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The Social Construction of Enemies: Jews and the Representation of Evil
Author(s): David Norman Smith

Source: Sociological Theory , Nov., 1996, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Nov., 1996), pp. 203-240
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3045387
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The Social Construction of Enemies: Jews and the
Representation of Evil*
DAVID NORMAN SMITH
University of Kansas
Fifty years after the Holocaust, anti-Jewish myths and sentiments are gaining momentum
in Europe, the Islamic world, the Americas, and even in Japan. Why? Does hate spring
eternal?
Seeking an answer to this question, I develop a seven-part argument. My aim is to
advance what can reasonably be called a "social constructionist" perspective on the
kind of antisemitic demonology that is now gaining worldwide currency. My method is
to seek clarity by evaluating varying kinds of constructionist claims. Both the strengths
and weaknesses of these claims are illuminating for my purposes, as I try to show in
connection with writers including Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl,
Daniel Goldhagen, and Pierre-Andre Taguieff.
My conclusion is that we can best understand antisemitism as an instance of what
historian Gavin Langmuir calls "chimeria." Interpreted in the spirit of certain classic
texts (by Sartre, Adorno, and Samuel), this notion offers a powerful starting point for
further inquiry. To illustrate the promise of this approach, I close with an interpretation
of the current, global antisemitic revival as an expression of anti-Jewish chimeria.
Fantasies of "Jewish conspiracy" have been rife in recent years. Amid a host of traumas-
the collapse of the USSR, German reunification, the travails of the former Soviet bloc,
recession in the Far East, and the austerity policies of the IMF-anti-Jewish mythology has
once again emerged from the shadow of the Holocaust. Fears and illusions that many people
thought had been forever discredited have been resurrected in many places. Once mainly
European, antisemitism is now genuinely global-and increasingly angry and delusional,
as Brym, Goodman, Miyazawa, Yadlin, and many others have shown.1
Startling views are widespread. In Poland, 36% of all survey respondents agree that "the
Jews" are still answerable for the murder of Christ-a claim echoed by nearly one-third of
all respondents in Uzbekistan and a quarter of all respondents in Austria. In Romania, a
powerful mass movement calls for "a bloody struggle against Hungarians, Germans, gyp-
sies, and Jews," while just 38% of Slovakians reject the statement that the Holocaust was
"just punishment" for Jewish sins. In Belarus, 25% of all survey respondents favor exiling
Jews to Siberia.2
All this is happening, meanwhile, in a period when Jews are an almost spectral presence.
Outside of the Americas, only Russia and Hungary have non-negligible Jewish populations
* I am grateful for the advice and support of many people, including Bob Antonio, Laura Bennetts, Craig
Calhoun, G6ran Dahl, Leah Florence, Mark Gottdiener, Marty Harwayne, Scott Kerrihard, Ernest Manheim, Hal
Orbach, Leon Rappoport, Alan Sica, and Violet Smith. I would also like to thank Bob Brym and David Goodman,
for sharing documents with me; Alberto Gasparini, James Woelfl, Dan Breslauer, Carl Strikwerda, Josh Rosen-
bloom, and Kevin Anderson, for giving me opportunities to present my ideas in public forums; and-last but not
least-the Research Support Office of the University of Kansas. Please address any correspondence to David N.
Smith, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS 66045.
1 For full data, see the annual Antisemitism World Reports (1992-1996, hereafter AWR); Fullerton 1995;
Mansurov 1993; Mudde 1995; Pelinka 1993; Yadlin 1989; and other sources cited below.
2 See AWR (1996:195), Benz (1993:8), Pelinka (1993:46-47), Ford (1991:xxxxi), Simon (1992:A4), and
Butorova and Butora (1992:94).
Sociological Theory 14:3 November 1996

© American Sociological Association. 1722 N Street NW Washington, DC 20036

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204 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
(about 2,000,000 and 80,000 respectively). Slovakia, Romania, and Poland-the sites of
the angriest antisemitism outside the former USSR-are virtually free of Jews. And some
of the fiercest antisemitism in the former USSR is found either in realms where most native
Jews were killed in the Holocaust (e.g., Ukraine) or where few have ever lived (Azerbaijan).
All this, Wolfgang Benz says, is "stringent proof of the thesis that antisemitism ... is not
only possible without Jews, it does in fact exist to [a] great [extent]" (1993:3).
With this background, it is perhaps not surprising that much of the reigning anti-Jewish
feeling is highly detached from reality. Perhaps the most vivid evidence of this is the
growing popularity of the classic demonological belief, most commonly associated with
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that a sinister cabal of rich and powerful Jews rules
the world. In Russia, "fifty to sixty publications, some read by millions, spread the notion
of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world" (Lerman, 1993:28; cf. AWR 1996). And this
notion is indeed widespread. In Moscow, 17.8% of the respondents in a recent survey
"agreed or were inclined to agree that a global Zionist plot against Russia exists" (Brym
and Degtyarev 1993:5; cf. Brym 1996). Perhaps even more remarkably, almost 25% were
"undecided"!3
Parallel concerns are widely voiced elsewhere. Almost 60% of Polish survey respondents
agree, for example, that "Jews hold most of the world's finances in their hands"; the claim
that "Jews have too much influence in the world" is endorsed by 42% of Azerbaijanis, 36%
of Germans, and 30% of Americans; 28% of Slovaks blame a "Jewish plot" for major world
problems. Among Czechs, the "Velvet Revolution" is routinely called a Jewish-Masoni
coup. The Romanian far right indicts "Israeli-Hungarian plotters" for toppling the former
Stalinist regime, and in Hungary, even the ruling party decries "Jewish hegemony" and the
"global financial conspiracy." In Turkey, the new Islamic president has blamed "Jews
freemasonry and the United States" for Turkey's woes.4
Meanwhile, perhaps reflecting the influence of recent "Holocaust denial," more than half
of Belarusian respondents report skepticism about "the full reality" of the Holocaust, while
15% of Germans say the Holocaust has been exaggerated (and 40% of Austrian children
implicate the Jews themselves in the Holocaust).5
Finally, in a crowning absurdity, a powerful wave of demonological Jewish-conspiracy
theory has swept over Japan-though almost no Jews have ever lived in Japan. Literally
hundreds of books insist, as one title proclaims, that Money Rules the World and the Jews
Rule Money. More than 100 such books appeared in 1990 alone, and by 1993, Uno Masami
had sold more than a million copies of his lurid bestseller, If You Understand the Jews, You
Understand the World: Scenario for the Ultimate Economic War (Goodman and Miyazawa
1995; Golub 1992).
Nor are these views simply idle prejudices. Since 1989, acts of anti-Jewish violence have
become increasingly common in the United States, in every part of Scandinavia and Europe,
and in remoter realms such as Brazil and Australia. And many seemingly disparate terrorist
acts of the recent past-from Aum Shinrikyo's poison attack on the Tokyo subways to the
Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings-seem to have been spurred by the
shared conviction that these deadly assaults were, in fact, valorous acts of war against
"Jewish conspirators" or the so-called "Zionist Occupation Government" (ZOG).6
3 In other words, "over forty percent of Moscow's adult population are open to perhaps the greatest anti-Semitic
canard of all time" (Brym and Degtyarev 1993:6).
4 See Krzeminski (1993:129); cf. Cala (1993), Benz (1993:8), Hertzberg (1993:53), Hockenos (1993:112f.,
283-284), and AWR (1996:249, 1994:135).
5 Russian respondents, when asked to name famous historical Jews, spontaneously choose "Adolf Hitler" as
their sixth most common selection (Gudkov and Levinson 1992:18).
6 My thanks to David G. Goodman for sharing a paper (1996, in press) on the antisemitism that led Aum's
leaders to imagine that, in attacking the Tokyo subways, they were striking the first blow in a millennial conflict
against Judeo-Japanese and Judeo-American enemies. (And cf. Kaplana nd Marshall, 1996:222f.) It is well-known,

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THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF ENEMIES 205
Antisemitism, in short, seems to have a radioactive half-life of millen

"postmoder" world, a kind of mythology that would have seemed at
years ago is now routine once again. Why?
Does hate spring eternal?
JUDEOPHOBIA IN QUESTION
Few sociologists would deny that the representation of the Jew as a demonic enemy is, in
some sense, an instance of "socially constructed" identity. The contrary view-the antisemi-
tic claim that the demonic Jew is in fact real-is now defended by just a few intellectuals
such as the Russian writer Aleksandr Dugin and the mathematician Igor Shafarevich. And
even the most richly embroidered antisemitic perspectives today-such as Dugin's "conspi-
ratology" or Shafarevich's theory of "Russophobia"-seldom lay serious claim to the mantl
of science. Not since the Third Reich has it been common for sociologists to join forces
with antisemites, and not since Max Scheler has antisemitism had a major sociologica
apologist.7
Scheler, it will be recalled, defended Nietzsche's claim that Jews bear fatal guilt for the
"transvaluation of values" that substituted popularly constructed norms (egalitarianism,
pacifism) for an originally-given spiritual hierarchy ([1912] 1961:145; cf. Nietzsche [1887]
1966:469ff.).8 In effect, Scheler's claim is that the very notion of socially constructed values
expresses the subversive hubris of Jewish humanism. Values and identities are objectively
given, he writes; Germans and Jews are hence unalterably antithetical, however much Jews
may wish to deny this (1917, passim).
Now, contra Scheler, the theme of "socially constructed" identities is widely applauded,
in myriad idioms. But there is still very little agreement about the implications of this notion
for "the Jews" of antisemitic folklore. Are these Jews pure phantasmagoric constructions?
Or are they, perhaps, distorted but still recognizable reflections of real Jews?
This is not, as we will see, a strictly academic question. Indeed, the practical difference
between these two claims is of critical significance. Antisemitic and antidemocratic move-
ments are both growing swiftly, and it seems likely that there may be an elective affinity
between them. To decipher and oppose these twin dangers, social theorists will have to
penetrate their interconnections. And this, in turn, requires a subtle investigation of each.
If antisemitism is partly a reaction to the conduct or character of living Jews, then Jews
may be able to reform antisemites by self-transformation. This is, in fact, exactly what most
currents of Jewry have believed in this century. Under various banners (assimilationism and
Zionism, Reform and Orthodoxy, liberalism and socialism), Jews have claimed the power
to dispel antisemitism by self-reform. Few have gone as far as to imply, with Bernard
Lazare, that only self-reform is needed.9 Nor is it common to say, like the ultra-Orthodox
rabbinate, that "those who seek the sources of antisemitism in external circumstances, such
as the complicated social and political conditions of the day, [are] self-deceived" (cited by
meanwhile, that many American ultra-rightists (from the alleged Oklahoma City bombers to the Montana Freemen)
affirm similar views; for relevant data see Stem (1996), Dees (1996), Ezekial (1995), J. Kaplan (1995) and the
indispensable social and intellectual background data in Aho (1994), Barkun (1994) and Boyer (1992). And see
Sprinzak (1995:25f.) for data on the recent influence of ZOG convictions among European neo-Nazis.
7 See Smith (1994).
8 On the nature of this hierarchy, of course, Scheler and Nietzsche parted company. Scheler's ideal (until the
murky, final phase of his development) was Catholicism-a fact that led Ernst Troeltsch to dub him "the Catholic
Nietzsche." Nietzsche, by contrast, was an enemy of "Judo-Christian" norms in all their guises.
9 Self-reform is vital, Lazare felt ([1894] 1903:8), since "the general causes of antisemitism have always resided
in Israel itself, and not in those who antagonized it." Ironically, Lazare personally was one of the bravest opponents
of French antisemitism during the Dreyfus Affair. This did not, however, prevent him from assigning Jews
comprehensive blame even for their own murders: 'The Jews want to live apart-a line is drawn against them.
They detest the spirit of the nations amidst whom they live-the nations chase them. They burn the [Quran and
the New Testament]-their Talmud is burned and they themselves are burned with it" ([1894] 1903:19).

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Ragins 1980:98-9). But if Jews can change antisemites by changing themselves, then
antisemitism is comparatively easy to understand-and mend. Answers are available with-
out complex sociological analysis. And Jews can cure this illness unaided, without asking
too much of antisemites.
This, in brief, is the consensus that crystallized in Jewish circles around the turn of th
century. Opinion leaders in each of the principal camps agreed that "at least some of th
responsibility for antisemitism was lodged in the nature of Jewish life itself, and that the
were real, objective characteristics in Jewry that contributed to the causes of antisemitis
and helped sustain it" (Ragins 1980:66). The only real dispute was over the exact nature
of the problematic traits, and how they should be handled. A leading liberal, who agree
that antisemitism does indeed have "factual foundations in the Jewish community," sounde
a common note when he objected to the "disquietude" of the Jews, their "limitless egois
and sensuality," their "loud, rash nature" (Philippson, cited in Ragins 1980:71). The rich
tended to blame poor Jews for this "disquietude" (which often inspired political radicalism
Socialist Jews, in turn, often pointed fingers of reproof at wealthy Jews (for their "limitl
egoism").0l And western Jews, rich and poor alike, tended to blame antisemitism on the
strange ways of Jewish emigrants from Galicia, which, they felt, repelled non-Jews (Asc
heim 1982; Wertheimer 1987). Walter Rathenau expressed this opinion with classical purity
when he spoke bitingly of eastern Jews as this "Asiatic horde," this "alien human stock in
the midst of German life," whose very nature, "effervescent and gaudily decorated," is an
affront to cultured sensibilities ([1897] 1981:89).
For assimilationists, meanwhile, any Jew who failed to abide by Gentile norms was a
kind of cultural provocateur. Raphael L6wenfeld, a founder of the German-Jewish Centra
verein, insisted that "one of the main causes of antisemitism" was the failure of Orthodox
Jewry to accept Reform Judaism and "become completely Germanized." The Orthodox,
turn, blamed antisemitism on their "covenant-betraying brethren"-those, like L6wenfel
and Theodore Reinach, whose quest to promote assimilation to French or German custom
provoked antisemitic fears of masked Jewish power and intrigue (Ragins 1980:50, 98; cf
Marrus 1971:94)."1
Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, was originally an assimilationist who late
despaired of finding acceptance for Jews in Europe. Yet even this despair, it should be note
did not impair Herzl's optimism about the power of the Jews to vanquish antisemitism.
'The Jews will leave as honored friends," Herzl insisted, and "anti-Semitism [will] stop a
once and forever" ([1896] 1943:28, 100).
The emerging consensus, in short, was that Jews provoke Gentiles, and that antisemitis
is the logical result. Hence, to undo antisemitism, Jews must either emigrate or undertak
what Rathenau ([1897] 1981:91) called an endeavor "without historical precedent: th
conscious self-education of a race to conform to foreign demands."
This, plainly, was a kind of syllogism, resting on an axiomatic foundation. As such, it
was unlikely to inspire curiosity or research. It is not surprising, then, that Jews in th
period seldom saw antisemitism as a puzzle requiring sociological investigation. It do
seem odd, however, that sociologists were equally blase. As Carl Mayer wrote, "sociology
seems to encounter few [phenomena] so unique and phantastic [as demonological antisem
10 See Wistrich (1982, passim). And even Otto Bauer, the renowned Austro-Marxist theorist of nationalit
contended that the antipathy that many workers feel for Jews "does not stem from political antisemitism, but fr
the naive instinctive reaction against the strange manners of the non-assimilated Jews." In particular, Bauer sai
Jews annoyed Gentile workers by "the inflection of their language, their gestures, their apparel, their customs
(cited in Wistrich 1982:339).
1 For the Orthodox, meanwhile, antisemitism was a weapon of God's avenging will, which would scourge t
faithless for breaking the covenant. Today, for many of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, the Holocaust is still interpreted
in this way.

