NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

One thing that characterizes us Jews is our sheer longevity, and yet, for almost all of our history, in almost every part of the world, we have existed as a minority. The reasons for this are complex and interesting and have much to do with the non-proselytizing nature of Judaism. Even the word "Hebrew," from Ivri -- which translates as "he who crosses" or "passerby" -- denotes a sense of otherness. Unlike the Greeks, Romans or Egyptians, Hebrews were not tied to land; they always came from somewhere else. And it is precisely the endurance of this minority status that has helped to preserve Jewish traditions and culture over such a long period of time. When you're not part of the mainstream, you tend to hang on to what distinguishes you, whether by choice or fiat.

The Jews, then, are an ancient tribe, which makes despising them an ancient ritual. Antisemitism is, as the saying goes, "the oldest hatred." As with all ancient rituals, this form of hatred has morphed and shifted over time. In other words, we Jews have been hanging around for so damned long in our alterity that an agglomerated host of stereotypes have been projected onto us. This is what happens when you've been the ultimate "other" for so long, at least in the Western public imagination. As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, "If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him." This makes antisemitism a very intricate and versatile prejudice.

Indeed, it has now become a commonplace when discussing antisemitism to note its multivalence. Jews have -- and for quite a long time now -- broadly been hated and derided as both subhuman (dirty, deformed, physically puny, eternal victims, that which T. S. Eliot -- or perhaps just his mouthpiece Burbank -- referred to as "underneath the lot," including the rats) and superhuman (rich, fat, physically grotesque, at the nexus of a sinister cabal of string-pullers, directing global politics and global finance for personal benefit). This is what Baddiel calls going both "high" and "low." We see it throughout history, tapping into the prevailing currents of the day.

During the medieval period, when religion trumped all, Jews were swept up in the wars over tolerance and heresy, as happened during the Inquisition. They were routinely cast as both petty swindlers and perpetrators of the greatest cosmic crime of all: deicide. (Only in 1964 did the Vatican formally repudiate collective Jewish guilt for the Crucifixion.)

Fast-forward to the 19th century and the prejudice inserted itself into the burning new questions about nationality and the nation-state, especially following the European revolutions of 1848. Jews were both hated for failing to fit in and, as restrictions on their civil liberties relaxed, despised and feared for their assimilation. Either way, they were seen as contaminating the national body politic. The person who gifted us the term "antisemitism" (a strange coinage that makes little contextual sense, given that "Semitism" comes from linguistics, referring to a language group rather than a religious or ethnic category) was a man named Wilhelm Marr, whose main concern was to turn Jew hatred on the basis of religion (which one could escape through conversion) into Jew hatred on the basis of ethnicity, or race. His League of Antisemites (Antisemiten-Liga) fretted about the "Germanization" of this eternal other, the sense that "Germanized" Jews would simply be old-school Jews hiding in plain sight. (Marr's second wife, Helene Sophia Behrend, nee Israel, was Jewish, and the marriage was allegedly a happy one, a reminder of the nonsense of the "But some of my best friends are ..." line of defense.)

During the 20th century, this Janus-like prejudice evolved again, inserting itself into both of the two dominant political movements. Jews were, according to who was talking, either communists, responsible for pulling down the global capitalist edifice, or arch-capitalists, responsible for shoring up that very edifice's foundations.

In certain ways, the 19th-century obsession with the nation-state has parallels in contemporary identity politics, in the affirmation of unique characteristics and heritages of multifarious individuals and groups, a phenomenon that has, in its turn -- and in ways that are depressingly unsurprising -- sprung up alongside (and helped to trigger) an upsurge in various ugly new forms of nationalism. 

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