latter is to start basing identities on absurd justifications: sexual proclivities, mental and physical diseases, etc.

The Victim Olympics is supposed to be good for the Jews: with the Holocaust and the ceaseless publicizing of it, the Jews figure they are positioned as favorites for a lot of gold medals. Some people of color might disagree: “Yeah, but Jews are so rich, though!” Nevertheless, cosmopolitan Jews still can’t help thinking of themselves as the champions of the oppressed and persecuted everywhere. “Scapegoats of the world, unite! Blacks, trannies, POCs, everyone!”

Another way to work around the contradiction of promoting ethnic dissolution as beneficial to one’s ethnic group has been to try to obfuscate the Jewish identity. “Jewishness isn’t an ethnicity; it’s a religion.” Or, “George Soros is a Hungarian who grew up in a Jewish household, but his parents were non-observant.” Then there is the whole “Schrödinger’s Jew” phenomenon: Jews are sometimes white, sometimes non-white (“Semitic”), depending on who’s asking and why. Cosmopolitan Jews are the only group who are offended, or at least uncomfortable, when people articulate their belonging to their ethnic group. “Naming the Jew” is a faux pas in respectable society.

Trickster Gods and Golems

We see now how the cosmopolitan Jews have made a great cause of the archaic scapegoat role. They have become trickster gods, shifting shapes and stirring trouble in what is supposed to be a divine banquet of a serene monoculture. Their shenanigans keep the circus running, delaying indefinitely the sacrificial act that is supposed to put an end and a meaning to the story.

In doing that, they maintain the differential required to survive and thrive as a distinct group. The trademark of Jewishness becomes its commitment to global progress and leadership in it. This is the form that chosenness takes in the modern era. And it results not in mere distinction, but in accumulation of great political power.

At this stage, it is no longer accurate to talk about the archaic scapegoat game as merely a Jewish reaction to adverse circumstances. It doesn’t ring true today to say that Jews are forced into progressive politics and iconoclasm. Rather, it all looks like a power play on the part of a powerful interest group. I’ve elaborated elsewhere on Girard’s idea that kings originated in the indefinitely delayed sacrificial victim, a Tupinamba captive who gets the special treatment without ever getting eaten. Sometimes, the archaic scapegoat flips into a position of privilege, even royalty.

Girard’s exact argument isn’t that the archaic scapegoat is innocent – no one is – but that he is arbitrary: the truth behind his role is universally misconceived under a layer of mythology. The scapegoat may participate in the delusion (méconnaisance), especially when the mythology is skewed towards white magic, when the captive is showered with special treatment and abundance. At these times, there may even be competition over who is going to play the captive.

It is difficult to make a moral judgment on who is guilty of what cultural sins and who should do what to make up for them. Besides the problem of collective guilt, there is what psychiatrists call enabling and codependence at the group level, too. On the one hand, we have the archaic goyim who, besides “vulgar antisemitism,” are also fascinated by white Jew magic. “A little bit of the Jew chases out the Jew,” they might think. Or not only a little bit; consider the existential codependence of the US Military-Industrial Complex and the state of Israel, and the manic, slithering tongue of dispensationlism up both their asses. I’m not sure that the Hindus or Buddhists would care much for the chosenness of the Jews.

On the other hand, you have cosmopolitan Jews hijacking legitimate progressive causes to steer them in directions that are not optimal for the cause, but that serve Jewish interests. “Bringing democracy to the Middle East” is probably the most striking example. While the Jewish backing of often opposing progressive ideologies gives an impression of factionalism, there is some unity, after all, if they are all led by Jews and steered to align with Jewish interests. And it may have more to do with historical revanchism against the dominant culture than with rational ethnic interests. Or it may simply stem from raw, dirty ambition and greed.

– A young Jew tells his Marxist cousin Ari that he took a job on Wall Street. “No, Larry, don’t do Wall Street! You’re not helping the stereotype! It might be fun for a while making a ton of money, but eventually the goyim are going to eat you!”

– “Don’t worry, Ari, we’ll deal with it. We’ve got business professors all over the academia. We’ll build Holocaust memorials all over the US, even though America had nothing to do with the Holocaust. And even if it all fails in the end, you and I can tag-team! Once the ambivalence turns negative on me, you jump in with your Marxist spiel and save my ass. We control the narrative from both sides, baby!”

