November 15, 2021 • 35 mins
This episode of ReligionWise features a conversation with Hartley Lachter, Associate Professor of Religion Studies at Lehigh University, where he holds the Philip and Muriel Berman Chair in Jewish Studies, and serves as the director of the Berman Center for Jewish Studies.
In this conversation, the origins of antisemitism are discussed as well as the contemporary social functions of the phenomenon.
Show Notes
- Kabbalistic Revolution: Reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain (https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/kabbalistic-revolution/9780813568751)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Chip Gruen (00:09):
Welcome to ReligionWise, the podcast where
we feature educators,researchers and other
professionals discussing topicson religion and their relevance
to the public conversation. Myname is Chip Gruen. I'm the
Director of the Institute forReligious and Cultural
Understanding at MuhlenbergCollege, and I will be the host
for this podcast.
(00:32):
Today's episode features myconversation with Hartley
Lachter on history ofanti-semitism. Hartley is
Associate Professor of ReligionStudies at Lehigh University,
and also the Director of theBerman Center. Hartley and I go
way back. He was a professor atMuhlenberg College when I first
started here, and I very muchvalued his collegiality and the
(00:54):
work that we did together. Ourconversation today is about the
history of anti-semitism andwhat it looks like in antiquity,
in the Middle Ages, and today.
And I think that this isactually a really nuanced
conversation, because Ispecialize in the ancient world
and late antiquity, and you haveanti-Judaism, you know, even if
you look in the New Testament,you have sentiments that are
(01:17):
anti-Jewish that, of course, areused in very horrific ways in
the Middle Ages and in themodern world. But some scholars
don't want to refer to those asanti-semitism. Their claim is
that anti-semitism is itself amodern phenomenon that has to do
with modern national identity,rather than something that is
(01:37):
simply the same as anti-Judaismas it exists in the past. So we
talked a little bit about that.
So there's a little bit of thatnuance that goes on about how we
use our vocabulary. And what doscholars mean when they use
these different phrases? I thinkanother thing that's really
interesting to keep an eye on inthis conversation is about when
(02:00):
anti-semitism or anti-Judaismhappens in the presence of Jews,
were there real Jews in thecommunity, and how often Jews
are held up as a foil or assomething that is the, the
scapegoat, if you will, in acommunity that doesn't have its
own Jewish population. So Ithink that there's some really
(02:21):
interesting comparisons there.
So you'll hear us talk a littlebit about fourth and fifth
century North Africa as comparedto 20th century Arizona in that
regard. So without further ado,here's my conversation with
Hartley Lachter.
Welcome Hartley, I'm so glad youcan join me today for this
(02:43):
conversation. So what I reallywanted to talk to you about is,
I know that you have a couple ofdifferent things that you're
working on, one you did a classat Lehigh called Anti-Semitism
Past and Present, where youthink about not only material
from from your work, medievalKabbalah, and that his response
(03:04):
to anti-semitism, but alsothinking about how those tropes
and how ideas that are, that arespawned in that period and some
of the polemic that comes fromthat period, reaches into the
contemporary world. And then asI mentioned, this also connects
to your research interest on onKabbalah and thinking about
social and cultural functions ofanti-semitism. So I'm really
(03:26):
interested in the intersectionof those things. So we'll start
off with your work and we'll seehow, how it goes. And we'll ask
that question of "so what" as wemove forward.
Hartley Lachter (03:35):
Well, thanks so much. It's a pleasure to have
this conversation, especiallywith a friend and colleague who,
we had offices next door to eachother for many years at
Muhlenberg. So thanks for havingme. So yeah, I taught this
course it was actually the firsttime I've taught this particular
course as an introductoryoverview of the history of
(03:57):
anti-semitism or anti-Judaism inWestern culture going, as you
noted, past to present. And itdoes stem from the work that
I've done on how medieval Jewishmysticism or medieval Kabbalah
engages some of these ideas thatwere just part of Western
(04:18):
Christian culture, regarding thenature of Jews and Judaism and
their role in history. And I'mworking on a book now that's
very interested in howKabbalists understood the
meaning of Jewish history, sortof post Second Temple, and even
post Rabbinic Judaism howKabbalists understood the fate
of medieval Jews, and what thetheological implications of that
(04:42):
were. And the reason why thiswas a conversation they couldn't
avoid was twofold. One, ofcourse, was that the sort of the
tragic events that, that wouldoccasionally happen to Jewish
communities throughout theMiddle Ages, especially during
the 14th and 15th centuries inWestern Europe, demanded an
explanation in terms of how thatfits into the theology of
(05:04):
covenantal theology, what werethe signs of divine abandonment?
Why were these things happening?
