WHY DO MUSLIMS HATE JEWS?
Before we address the question of why Muslims hate Jews let us work on nomenclature and the broader question of why so many non-Muslims have also hated Jews through the centuries.
We will not use the term
anti-Semitism
in this article. The word was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr to replace the then-current term
Judenhass,
which translates literally as “Jew-hatred.” Marr hated Jews and conjectured that middle-class Germans were turning away from the practice of Jew-hatred because the term for the activity sounded ugly. The neologism
anti-Semitism
was intended to sound more scientific and therefore make hatred of Jews more appealing to educated people in an industrial age.
Before considering why so many non-Muslims hate and have hated Jews, let's look at basic psychology research that has been done in this field. The classic experiment in this area is reported in
Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers
Cave Experiment
(Muzafer Sherif et al., 1954; full text at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Sherif/). In 1949, Sherif divided 22 boys into two groups and took them to a 200-acre camp surrounded by Oklahoma's Robbers Cave State Park. The groups were set up in competition with one another and soon resorted to fighting and negatively stereotyping each other. Hating an out-group seems to make it easier for an in-group to function together. Moreover, inciting hatred can be beneficial to leaders.
For an example that is close to home, consider George W. Bush and his constant talk of a “war against Iraq.” Militarily the term “war” does not make much sense. Using 5 percent of the American nuclear arsenal, Iraq could be wiped off the planet in five minutes. Limited to conventional bombs, the U.S. Air Force could reduce every Iraqi city to rubble within a few months, at little greater expense or risk to American lives than is currently entailed in the Air Force's training missions over Nevada. It doesn't make linguistic sense to talk about a “war” if there is no possibility of losing, but it does make political sense. If a president is in the middle of a war it is difficult to mount political opposition to that president without appearing disloyal and unpatriotic. Focusing media attention on a war prevents reporters from asking questions such as “How come William T. Esrey and Ronald LeMay, the two top executives at Sprint, deserved to get paid $311 million for their services to shareholders when the company's business and stock are in tatters? And then why is it fair that Joe Sixpack has to pay income tax but Esrey and LeMay didn't have to pay tax on their $311 million income? Would it have been fairer to divide the $311 millionâequal to half of Sprint's 2002 profitâamong the 13,000 workers that these guys laid offâ$24,000 per workerâ or possibly to the shareholders(!)?” (These gentlemen did pay a few million dollars to the accounting firm of Ernst and Young to participate in a tax shelter that the Internal Revenue Service is currently investigating and considering disallowing, in which case presumably Esrey and LeMay will join the folks in the February 7, 2003,
New York Times
story “Wealthy Suing Accountants Over Rejected Tax Shelters.”) After the U.S. military crushes Iraq, a country that in 1990 had the same gross domestic product as West Virginia, George W. Bush will get a big boost in popularity for winning the war. Having Iraq as an enemy is apparently somewhat useful to the American people and very useful to America's leaders.
Why have the Jews through the centuries made such good all-purpose targets for hatred? It is difficult to understand how Jew-hatred started so let's focus on the factors that have made it endure: (1) concentration in residence, (2) concentration in occupation, (3) smallness in number, (4) military weakness.
Factor
1:
concentration in residence. Until the early nineteenth century, when they were emancipated by Napoleon, the Jews of Europe were required to live in ghettos, separate from gentiles, by order of the Catholic Church. After emancipation, the Jews still tended to clump together if for no other reason than the requirement that at least ten men be assembled for morning prayers. In the United States, real estate covenants prohibiting the sale of property to Jews kept them to some extent separate from other Americans, at least from those in the ruling class (these covenants were gradually dismantled through legal action just before and after World War II). It is easier and more convenient to hate people if you don't have to live with them.
Considerably strengthening the effects of Factor 1 is the fact that people don't change their prejudices without direct personal contact with the object of those prejudices. For example, suppose that you've been taught negative stereotypes about black people. If you move into a middle-class neighborhood where half of your neighbors are black you'll probably begin to change your mind. But if you never meet a black person face-to-face, why would you ever change your mind? The phenomenon has also been demonstrated by those Europeans who express hatred of Jews in opinion polls despite the fact that they live in countries where all the Jews were killed in 1944. An Anti-Defamation League (ADL) study in 1998 concluded “The current survey shows that the most anti-Semitic Americans tend to have less contact with Jews in their day-today life than do other Americans.”