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tism, yet thus far] sociologists have abstained from making it a serious o
tion" (1942:316). Not until the eve of the Second World War did the tid
Nazi and east European antisemitism assumed ever more grotesque
increasingly evident that neither assimilation nor Zionist emigration was,
to the problem. Judeophobia was increasingly violent and hallucinatory. N
did, or failed to do, made any difference. What strange fury is this, man
do fascists, in particular, so often rage against Jews? And why are Jews s
as sinister, world-conquering demons, the very soul of evil?
For a moment after the war, the prospect of a vital multidisciplinary i
questions seemed within reach, as Adorno, Fenichel, Sartre, and a host of
valuable studies.12 But the spirit of the 1940s soon faded. After the mid-
genocidal hate seemed to lose its luster for social theorists. Rich histori
to appear, but with rare exceptions (e.g., the work of Saul Friedland
Guillaumin [1972], Joseph Gabel [1975], Shulamit Volkov [1978], and Alp
[1981]), the wider currents of theoretical analysis branched into other ch
As a result, antisemitism "received little sustained attention or any cont
discussion among social scientists" for a generation (Fein 1987b:67).
searchers in this period (e.g. Selznick and Steinberg [1969], Quinley
were empiricists studying variations in routine bias. "Antisemitism"
dislike or disapproval of Jews, and little else. And in fact this remains
social-scientific notion of antisemitism.
Only recently has a renewed interest begun to stir in anti-Jewish demonology. Most
the writers who have delved into this theme grasp, to varying degrees, that demonology
not simply conventional prejudice, and many are now beginning to avow "construction
views. In a profusion of idioms, in many fields, and with uneven self-consciousness, crit
are saying that ethnic and "racial" identities are social rather than natural facts, "construct
by cultural practices and representations. This is the premise shared, for example, by crit
of "culturally constructed binary oppositions" (Culler), "chimeria" (Langmuir) "social ra
cism" (Bock), "moral panic" (Morin), "demonology" (Poliakov), "orecticism" (Youn
Bruehl), "mixophobia" (Taguieff), and "racisation" (Guillaumin).'4 And there are ma
related perspectives put forward by such notable figures as Moishe Postone, Slavoj Zize
Nonna Mayer, and Yves Chevalier.15
My objective, in what follows, is to trace a path through the labyrinth of classical a
contemporary perspectives on antisemitism, seeking to clarify the implications of the id
that Jews are "socially constructed enemies." After a brief glance into the celebrated rec
inquiry by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, I look critically at Gavin Langmuir's fruitful noti
of "chimeria." This leads to an account of classic texts by Samuel, Sartre, and others.16
Certain difficulties in these texts are clarified by a glance at Sartre's critics. And sever
obstacles to the sociological application of constructionist tenets are explored via recent
works by Goldhagen, Young-Bruehl, Taguieff, and Wieviorka.
12 Other stellar names of this period include psychologists Marie Jahoda, Bruno Bettelheim, Rudolph Loewen
stein, Daniel Levinson, and Ernst Simmel, and historians Eva Reichmann, Aurel Kolnai, Paul Massing, and Joshu
Trachtenberg.
13 Outstanding recent historians of antisemitism include Leon Poliakov, Eleonore Sterling, Rosemary Ruether
Hans Rosenberg, Norman Cohn, Shulamit Volkov, Peter Pulzer, George Mosse, Michael Marrus, Jacob Tou
Jacob Katz, and Reinhard Riirup. And I particularly wish to call attention to the brilliant work of Stephen Wi
(1982).
14 "Chimeria" is pronounced "ky-meria" (with the hard Greek "ch," as in charisma).
15 See also the recent work of Alain Finkielkraut ([1980] 1994), Christian Delacampagne (1990), Joseph Gabel
(1987), and Alex Demirovic (1992), among others.
16 This reading of antisemitism was prefigured in the Volkerspsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal. The earliest
critiques of Judeophobia, from Pinsker and Ahad Ha'am to Peretz Bernstein, all clearly bear the marks of what
Dilthey once called "Lazarista" influence. (See Smith 1997, in press).

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My thesis, briefly, is that Sartre et al. formulated a perspective of lasting merit which
can be distilled into seven basic points (and several corollaries). This perspective is complex
in detail but comparatively simple in principle. I argue that the antisemite's malign "Jew"
is a figment of the social imagination. This is most clearly evident in the myth of the world
Jewish conspiracy, which, as Cohn observes, is "a modem adaptation of . . . ancient
demonological tradition" ([1966] 1981:22). In the most widespread current version of this
demonology, Jews figure as evil personified, the engine of a Zionist-ZOG plot to enslave
the planet (Hockenos 1993; Wilson 1982; Postone 1986, 1980). And this, in turn, is a
specifically Manichaean myth, moored in authoritarianism and manifest in hallucinatory
visions.
We begin with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.
A CULTURALLY CONSTRUCTED POLARITY
According to Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is a "necessary condition for

combating the totalitarian risk" (1989:155).17 And Jonathan Culler sees spe
deconstruction of Nazi antisemitism: "Never," he stresses, "has there bee
of the deadly functioning of a culturally constructed binary opposition.
seeks to undo oppositions that, in the name of unity, purity, order, and h
eliminate difference" (1989:783).
Perhaps the most acclaimed recent account of antisemitism comes from
Labarthe, who is not a minor figure in the deconstructionist pantheon.
many of the main deconstructive categories were forged in an effor
Heidegger from Sartre-and Lacoue-Labarthe was pivotal to that effort. "
years, methods of reading Heidegger ... that were not influenced by eith
or Sartre . . . were developed by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, by Jean-Luc N
by myself" (Derrida 1990:146).18 The very notion of "deconstruction" spra
reading of Heidegger: "If this ancient French word has any meaning today,
"it is almost exclusively within the context of Derrida's thought.... For D
has served to retrieve and re-elaborate Heidegger's notion of Destr
1990:102).19 Like Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe has pursued this "delimitation
tion" (Destruktion, Zerstorung, Abbau) of philosophy" (1990:10). It is no
that Lacoue-Labarthe's La Fiction du politique originated as an intervention
over Heidegger's Nazi past.20 Nor is it coincidental that this book has be
so many of Heidegger's admirers, including, e.g., Maurice Blanchot ([
17 Compare the similar views of Paul de Man (1986:11) and J. Hillis Miller (1989:339).
18 Lacoue-Labarthe's role in the anti-Sartrean reading of Heidegger is also stressed by Lyot
his book on Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and "the jews," that the rubric of deconstructio
'philosophers' in France (and elsewhere, to be sure) have understood as what is trying to writ
texts. It is thus that existentialism, phenomenology, and Marxism have given way to existenti
which is 'nomadic' because without place, deconstructive because paradoxical" (1990:5).
In the early 1980s, as co-director (with Nancy) of the Centre de recherches philosophiq
Lacoue-Labarthe played an important role in mediating between the various currents in Fren
Derrida, Lyotard, Ranciere, Lefort, and Ferry were among the prominent participants in a s
by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, who edited the proceedings in three volumes (1985, 1983
19 Gasche suspects that Heidegger may have borrowed the idea of Destruktion from H
"Abbau" and phrase "gedankliche Destruktion" anticipated Heidegger substantively as well as
20 This debate began with Farias ([1987] 1989) and continues apace. Heidegger was a du
the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945 and played an active role in the effort to Nazify the Germ
in 1933-1934 while serving as "Rector-Fiihrer" of the University of Freiburg. For details
Megill (1985); and cf. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy ([1980] 1991).

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Cynthia Chase calls the book "indispensable" (1989:70), and Jean-Francois

a study of his own to Lacoue-Labarthe's views on Heidegger and the Jew
Lacoue-Labarthe is opposed, above all, to the claim that Heidegger's ph
an affinity for fascism (1990:105). Against Adorno and others who
Lacoue-Labarthe insists that Heidegger's Destruktion of ideology is an
cism-and that German fascism and Judeophobia sprang, rather, from th
that Heidegger sought to destroy. What were these ideologies? Applying a
from Walter Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe says that "in its essence, th
National Socialism" consisted of an "aestheticization of politics" (1990:61)
Lacoue-Labarthe grounds this proposition in the work of the filmmaker
whom the Third Reich is an example of the "total artwork of a pervert
understood the significance of film," Syberberg says. "We might even wo
did not merely organize [the] Nuremberg [rallies] for [filmmaker] Leni
and, . . . whether the whole of the Second World War was not indeed co
budget war film, solely put on so it could be projected as newsreel each
bunker" (cited in Lacoue-Labarthe 1990:63).
This view is "profound," Lacoue-Labarthe says. "Racism-and antisemitis
lar-is primarily, fundamentally, an aestheticism" (1990:64, 69). If this is
rage against Jews is not "fundamentally" psychodynamic or social in orig
The implication of this claim is concisely stated by Jean-Joseph Goux, w
with Lacoue-Labarthe: 'The fatal inclination of such an aesthetic fiction
is towards the elimination of all that seems misshapen, strange, unhealthy
ous to the beautiful organic totality of the community-thus the extermin
(1989:19).
This is remarkable. The Jews were killed, by this logic, because they w
"the beautiful people" of Aryan myth. In the eyes of their assassins the
lacking in the Nordic graces. "In his essence, the 'Jew' is a caricature
Lacoue-Labarthe explains (1990:69).
For Lacoue-Labarthe, in other words, the infinite complexities of Nati
be reduced to little more than a cinematic idee fixe, while genocidal hatre
a kind of aesthetic reflex. Everything unique about the historical ex
antisemitism is left in the shade. Why were the Jews so uniquely abhorre
did the Nazis choose genocide rather than some lesser measure? Wh
diverted from the Russian front to the death camps? And why did Judeo
flame at this moment, in this place?
To solve riddles of this kind, Lacoue-Labarthe would have to turn to h
embraces metaphysics. "In the Auschwitz apocalypse, it was nothing less t
its essence, that revealed itself. ... God in fact died at Auschwitz-the God of the
Judaeo-Christian West." The rationale for this claim is evidently Lacoue-Labarthe's convic-
tion that Western art gives rise to an inherently murderous technology. "Auschwitz is, very
precisely . . . the useless residue (le dechet) of the Western idea of art, that is to say, of
techne" (Lacoue-Labarthe 1990:35, 37, 46). Pressed by critics, Lacoue-Labarthe disavows
any social-scientific intent. Affirming "the fact [that] national aestheticism . . . entered in a
decisive way into the Hitlerian variant of antisemitism" is not the same, he says, as
"believing that this 'explains' the mass phenomenon of antisemitism." On the contrary,
"there is no question here of a cause. This is why I speak, for want of a better term, in
terms of essences" (1990:49).
Apparently, the aesthetic "essence" of Western culture is so warped that genocide is
woven into its very fabric. "We knew," Lacoue-Labarthe proclaims, "that Western man was

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a killer... We even knew-or could guess-that the West had always hated something in
the Jew" (1990:49).
Paradoxically, then, to explain why "the Jew" seems "essentially" vile to antisemites,
Lacoue-Labarthe says that "the West" is "essentially" murderous. The very same metaphysi-
cal, essentialist category that the Nazis applied to the Jews, Lacoue-Labarthe now applies
to Nazism-and evidently, to Western democrats and antifascists as well.
Few sociologists are likely to agree that the differentia specifica of Weimar democracy,
hyperinflation, depression, bigotry, and class conflict can be safely ignored in favor of a
transhistorical conception of aesthetic causality.21 At one point, even Martin Heidegger
ironized about efforts to equate Nazism with the Western heritage. "One does not at all
serve the knowledge and appraisal of the historical uniqueness of National Socialism," he
said in a lecture on Holderlin ([1942] 1984:106), "if one now interprets the Hellenic realm
(Griechentum) such that one could suppose that the Greeks have already all been 'National
Socialists."22 Derrida's friend, the critic Paul de Man, made a similar point: "One would
think," he wrote, "that, after some of the experiences of this century, the complexity of the
relationship between thought and action would be better understood.... The responsibility
[for Nazism] rests not with the tradition but with the manner in which it was used or
neglected, and this is primarily a sociological problem" ([1966] 1989:163).
De Man may be less critical of Kant and Fichte than the historical record warrants, but
he is entirely right about the pressing need for sociological insight. For this we must turn
to writers who analyze antisemitism without recourse to metaphysical absolutes. Among
recent writers, the historian Gavin Langmuir has shown a particularly keen sensitivity to
the social and historical nature of antisemitic myth, which he classifies as a form of
chimeria.
EVIL PERSONIFIED
'n 1898, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, the royalist leader Lur-Sal
colleagues that they could obtain "every advantage by diverting to our pro
movement which grows larger every day." A few years earlier, he added,
have been less credible. Aristocrats then "found antisemitism to be frigh
pillage the Jews, they said, we will end up being pillaged as well." But th
changed: 'Today such fears no longer exist. There is a sense that it is no
of money and that [religious] beliefs are not at issue. Everyone has unders
struggling against a race and defending ourselves against its cosmopo
Irvine 1989:173).
A few years earlier, Bernard Lazare had concluded, on similar grounds,
now eclipsed religion as a spur to anti-Jewish feeling. ([1894] 1903). An a
derives from Sartre and others for whom demonology differs decisively f
Antipathies rooted in "race" or creed may yield a full-blown demon
situations, but this is not always the case. And demonology, not simple bi
vitally in question when we deal with anti-Jewish myth.
21 On Foucauldian grounds, the late social historian Detlev Peukert argued that there is
deadly about the "disciplines" of twentieth-century science; for a critique of Peukert, se
somewhat analogous argument by a sociologist, see Zygmunt Bauman (1991:31f.). For Ba
real point at issue is not; 'What can we, the sociologists, say about the Holocaust?', but, r
Holocaust to say about us, the sociologists, and our practice?"' (1991:5). This emphasis sharply
of Bauman's analysis for my purposes.
22 I have slightly altered the translation of this passage, which I found in Michael Zimmer
on Heidegger (1990:41). Zimmerman renders "Griechentum" as "Greek humanity."

