Why the Jews?

The Psychology of Anti-Semitism and the Need for Enemies

In 1994, while researching my book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say it?, co-authored with Alex Grobman, I interviewed David Irving, the now-disgraced British writer and historian who famously lost his libel case against Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. Irving was in Southern California for a conference sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review, the most prominent (at the time) organization devoted to casting doubt on what really happened to the Jews during the Second World War. Here is what Irving told me when I asked him about the causes of anti-Semitism:

“I think the Jews are largely to blame for themselves by their knee-jerk responses. Every step that they take to try to control anti-Semitism produces precisely the opposite effect in my view. Goebbels himself said that, in fact. I don't think it is anti-Semitism so much as it is xenophobia. And I think it is built in like the hunting instinct or the mating instinct. It is built into us as one of God's little tricks.”

The book table at the conference was revealing for its dissemination of some of the most anti-Semitic works in history:

Why the Jews? Why anti-Semitism? Much has been written about this since October 7—a date that will live in infamy like December 7 and September 11—by scholars and historians far better equipped to answer this specific form of xenophobia than I am, so here I would like to pull back and consider the psychology of what drives people to accept spurious beliefs and conspiracy theories about groups of people they consider to be the enemy, and the need for enemies in general. I begin with John George and Laird Wilcox, scholars of fringe movements, who have outlined a set of characteristics of political extremists and ideological contrarians of all stripes:

1. Absolute certainty they have the truth.

2. America is controlled to a greater or lesser extent by a conspiratorial group. In fact, they believe this evil group is very powerful and controls most nations.

3. Open hatred of opponents. Because these opponents (actually “enemies” in the extremists’ eyes) are seen as a part of or sympathizers with “The Conspiracy,” they deserve hatred and contempt.

4. Little faith in the democratic process. Mainly because most believe “The Conspiracy” has great influence in the U.S. government, and therefore extremists usually spurn compromise.

5. Willingness to deny basic civil liberties to certain fellow citizens, because enemies deserve no liberties.

6. Consistent indulgence in irresponsible accusations and character assassination.

According to George and Wilcox, extremists practice “character assassination, name calling and labeling, sweeping generalizations, inadequate proof for assertions, advocacy of double standards, use of buzzwords, assumption of moral superiority over others, doomsday thinking, problems tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty,” and they “often feel that the system is no good unless they win.” Of course, at one time or another we are all susceptible to these fallacies of thinking, but as George and Wilcox point out, “the difference between true extremists and others is that this general kind of behavior is the extremist’s normal and usual way of relating their values and feelings, and they usually feel no guilt or sense that anything is wrong when they behave this way.”¹

Where those in the mainstream may question the judgment and reasoning of their opponents, extremists tend to impugn the character and morality of theirs. Where mainstreamers operate within the existing system to change it, extremists may resort to quasi-legal and illegal methods to elicit change, with the justification that the ends justify the means. These ends often include a level of xenophobia far beyond that of the mainstream.

In their book on “right-wing extremists, ‘revisionists’ and anti-semites in Austrian politics today,” poignantly titled Incorrigibly Right,² Brigitte Bailer-Galanda and Wolfgang Neugebauer speculate “that people with fears for their future, those who believe that ‘aliens’ and other ‘enemies’ are the personification of that fear, serve as a permanent reservoir for extreme right-wing rat-catchers of all hues.” Antisemitism fits this pattern: its 19th-century stereotypes of Jews as “God killers,” or of the “Talmud Jews” out to eliminate Christians gave way in the 20th-century to the image of the Jews as “subversive” corrupters of philosophy, art, and culture, completely ignoring that Jews made some of the greatest contributions to those fields. Here it is worth considering the observation of the sociologist Daniel Bell:

“The way you hold beliefs is more important that what you hold. If somebody’s been a rigid Communist, he becomes a rigid anti-Communist—the rigidity being constant.”³

The psychologist Milton Rokeach, in a study on the organization of belief systems, commented on the importance of the structure over the content of beliefs:

“The relative openness or closedness of a mind cuts across specific content; that is, it is not uniquely restricted to any particular ideology, or religion, or philosophy or scientific viewpoint.”⁴

The specific belief may be communism, existentialism, extreme Afrocentrism, radical feminism, or Holocaust denial, but these beliefs may be held in an open or closed manner. “Thus,” Rokeach explains, in trying to understand the mindset common to all these beliefs, “a basic requirement is that concepts to be employed in the description of belief systems must not be tied to any one particular system; they must be constructed to apply equally to all belief systems.” Insight into the psychology of believers is to be found more in the universals of extremist belief systems and less in the details of the claims themselves.