What does this have to say aboutthe relationship of Jews to God
and the sort of biblicalpromises the covenant between
God and the people of Israel. Sothere's the events themselves
demanded explanation, but therewas also a long standing polemic
between Jews and Christiansabout the meaning of Jewish
(05:28):
history, and that Christiantheology also spent, and
medieval Christian thinkersspent, a lot of time thinking
about the meaning of Jewishhistory and that the fact of
Jews living in exile, and thefact of Jews being in servitude
to non-Jewish, and oftenChristian majority power was a
(05:48):
confirmation of the doctrine ofsupersession, or the notion that
the mantle of biblical Israelhad passed to the followers of
Christ, and that the Jewishpeople, who were regarded as
guilty for the death of Christ,had been rejected by God. And
their role was to serve asthese, as a cautionary tale, a
(06:08):
kind of living reminder of whathappens to those who reject the
message of Christianity, andthat this is the the function
that Jews serve, building onAugustine's doctrine of the
Jewish witness, that Jews bearwitness to the truth of
Christianity by living inservitude, as a subjugated
minority to other nations. Sothere was this theological
(06:32):
meaning attached to the lack ofJewish autonomy, and Jews needed
some kind of way of respondingto this challenge. And in many
respects, this becomes part ofhow, out of the Middle Ages, out
of the crucible of thisconflict, Jewish identity and
Christian identity are actuallyformulated in conversation with
(06:53):
each other, about the the natureof the meaning of Jewish
history. But over the course ofthat, lots of new tropes were
developed regarding anxietiesabout Jews within the broader
majority culture, fears thatJews might in fact be very
powerful, that they function asa secret group or a secret
(07:15):
cabal. Even the word cabalactually comes from Kabbalah and
the notion of a secretive groupof powerful Jewish men with a
powerful doctrine or mechanismfor undermining the majority
cultures in which they live,which led to all sorts of really
unfortunate notions such as theidea of the blood libel, or the
(07:37):
notion that Jews would murderChristian children and take
their blood, that they wouldutilize this blood for ritual
purposes, in particular, for themaking of unleavened bread, or
matzah on Passover. Othernotions about Jewish
manipulation of power thatdeveloped in the Middle Ages,
fears of Jews poisoning wells orhaving been the cause of the
(08:01):
bubonic plague in the 14thcentury, thinking about plagues
this semester was very relevant,which would lead to these
outbreaks of violence sometimesat the hands of the Christian
power, but often sometimes atthe, against what Christian
rulers would have wanted interms of social unrest and mass
acts of violence. And it led meto think about violence against
(08:25):
Jews in the 20th century or inthe contemporary period, and
that the Holocaust was not theonly event of mass violence
against Jews, of course, it wasthe most catastrophic in terms
of its scale. But in 1391, inSpain, 100,000 Jews were killed
over the course of one summerthrough what was essentially a
public uprising against the willof the Royal authorities or the
(08:47):
church. But 100,000 people beingkilled, essentially by hand, in
a sort of mass public, whatmight be called a pogrom, or act
of violence, these things demanda kind of explanation in terms
of what is the social work thatis performed in Western
Christian culture, byattributing society's problems
(09:11):
to Jews, Jewishness, and Jewishpeople. So I would just pay
homage to David Nirenberg, whohas, I think, a really
interesting observation about animportant feature of
anti-semitism, or anti-Judaism,which is the notion that it's a
form of discourse thatattributes pressing societal
(09:34):
problems to Jews or Jewishnessand that suggests that that
problem can be resolved throughthe removal of Jews or
Jewishness or Judaism from thatsociety or from culture. And
that continues to be, I think, areally relevant feature of
anti-semitism today.