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Leon Poliakov, the dean of today's historians of antisemitism, finds

tion of this point in the writings of Gavin Langumuir, for whom "ass
"assertions chimeriques" are ideal-typically opposed (1993:83). Lan
chimeria does, in my opinion, offer a valid point of entry for the ana
demonology. Although there are problems with some of his key form
core position is rich and insightful.
"I am a historian," Langmuir says, "not a philosopher." The starting
is hence a "practical historiographic problem" (1990a:349-350). Why, t
wish to annihilate Jews? And what cluster of German hopes and sent
to realize this wish?
The innovative feature of Langmuir's response to these questions is that he posits an

impassable divide between chimeria and reality-based bias. Impressed by the fact t
antisemitism has flourished even in realms and periods without Jews-such as Sha
speare's England, three centuries after the Jews had been expelled-Langmuir argues th
at least two major forms of prejudice fall under the rubric of "antisemitism." Everyd
anti-Jewish bias springing from direct contact is routine, akin to English anti-French
statement. But there is also the more radical belief that "the Jews" form a surreal gro
with demonological traits. To define this sort of bias ("to make a distinction which is
recognized in the [ordinary] social scientists' conception of 'ethnic prejudice'.. ."), Lang
muir introduces the term "chimeria," which he derives from classical mythology:
the ancient use of [the terml chimera to refer to a fabulous monster emphasizes the central
characteristic of the phenomenon. ... In contrast to [routine bias], chimeric assertions
present fantasies, figments of the imagination, monsters which, although dressed syntac-
tically in the clothes of real humans, have never been seen and are projections of mental
processes unconnected with the real people of the outgroup. Chimeric assertions have no
"kernel of truth." This is the contrast which distinguishes the hostility that produced
Auschwitz from that manifested against Jews in ancient Alexandria. (1987:109-110)23
This is a crucial distinction. Langmuir shows its power and flexibility by applying it
a series of historical examples, largely drawn from research on medieval Europe
Langmuir 1990b, 1984, 1980, 1977, 1976, 1975, 1972). He maintains, briefly, that
adversos Judceus tradition in the first millennium of Christianity was mainly an express
of real religious antagonisms, albeit in distorted, often overzealous forms. The aim of th
tradition was twofold: to explain the baffling refusal of the Chosen People to acknowled
Christ, and to convert them. Only later did antisemitism proper arise. "If antisemitism
defined as chimerical beliefs or fantasies about 'Jews,' as irrational beliefs that attribute
all those symbolized as 'Jews' menacing characteristics or conduct that no Jews have b
observed to possess or engage in, then antisemitism first appeared in medieval Europe
the twelfth century" (Langmuir 1990a:297).
The first wave of anti-Jewish fantasy appeared at the time of the Crusades. "We can p
the origin of the first such fantasy down to a single individual. In 1144, the body of a ch
was found near Norwich, England. Nothing about the boy was religiously significant sa
that someone had killed him at Eastertide" (Langmuir 1990a:298). Thomas of Monmouth
a monk who arrived on the scene four years later, spread the rumor that Jews had crucif
this boy, and that ritual murders of this kind took place yearly.
23 Interestingly enough, the Jews were described as a "chimcerisches Volk" by Bruno Bauer in "Die Juden-Fra
([1843] 1978:149).

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This was the first of many lurid anti-Jewish rumors to win an audience in late medieval
Europe.24 The English and continental public, disconcerted by religious and economic
upheavals, accused the Jews of plotting to afflict them with a host of maladies and
misfortunes. Jews were blamed, for example, for the Black Death of 1347-1350, although
they suffered like everyone else. "It would be hard to find a clearer example of irrational
scapegoating; and the fact that the people known as flagellants were particularly active in
inciting attacks on Jews reveals something about the mental processes at work" (Langmuir
1990a:301-302). The Inquisition, expulsions, and other persecutions ensued.
The twentieth-century relevance of Langmuir's idea of chimeric prejudice is indicated by
the stubborn persistence of antisemitism in many places where Jews have been eliminated
or have never lived. It is hence no surprise that Werner Bergmann, Helen Fein, and others
who probe this persisting prejudice find merit in Langmuir's deft and imaginative handling
of the idea of chimeria. Nor is it surprising that others (Ostow [1996], Rubin [1990], Chalk
and Jonassohn [1990] and Gerber [1986]) speak in similar terms.25 This is not to say,
however, that Langmuir offers a fully clear or coherent theoretical perspective. On the
contrary, his analysis is significantly flawed in several ways.
The main problem is that, in lieu of a theory, Langmuir offers a typology. There is nothing
wrong, obviously, with the effort to classify anti-Jewish claims. Saying that antisemitic
myth is a form of "chimeria" adds a degree of clarity to our thinking on this subject, without
in any way relativizing this unique bias.26 It is also plainly important to clarify why specific
biases rise and fall. Why does bias vary across cultures? What dynamics of class, worldview,
and character structure are effective in different contexts? Langmuir notes the salience of
these questions, but he does not address them cogently. Rather than offering a sociological
explanation for Nazi chimeria, for example, he retreats to an eccentric reductionism.
The "origin of chimeria," Langmuir concludes, "is to be sought primarily in individual
development" (1987:114). It is less a social fact, a collective force, than a feature of personal
faith. The weakness of this claim becomes palpable when Langmuir seeks to explain why
German hatred for Jews became not only chimerical but genocidal. 'The heritage of Judaism
and Christianity ensured that the symbol 'Jews' and the chimerical fantasies associated with
it would be salient in the religiosity of those attracted to the Aryan myth," he observes
(1990a:345). "But the reality of Jews contradicted Nazi beliefs far more obviously than
Christian beliefs." It was, in fact, Hitler's inability to face contradictory "facts" that led to
the Final Solution, Langmuir concludes:
Hitler could not content himself with degrading and marginalizing the Jews, as Christians
had for centuries to provide proof of their beliefs. At some level, he was aware that the
very existence of Jews as Jews would always be a direct empirical invalidation of his
beliefs about "Jews"-and therefore of the Nazis' belief in their own superiority as
24 R.I. Moore, who extends Langmuir's account, points out that in 1171 the Count of Blois ordered the hanging
of 31 Jews as punishment for a ritual murder, "even though no body had been found or boy reported missing."
And as early as 1190, Richard of Devizes claimed that the alleged murder of a Christian boy at Passover was the
work of a far-flung Jewish conspiracy (Moore 1987:37f., 119f.; and cf. R. Po-chia Hsia [1988] and Jeremy Cohen
[1982]).
25 Langmuir has been uniquely influential among recent students of antisemitism. Sociologists Werner Bergmann
(1988), Yves Chevalier (1988), and Helen Fein (1987a) all avow this influence, and, like historian Poliakov
(1993:83), endorse the notion of chimeria. "It is arresting," Fein remarks (1987a:3), "to observe how much [we]
agree with each other despite different methods." Chevalier's system-theoretical model, however, gives too much
weight to opinion-forming elites, while underspecifying the dynamics of public opinion (1988:135-137, 148).
26 Placing antisemitic myth under a wider rubric might, at first, seem to deprive it of specificity, but further
reflection makes it plain that this is not so. Witchcraft accusations, for example, are often just as chimerical as
anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, but no one is likely to confuse the two phenomena simply because both can be
reasonably defined as instances of "chimeria." See below for further substantive discussion of this point.

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"Aryans." The contradiction was so blatant that the only way Hitler
Aryan religion was to suppress the knowledge of the human reality of
by exterminating them. (1990a:345-346)
In other words, the Holocaust was the violent expression of a r

dissonance. I find this unsubtle. It is tantamount, in effect, to sayin
occurred because avowed irrationalists were unable to repress fears o
mation. Langmuir even raises this claim to the status of a law-like fo
concrete and specific the basic beliefs and this-worldly prediction
religion [i.e., a creed resting on allegations of physical traits], the mor
adherents will become aware at some level that what they can directly
what their religion asserts" (1990a:345).
The problem with this hypothesis is that, on the contrary, the hallmark
is precisely that it is immune to ordinary criteria of proof and testi
always been rife with absurdities, and yet Nazi propagandists seldom
claim. Indeed, Hitler and Goebbels often gloried in their contradictions
to the bunker, it was routine for the Nazis to say that Jews are sim
and communist, powerful and puny, and so on. Else Frenkel-Brunswi
have shown that contradictions of this type are intrinsic to antisemi
from being latent dangers for secretly rational worldviews, self-contr
the very fiber of chimeria. In fact, as we will see, they form a major
"Faith," Durkheim observed, "is not uprooted by dialectic proof; it m
shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argume
Nor is it clear that Nazi faith was ever genuinely shaken. Indeed, con
chimerical faith tends to lead directly to genocide. The accusations le
are believed-and it is precisely because they are passionately and viole
Jews are massacred. Langmuir deserves great credit for revealing the
medieval history, but he is wrong to think that the Nazis pursued the
their anti-Jewish fantasies "so conflicted with the reality of Jews tha
themselves could be defended only by destroying whomever they thou
(Langmuir 1990a:368).
On the contrary, the evidence suggests that the Nazis perpetrated Ju
were deeply attached to their chimeric fallacy, not because they
plausibility. The Holocaust occurred not because the Nazis doubted th
but because they devoutly believed them.
FROM CHIMERIA TO GENOCIDE
It is ironic that Langmuir should view the Holocaust as an expression

ism, since no one has depicted the collective misrepresentation of the
clarity. In this he resembles the assimilationists of an earlier era,
antisemitic extremists, confronted with dissonant facts, would chang
tisemitism is an enemy of thought," leading German Jews wrote in 1
is also a danger to antisemitism."27 The difference is that Langmuir d
when antisemites are exposed to the truth they cease to fear and hate;
that cognitive contradictions enrage them. The assimilationists assume
rationality in the antisemite can be fanned into a flame; Langmuir ta
27 This statement, in a Central-Verein publication, appeared shortly before Hitler ca

1932); for details, see Peter Baldwin 1982:92 and passim).

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but opposed stance that antisemites wish to smother their own latent rationality, in company
with the Jews (who indeed seem to embody rationality).
On balance Langmuir's virtues are twofold. On the one hand, he clearly divides chimeria
from reality-based bias; and second, he grasps that belief alone is not enough to inspire
genocide-there must be a mix of myth and hate, of chimeria and hysteria. Yet the enigma
remains: Why did rage against Jews rise to genocidal levels in this century? And what forces
converged to turn anti-Jewish demonology into violent pathology in Germany in particular?
For further insight into these questions I will turn to the classical works of the generation
which witnessed the Holocaust. In these works, many ideas akin to Langmuir's notion of
chimeria were put forward with great psychological as well as historical acuity.
The Manichaean Vision
Adoro, Frenkel-Brunswik, and the other authors of The Authoritarian Persona

(1950:971) were pleased to observe a "marked similarity between the syndrome whic
have labeled the authoritarian personality and 'the portrait of the anti-semite' by Je
Sartre. Sartre's brilliant paper," they wrote, "became available to us after all our da
been collected and analyzed. That his phenomenological 'portrait' should resem
closely, both in general structure and in numerous details, the syndrome which slo
emerged from our empirical observations and quantitative analysis, seems to us rem
able."28 In his preface to the same work, Max Horkheimer applauded the even
convergence he saw in "the remarkable psychological profiles of the prejudiced ind
projected by Sigmund Freud, Maurice Samuel, Otto Fenichel, and others" (1950:xii).
The meeting of minds in this period was, indeed, remarkable. Many of the key tex
this period are milestones of social theory, and several dovetail to form an inv
resource for insight into chimerical antisemitism.29 These authors were deeply intere
the demonological side of antisemitism. Fenichel, an eminent psychoanalyst with M
leanings-an early ally of Wilhelm Reich and the guiding spirit of a miniature circle
discreetly left-wing Freudians-had written a psychoanalytic account of antisemitism
exile in 1937.30 The prolific Maurice Samuel ("a Zionist who thinks, a wit with
[Fischer 1941:243]) wrote two early books on antisemitism (1932, 1924) and many ot
works.31 His most incisive account of antisemitism was given in a brilliant course of l
published in 1940 as The Great Hatred. Six years later, Sartre published Reflexions
question juive.32
The unifying insight of this new school of thought was well expressed by the ps
historian Norman Cohn, who was ordered to examine fascist literature while serving
28 Others who were praised included Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, and Abraham Maslow.
Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford ([1945] 1987:108-113) had praised Fenichel, Horkheimer, and Ernst Kris
similar terms.
29 Few writers have pursued parallels between Sartre, Samuel, et al. In Cramer's study of the Frankfurt critique
of antisemitism, which is perhaps the key work in this field, Fenichel and Sartre are mentioned only in passing
(1979:18, 112), while Samuel is overlooked completely. Other leading historians-Reichmann (1974), Bahr
(1978), and Jay (1980)-are even more cursory. Wieviorka (1991a) and Hannush (1973) both mention the affinity
between Adoro and Sartre, but say very little about it.
30 This paper, perhaps his "best" (Jacoby 1983:113), first appeared in 1940 and was later anthologized by Ernst
Simmel (1946). Fenichel, Simmel, Adorno, and Horkheimer were all members of the Psychoanalytic Study Group
of Los Angeles in the mid-1940s. Simmel's anthology contained essays by each of them.
31 Samuel collaborated on Chaim Weizmann's memoirs and also published novels, polemics, a celebration of
Sholem Aleichem, a biography of Herzl, and translations from Yiddish, Hebrew, French, and German. See
Goldsmith (1994), and Ozick (1977).
32 I will leave Freud to one side, since his relevance for the critique of antisemitism rests mainly on the
applicability of his notion of projection, which was more extensively applied to antisemitism by Samuel, Sartre,
and Fenichel than by Freud himself.

