The West’s most enduring demons rise again
The haunting, perennial connection between anti-semitism and misogyny
The 2018 biography of Golda Meir, one of the founders of Israel and its fourth prime minister, starts not in Israel but in Russia. And it starts with Jews cowering in fear not from Nazis, but from Orthodox Christians who were drunkenly marauding through the warrens where Jews lived. Their rage driven by the age-old belief that Jews were magically causing Christian misfortune, they committed unspeakable violence upon all they found there: babies, old women, the blind. In addition to the butchery, six hundred women were raped.
“Bodies were hacked in half or gutted and stuffed with chicken feathers as the city’s bourgeoisie sauntered in the streets with calm indifference,” writes Elinor Burkett in her book Golda Meir and the Birth of Israel.
It was 1903, in the city of Kishinev. The twentieth century’s first pogrom. Today, it is barely remembered by many Jews, and entirely unknown among Christians.
In my late father Jack Holland’s last book, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice, he argues that hatred of women is the first and most common hatred in the human race. But, he adds, Jew hatred is a close second.
Though no doubt others made the point before him, my father was the first person I heard talk about the haunting connection between misogyny and anti-semitism. And he was the first person I heard to articulate the exceptionalism of both forms of hate.
I was reminded of his point after seeing the recent explosion of footage from “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations in Europe, the UK and the US where attendees threatened, taunted and attacked Jews.
In London, cars drove up the Jewish Finchley Road with Palestinian flags flying, and men shouting “Fuck the Jews” and “rape their daughters, we have to send them a message” from a loudspeaker.
In Manhattan, men dressed in kaffiyehs and carrying the Palestinian flag spit on diners sitting outside a restaurant.
Another man was beaten by a crowd in the middle of Times Square, in what the NYPD called a “hate crime.”
It is in America — the place where for over a century Jews could walk the streets and live the rituals of their religion unmolested — where these images are the most jarring. The US was known as a haven for Jews fleeing persecution, and a place where they had established tremendous cultural influence and success, is now a place where synagogues have private security and 2019 saw the highest number of reported anti-Semitic attacks since 1979.
My father wrote:
“[Anti-Semitism] bears more than a passing resemblance to misogyny, to which it offers some interesting parallels as well as contrasts. For about 1,500 years, anti-Semitism was part of the ‘common sense’ of society — a belief that was taken for granted as part of the cosmic and social order, so much so that it was hardly commented upon. Jews like women were held ‘to violate the moral order of the world’ mainly because of their role in the death of Jesus. Jews were deemed responsible for denying his divinity and women, because of Eve’s role in the Fall of Man, were blamed for necessitating the Incarnation in the first place. Both Jews and women in the early modern period in Europe were attributed incredible powers to blight crops, poison wells, force cows and other men’s wives to miscarry. Both Jews and women were ascribed these powers though the vast majority of them occupied the lowest and weakest rungs of society. Clearly, neither represented a real threat to anyone. This did not save either from vicious outbursts of communal violence. For Jews, it occurred on a fairly regular basis. For women, it took this form during the witch craze, which persisted with peaks and troughs of intensity for almost 300 years.”1
Misogyny is, as my father wrote, “pervasive, persistent, pernicious and protean” — and so is anti-Semitism. Even after the religious dominance dissipated from mainstream European culture, the urge to hate Jews remained.
“It was transformed from a religious into a secular prejudice. Race replaced religion as the motivation for the persecution of Jews. In this form it thrived with particular intensity… in the intellectual circles of early twentieth-century Vienna. There, in the first decades of the last century, anti-semitism and misogyny came together in a lurid alliance.”2
That alliance was forged in the psyche of one Adolph Hitler. He denounced women’s rights as a “phrase invented by the Jewish intellect;” the Nazi propaganda rag Der Sturmer, “combined anti-Semitism with violent, pornographic depictions of helpless German maidens being raped by demon-like Jews.”3
It is no mystery that, after being persecuted by the Church and then by right-wing ultra-nationalists, both women and Jews came to see socialism as their saviour and protector. When I was growing up, all the Jews we knew were secular and left-wing, like almost everyone else in our family and social circle. They were the descendants of labour activists, teachers, academics. One close friend of my mother was a French Jewish Trotskyist whose father was dragged out of his home and shot by the Gestapo.
Israel itself was founded as a socialist state. And before that, European Jewish refugees founded the experimental, utopian, agrarian and egalitarian kibbutzim.
As Jews attempted to protect themselves under the principles of socialism, equality-seeking women also aligned themselves with the left. In the brutal American labour battles of the early 20th century — where union members and free speech advocates were beaten, tortured and killed by agents of the state and their industrialist allies — women played a central role. Women like Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, and Lucy Parsons. In the century since these foundational movements, the alignment of working class women and shtetl Jews — ie the powerless — with the spectrum of left-wing politics became itself part of the ‘common sense’ of society. As these two groups ascended the social mobility ladder (in part thanks to left-wing activism), many remained faithful to the ideals of socialism and helped shape society in the image of those ideals.
But it is absolutely essential to understand that neither misogyny nor anti-Semitism are political phenomena. And in fact, attempting to defeat them simply with political alignments is at best useless — at worst, extremely dangerous. Because political actors will cease to stand by you once their political aims have been achieved.
On March 19th 2012, a man jumped off his scooter at the gates to a Jewish school in the provincial French city of Toulouse, and began firing a 9 mm handgun into the crowd. First he shot 30-year-old rabbi Jonathan Sandler, then his two sons, Aryeh, six, and Gavriel, three, killing each of them. When his gun jammed, he switched to another one and began chasing children through the school grounds. There, he found a little girl by the name of Miriam Monsonego and, according to some reports, grabbed her by her blonde hair and put a bullet in her head at point blank range. The motivation behind the murders of three small Jewish children and a Rabbi in a French schoolyard? In the mind of their killer, their Jewishness carried in it an essential and eternal responsibility for the plight of Palestinian children, nearly 5000 kilometres away.
