The Wall Street Journal has a section on Saturdays that is intended to be intellectually provocative. I appreciate that. They are picking intelligent people with interesting ideas as opposed to the New York Times that is simply publishing ideologues of the Time’s own cant regardless of their intelligence.
I wrote a blog on the erroneous ideas of Peter Thiel written in the WSJ and now I must comment on a recent article by Jonathan Sacks, the chief Rabbi of England, who is currently teaching in some prestigious New York Universities.
Sacks argues that Jew hate of the most dangerous kind arises when a nation or peoples have been humiliated. His model is Germany after WWI and the modern Arab world after the Ottoman Empire was disemboweled at the same time. Humiliation, in both cases led to dangerous Jew hate.
I see two reasons for Jew hate and several examples that contradict Sacks.
To me the dangerous kind of Jew hate that leads to genocide occurs only in societies where humiliation is concurrent with a hereditary upper class that promotes an external reason for the social problems. Jew's.
The second reason must invariably be that the humiliation and antagonism comes from commercial humiliation. It is not sufficient to just have humiliation in itself.
We have two recent cases of national humiliation where dangerous terminal Jew hate has not occurred. The Soviet Union was defeated, and feels horrible humiliation at the end of communism. We hear this stated explicitly by Vladimir Putin. And yet Jew hate has not risen to genocidal levels in the current Russia.
The reason is the absence of an hereditary upper class that is widely recognized.
The same is true for China that was bitterly humiliated by Britain and then conquered by Japan. We got a revolution but we didn't get Jew hate and we did not get a focus on some other minority. In both cases we get a hatred of America.
To me the proof that Sacks model is wrong is that my model applies not just to Jews, but the same people who hate Jews hate America. To me that is proof that this hatred of Jews and America arises from humiliation caused by inadequate commercial competence which is true for Europe today and the Arab world as well as most Latin societies. They hate America as well as Jews.
I think I have given enough examples. Humiliation alone does not lead to genocide and that Jew hate is generated by commercial humiliation which is contemporaneous with hatred of America.
The real problem can be understood in terms of hatred of modernity which is synonymous with commerce, America and Jews.