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British army in 1945.33 Cohn soon formed a "pretty strong suspicion.... I

that the deadliest form of antisemitism . . has little to do with real conflicts of interest
between living people, or even with racial prejudice as such. What I kept coming acro
was, rather, a conviction that Jews-all Jews everywhere in the world-form a conspi
rial body set on ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind." And this teachin
appeared to be specifically modem, forming a decisive extension of the late medieval
that Jews are "mysterious beings, endowed with uncanny, sinister powers" (Cohn [19
1981:8, 25). Everyday religious and cultural strife had given way to a global dualism,
Manichaean vision of a world divided between Jewish evil and Gentile good.
For Sartre, too, antisemitism is "at bottom a form of Manichaeanism," in which go
and evil are embodied in opposed deities (1948:40). As Adorno and Horkheimer note, t
polarized deities are usually said to embody an indwelling force of divine or dem
influence, which ethnologists often call by the Melanesian term mana ([1947] 1972:15
cf. Durkheim [1912] 1995). For antisemites, Jews embody evil mana and are thus "bot
holy and accursed" (Fenichel [1940] 1946:18). "Knight-errant of the Good, the antisem
is a holy man," Sartre notes (1948:43). '"The Jew is also holy in his manner-holy like
untouchables, like savages under the interdict of a taboo."
Seeing Jews in this light is the first step away from realism, towards chimeria. Coh
emphatic about the split this vision establishes between Jewish reality and antisemit
fantasy: "What Jews really were or did or wanted, or what Jews possibly could be o
or want, had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter" ([1966] 1981:25). The alleged
ulterior reality of evil mana is what occupies the Manichaean antisemite, not the hum
reality of actual Jews. Sartre expresses this idea with great clarity (1948:37-38):
No doubt the proletarian caricatures "the bourgeois" on posters and newspapers in exactl
the same manner as the antisemite caricatures "the Jew." But this external resemblance
should not deceive us. To the worker, what constitutes the bourgeois is his bourgeois
status, that is, an ensemble of external factors.... It is an ensemble of various modes o
behavior. For the antisemite, what makes the Jew is the presence in him of "Jewishness,
a ... principle analogous to phlogiston or the soporific virtue of opium. We must not b
deceived; explanations on the basis of heredity and race came later; they are the slende
scientific coating of this primitive conviction. Long before Mendel and Gobineau ther
was a horror of the Jew, and those who felt it could not explain it except by saying, like
Montaigne of his friendship for La Boetie: "Because he is he, because I am I." Without
the presence of this metaphysical essence, the activities ascribed to the Jew would be
entirely incomprehensible.
Adomo and his co-authors illustrate this point with a wealth of evidence. Often, as Da
Levinson observes in his chapter on antisemitism, sweeping generalizations are advanc
"about 'the Jew,' when the Jews are actually [highly] heterogeneous" (1950:57). On ins
tion a cornucopia of inconsistencies surface. Levinson notes, for example, that subscal
indicating Jewish "seclusiveness" and "intrusiveness" are strongly correlated. This corre
tion reveals "a deep contradiction in antisemitic ideology. As a matter of simple logic
impossible for most Jews to be both extremely seclusive and aloof and at the same tim
too intrusive and prying" (1950:75-76).34
33 Poliakov (1980:35) calls Cohn a "pioneer and, in a sense, theoretician" of the new historiography of
He makes it clear that Langmuir, "l'erudit historien de Stanford' (1980:40), is among Cohn's intellectual su
sors.
34 'These contradictory criticisms," as Rudolph Loewenstein observes, "sometimes come from different p
but almost as often from the same person" (1951:377).

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Illogic, however, is symptomatic. This "self-contradictory rejection of an entire group is

... more than a matter of faulty logic. Viewed psychologically, these results suggest a deep
lying irrational hostility directed against a stereotyped image to which individual Jews
correspond only partially if at all" (Levinson 1950:75-76). Plain evidence of the irrational
hostility under the surface of antisemitism is available in two irreconcilable images of Jews
that many antisemites hold simultaneously. Maurice Samuel illustrates these views with
passages from Hitler's Mein Kampf Alternately scornful and fearful, Hitler calls Jews weak,
timid, and contemptible-and then, without skipping a beat, calls them demonically ener-
getic, relentless and powerful. For Samuel these views are not just different, but "incom-
mensurable." Hitler sees Jews as a "terrible enemy"-"capable of the most daring visions
of conquest"-"and yet puny, unclean, and laughable." In this hall of mirrors, Jews are
"both elemental and ignominious, sublime and verminous" (Samuel [1940] 1988:18-20).
Even if skeptics doubt "that the hard-headed leaders of the Nazi-Fascist groups accept
at face value their own staggering descriptions of the power of the Jews," it is nevertheless
clear, Samuel says, that "the vast mass of antisemites are sincere .... They do believe in
the omnipotence of the Jews, those weird, crafty, implacable Jews" ([1940] 1988:127). This
belief is revealed with special clarity by the widespread and enduring popularity of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Bible of "the most famous modem chimerical belief'
(Langmuir 1990a:341), namely, that world Jewry is a conspiratorial force bent on world
domination. The Protocols have been hailed by nearly every antisemitic group in this
century despite their status as a patent forgery, copied nearly verbatim from a satire of
Bonapartism by Maurice Joly (1864, in Bernstein [1935] 1971).35 Despite a large and
outwardly successful campaign to prove the Protocols a fabrication-a Belgian court in
1935 ruled the book a "bold plagiarism . . . and absurdity" (Neumann 1944:488)-they
have continued to circulate widely, as Taguieff (1992) and many others have shown. In the
success of this text we see a "remarkable folkloristic phenomenon," the penetration of a
magical worldview into "the culture-structure of millions" (Samuel [1940] 1988:29).
Where does this leave us? Samuel, Sartre, and their co-thinkers agree that latter-day
antisemitism is chimerical-"Manichaean," a "folkloristic" unification of logical opposites,
a worldview, akin, in some ways, to totemism. The principle of this chimeria, Samuel says,
is "obsessional exaggeration," which antisemites mistake for "objective evaluation." And
rationalists, he argues, mistake this exaggeration for simple error. "A notable instance of
the false approach," he writes, "was that of America's Jewish leadership to [the movement
known as] Coughlinism." Rather than grasping the sheer madness of Father Coughlin's
chimerical claims, these Jewish leaders "concerned themselves almost exclusively with the
attempt to prove that what Coughlin said about them was not true" (Samuel [1940] 1988:5,
187).36 Nor is this unusual. Indeed, "in every liberal discussion of anti-Semitism which has
come to my notice," Samuel writes, "I have encountered the same obstinate refusal to
distinguish between anti-Jewish sentiment and anti-Semitic hallucination." Yet there is a
world of difference, he writes, between mere anti-Jewishness ("a dislike of Jews based on
contact, direct or indirect," which is just "an ordinary variety" of ethnic or religious bias)
and the "primitive terror and folkloristic mental helplessness" of the true antisemite. There
is, in "obsessional exaggeration," a "mad disparity" between realities and conclusions. Jews
are not, for antisemites, just one more unwelcome group. 'They are," rather, "aboriginal
35 Hitler, in fact, called the charge of plagiarism "the best proof that [the Protocols] are authentic"; see Mein
Kampf ([1925] 1943:307). Samuel cites this passage ([1940] 1988:127) as an illustration of Hitler's "gibbering,
immovable faith" in the Protocols.
36 The intellectual source of Father Coughlin's antisemitism was the Irish Catholic theologian, Denis Fahey,
whose many volumes on the sins of the Jews form a kind of summa theologica of anti-Jewish strictures. See, e.g.,
Fahey (1935).

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evil," and so "for the salvation of humanity, . . . there must be a tota

Jews" (Samuel [1940] 1988:10-11, 4-5, 167).
Routine anti-Jewishness is also real, but it would be folly, Samuel s
this is the only danger we face. Chimerical hallucination, to be resist
seriously in all its peculiar complexity. And this, in turn, requires a refu
views of "hard-headed-no-damned-nonsense" rationalists. What is need
support for "the obscurantists who want to look for deeper causes" ([
Where do these deeper causes lie? Not only in the realm of belief, S
character and motives as well. It is not merely chimerical "exaggerati
penetrated, but the "obsession" that gives it malevolent force.
Here Samuel parts company with those, like Langmuir, whose e
cognitive, and enters the sphere of neopsychoanalyic theory, where he
by Sartre, Adomo, and the others.
The Authoritarian Personality
Adomo remarks, with reference to the lurid demonology in the Prot

Zion, that "the assertions of the agitator are so spurious, so absurd, th
be very powerful emotional reasons why he can get away with them"
These reasons, he feels, lie in the realm of personality-specifically, in
tendencies that coincide in the so-called authoritarian personality.
It would be bold to say too much about the vexed topic of authorita
The "authoritarian personality" thesis has been clouded by controvers
formulated, and it remains hotly contested (although, as we will see b
researchers are finding it increasingly compelling). All technicalities
the heart of the notion when he links Manichaeanism to authoritarian love for leaders.
"Often enough," he points out, "the citizen ... wants someone to come along and prov
him with unshakable convictions, a leader so overwhelmingly authoritative that there
appeal from his pronouncements. Except in extreme cases, the citizen will not actually
'I am not fit to rule myself, I am not fit to vote, choose, think, accept responsibility. I
want freedom, I don't want the burden"' (Samuel [1940] 1988:71). But embracin
Fiihrerprinzip implies exactly that-and antisemitism lends a hand by giving the Lead
sacred Enemy fearsome enough to justify dictatorship.
For the savior on horseback, the dragon is a pretext for authoritarian rule.37
Adorno detected a similar tendency in the so-called prejudiced personality, who tend
combine authoritarianism with antisemitism and ethnocentrism in general. "He sees
forces at work everywhere and easily falls for all kinds of superstitions and fears of
catastrophes." The barely concealed nihilism of this personality, Adomo says, expresses
wish for a final battle between idealized forces of racial and moral purity and the unc
Other-the bigot "has no pity for the poor and is prone to consider the unemploy
naturally lazy, and the Jew as a misfit, a parasite who might as well be exterminate
(1950:427).
Love for leaders, in short, often dovetails with hate for Others.38 To explain
powerfully mixed emotions, Adomo invokes the psychoanalytic notion of projection, w
37 This is especially true, Samuel says, for the socially and economically distressed: "small people, the o
and unimportant, those whose gifts of the spirit cannot be translated into economic-political power"
1988:71). For these people, there are real afflictions "compared with which the Jewish problem is purely sp
([1940] 1988:52). Antisemitism appeals to the distressed, he concludes, for psychological reasons. Cf
([1948] 1975).
38 For an extended discussion of this theme, see Smith (1992).

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Fenichel concisely defines as "seeing in others that which one does not wish to become
conscious of in oneself' ([1940] 1946:19). Horkheimer, many years earlier, had already
applied this category to antisemitism. "Behind ... the rage over Jewish immorality, over
Epicureanism and materialism," he wrote in 1936, "is hidden a deep erotic resentment which
demands the death of their representatives. They must be wiped out, if possible with
torments . . ." ([1936] 1993:101).39 Too much of the public, Horkheimer felt, is imbued
with a dangerous ethic of self-denial. The unruly passions that ascetics repress, he felt, are
easily displaced into animosity against Jews and others who, it is imagined, dwell beyond
the pale of self-repression. In the carnal sensuality and bloodlust of "the Jews" of popular
fancy-soon to be depicted with unmatched perversity by Celine in Bagatelles pour une
massacre (1937)-Horkheimer found the unintended self-portrait of the antisemite.40 In
violent fantasy, he said, "virtue betrays its own dream" ([1936] 1993:101). The irrepressibly
sadistic, sexually unbridled, world-conquering "Jews" of antisemitic fiction embodied the
secret desires of the ascetically virtuous. To antisemites it could thus be said, a la Horace:
The story is told of you.41
Later, in collaboration with Adorno and others, Horkheimer argued that radical authori-
tarians harbor a nihilist impulse at odds with their conscious quest for order; the result is
that, since "the totalitarian character cannot admit to itself this wish for destruction, it
projects the wish onto others, above all, the enemy which it has chosen, invented, or which
has been invented for it by others, an enemy that is always imagined as inferior, just as he
is dangerous. Fables of conspiracies and other evil things are spread about" ([19561
1972:176). Here, Sartre agrees, we enter "the domain of psychoanalysis. Manichaeanism
conceals a deep-seated attraction toward Evil. For the antisemite Evil is his lot, his Job's
portion. Those who come after will concern themselves with the Good, if there is occasion.
As for him, he is in the front rank of society, fighting with his back turned to the pure
virtues he defends. His business is with evil" (1948:45). Sartre adds that what the antisemite
"contemplates without intermission, that for which he has an intuition and almost a taste,
is Evil. He can thus glut himself to the point of obsession with the recital of obscene or
criminal actions which excite and satisfy his perverse leanings; but since ... he attributes
them to those infamous Jews . . . he satisfies himself without being compromised"
(1948:46).
This, in a nutshell, is the psychoanalytic notion of projective chimeria.
Projection as Construction
A sociological notion is closely related. This rests, briefly, on the idea that social practices
based on projective imputations give rise to real projected social powers (Smith, 1988).
The power of money, for example, is unquestionably real, though it exists only in society.
As Dorothy and W.I. Thomas (1928) so acutely noted, anything that is imagined to be real
is, indeed, real in its consequences. Jews, who are imagined to be world-endangering
plotters, are in this way projectively endowed with a social status they would not otherwise
have. This status is not, of course, that of conspirators, but of people who are stigmatized
39 This appears to be an allusion to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, where it is reported, in the Prioress's tale, that
'"The magistrate at once put every Jew/To death with torment and with shamefulness." See Chaucer (1949:185).
40 Cf. Julia Kristeva's recent account of Celine's antisemitism (1990).
41 There is reason to suspect, in fact, that the very idea of projection sprang from the effort to grasp antisemitism.
As early as 1889, Rabbi Isidore Loeb asserted that "those who accuse the Jews accuse or betray themselves. The
Jew is there only to put into action the dream they carry within themselves. They burden [us] with playing their
place in the drama which simultaneously attracts and terrifies them" (1889:184-185; cited by Dundes 1991:359-
360). And it may not be mere coincidence that Freud first tied the notion of projection to paranoid "distrust directed
against others" in 1896, at a time when he was deeply disturbed by the meteoric rise of antisemitism in Vienna
([1896] 1963:172; see Klein 1985:69ff.).