Factor
2:
concentration in occupation. Jews in Europe were prohibited from owning land or farming and encouraged to take up a variety of trades including money lending, an activity prohibited by scripture for Christians. This made it easy for Europeans to believe that Jewish bankers controlled the financial markets. Jews in the United States were excluded from universities by quotas. Jews weren't welcome in traditional industrial enterprises. For example, in the early 1920s Henry Ford was the most respected businessman on the planet, sort of like an über Bill Gates. He demonstrated his commitment to diversity in the workplace by publishing
The International Jew: The World's
Foremost Problem,
a book that was a great inspiration to Adolf Hitler and early Nazi converts (if you Google the title you'll find the full text available on many Muslim sites worldwide). Jews looking for opportunity turned to new industries such as Hollywood and publishing. This made it plausible for Americans to believe that Jews controlled their media. Concentration in occupation among Jews reduces the likelihood that the average gentile will encounter a Jew at work and thereby have his or her prejudices contradicted.
Factor
3:
smallness in number. Jews today number roughly 13 million worldwide. The peak of Jewish population was 1939 when the estimate was between 16 and 18 million. Close encounters, the only antidote to prejudice, are unlikely when the hated group is only 0.21 percent of the world population.
Factor
4:
military weakness. Between the rise of the Roman Empire and 1948 the Jews were unable to achieve sovereign power in any region of the world and therefore were unable to build a military force. If you're going to hate a group and periodically inflict violence on them, it is best to pick a group that cannot retaliate.
The inherent virtues of hating an out-group plus these four factors were sufficient to fuel anti-Jewish violence throughout Christian Europe sponsored by the ruling class of the time. In medieval times this was primarily the Catholic Church and its local officials with secular authorities in the background. In modern times, up through the Holocaust, the primary sponsors of violence against Jews were secular officials with the Christian authorities in the background. The experience of Jews in the Islamic world was similar to the experience in Europe. State-sponsored murders of thousands of Jews were common in North Africa between the eighth and twelfth centuries; Arab mobs were responsible for most of the killings after 1800.
It is difficult to reach back through the mists of time to determine whether or not stirring up Jew-hatred was truly beneficial to the Catholic Church or various secular rulers. So let's start with Nazi Germany. Jew-hatred was one of the most successful programs of the Nazi party. Hating Jews galvanized the German people and helped in creating an economic boom through the 1930s. The Jews of Germany were pauperized, their wealth and property transferred to German gentiles, and profits spread among the government contractors who helped smooth the process along (see the book
IBM and the Holocaust
for just how willing American companies were to assist the German government, up to December 1941 and beyond). Foreign governments did not object to anti-Jewish measures such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Germany's military and territorial ambitions ultimately resulted in negative consequences but her experience with Jew-hatred was almost entirely positive.
(Even those Germans directly involved in exterminating Jews were seldom punished. Participants in the Wannsee Conference, for example, where the Final Solution was planned, generally spent less than four years in prisonâcompare this to the minimum of five years in federal prison that you'll get today if you are caught with five grams of crack cocaine.)
Let us consider Jew-hatred in modern Europe. Opinion polls in countries such as Poland reveal that hatred of Jews has survived even where the Jews have not. British and French academics propose a cultural and scientific boycott against Israel, an echo of 1930s Germany in which university professors joined the Nazi party at a rate double that of the general population. What purpose does Jew-hatred serve in modern-day Europe? Nearly all European countries were home to enthusiastic participants in the murder of the Jews of Europe. This is a source of a certain amount of shame and bad publicity for Europeans. Suppose, however, that it were possible to demonstrate that Israel is the worst of the 300 nations on this earth? This justifies the killing of Europe's Jews to a large extent: “Just look at the rogue nation these Jews created when left to themselves.” (The reasoning is a bit flawed because the vast majority of Israel's Jews come from Arab countries or Russia; the Europeans did such a thorough job of killing their Jews that we'll never know what kind of country they would have created.) A side effect of this desire to show how evil the state created by the co-religionists of the Jews whom they murdered is the European focus on Palestinians as a humanitarian cause. There may be billions of people in the world who are poorer and more oppressed than the Palestinians but they can't be held up as examples of how horrible Jews are and therefore get no mindshare and no assistance.
