The Moral Inversion of Antisemitism

A review of Robert Spencer’s new masterpiece, Antisemitism: History and Myth.

After Oct 7, Robert Spencer, the eminent scholar of religions and expert on Islamic terrorism, witnessed the irrational return of antisemitism, not just on the left, but also on the right.

“Fervent and articulate opponents of globalism and socialism began sending me articles in which globalists and socialists rehearsed all the alleged evils and misdeeds of Israel,” he writes.

“Vociferous critics of the United Nations began citing its figures on civilian deaths in Gaza.”

In response, Spencer began working on what would become his latest book, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’. Spencer, already the author of numerous critically acclaimed books touching on the intersections of religion and history including ‘Empire of God’, about the Byzantine Empire, ‘The Palestinian Delusion’ and his recent, ‘Muhammad: A Critical Biography’, once again goes back in time and perhaps further so than his past books have ever traveled before.

In  ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’, Spencer traces the origins of antisemitism to an initial pagan reaction against the translation of the Bible until “in the ancient world, revisionist versions of the accounts in the Jewish scriptures became a cottage industry.” Antisemitism became a way to rebut scripture and with it the moral foundations of a divine religion. The more contemptible the Jews were, the less reason there was to respect anything that Moses and later prophets had to say. This echoes the moral inversion that Spencer now sees all around him on social media in which the Jews attacked on Oct 7 become the perpetrators and Hamas becomes the victim.

In trying to understand this present day moral inversion, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’ travels through the ancient pagan world, from Egypt to Greece and Rome, through to the rise of Christianity in which Spencer, a devout member of the Greek Orthodox Church, grapples with the troubled history of antisemitism in Christianity, and then on to the Muslim world.

As a scholar of Islamic teachings, particularly those which the politically correct formal world of academia no longer sees fit to acknowledge, Spencer is especially able to trace the history of hate within the Koran and assorted Islamic texts that compare Jews to “apes and pigs”, curse them and call for their annihilation. As his deathbed wish, the founder of Islam vows, “If I live—if Allah wills—I will expel the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian Peninsula.”

Unlike Christianity, within Islam there is no reevaluation, reformation or rethinking of the status of the Jews. And thus contemporary Muslims see Jews exactly the way Mohammed and his followers had and treat them in much the same way. As a subjugated people, the Jews were persecuted, but useful. Once they had been liberated from bondage by the rebirth of Israel, all that remained was a ceaseless war to either return them to bondage or exterminate them.

Much as Islam systematically represses every non-Muslim minority to show its superiority.

As recently as 1880, Islamic Sharia law banned Jews from wearing shoes in Morocco outside the ghetto. Hamas justified its atrocities of Oct 7 by objecting to Jews praying on the site of their former Temple, naming their genocidal campaign ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ after their mosque built over that sacred site. Such humiliations of non-Muslims form the theological triumphalism of Islam.

The calls for violence by Imams against Jews after Oct 7, with resulting attacks in America and around the world, which  ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’ documents, maintain that tradition. Many of them depend on the same moral inversion that Spencer finds back in the ancient world in which the ancient Pharaoh was the hero and Moses the villain, in which Jewish moral rights can be rebutted by flipping them into moral wrongs and making the villains appear justified.

In Egypt, Pharaoh was reinvented as the hero of the story of the exodus. Today it’s Hamas.

‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’ also delves into the emerging ‘secular’ antisemitism beginning in revolutionary Europe and on to the atrocities of Communism and Nazism whose ideological systems were, as Spencer notes, premised on defining Jews as the ultimate enemies of their creeds and requiring the eradication of the Jews as a people for their utopias to succeed.

The persecution of the Jews under Czarist rule only intensified under Lenin and Stalin climaxing in a “carefully constructed plan in which almost all of the Soviet Union’s two million Jews, nearly all of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, were to be transported to the Gulag—in cattle cars” interrupted only by Stalin’s death, and the USSR’s creation of the ‘Palestinian’ movement.

In ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’, Spencer delves into everything from Holocaust denial to conspiracies about the Talmud and finally clears away the cobwebs with common sense.

“If the Talmud commands so straightforwardly that Jews behave this way toward Christians, it would be only reasonable to expect that at least some Jews, somewhere, would opt for the more direct approach and simply bomb a church,” he writes. In contrast to those same arguments about Islam, which contends that it’s a ‘religion of peace’, and yet there have been “nearly forty-five thousand violent jihad attacks worldwide” since 9/11. Along with quite a few attacks on churches including a recent beheading of Christians in a church in Africa.

The best evidence of a religion’s teachings is in the behavior of its worshipers.

Moral inversion insists that Islam is peaceful and that the Jews are violent. But everyday reality shows a very different pattern. Antisemitism flourishes when there is something trust that must be denied. In ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’, Spencer shows that many antisemitic figures were obsessed with denying some basic truth, biblical, historic or that of human nature, as with Marx’s insistence that capitalism was simply a Jewish problem, or the more contemporary insistence that the reality of Islamic terrorism would go away if Israel did not exist.

“This is an age of social contagions,” Spencer warns in his conclusion. Social contagions emerge, vanish and then reappear. Antisemitism may be the most persistent social contagion of them all because there is always something that people want to unlearn, some truth they want to bury and someone else that they want to blame.