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as conspirators. And this stigma, this evil mana, is conferred upon Jew
concern for their real deeds or qualities.
This process rests entirely on chimeria yet it is no less effective
consequences. Jews may deny that they conspire against Gentiles, but t
their own persecution. Their chimerical status has consequences.
The reason this is true is that the category of "projection," for Sartre a
denotes not only the way people view objects and each other, but also th
these objects and people. In this sense, projection is a matter of pr
psychology-and it has objective results. Exchange and ritual, for exa
value and divinity. Antisemitic projection, meanwhile, produces the neg
Jew. This mana is not "real" in any ontologically simple sense, but it is ve
fact in Durkheim's sense. This is especially clear in the case of those assi
Jews who denied their basic Jewishness, yet were killed in the Holocaust
others. What mattered was not what they said or did, but how they we
treated. They discovered, to their woe, that they were the bearers of a
conferred upon them by antisemites. Thus even their very "Jewishness
social sense, fabricated by their enemies.
Sartre explains this lucidly. "In a bourgeois society," he writes, "i
movement of people, the collective currents, the styles, the customs, all t
in effect create values. The values of poems, of furniture, of houses, of
in large part from the spontaneous condensations that fall on these object
they are strictly national and result from the normal functioning of a
society" (1948:80). The "value" of the Jews, Sartre says, is created by socie
a personality like the rest of us, and on top of that he is Jewish. It amo
a doubling of the fundamental relationship with the Other" (1948:79). In
period, Jews were barred from production and thereby driven into mon
the religious prejudice of medieval Christendom that tied Jews to mone
Christians who have created the Jew." The unavoidable implication, Sartre
is not. . . Jewish character that provokes antisemitism" but the "choice
ism which explains and conditions antisemitism" (1948:68; cf. 94-95, 143,
Jews are the chosen enemy-chosen projectively, not intentionally. As "e
they embody the antisemite's inner demons. And it is the antisemite who
personifies, and murders. At times, of course, other scapegoats are chosen
the "Illuminati." Thus Jews are "responsible" for antisemitism only in t
Fenichel observes, their unique relationship to Islam and Christianity m
tionally well suited to serve as "the carrier of this kind of projection" (
The Jew is, in this sense, a product of the Manichaean imagination-bo
holy" thanks to chimerical practice.
THE ENEMY AS COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION
Sartre's critics have often derided this analysis. One early critic, for exam
Sartre's vision "the Jew becomes a sort of phantom, a sociological misu
mistake in identities rather than an identifiable being" (Eppstein 1
equally the verdict of many other early critics, including Rabi (1947) an
it was upheld "unanimously" by later writers as well (cf. Sungolowsky 1
those who praise Sartre highly often fault him on this score.42 Poliakov
for many when he concluded, in 1980, that Sartre had been guilty of red
42 See e.g. Hertzberg (1960:98 and n. 77).

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spectral figures of "pure negativity" who exist "as nothing more than products of antisemi-
tism" (1980:225).
These criticisms reflect an anticonstructionist viewpoint that is helpful to consider. Is
Sartre, in fact, reducing Jews to nonpersons? Is this, generally, what writers who identify
and critique chimeria are doing?
Art critic Harold Rosenberg answered these questions positively when he argued, against
Sartre, that Jews are not in fact what antisemites make of them; they are, rather, objectively
real, figures of history and religion. 'To show that the origin of the Jew lies not in Abraham
but in the anti-Semite, Sartre would have to indicate at what point the Jew of former times
ceased to exist and a different Jew was born out of antisemitism" (1949:12). Confident,
evidently, that this challenge is unanswerable, Rosenberg declares that "Sartre has misun-
derstood fundamentally the problem of identity" (1949:12).43 Elaine Marks echoes this
claim. Asserting that "Jews, Blacks and women have distinctive traits, which neither
non-Jews, nor whites, nor men invent," she reproaches Sartre for his alleged refusal to
acknowledge "a reality that is not included in a point of view," saying that, "as a result, the
specificity of the 'question juive' is lost and Sartre's Jew becomes slightly grotesque,
becomes in fact what the antisemite thinks he is in fantasy" (1972:784). This sharp reproof
is repeated by Stuart Charme: "Because Sartre could not conceive of Jewish life without
reference to the ideas of antisemitism, he ended up indirectly endorsing the antisemite's
image of the Jew" (1991:139).
In my opinion, however, these accusations betray a grave misunderstanding. Sartre's
essential claim is that "the Jews" of antisemitic myth are wholly chimerical-i.e., pure
demonological fictions. This in no way implies that actual Jews lack an autonomous reality.
It is, in fact, precisely Sartre's point that the imaginary Jews of Manichaean myth depart
from the Jews of history. The issue we face is the problematic character of the connection
between real Jews and the Pseudo-Jew of antisemitic tall tales. Historical Jews have
countless real traits, some of which make them ideal screens for chimerical proje
they are utterly unlike the demons of Judeophobic fantasy. Jews are not omni
sinister plotters, master criminals or the riddle of history at last revealed. "Jewi
a myth, purely and simply. There are no "Elders of Zion." Jews do not ritually
Christian children.
The conceptual issue here is the difference between chimeria and routine prejudice.
Sartre's critics seem to think that antisemitism is reality-based, springing not from a
Manichaean demonology but from antipathy toward the real traits of historical Jews. As it
happens, even Harold Rosenberg understood the error of this outlook at one point. Writing
years before he reviewed Sartre, Rosenberg said that the analyst who finds an "objective"
basis for antisemitism in the traits of the Jews "is like the policeman who solves the crime
by arresting the corpse." He added: "If you want to understand anti-Semites, you should
analyze the anti-Semites, not the Jews. Those who ask: What is it about the Jews that causes
people to hate and attack them?-these questioners have already decided that the Jews are
responsible for anti-Semitism, that the victim is guilty of the crime" ([1944] 1973:243, 242).
43 Nearly twenty years later Rosenberg returned to the attack, saying that while Sartre "has always been a friend
of the Jews," his theory is "the raw material out of which anti-Semitism has been formed." And he adds, with
misplaced irony ([1966] 1973:225), that "most of us believe that there is such a thing as a Jew (and Sarte should
be praised for taking a positive stand on this)." Then, in flagrantly self-contradictory style, he criticizes Sartre for
venturing sympathetic if not reverent opinions on the real qualities of Jews.
I find Sartre's portrait of the "inauthentic Jew" far less credible than his account of the antisemite, and
occasionally objectionable (cf. Suleiman 1996). But Sartre plainly did see a Jewish reality, and he made a modest
effort to understand this reality historically. He saw nothing "essential" or racial in Jewish qualities, and his main
criticism of "inauthentic Jews" was that they had been "persuaded by the anti-Semites" that they do indeed "have
the characteristics with which popular malevolence endows [them]" (1948:94-95). To my ears this does not sound
like antisemitism.

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If Sartre is right, there are three realities to account for: not just Jew
but mythic Jews as well. These ghostly, walking tropes are not Jew
representations of people, not people per se. There are, to be sure, good
why these simulacra were named after a living people, and antisemites
their obsession a veneer of credibility-by listing all Jews, real or imagine
or in the Kremlin; by tracing every disaster to the visible hand of Israe
Marx and Rothschild. But all this is window dressing and self-deception
Jews and historical analogies are distorted beyond recognition in exerci
Like the Chimera, the demonic Jew is a fabulous monster.
The Chimera, daughter of Typhon and Echidna, foe of Pegasus and Be
impossible mixture, depicted, in an early Hittite bas-relief, as a beast w
head, a woman's head, and a serpent for a tail. In Greek myth, the Xim
lion, a goat, and a snake. The analogy should be plain. Lions, goats, a
creatures-but the composite of the three is an imaginary creature.44 In
although Marx and Rothschild were undeniably real and significant figu
nist-capitalist "Council of the Elders of Zion" is pure fantasy. Deducing a
from the union of Marx and Rothschild is like deducing the speed of ligh
of two and two.
The actual deeds of real Jews, added together, will never yield a transcendental result.
Let me be as clear as possible. It is true that antisemites take the actual Jews of history
as their premise. Jews did play a singular role in the origin of Christianity, and they are
singled out for special attention in the Islamic and Christian traditions. Jews unquestionably
did seem uncanny to medieval Christians, and they did play a distinctive role as money-
lenders in late medieval Europe. Marx was instrumental in forging the intellectual arma-
mentarium of socialism, and the Rothschilds were central figures in early modem finance.
None of this, however, changes the basic fact-that demonologists turn truth into myth.
The obsessive, exaggerated claims of chimerical antisemites are radically divorced from the
reality they claim as their premise. And even were we to agree, for example, that actual
historical contacts between Jews and Gentiles were a necessary condition for the rise of
antisemitism, that would not mean that antisemitism in its hallucinatory phase is actually
about Jews. An actual people served as a point of departure for this creed, but the figures
that people its intellectual horizon are imaginary.
Hannah Arendt thought differently. She decried the "modem sophists" who absolve the
Jews of "all specific . . .responsibility" for antisemitism, and who wrongly affirm their
"complete and inhuman innocence," "regardless of what they had done or omitted to do,
regardless of vice or virtue." The real source of twentieth-century antisemitism, she said
"must be found in certain aspects of Jewish history and specifically Jewish functions during
the last centuries." Claims to the contrary amount to a "negation of the significance of
human behavior," in a vain quest to win a "lasting victory at the expense of reality." And
she stresses the stimulus given to antisemitism by the "useless wealth" and concentrated
power of Jewish financiers, especially the Rothschilds (Arendt [1951] 1968:8-9, 26f.; cf.
68f., where she assesses Disraeli's role). The Jewish people, Arendt concludes, "does not
simply cease to be co-responsible because it became the victim of the world's injustice and
cruelty" ([1951] 1968:8).
This is precisely what I reject. However much real Jewish deeds may have inspired
chimerical fantasies, they cannot be assigned "co-responsibility" for such fantasies. Con-
sider, e.g., the "rumor in Orleans" that sociologist Edgar Morin analyzed so perceptively
44 In Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony, Sphinx calls Chimera "Fantasy" and Chimera calls Sphin
"Unknown." Coleridge, earlier, had called Chimera "the very figure of Fancy." For further details, see Ginevr
Bompiani (1989).

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([1969] 1971). Orleans fell into a panic when rumors circulated that Jewish boutique owners
were kidnapping young female shoppers and selling them into white slavery. The police,
the press, and even a team of sociologists led by Morin found absolutely no truth to the
rumor. Yet the Orleans public was not to be dissuaded. Where, in this, is the "responsibility"
of the Jews? In the fact that a few Jews owned stores in Orleans? That, it should be clear,
makes no sense at all. Yet Arendt's thesis should cover cases like this one, since, in
microcosm, this is a chemically pure case of antisemitic chimeria.
The Jews of myth and rumor, then, are Virtual Jews, Simulated Jews-not real people
but projectively constructed enemies, mythic abstractions from history. In the psychic
economy of the antisemite, the Virtual Jew is a metaphor for other forces, the projection
of other concerns-and is thus linked to real Jews in name only. This "Jew" is a shadow
in a dreamworld.45
What significance, if any, might this perspective have for sociologists? Are there clearly
marked paths to follow, or errors to avoid, if we hope to find Maurice Samuel's "deeper
causes" of antisemitism? These are the questions I explore in the final sections of this paper.
MYTH, TRUTH, AND CRITIQUE
My argument, thus far, is sevenfold: that, unlike routine anti-Jewish bias, Manichaean
antisemitism is a kind of chimeria; that chimerias, in general, are so hallucinatory that they
are qualitatively distinct from routine biases; that chimerical antisemitism often rises to
obsessional as well as delusional heights (culminating, in extreme cases, in genocide); that
obsessional chimerias are given force and ferocity by psychodynamic tendencies at the level
of character; that, in the case of genocidal antisemitism, character traits reminiscent of "the
authoritarian personality" seem to be active; that the psychic mechanism which creates the
Satanic Jew of obsessional myth is "projection," in the psychoanalytic sense; and that this
Satanic Jew is a socially constructed enemy, with a projective status that cannot be wished
away. This status-this shadow-falls like a veil over real Jews.46
This shadow also obscures vision. Few analysts, as we will see, are able to keep
antisemitism in focus, even when they affirm the notion of chimeria. The unreality of the
chimerical Jew is simply too pronounced, it seems, to be readily intelligible. How can fiction
be fact? What divides one fantasy from another? Where are the boundaries to be drawn?
And how can we penetrate the veil of myth making and apologetics to decode the
psychology of conspiratorialism?
To clarify these issues, it will help to glance briefly at several noteworthy recent efforts
to answer queries of this kind. No one yet has taken the thesis of "socially constructive"
obsession and illusion very far. For mainstream sociology, "antisemitism" remains little
more than "hostility to Jews." Whether this animus is reality-based or delusional, ordinary
or obsessional, is a question that is not often posed. Yet even scholars who do take chimeria
45 To be sure, Jews have often been vilified for prosaic religious or social reasons. Even what Langmuir calls
"xenophobia" is largely reality-based. But genocidal chimeria is altogether different. Psychologist J.F. Brown was
hence wrong when he wrote that antisemitic "stereotypes show exaggeration, distortion, and omission of charac-
teristics; but they scarcely ever show characteristics which are completely nonexistent" (1942:129). On the
contrary, the distinctive quality of chimerical Judeophobia is precisely its detachment from reality.
46 This point, it will be apparent, closely resembles what W.E.B. DuBois said about "the veil of color" in The
Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1989). And it should be noted that even non-Jews are often transfigured, by the power
of projection, into mythic Jews. Roosevelt, Stalin, and even Hitler have all been widely feared and hated-as
"Jews"! For Japanese antisemites, meanwhile, the United States as a whole is widely regarded as a Judaized if
not literally Jewish nation. For Hitler, Bolshevism was "Jewish"-though in reality, of course, most Bolsheviks
were ethnic Russians (or, as in Stalin's case, Georgian).
All this, it seems to me, is further evidence of the sheer delusionality of chimerical antisemitism, and yet another
reason to cast a skeptical eye on claims that Jews somehow bear responsibility for the wild extrapolations of
antisemites, who manage to find "Jews," and Jewish evil, wherever they look.