In his book Turncoats and True Believers: The Dynamics of Political Belief and Disillusionment, the sociologist Ted Goertzel shows just how important the structuring of the belief system can be. A case in point is the phenomenon of “left-wing authoritarianism”, which, as Goertzel notes, should be a contradiction in terms:

“Leftist protesters are usually compassionate people who empathize deeply with the suffering of others, while authoritarians, such as the Nazis and their apologists, have only hatred and disdain for society’s victims. Despite this difference in their feelings, protesters and authoritarians have a great deal in common in the way they think about the political world. In both ideological scripts, the world is polarized between good and evil forces.”⁵

This goes a long way to explaining the madness we have been witnessing on college campuses and public venues since October 7, in which leftists are celebrating the rape, murder, and mutilation of over 1400 Israeli women, men, and children by Hamas terrorists, while condemning the Jews as having brought it on themselves, leading some to chant ”Gas the Jews” and “Fuck the Jews” (here in front of the Sydney Opera House).

The puzzle is solved when we go to a deeper level of analysis and consider not the content of the ideology, but the psychology of it, namely, the need for opposition, an enemy. An external enemy clears away internal strife. An enemy in life, like an opponent in sports, gives focus and meaning—someone to defeat, something to overcome. Any enemy helps define a cause, delineating good from evil, black from white, as Richard Nixon explained:

“It may seem melodramatic to say that the U.S. and Russia represent Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, God and the Devil. But if we think of it that way, it helps to clarify our perspective of the world struggle.”⁶

The psychologist David Barash, in his provocative book Beloved Enemies,⁷ suggests that a need for enemies may have evolved in the human species from our earliest social bondings into tribes and clans, which eventually gave rise to our modern classes and states, religions and races. The Same and the Other. Us and Them. Friend and Enemy. Good and Bad. “In enmity, there is unity,” Barash concludes.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz says these “primordial alliances” are at the very heart of the tendency to see ourselves as members of a group and others as not in that group.⁸ This proclivity to cleave people into collectives may be so ingrained in human nature and culture that we not only feel directionless if we do not belong to a group, we feel empty without another group with whom to contrast ourselves. Here is the poet Constantine Cavafy, in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”:

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

And some of our men just in from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

In what would turn out to be a prophetic statement about his own people, Friedrich Nietzsche noted that in many ways enemies are more important than friends in uniting a new nation: “Our spiritualization of hostility…consists in a profound appreciation of having enemies.” Writing in 1880 of the recent unification of Germany under Bismarck, he warned that “a new creation—the new Reich, for example, needs enemies more than friends: in opposition alone does it feel itself necessary.”⁹

The Third Reich, of course, found its enemy in the Jews, but they were not the first nor the last to do so. Tragically, more groups and nations than one cares to consider need the Jews as an enemy, in much the same manner as Captain Ahab needed the white whale:

“The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung…. He pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things, all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”¹⁰

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.

1. George, John and Laird Wilcox. 1992. Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 58-61.

2. Bailer-Galanda, Brigitte and Wolfgang Neugebauer. 1996. Incorrigibly Right: Right-Wing Extremists, “Revisionists” and Anti-Semites in Austrian Politics Today. Austria: Stiftung Dokumentationsarchiv de österreichischen Widerstandes, 10.

3. Bell, Daniel. 1991. The Radical Right. New York: Doubleday, 14.

4. Rokeach, Milton. 1969. The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations in the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems. New York: Basic Books, 6.

5. Goertzel, Ted. 1992. Turncoats and True Believers: The Dynamics of Political Belief and Disillusionment. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 36.

6. Nixon, Richard. 1980. “America Has Slipped to Number Two.” Parade, October 5.

7. Barash, David. 1994. Beloved Enemies: Our Need for Opponents. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 137.

8. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

9. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1880. The Twilight of the Idols. New York: Viking, 1954, 114.

10. Melville, Herman. 1851/1964. Moby Dick. New York: Washington Square Press, 391.