Jew-hatred in America is less prevalent and less violent than in Europe. As noted in the first section, a 2002 ADL study found that 17 percent of Americans were solid Jew-haters and 52 percent held some anti-Jewish beliefs. These numbers compare to 21 percent of Europeans holding the full range of stereotypes and a variable number by country proving mildly anti-Jewish, with the Spaniards topping the list at 71 percent. Americans generally are able to hold anti-Jewish stereotypes without feeling the need to take action. For example, the author has encountered quite a few Harvard Ph.D.s who express the belief that a conspiracy of Jewish financiers manipulates the U.S. economy (their doctorates are in humanities, not business). These university professors and non-profit organization administrators would not want to be seen at a Ku Klux Klan rally nor participate in a lynch mob but they'd be happy to join a boycott of the State of Israel. That only about half of Americans hold some of the same beliefs about Jews espoused by the Nazi party is comforting until one one reflects that Hitler was able to hold power in Germany with only 33 percent of the vote in 1932 and 44 percent in 1933.
We come finally to the original question of why Muslims hate Jews. These days it is mostly because they're taught to by their governments. The standard grade school curriculum in Muslim countries includes a healthy measure of Jew-hatred, much of it translated from materials first developed by Nazi Germany. State-run television in Muslim countries keeps the public fed with a constant stream of images of Israeli troops beating up Palestinians in the West Bank. Saudi-funded mosques complement the government-supplied material to the point that the average Malaysian Muslim, who has never been within five hundred miles of a Jew, might easily ascribe any of his problems to an international Jewish conspiracy and the rogue state of Israel.
A declining standard of living contributes to anger among the populace and the consequent search for scapegoats. The vast majority of Muslims live in Third World countries where any economic surplus is appropriated by the ruler's family and friends. Rather than investing the money in new machines for factories or productivity-enhancing technology, rich people in the Third World tend to sock money away in Swiss bank accounts or build themselves fabulous villas with fleets of imported cars and jets. The family that owns Saudi Arabia, for example, has reportedly transferred $1 trillion into foreign bank accounts, an amount nearly equal to the $1.1 trillion invested in capital goods during 2001 by all U.S. businesses; King Fahd spent $300 million on his August 2002 family vacation in Spain. Lack of re-investment of surplus results in slow or negative economic growth. Meanwhile the population in Muslim countries generally grows rapidly, e.g., 2 percent per year for Egypt, 2.5 percent for Jordan, and 2.9 percent for Saudi Arabia, compared to 0.1 percent per year for the average rich country (source:
www.prb.org
). If the Canadian economy grows 2 percent next year, for example, and the wealth is spread equally, the average person will have 1.7 percent more money to spend because the wealth need only be shared with 0.3 percent more people. If the Saudi economy were to do as well as it did in 2001 and grow 1.6 percent, the average Saudi would have a standard of living that was 1.3 percent lower, even if the new wealth were distributed equally.
(There is evidence that growth in the U.S. economy is governed by similar forces. In the late 1920s the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent of Americans rose to 45 percent. They built a lot of big fancy houses for themselves and the Great Depression followed. Between 1979 and 1997 the share of wealth for the top 1 percent of Americans rose from 20 percent to 40 percent. All of these rich people bidding against each other for waterfront property and Impressionist paintings has led to tremendous inflation in beach house prices and Sotheby's auctions while nobody can give away machine tools or improved information systems. In the 1950s a CEO made five to ten times the salary of the average worker and a company could pay out some of its profit in dividends, thereby encouraging further investment, and internally invest the rest in productivity improvements. In the 1990s a typical large company employed a long list of top executives earning one hundred to one thousand times the salary of their average worker. As in the case of the Sprint managers mentioned earlier, these amounts were often comparable to the company's total profits and therefore public corporations had a lot less to invest. The result was the recession that started in late 2000.)