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seriously often show an unsteady grasp of this question. This is clear in s

acclaimed recent studies, in which a Sartrean stress on the spectrality o
proves to be a very uncertain gesture.
The Specificity of Chimeria
Five writers in particular command our attention: Pierre-Andre Taguieff

the worldwide popularity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Mi
prolific author and a close associate of the sociologist Alain Touraine
Bruehl, the author of respected biographies of Anna Freud and Hann
Goldhagen, the author of a harsh and profoundly controversial indictmen
people for acting (he says) as Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996); and G
Erich Goldhagen, whose writings in the late 1970s are the original locus
executioners" argument.47
All of these writers sound, at times, like Sartre or Samuel. Consid
Taguieff, who seeks to lay bare the semantic structure of popular an
"Judeo-plutocratic" and "Judeo-republican" plots. In all such theories, h
principle is a chimerical vision of the "Anti-Jew," the real Jew reduced t
of a genre, "type personified." In such cosmologies, Jew and Aryan are
"symmetrical schismogenesis," leading finally to the "extermination of th
... the absolutely malevolent counter-type" (1988:167).48 And this A
stresses, is strictly imaginary (1992:116-117).
Wieviorka, similarly, finds the crux of the Jewish conspiracy myth in t
of "evil, imputed to the Other." He declares himself "with Adorno," stres
tion of two orders of problems"-the real and imaginary. Since these ord
"wholly separate," "one must explain racism entirely without refer
reality-as Sartre said in his own way, in a celebrated formula, when he
Jew is defined by the gaze of the Other: 'It is the antisemite who
(1991a:56-59).49
For Young-Bruehl, echoing and amplifying a point from Samuel, antis
paradigmatic obsessional prejudice," which differs from ordinary anti-Je
of the "constant 'obsessional exaggeration' of Jewish power" revealed by
Jews can "mobilize both capitalists and communists for their internation
216, citing Samuel [1940] 1988:5, 10). Samuel's influence is also evide
hagen's formula that the Nazis' "venomous hatred" of the Jews is cleare
satanic imagery" of their diatribes against "the Jew"-"the world enemy
civilisation, the parasite among the nations" (1978:3, citing a passage
[1940] 1988:10). Goldhagen's thesis, later fleshed out by Daniel Goldh
mainspring of the Holocaust [lay] in the mythical vision of Jewry that an
and that "the charter myth of Nazism" was "the theory of the Jewish con
murdered in the Holocaust, Goldhagen writes, died at the hands of "men d
of their imagination" (1978:9, 6, 12).
47 Daniel Goldhagen vows fidelity to his father's vision in many places.

48 "Genocide ... is the logical conclusion of a certain mode of construction of Othernes
demonized by Hitlerism stand as the paradigm. 'The fascists (read: 'the Nazis) did not c
minority, but as another race, the incarnation of the absolute negative principle; the h
depended on their elimination" (Taguieff 1988:167).
49 Like Collette Guillaumin, Wieviorka also stresses "the production of an imaginary an
of the Other" (1991a:72-74); and cf. the new English version of this work (Wieviorka 1995).
adds that this dialectical process often depends on factors "having nothing to do with the a
the racist and victimized groups" (1993:55).

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Daniel Goldhagen, meanwhile, could not be more emphatic in stating his conviction that
Third Reich "beliefs about [the Jews] were absolutely fantastical, the sort of beliefs that
ordinarily only madmen have of others." Indeed, "when it came to the Jews," the perpetra-
tors of the Holocaust were virtually unique in their "proneness to wild, 'magical thinking,'
... .their incapacity for 'reality-testing" (1996:412f.). He concludes, in Sartrean fashion,
that "antisemitism tells us nothing about Jews, but much about antisemites and the culture
that breeds them" (1996:39).50
These claims and definitions are entirely consistent with a Samuelesque critique of
chimeria. The authors depart from Samuel, however, when they stray beyond definitions to
issues of context and implication. At this level they falter, and in several ways.
Two problems are most salient. The first is classificatory, concerning the range and
inclusiveness of the notion of chimeria; and the second is substantive, concerning the causal
relationship between chimeria and sadism. To what extent, briefly, is Manichaean antisemi-
tism correlated with outwardly similar prejudices? And to what extent is this form of
antisemitism correlated with authoritarianism?
Young-Bruehl, Taguieff, and Wievorka all offer crystal clear statements of the premis
of chimeria, and Young-Bruehl, in fact, expressly endorses the term as well. (She praises
Langmuir for "effectively ... drawing a line" between ordinary anti-Jewish ethnocentrism
and "the antisemitism of 'chimerical character,' which paved the way to Auschwitz"
[1996:76-77].) But all three muddy the waters when they stray from this premise.
Taguieff, seeking to formulate a general theory of racism, posits that there are two basi
forms of racism: "bio-inegalitarian" (zoologically racist) and "differentialist" (concealing
racial concerns under the rubric "cultural difference"). This helps him analyze the French
New Right and its well-publicized shift from biological to "culturalist" racism. But as a
classificatory criterion Taguieff's distinction is too frail to serve its purpose. Unlike Lang-
muir's contrast between chimeria and "realistic" prejudice, Taguieff's distinction occludes
the most salient feature of antisemitism-essentialism. Jews, or any group, can be stigma
tized as "essentially evil" on racial, religious, or cultural grounds. Hence the fundamental
issue is not which kind of "difference" is assigned to such a group, but whether thi
difference is regarded as ethical and essential. A group that is not "essentially" evil would
not plot against humanity. Nor would it be necessary to annihilate such a people.
To penetrate Manichaean phenomena like antisemitism, in other words, we need to focus
not merely on the formal "racisation" or "differentialisation" of a people, but on the degre
to which, in the discourse of "race" or "culture," these constructs are regarded as markers
of essential evil. The difference that matters is the degree to which a people is demonized,
not merely the pseudo-scientific or semantic distinctions that veil or legitimate this demoni
zation.
For the Manichaean, the world is indeed divided-between good and evil. When "races"
or cultures are construed in these terms, they enter the realm of the Manichaean. But the
essential Manichaen concept is essence, sundered into antithetical moral halves and per-
sonified by opposing hosts of angels and demons.
The practical import of Taguieff's distinction is revealed by Wieviorka when he affirms
that antisemitism is, indeed, a form of antimoder racial differentialism. The implication,
he concludes, is that paranoia about the "world Jewish conspiracy" is functionally equivalen
to fear of "fanatical Islam" (1991b:77) or, for that matter, to bias against Asian immigrants
(1993:55). Young-Bruehl takes a similar position. Although she never retreats from her
50 Elsewhere Goldhagen cites a memoir by Melita Maschmann, recalling her years as a member of the Hitler
youth. "Those Jews," she writes, the Jews of popular stereotype, "were and remained something mysteriously
menacing and anonymous. They were not the sum of all Jewish individuals ... They were an evil power
something with the attributes of a spook" (cited in Goldhagen 1996:88).

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claim that antisemitism is, in principle, an obsessional prejudice, she dilu

this claim by widening the circle of obsessional prejudices to include
German rage against Turks, anti-Asian prejudices in East and South
(1996:344-346, 354, 461, 543-544, 575).
Each of these prejudices is, of course, a grave and complex problem in it
the parallels with antisemitism that these authors allege are anything but
we to think, for example, of Young-Bruehl's assertion that "the obsessio
bashing in the United States has its counterpart in Japan, where the Jews
Or her claim that "prejudice against Turks in Germany" is a phenomenon
as antisemitism" (1996:461, 544)?
I find these claims false and rather strange. This is not because I regard
utterly unique or a holy mystery. Obsessional Jew-hatred does have
including very remarkable ones. But I believe that antisemitism can be a
to a wider class of phenomena. This is the burden of my argument
antisemitism is a form of chimeria-a claim that Young-Bruehl and Wiev
echo. What, then, divides their viewpoint from mine? And what more can
classification of antisemitism?
The crux of the matter, once again, is that Jews are the objects of an obsession
exaggeration so extreme that they are transfigured, in thought, into literally transcendent
Luciferian figures of bestiality and danger. It is possible, of course, for other groups to
share this fate, and history offers several examples of groups that have been similarly
vilified: "heretics" in medieval Christendom, "soulstealers" in late-imperial China, t
Illuminati and masons in the aftermath of the French Revolution. But there is a specificit
to chimerias that we miss entirely if we revert to the idea that, since every prejudice distorts
truth to some extent, every bias is Manichaean. Not every exaggeration is equal. Not every
lie is a Big Lie.
Chimerias, now and in historical memory, are so qualitatively contrary to reality that th
negate it, utterly and abstractly. They have an antithetical relation to truth, not one of simpl
distortion.
If this is true, then Young-Bruehl and Wieviorka are not sufficiently discriminating
their claims. Muslims and Asian or Turkish migrants may be reviled, but currently onl
Jews have the misfortune to be the object of a globally diffused conspiracy theory. Consid
for example, the Japanese antisemitism that Young-Bruehl equates to "Japanophobia." Jew
for Japanese antisemites, are the protagonists of a fierce and calculating war again
everything Japanese. Jews are said to rule the United States, the big U.S. corporations, an
the world's finances. They are said to plot economic and even nuclear ruin for Japan.51
"Japan bashing" equally hallucinatory? Clearly not. Japan's critics may overstate Japane
power or ill will, but with rare exceptions they do not make mountains out of mere rumor
of molehills. Japan is in fact a formidable capitalist power. Japanese banks are indeed th
world's largest. And public opinion in the United States is not fevered with chimerical fea
of Japanese conspiracy.
The same applies to Islam. Not until fear of 'fanatical Islam" is as delusional as
Manichaean antisemitism will it qualify as a form of chimeria; and even then it would
remain a minor chimeria until it captured the imaginations of tens of millions of people.
The question, then, is how widely and meaningfully the concept of chimeria can
applied. A limiting case is the position (defended by "strict" constructionists in the soci
problems field) that all "claims" about groups and cultures are equally social constructions
and that, as an act of agnostic faith, analysts should rigorously abstain from judging an
51 The Aum Shinrikyo cult even blamed Jews for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

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claims by criteria of "truth." Hence leading figures in this field agree that occult and even
fanatically ethnocentric claims should be judged no differently than any others. Ibarra and
Kitsuse, for example, avow a "methodological commitment to refrain from privileging" one
claim over another. On the basis of this "commitment," they distance themselves from the
very idea of "innocent victims" and speak with clinical detachment about the rhetorical
quality of "negative terms ... emblematic of forms of discrimination: intolerance, oppres-
sion, sexism, racism" (1993:29, 40, 38). In this framework, racism is little more than a
"negative term" in a moral rhetoric. And antisemitism can be little else, since this method
reduces all social "problems" to "claims" and affirms that all claims are equally constructed,
and hence equally undecidable (Pollner 1993:202; Troyer 1993:126).52
One might ask: Is there no difference between crying "Jewish conspiracy" and chronicling
Jewish history? From the strict constructionist standpoint, the answer can only be "No." A
claim is simply a claim-nothing more.53
This, clearly, is the maximal possible extension of the notion of social construction. For
these theorists, myth and truth are indistinguishable; hence the very notion of chimeria
would be meaningless to them-save, perhaps, as the rhetoric of yet another unverifiable
"claim" about society.
This is not what Berger and Luckmann meant when they first spoke of the "social
construction of reality." On the contrary, Berger and Luckmann distinguished plainly
between mythic constructions concerning Jews and identities which emerge from ordinary
interactions. The mythic Jew, they say, is a classic example of a "type" identity in which
there is "a total identification of the individual with his socially assigned typifications," so
that "he is apprehended as nothing but that type." The ultimate consequence of this
typification is to "bestow an ontological and total status on a typification that is humanly
produced" ([1966] 1973:108-9).54
Muslims, Japanese businessmen, and Asian immigrants are not widely typified in this
way. Are there other groups, then, which are chimerically typified?
One complex case that merits attention is the vilification of Tutsis by Hutus before and
after the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Some authorities on this genocide argue that the
Rwandan conflict pivoted around "antihamitic racism," which they characterize in phrases
borrowed from critics of antisemitism (Chretien et al. 1995:139-207).55 Chretien says that
the Tutsis massacred by Hutu chauvinists were victims of a kind of racist "diabolization."
Originally a cattle-herding warrior people who were clearly distinct from the Bantu peasants
over whom they established dominion five hundred years ago, the Tutsis ultimately evolved
into an ethnically tinged ruling class; and when Belgian colonialists early in this century
declared that the Tutsis were not Black Africans but a "bronze" race of "Hamites," they
were imposing ideas of race and Old Testament genealogy that were entirely foreign to
traditional Rwandan thought.56 Chretien and his co-authors argue, however, that racialized
52 This reasoning suggests, as one possible reductio ad absurdam, that astrology and physics are equally
uncertain. David Heise (1988) does not shy away from even this conclusion, saying that "truth is a will-o'-the-
wisp."
53 Joel Best (1993) calls for a "contextualist" alternative to strict constructionism to permit reasoned, empirically
grounded discrimination between opposing claims. As an example, he cites the growing popularity of the irrational
fear of a "satanist" conspiracy," which should be subject to critical scrutiny as an example of a myth, not simply
a "claim." And Philip Jenkins (1992) notes the parallels between antisatanism and antisemitism, adding that, given
the proper circumstances, antisatanism could easily evolve into a new subspecies of antisemitism.
54 Such total typifications, they say, can take forms ranging from everyday beliefs about Jews to "complex
theories of Jewishness as a manifestation of biology ('Jewish blood'), psychology ('the Jewish soul') or metaphysics
('the mystery of Israel)" (Berger and Luckmann [1966] 1973:109).
55 Echoing Poliakov, although without citing him, Chr6tien and his co-authors speak of the "new harvest of
hate" that grew from the "diabolization" of the Tutsis by Hutu propagandists (1995:141). "Harvest of Hate" is the
title of an early Poliakov book ([1951] 1974), and "causalit6 diabolique" is the title of one of his later works
(1980).
56 For the remarkably complex interpenetration of class and ethnicity in pre-colonial and colonial Rwanda, see
Smith (1995a; cf. Smith 1996, in press).