Here, in the horrifying deaths of small Jewish children in our contemporary era, I hear echoes of the ancient hatred of women throughout Christianity — held responsible for the fall of man, his lust, and his vulnerability.
Such actions are not precipitated by politics. They arise deep within the psyche, in our brain’s fear centre, learned at the cradle from family members who also are toxically tied to their fear, and then reinforced by a society where such fear is justified and promulgated and given cover through utterly inadequate “political” (or “religious”) arguments. Why should Jewish girls in London be threatened with rape because of Palestine? Why should Jewish diners be spat upon in New York because of Israeli defence policy? Why was Miriam Monsonego chased down and shot by a French man? Because she was held responsible for her race, by a man with so much rage in his heart that he could murder a defenceless child.
Politics is just a fig-leaf for a primordial drive to murder Jews that has stalked humanity for nearly three thousand years.
Similarly, women’s struggle against misogyny was mistakenly relegated to the feminist political movement, where it generated a lot youthful energy, sloganeering and protest marches. All of which are decidedly ill-equipped to protect against the ancient, wily demon that is misogyny. For a while there, satisfied with the gains that women in our advanced economies had made, I was skeptical that misogyny was really a concern any longer. And I was dismayed that something as profound as misogyny was frequently worn as a mantel by young, affluent Western women for whom victimisation is a status symbol, a trend.
Of course misogyny hasn’t gone away. True to its protean nature, it has just changed form. I see that now, the wise words of my father, when he wrote of the “phantasmagoria” of misogyny: the dark fairy tales in “which women fly through the air on broomsticks” and “make men’s penises disappear.”4
In our latest iteration of misogyny, women are now being forced to accept the claim that some women have penises; and that these penises — even if attached to hulking criminals accused of sexual violence against women — must be accepted in spaces where women go to be away from men. Liberals would be horrified to remember the time when the Church promoted the phantasmagorical claim that women suckled cats; so how can so many of them accept claims that not *only* women menstruate and give birth — and attack those who do not?
In our latest iteration of misogyny, the statement: “women don’t have penises” is — according to one UK police department — “not acceptable and we take incidents of this nature very seriously.”
Social media is awash in examples of boys and men posting debasing, leering claims and questions about female bodies in the hopes of imitating the physical processes they can never possibly experience — like one who asked about possibly drinking women’s urine to better achieve transition. Cramps and periods are fetishised by these men and boys in ways that are redolent of the witch-hunting days (though these men and boys claim to be acting out of a desire to be the same as women. Which I don’t buy, at all.) For many women, this is patently degrading and voyeuristic, but those voices who say so are vociferously suppressed.
While some on the left — old-school Marxist radical feminists in particular, who rightly point out that the female sex is a material reality, not an ideology — have held out against this creepy encroachment on women’s bodies, the push to accept and normalise it has come exclusively from liberal and left-wing quarters. Gender ideology is now considered harmless and tolerant by large swaths of the bien-pensant.
Do these left-leaning educators and policy makers truly believe that a man with a penis and a history of sexual violence is exactly the same biological entity as a woman?
While both misogyny and anti-Semitism undoubtably exist on the right5, it is now dismayingly clear that the main bastions of woman and Jew hate are gathered on the left. And because the left-liberal nexus is the dominant cultural, social and educational force, this is a disturbing turn of events. As shocking as those words sound to someone like me who was steeped from birth in the folklore of left-wing social justice, the evidence can no longer be ignored. To do so risks our safety.
Political figures like Ilhan Omar and Jeremy Corbyn speak out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to Jews, doling out lip-service condemnation over attacks on Jews but also aligning themselves with openly anti-Semitic positions and organisations. The Democratic Party in the US, long a Jewish power centre, has undergone a “seismic shift” with younger generations (epitomised by Omar) “considerably more sympathetic” to the Palestinians.
In 2019, interestingly, the states with the most reported anti-Semitic incidents were heavily liberal, Democratic stalwarts: New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, as reported in The New York Times.
Has the now secular west forgotten that anti-Semitism was not a Nazi invention? That its metaphysical derangement has endured for centuries in ways that require us to be ever-vigilant?
Have feminists forgotten the dark history of men fixating on women’s biological functions as though they contained some magical power that men needed to usurp?
Did the secular west ever even understand these things?
In obsessively decrying every mild critic as the second coming of Hitler, the left has stopped guarding against the shape-shifting nature of misogyny and anti-Semitism. And it has actually left the door open to those who really do carry with them these ancient hatreds — and express them both in word and deed.
In today’s upside-down social and cultural climate — where to be seen as a victim is the easiest route to power, where left-wing movements across the west abandon both women and Jews to those who want to see them erased— this connection between the two oldest hatreds urgently needs revisiting.
Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice by Jack Holland Carroll & Graf, 2006 p. 275
ibid, p. 275-276
ibid, p. 220
ibid, p. 274
The most recent example I saw was a post on a “red-pilled” Instagram account, encouraging men to report women’s OnlyFans accounts (where women collect subscriptions from people in return for suggestive or erotic photos and videos of themselves) to the tax authorities, in order to punish “the whore.”
This is a subject I will now only discuss among sane personal friends but I will offer this thought. Why don’t the stories of men like Primo Levi or Viktor Frankl get taught in our school? We will focus on Hitler, Stalin, Beria or any other “monster” but few common heroes are mentioned. Our culture is debased, most likely things will get worse and blow up before we turn the corner.