Though clever at first sight, the cosmopolitan Jewish strategy suffers from some fatal flaws. There is some blindness to it. It is not plain suicidal, but there are aspects of self-harm in the long run. For one, embracing unbounded modernity in and of itself brings about self-harm to Jews just as it does to anyone else. But beyond that, there’s always some risk, some playing with the Devil in embracing that magic scapegoat role and hoping for the best. It plays right into the hands of the vulgar antisemites.

It becomes a game of whether cosmopolitan Jews can subvert the vulgar antisemites faster than the latter can manage to persecute them for being subversive. It’s like a Tom and Jerry cartoon in which Tom the antisemitic mob chases Jerry the cosmopolitan Jew, with Jerry throwing all sorts progressive traps and objects in Tom’s path in an attempt stop him, but it all only makes him angrier. Socialism – boom! Feminism – crash! Hollywood – boink!

In thinking of the strategy, I also cannot help but think of the character of golem in Jewish folklore. The two are strikingly reminiscent of each other. The stories of golems date back to the European Middle Ages. A golem is an animated, anthropomorphic monster typically created by a Jewish sage from clay for the purpose of protecting the Jewish community from persecution, but who, being coarse and stupid, has the tendency to turn against its creators, who then must remove a Hebrew letter from its head or mouth to shut it down (“The Goyim Know, Shut It Down” meme comes to mind here). The golems are like almost every progressive ideology spearheaded by the Jews, be it Marxism or the Chicago school of economics: powerful, destructive, and retarded. Though they set off as projects that are good for the Jews, they inevitably turn against them.

Bolshevism in Russia started off as a Jewish-led project born in reaction to the antisemitic persecutions of Tsarist Russia. It kicked off with tremendous force, bringing about arguably the most momentous revolution in history. It created a formally classless and nationless society in which Jews were supposed to at least blend in easily, if not run the show. But the good times didn’t last long. The golem of the Revolution turned into the golem of Stalinism, whose eponymous leader quickly decided that Jews must be purged, persecuted, and disenfranchised. As knock-on effects, the same golem gave rise to fascism and then Nazism in Western Europe.

More recently, the golem of multiculturalism and globalist capitalism (the beloved of the Chicago school), which was also supposed to help Jews blend in, and also run the show, ended up giving rise to mass immigration and a flood of Muslim migrants who now harass and attack Jews all over the West. But surely the bigger and more significant boomerang effect is the whole rise of the New Right and its open questioning of Jewish power and influence.

Anti-Christian antisemites like Nietzsche would argue that the first and biggest golem was Christianity itself, designed to turn the goyim into submissive turn-the-other-cheek pussies. But, as a Christian, I categorically reject that idea.

The Solution to the Jewish Question

I will not be like some culturally insensitive Evangelical and say that the solution to the Jewish Question is for everyone to find Jesus. I will, however, give a religious piece of advice: given my analysis, if there is a solution, it ought to involve everyone dropping and moving away from the game of archaic scapegoating. So, though I don’t expect everyone to convert to a pure Christian faith, an elusive El Dorado even for nominal Christians, is it too much to ask that everyone should stop being archaic?

I’m no Talmudic scholar, but the stories of golems are stories of magic and monsters, and as such sound rather more pagan and archaic than monotheistic. I’m not sure that Moses would approve of these practices. The flirtation and obsession with controlling the environment with monstrosities is as bad for the Jews as anyone around them.

As for the Gentiles, they would need to stop fetishizing the Jew either as a white-magic talisman who brings economic prosperity and political utopias, including the Kingdom of Heaven (through the establishment of the Third Temple in Jewish state of Israel), or the black-magic monster of esoteric conspiracy theories. Jews as sacred victims is not a good take, one way or the other. All of this is archaic paganism. Western non-Jews need to “exorcize the Jew within one’s own soul,” as Owen Benjamin likes to say, that phantasmagoric Jew who is not real but who appears as a demonic projection and suggestion. And they need to treat the real Jew out in the real world as a regular, flesh-and-blood human being – deserving of respect and compassion, but often up to no good.