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notions of "Tutsi" and "Hutu" identity did ultimately win popular acc
supplied part of the motive force for genocide when the Hutu gov
mobilize the largely Hutu public to slaughter the largely Tutsi politic
significant extent this effort succeeded (see Omaar and de Waal 1995),
his co-authors credit this fact, in part, to the antihamitic "diabolisation
Hutu propagandists engineered.
Is this, in fact, an instance of chimeria? Perhaps. Without systemat
opinion, it is, of course, hard to know exactly what was said and belie
the pre-genocidal period. But certain facts are clear. It is true, for ex
chauvinists worked overtime to propagate a fearsome image of "the wic
from power in 1961 but scheming to obtain revenge. And it is also true
Rwanda were nothing like the stereotype; the large majority were poo
most Hutus. On the other hand, this stereotype was not fabricated from
lords had wielded great power just a generation earlier, and in 1990 ex
of Ugandan civil wars had declared war against the Rwandan governm
propagandists claim that Tutsis are the heart of a "world conspiracy."
often said to be pawns of Uganda. Finally, we have reason to believe t
of the genocide, seeking to minimize their own culpability, hope to cap
stereotype of a sadistic mob, spontaneously acting out its deepest and m
On balance, the Rwandan case seems unclear to me, largely because w
data to offer a fully informed judgment on the ideas that spurred gen
to Rakiya Omaar and her co-workers, this problem may be remedied.5
the Rwandan genocide we need to know not only what Rwandans thou
felt. If mass chimeria did play a part, we will not fully understand w
we grasp the psychodynamic energies that turned myth into murder
racism" fueled by authoritarianism in some sense? Is authoritarianism,
in chimeria? Or are there better alternative explanations?
Questions of this type are posed by Young-Bruehl, Taguieff, and Gold
they give, however, leave something to be desired.
Antisemitism and Authoritarianism?
The least credible explanation is offered by Daniel Goldhagen, who credits chimer
the power to turn Hitlerians into sadists as well as paranoids. His claim, briefly,
Hitler's followers, ensnared in the web of chimerical illusion, were therefore viciou
victims. They were cruel because they were deluded. Hence, instead of seeking to
cruelty as well as chimeria, we can explain both at once.
Goldhagen is well aware that this sounds like a monocausal explanation of the Ho
and he is quick to add that he does, indeed, acknowledge the importance of other
factors. Yet to explain the motives of Hitler's followers, he says, "a monocausal exp
does suffice." The Hitlerian conception of Jews was so hallucinatory that it was "
historical instance causally sufficient to provide . . . the perpetrators [of the Hol
with the requisite motivation to participate willingly in the extermination of th
(1996:416-417; cf. 392-393).58
These "executioners" were willing, in other words, because they were chim
mistaken about the Jews. Their very illusions drove them to murder. To illustrate t
57 Rakiya Omaar and her co-workers (notably Alex de Waal) are making a tremendous effort to l
ordinary Rwandans did and thought during the genocide. Their work (resulting, thus far, in Omaar an
1995) promises to yield one of the richest archives ever gathered in connection with a genocidal confli
58 "A second claim is equally strong," Goldhagen adds. "Not only was German antisemitism in this
instance a sufficient cause, but it This
was content
also a downloaded
necessary cause
from for such broad German participation"
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Goldhagen cites Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of one of the four special SS units created
by Himmler to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Ohlendorf, Goldhagen says, was
"anything but a sadist," yet he "shared the demonological view of Jews common to German
society." After establishing this (to his own satisfaction at least), Goldhagen asks, with a
rhetorical flourish: "How did such beliefs produce all of the distinctive features of the
Holocaust?" (1996:394) The answer, he seems to say, is that they simply did.
Somehow, "Germans' beliefs about Jews unleashed indwelling destructive and ferocious
passions that are usually tamed and curbed by civilization." How this might have happened
Goldhagen does not reveal. It is evidently enough to say that "certain kinds of dehumanizing
beliefs about people, or the attribution of extreme malevolence to them, are necessary and
can be sufficient to induce others to take part in the genocidal slaughter of the dehumanized
people, if they are given proper opportunity and coordination" (1996:397, 418).
Since Goldhagen repeatedly decries the sheer "cruelty" of Hitler's followers, this is not
a minor point. Yet he appears to feel no unease about asserting, without evidence, that "only
the common structure of cognition can account for the essential constancy of Germans'
actions towards Jews" (1996:400; cf. E. Goldhagen 1979).59 Lest there be any doubt, he
untiringly stresses the "power of the antisemitic ideology in producing German action, in
causing them to act in an otherwise abnormal manner" (Goldhagen 1996:402).60
The palpable one-dimensionality of this analysis is a cautionary reminder of the folly of
placing too great an explanatory burden on the concept of chimeria. As a classificatory
principle, the idea of chimeria is valuable for what it suggests about the character, probable
sources, and possible dangers of certain kinds of ideas influential in revolutionary conser-
vative movements. There are also clear implications about the strategies that may be apropos
to counter the influence of such ideas and movements. But if, like Goldhagen, we are
content to identify chimeria without seeking to explain it, we are left with an abstraction,
not an analysis. This is clear to Young-Bruehl and Taguieff, both of whom seek a psychody-
namic explanation for the obsessive appeal of Manichean delusion. Yet they, too, stumble
at the starting gate.
The problem in each case is that chimeria is reduced to an analytic framework that
occludes insight into the specificity of Manichaeanism. Taguieff, after dividing biological
from cultural racism, finds "the core" of each in an obsessive fear of contact and cross-
breeding, which he calls "mixophobia" (1993-94:123).61 How, we might ask, does this
thesis help us grasp "Nordic religion" or the Elders of Zion? How can fear of crossbreeding
explain paranoia about the occult unity of capitalism and communism, "Judeo-plutocrats"
and "Judeo-bolsheviks"? 'The globalization of the 'Jewish plot' realizes the maximal
demonization of the Jews," as Taguieff wrote on another occasion (1992:214). If "mixo-
phobia" is well-nigh universal, why have so few other peoples been "maximally demon-
ized"? There may be a kind of racist mixophobia; but Judeophobia has another origin.
Young-Bruehl takes a very different tack. As a psychoanalytic purist and an admirer of
Anna Freud, she is at times "more Freudian than Freud" (1996:297). This predisposes her
to sympathize with Adomo-so much so that she calls "the classic antisemite . . . an
obsessional character equivalent to the Adomo group's authoritarian personality," whose
59 Meanwhile, historically speaking, it should be evident that the alleged "constancy" of German actions toward
Jews is a figment of Goldhagen's imagination. Showing practically no interest in the historical record, Goldhagen
repeatedly affirms the "ubiquity and continuity" of chimerical antisemitism in Germany. This is contrary to most
of the evidence.
60 "Why did these ordinary Germans turned executioners . . . exhibit so much wanton, spontaneous, and
unbidden cruelty? The answer to this lies in their conception of the Jews" (1996:398).
61 This is true, Taguieff says, even for "differentialists" who formally disavow racism. 'The differentiali
imagination wants to preserve collective identities (and inter-communitarian differences) at all costs. It is haunt
by the threat of the destruction of identities through inter-breeding-physical and cultural cross-breeding. This
the 'mixophobic' core of differentialist racism" (1993-94:101).

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goal is "to eliminate a Jew who is both a filthy nothing and a secret wo
conspirator."62 She parts company with Adorno, however, when she trie
claim with the letter of psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Classifying antisemiti
the obsessional biases, Young-Bruehl classifies obsessional prejudice, i
three "ideologies of desire"-each of which corresponds directly to one of
three hypothesized character types. (Racism correlates to the hysterical
to the narcissistic character, and antisemitism to the obsessional character
yields a neatly symmetrical theory, it also poses a serious empirical prob
can be brought to bear on this conjecture? Here Young-Bruehl makes an
She says, first, that ideologies of desire, like Langmuir's chimerias,
impassable gulf from ordinary ethnic biases. Such ideologies are prejudic
nary or constructed groups," whereas ethnic biases target "real groups." H
we pursue this distinction? By psychology and sociology, respectively. Ord
trism must be studied by means of "intricately elaborate sociological
put the matter in stark terms-ethnocentrism involves real groups. Real
histories, real social traditions," and so on. But ideologies of desire, whic
also calls "orecticisms," must be approached differently-not sociologicall
of "a complex psychological description, which must precede any effort to
into public domains" (1996:298-299).
This is curious. Chimerias, or "orecticisms," defy sociological analysis,
says, because they have as their objects fictitious groups. But it should b
that the object of prejudice is never the prime focus of scrutiny for the s
Like Sartre or Samuel, the sociological critic of chimeria studies the
chimerical true believer. And antisemites are as "real" as any group that b
of ethnic prejudice. Antisemites not only can be studied by "intricately" s
but often have been so studied. Hence Young-Bruehl's methodological dis
logical research is an admission of self-limitation. Even though obsession
be studied, Young-Bruehl opts instead to simply "assume" the reality of
character types (1996:206-207). Chimeria, in this peculiar perspective, be
for speculation rather than an object of study.
For deeper insight into the nexus of relations between antisemitism and
we must turn to scholars who are working directly in the field.
CHIMERIA AND FASCISM
The question of the correlation between antisemitism and authoritarianism

less abstract when we observe that today, as in the past, Manichaean preju
elective affinity for fascism. It continues to seem likely, as Sartre and Sam
fascism and antisemitism are characterologically homologous, and that the
of origin is, in fact, "authoritarian" character structure. This, at least, is one
has been suggested by researchers who are now studying the revival of ch
chimeria in Europe and the former USSR. Once again, Adorno's notion of th
personality has become popular.
Nikolai Popov, for example, who heads the political surveys department
Center for Public Opinion Research, reports that inquiry based on a versio
from (Adomo et al. 1950) shows that "the number of people [in the forme
62 Young-Bruehl adds an even more striking affirmation of the authoritarian premise: 'The l
Obsessional.... He is the one to whom the obsessional can submit without feeling penetrat
submission is ecstatic, the innocent fulfillment of a great and greatly forbidden desire" (1996:

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authoritarian attitudes is twice those with the nonauthoritarian mentality." Over half of
Popov's respondents agree that "strong leaders are able to do more for the country than all
the laws and talk," while fewer than a third disagree; and even more feel that "strictness
and discipline" are the secret to childrearing (1995:125). In general, Popov says, there
appears to be "a deep penetration into mass consciousness ... of the authoritarian type of
personality" (1992:322).63 And he concludes that Russia now appears to be "fertile soil for
the creation of a new Hitler" (1995:136).
Another recent survey, in which Russians and Estonians were polled about eight out-
groups (including Jews, democrats, and non-Russian minorities), showed that "authoritari-
anism strongly predicted each prejudice." Negative items about Jews, which were culled
mainly "from statements ... by ultra-nationalistic groups such as Pamyat," were more
strongly endorsed than negative claims about any other outgroup. One such item is the
claim that "Jews have already conquered most of the Western world, and now they are
trying to conquer us" (McFarland, Ageyev, and Abalakina 1993:207, 204-205).
This belief in a Jewish plot is strongly associated, in turn, with a preference for Stalinism
over democracy and a willingness to actively protest economic woes, "even by destroying
property." Most Russians who say they would protest falling living standards also accept
or entertain the notion of a Jewish plot (Brym and Degtyarev 1993:6, 11; cf. Brym 1996).
In Poland, meanwhile, people who say that Jews seek to "rule the world" also tend to
prescribe resistance: "We have a right to fight on our own behalf [since] they are against
us" (Krzeminski 1993:131).
Elsewhere, researchers also report findings that support what Pettigrew and Meertens call
the "classic" claim that racism, authoritarianism, and conservatism co-vary. Indeed, Petti-
grew and Meertens report several findings that, they say, "prove the force of this theory"
(1993:120). Nonna Mayer inclines to a similar conclusion in connection with French
ethnocentrism and antisemitism (1993). The implication, for McFarland et al., is "that
authoritarianism, in whatever culture it is found, produces strong condemnation of the
culturally defined enemies" (1993:212).
"An Extremist Wave"
Since German reunification and the collapse of the USSR, the affinity between chimeria
and chauvinism has become very striking. This led Le Monde, for example, to warn of a
"extremist wave moving across Europe" (October 1994).64 Perhaps most alarming has bee
the meteoric rise of the "Red-Brown" tendency in Russia, where a motley collection of
Stalinists, neo-Nazis, and traditional Russian chauvinists has emerged as a potent elector
force. The first proof of this was the rise of "mad Vlad" Zhirinovsky, whose "Liber
Democratic Party" produced global shock waves in late 1993 by winning more vote
(22.8%) than any other party in the national elections, thus becoming the largest oppositio
party in the Russian Duma. For Zhirinovsky, an open admirer of Hitler, antisemitism is
claim to fame. He enthusiastically repeats most of the usual chimerical canards (blaming
the Jews, e.g, for both World Wars), and has denounced the IMF as "part of an internation
Jewish conspiracy." And, like virtually every other Russian xenophobe, he contends tha
Russia is ruled by Jews (see Frazer and Lancelle 1994:138-43).
The latter claim is given specificity by Aleksandr Prokhanov, a novelist, editor of Russia
most popular agitprop tabloid, and a member of Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov's
63 The Russian discovery of the authoritarian personality is a recent development, since under the old Stalinis
regime The Authoritarian Personality was unavailable.
64 All data below, unless otherwise specified, are from the AWR or from articles in the New York Times or t
Washington Post.

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brain trust, whose claim, endlessly repeated, is that Russian president Boris
secretly a Jew, "working according to a secret Jewish plan to wreck Russia
1996:C3).65 Zyuganov, meanwhile, soared to prominence in late 1995 when h
Communist Party (KPRF) won more than a third of the seats in the Duma. Winnin
of the vote, almost exactly the total tallied two years earlier by Zhirinovsky, the K
more votes than any other party. (Zhirinovsky's party won 11.2% to place secon
of Yeltsin's party.) In July 1996, in a losing campaign for the presidency, Zyugano
40 million votes. And he, like his adviser Prokhanov, professes the kind of chim
Judeophobia that plays so well in Red-Brown circles. "Jewish influence grew by t
not by the day," Zyuganov wrote in his tract, I Believe in Russia. 'The Jewish D
traditionally controlled the financial life of the [European] continent and became
more the owner of the controlling interest in all the stocks of Western civilizatio
socioeconomic system" (cited by Remnick 1996:50).
The startling gains registered by Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky in Russia were m
Austria in October 1994, when "yuppie fascist" Jorg Haider's Freedom Party (FP
the "F movement") won 22.6% of the national vote, scoring what Haider called a
breakthrough." His party, founded in 1954, is the lineal heir to Austrian National
and is notorious for its ultra-right profile.66 Mixing neofascist politics with Judeo
the familiar way-a recent poll showed anti-Jewish feeling to be "widespread" in
movement (AWR 1996:84)-Haider's group won 42 parliamentary seats in 1994, em
as the third largest Austrian party (thanks largely to its popular anti-immigrant c
Haider expects to become chancellor by 1998.
In Italy the party founded by Mussolini's disciples after the war entered govern
early 1994 in coalition with two other parties, winning 13.5% of the total vote and
15 members into the cabinet. This was the first victory at the national level for ne
anywhere in postwar Europe, and Gianfranco Fini, the youthful leader of the part
of the most popular Italian politicians.68 In 1995 this party had 210,000 member
branches, 109 deputies in the lower chamber of parliament, 48 senators, 44 may
chairs of city councils, 2,600 municipal councillors, 45 regional councillors,
Members of the European Parliament (AWR 1996:155). In April 1995, Fini's new e
"alliance" won 14.1% of the total vote.
In France, the progress of reaction can be measured by the success of the Ur-p
the European far right, Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National (Marcus 1995). Measu
that standard, French reaction is robust. In the presidential elections of April 1995
tallied his highest vote total ever, 15.3% of the national vote.69 In Marseilles and
performed as well as Zyuganov and Haider did elsewhere, winning 22.3% and 23.7
65 Prokhanov first gained notoriety for his chauvinist novels about the war in Afghanistan. With hi
Aleksandr Dugin, he later founded the "Day" movement and emerged as a pioneer of the Russian "N
modeled after the French Nouvelle Droite. In this phase, Prokhanov argued that antisemitism was coun
tive for the right-thus taking a short-lived "differentialist" stance. Cf. Remnick (1996), AWR (1996), a
(1994).
66 As Carinthian governor in 1990, Haider praised Nazi labor policies. In September 1995, he greeted a gathering
of former SS members and ex-Nazis as "dear friends." Haider often toys with Nazi lingo (e.g., the "final solution
to the farm question") and calls immigrants "profiteers" or "parasites." Perhaps the wealthiest Austrian politician,
Haider lives on a 3,800-acre estate expropriated from Jews in 1938. His father was a Nazi stormtrooper.
67 Warning that street violence of the German kind could erupt if immigration is not halted, Haider predicts a
"revolution" over this issue. Polls show that 76% of Austrians agree that no more immigrants should enter Austria,
and there is an "atmosphere of general ethnic intolerance and openness to authoritarian measures" in Austria today
(AWR 1994:11).
68 Fini has moved slightly to the center recently, ambiguously declaring his newly renamed party "postfascist."
69 This is nearly 6% better than Le Pen's original breakthrough in 1988, and substantially better than the 12.5%
he polled in 1994. In 1994, in 66 constituencies, the Front National won more than 30% of the vote. If seats were
awarded on the basis of the total vote, the FN would have won 64 seats of 577. In a 1991 national poll, 32% of
the respondents said they agreed with many FN positions.

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the votes. In June, the FN scored a "breakthrough," winning mayoral races in three cities
(including Toulon), doubling the number of FN councillors (to 992), and reaching the
second ballot in 150 urban areas with populations over 20,000 (AWR 1996:119). A year
earlier, the FN had scored a 10% vote in the European Parliamentary elections. Overall, 87
French periodicals express FN views, along with 18 neo-Nazi papers, 17 "New Right"
journals, five that deny the reality of the Holocaust, and roughly 50 more that purvey
assorted far-right views.
In Belgium, the neo-Nazi Vlaams Blok is "one of the most significant" far-right parties
in Europe (AWR 1996:90). Ideological heir to the prewar fascists of the Rex Party, the VB
is the largest Flemish party in Brussels, where in May 1995 it won 12.2% of the Flemish
vote. Less than a year earlier, the VB had won 28% of the vote in Antwerp, thereby
becoming the largest party in the second largest Belgian city. With 400 officeholders in its
ranks, the VB has representatives in the European Parliament (two), at the national level
(15), in the Flemish federation (16), and at lower levels. Allied with the Francophone Front
National Belge (FNB), the VB is close to Le Pen's right wing in France, Zhirinovsky's party
in Russia, and extremist groups in Germany and South Africa. In 1993, the Belgian minister
of defense refused to rule out a possible coalition with VB, which "expresses open
admiration for the Hitler regime and apartheid" (AWR 1994:13).
In Romania a poll showed 27% support for "authoritarian, strong-armed leadership"
(AWR 1994:131). This is not surprising, since in late 1992 a coalition of the main chauvinist
parties vaulted into parliament with 15% of the national vote, gaining 84 seats. By 1994,
polls showed that these parties enjoyed support from 19% of the Romanian public. Most
of this gain was registered by the electoral wing of the violently chauvinist Vatra Ro-
maneasca, which claims a (very dubious) six million members.70 A total of four neofascist
parties are now represented in the Romania parliament; all are stridently antisemitic. In
1995, Comeliu Vadim Tudor's ultra-right Partidul Romania Mare joined the national
government. With 28 mayors and 23 members of Parliament, the PRM is now an electoral
force to be reckoned with. Tudor is a notorious antisemite, who led the PRM out of the
governing coalition late in 1995, charging that the Iliescu regime had "sold out to the Jews"
(AWR 1996:198).71 Another major party went so far as to call for vengeance: "We have
the right to round up [the Jews] and judge them severely for their odious crimes," the party
paper editorialized. "And if the wrath of the people cannot be appeased, then the flight from
Egypt is going to look like a picnic in retrospect" (cited by Hockenos 1993:280).
Antisemitism and Antidemocratism
An astute observer of the eastern European scene notes that old religious and cultural biases
against the Jews are conspicuously less salient than they used to be; the new Judeophobia,
he writes, "has less to do with actual Jews than it does with an abstract image of 'the Jew"'
(Hockenos 1993:273). And the content of this image is far from arbitrary: "from Rostock
to Tirana, Moscow to Paris, those particularly 'Jewish' qualities that the right singles out
are inevitably tied to European modernity, as a ... protest against liberalism and the idea
of a united Europe, against human rights and democratic values" (Hockenos 1993:275).
For Manichaeans, the demonic enemy personifies whatever is most reviled. For authori-
tarians, the ultimate enemy is whatever obstructs Caesarist rule.72 That can be a "soft"
70 The total circulation of ultra-right dailies, weeklies, etc., approaches one million.
71 Tudor has announced plans to run for president.
72 I use the term "authoritarian" here with ideal-typical intent, since in reality very few people are simply
"authoritarian" without some degree of ambivalence. However, many people do seem to be moved largely by
authoritarian impulses. For simplicity I will call this group "authoritarian" sans qualification.

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government, a protest movement, an unruly legislature, the press, the int

missiveness." Is it coincidental that the Satanic Jew of antisemitic fantas
of composite stereotype of all these forces? Soft yet menacing, loud but ce
yet orgiastic? The chimerical Jew, it seems, is all this and more: a shado
visible anarchy, reason, revolution-everything, that is, which conspires to
fist.
The Mythical Jew, then, is democracy demonized. The antisemite's enemy is the authori-
tarian's nightmare, the democrat perceived as anarchist (and personified as Antichrist). This
is why the mythopoesis of anti-Jewish chimeria has special appeal for antidemocrats.
Democratic opponents are eternally present in potentia. 'The Jew," as master metaphor for
this eternal enemy, can never be destroyed, no matter what happens to actual Jews. Every
new antiauthoritarian current can be subsumed under the rubric "Jewish." In Richard
Wagner's phrase, the Jews are "plastic demons," ever mutable and forever evil.73
Since authority can always be questioned, "Jews" can never disappear. This, it seems,
the metaphysical deduction of the Manichaean unconscious.
This is not to say, however, that democracy is the only force demonized by the antisemi
On the contrary, in the subterranean realm of psychic equivalences, "the Jew" is a ver
plastic demon indeed. Authoritarians are upset by democracy in particular as a levelling
force, an "abstract" egalitarianism that negates or limits the "natural hierarchies" they
revere-crown and subject, patrician and plebeian, husband and wife, father and child. B
other forces also weaken traditional hierarchy: "reason," which calls custom into question
"humanitarianism," with its challenge to the very notion of inequality; capitalism, for
upsetting the old order of class inequities; socialism, for opposing the new order of cla
inequities; pacifism, for putting power politics under a moral cloud; feminism, for fightin
patriarchy; and "cosmopolitanism," for weakening patriotism.74
These forces are terrifying for authoritarians. They see not the professed good will an
humanism of democracy, but, rather, its power to atomize and profane established codes
superiority and servility. This is one reason why they so often oppose ruling parties th
they see as both "weak" and "terroristic." For partisans of central authority, democrats a
terroristic precisely because they forcibly decentralize power. "Softening" authority leve
hierarchy. For authoritarians, in other words, the "soft" rule of the majority tyrannical
suppresses the wish for a tyrant. This may be paradox, but its psychological force is great
In a similar spirit, revolutionary conservatives seek to "prove" the evil of reason, whic
they know, in their hearts, is unreasonable (Dahl 1996; cf. Kolnai 1938). All that is needed
then, is to equate Jews with reason, with democracy, and Manichaean antisemitism sprin
to life, fully formed. The Jews, in this vision, are the plastic unity of all the antisemite
inner demons. They unite a plethora of fears into a single specter, serving, as Zizek we
explains (1996, 1993, 1991, 1989), as a kind of "quilting point" (cf. Lacan [1956] 1993).76
J.-P. Dupuy puts the logic of this point in a different language (and without reference t
73 See Erich Goldhagen (1978, n. 6).

74 For reasons of space I cannot analyze the equation of Jews to capital in this paper, but I want to emphasiz
that I believe this a major aspect of the problem. Thus far, the single best contribution on this subject is that
Postone (1986). And Wilson's social history of the Dreyfus Affair (1982) offers a wealth of relevant data.
75 It is not true that authoritarians mechanically favor whatever authority they encounter. On the contrary
authoritarians are utopians who wish for Leaders of impossible, ultra-paternal strength. They do not automatica
favor "formal-rational" authority simply because it exists; instead, they thirst for Great Leaders, whether traditional
charismatic, or-in the best of both worlds-charismatic in form but traditional in essence. They long for a stro
hand, not a government that surrenders to the "invisible hand" of the market.
76 Berger and Luckmann make a related point when they note that "some roles have no function other th
this symbolic representation of the institutional order as an integrated totality" ([1966] 1973:121). The pertinen
of this comment is clear not only vis-a-vis the Jews of myth but also, as ethnologists have often shown, vis-a-v
"divine kings" and chiefs.

49.34.208.193 on Thu, 09 Dec 2021 12:05:18 UTC
the Jews) when he analyzes the leader as an "endogenous fixed point, produced by the
crowd while the crowd imagines itself to be its product." The chimeric leader, or enemy,
"is not a cause, it is an effect: a systemic effect," reflecting the group's "self-externalization"
(Dupuy 1990:120). And this self-externalization, Zizek would add, is self-constituting.
Manichaean antisemites find an identity in their unity as Anti-Jews. They are the living
antithesis of the Jew, revolving like planets around a radiant myth.77
It should be clear, in this context, that since the authoritarian's enemies, visible or
invisible, can always be personified as Jews, real Jews are unnecessary to prompt or sustain
this worldview. Mythic Jews serve as an explanatory master key for Manichaeans whether
real Jews are present or not. Hence the decisive issue is not the presence of Jews, but the
presence of antisemites. "If the Jew did not exist," as Sartre famously wrote, "the antisemite
would have to invent him" (1948:10).78 In a sense, this appears to be what has, in fact,
happened. In Japan, Romania, and Slovakia today, a distant echo of Jewish history has taken
on transcendental life in Manichaean myth.79
Critics of this perspective often note that Jews are less directly menaced by ethnic bigotry
than other, more visible minorities. In Russia, Azeris and other so-called "chernye" (Blacks)
are in greater danger; in Germany, Turks and Vietnamese are assaulted; in France, North
Africans are at risk; in Austria, migrant Slovenian laborers; in Romania, ethnic Hungarians;
in Iran, Kurds and Baha'i believers; and so on. The truth of this point is plain. It should be
recalled, however, that antisemitism tends to correlate strongly with bias against other
outgroups. Hence it is poor consolation for Jews to learn that the bigots who violently
assault Azeris, Turks, Sinti, Roma, and Maghrebs probably hate them too. And the fact that
Jews are injured less often than Turks or Roma does not contradict the claim that Judeo-
phobia grows and prospers. On the contrary, it is perfectly possible for antisemitism to
flourish while Jews are left comparatively undisturbed. Chimerias differ from ordinary
prejudice. They revolve around imaginary enemies, who can be fantasmically annihilated.
As we have seen, actual Jews, whether living or dead, are beside the point for chimeria. In
a sense, only mythic Jews count.
This perspective also helps us understand why the denial of the Holocaust is now so
common among antisemites. The Elders of Zion are simply more real to chimerical
antisemites than the Jewish millions who died in Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka. Jews
seem imperishably occult, as nebulous as they are nefarious-a ghostly dispersed people
that cannot be annihilated by ordinary physical means. For many, this is the "lesson" of the
Holocaust.80
It seems unlikely that, in the post-Holocaust era, there will be a second edition of the
Final Solution. Jews, however, will never be safe as long as they personify principles hateful
to authoritarians. And that, unhappily, is something wholly beyond their control.
Antisemites oppose reason and democracy, not just a people or culture. And no one group
is uniquely "chosen" to resist.
77 Zizek's work, to date, has referred to antisemitism glancingly, as an illustration of other claims. It would be
interesting to see him make "the Jew as quilting point" the object of a more extended discussion.
78 Sartre, interestingly, was not the first to formulate this famous aphorism. In Der Antisemitismus (1894),
playwright Hermann Bahr wrote that "If there were no Jews the anti-Semites would have to invent them" (cited
in Massing 1949:99).
79 This is perhaps clearest in Japan, where Jews are little more than rumors. "A country containing no more
than 1,000 Jews," Jennifer Golub writes, "one that is neither a Christian nor Muslim society, should not-logically
speaking-have antisemitism" (1992:1). This is, however, "logical" only if we assume that antisemitism actually
requires the existence of Jews. In Japan, as in many other places, this assumption clearly is not tenable.
80 It is also relevant to note that Jews often are implicitly attacked in battles that explicitly involve others. When
Romanian chauvinists, for example, attack ethnic Hungarians, they often say-and seem to believe-that they are,
in fact, striking a blow against the "Judeo-Hungarian conspiracy."

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The Social Construction of Enemies: Jews and the Representation of Evil

Author(s): David Norman Smith

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3045387

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Sociological Theory 14:3 November 1996

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Antisemitism, in short, seems to have a radioactive half-life of millen

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A CULTURALLY CONSTRUCTED POLARITY

According to Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is a "necessary condition for

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Cynthia Chase calls the book "indispensable" (1989:70), and Jean-Francois

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Leon Poliakov, the dean of today's historians of antisemitism, finds

The innovative feature of Langmuir's response to these questions is that he posits an

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In other words, the Holocaust was the violent expression of a r

FROM CHIMERIA TO GENOCIDE

It is ironic that Langmuir should view the Holocaust as an expression

27 This statement, in a Central-Verein publication, appeared shortly before Hitler ca

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The Manichaean Vision

Adoro, Frenkel-Brunswik, and the other authors of The Authoritarian Persona

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British army in 1945.33 Cohn soon formed a "pretty strong suspicion.... I

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Illogic, however, is symptomatic. This "self-contradictory rejection of an entire group is

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evil," and so "for the salvation of humanity, . . . there must be a tota

The Authoritarian Personality

Adomo remarks, with reference to the lurid demonology in the Prot

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THE ENEMY AS COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION

42 See e.g. Hertzberg (1960:98 and n. 77).

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MYTH, TRUTH, AND CRITIQUE

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seriously often show an unsteady grasp of this question. This is clear in s

The Specificity of Chimeria

Five writers in particular command our attention: Pierre-Andre Taguieff

47 Daniel Goldhagen vows fidelity to his father's vision in many places.

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claim that antisemitism is, in principle, an obsessional prejudice, she dilu

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Antisemitism and Authoritarianism?

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CHIMERIA AND FASCISM

The question of the correlation between antisemitism and authoritarianism