Chip Gruen (10:00):
So something that we had talked about leading up to
this conversation that I justwant to sort of drive home and
think about a little bit, andthat you mentioned just now, you
mentioned these, these, thesetropes, or these sort of common
places that Christian ideologywould sort of come back to, or
that these, these polemics woulregister the idea of thes
(10:21):
powerful men with the secreknowledge and so forth being i
control. And obviously, tharesonates very strongly in th
contemporary world with thkinds of tropes that are presen
in the 21st centuranti-semitism as well. And so
know that, you know, as we'vtalked about this, you said tha
a lot of modern historianimagine or construct an idea o
(10:45):
anti-semitism as a moderphenomenon, something tha
develops with the development othe nation-state, in the 19t
and the 20th century. But whayou're saying is that a lot o
these elements can reach muchmuch, much further back, whic
sort of calls into question, thidea of anti-semitism bein
something different from maybwhat modern Jewish historian
(11:08):
would refer to as aanti-Judaism from an earlie
stage
Hartley Lachter (11:11):
Yeah, it's a re lly interesting and very rele
ant question right now, in termof the study of this phen
menon, and there are good reasns for seeing the modern peri
d as being very different fromthe premodern, seeing anti-semit
sm as a category of politcal discourse that drew upon
(11:31):
different structure of powr that develops in the mod
rn period with the devlopment of the nation-state, tha
it draws upon race science andother kinds of things that are
features of modernity. And sonti-semitism, they would su
gest is well, you know, it's nt to suggest that there was no
(11:53):
antipathy towards Jews in the prmodern world, that it just, i
functions differently becausethe context is differe
t. And those differences are cerainly worthy of our attenti
n. On the other hand, what isthe more illuminating way of
nderstanding or categorzing this phenomenon, when a
ember of the United States Congess attributes a forest fi
(12:15):
e to a "Jewish space laser,"hich also happened as I was te
ching this class, so that was iteresting food for thought. Is
this because of a very moern way of thinking about Jews
nd attributing this tohe Rothschild family, t
at there's the notion that powrful economically, you k
ow, that wealthy Jews, who hve a kind of secret power, are a
(12:40):
le to manipulate the majoity society for their own econo
ic benefit, and that this is pat of a kind of international co
spiracy? Is that way of thinkinabout Jews really distinctly m
dern, and that there was nothng contiguous with the
premodern, that we should get btter, we are better able to u
(13:02):
derstand that as part of somehing that's a kind of clean brea
from the premodern. Or is thee something more useful
that we gain from seeing howhis is connected to a broade
trend, because it was certaily the case that blood libel
claims, for instance, in theiddle Ages, often attribute
the murder of Christian cildren by Jews, to an internati
(13:25):
nal conspiracy among Jewishleaders to select the place and
the time when a Jewish child -ahristian child- would be sacr
ficed ritually by Jews. Ad so these ritual murder claim
were part of a claim about sot of secretive internati
nal Jewish conspiracy that wasbeing done to the detriment of
(13:47):
the majority cultures in which tey lived for some sort of intern
tional secret Jewish beneft. And that Jews were conspirin
in this fashion. This is anolder, this is an older trope. A
d if we think of it as an oldething, I think the one possi
ly beneficial outcome from thatis the ability to see this as p
(14:10):
rt of a broader structure of thconstruction of identities i
the West, and the way that scietal problems are identi
ied, and that Jews dothey are one of the location
for the scapegoating of socil problems, even for the s
apegoating of something likeildfires in California, but of
all kinds of problems, economicproblems, political problems th
(14:35):
t can be, come to be attribued to Jews. And that i
we understand this is not a sot of fairly recent phenomenon, t
is is not a sort of contempoary blip, but that it
s part of a broader trend, we'rebetter able to identify the wa
that this has performed socialwork for a longer period of ti
(14:57):
e in Western culture, and juste more aware of that as a po
ential problem within Western sciety.
Chip Gruen (15:09):
So this might be a little tangential, but given
that your work really stemsfrom, you know, these texts that
emerge in medieval Spain, theseKabbalistic texts, so obviously,
you're dealing with real Jewsand real Jewish communities who
are responding to real problemsand real historical situations.
(15:32):
I know in my field, and thinkingabout the Roman Empire, whenever
we read a text in which there isthis anti-Judaism, you know, not
New Testament, because that'ssort of a different, we're
talking about Jewish communitieswho were writing those texts.
But, when you talk about later,I mean, you mentioned Augustine
and contemporaries, that one ofthe questions we really ask very
(15:56):
often is, are they responding tothe idea of Judaism or are they
responding to Jews? Anddepending on who you talk to,
you'll have very differentanswers on whether, you know,
Judaism becomes sort of thisboogeyman that people can point
to, and so it becomes thisscapegoat in the absence of
evidence, or whether there arereal communities that are, you
(16:18):
know, that they're interactingwith, and that they're
struggling with. And I'll tellyou, a lot of the times in the
texts, you'll see when there's areal Jewish community, they'll
talk about how, isn't it greatthat we share the Psalms, or
something like that, that therewill be sort of an idea of sort
of a shared culture. And thereason I asked this is that in
(16:38):
the contemporary world, theplaces where there is any kind
of phobia around, whether it beJews or minority communities or
other, other communities, as youput it earlier, or immigrant or
whatever, that very often thoseend up being the most
homogeneous communities thatdon't have access to the, you
(17:01):
know, other identities that arethe target of their hatred. I
mean, how do you think aboutthat, the imagined Jew versus
the real Jew both in in yourtime period and and in the
modern world?
Hartley Lachter (17:15):
So that is such a terrific question, because one
of the things we talked aboutall the time was the gap that
occasionally exists. One of thethings we talked about in my
class is this way in which therewas a sometimes a significant
gap between the imagined Jew, insome forms of Christian
anti-Jewish discourse in thepremodern world, and real Jews.
(17:38):
I'll give you a what I think isa helpful, giant
overgeneralization, which isthat for the most part, the
texts that are composed bymedieval Jews living in
Christian territories in themedieval West, the Christians or
Christianity imagined in thosetexts are based on interactions
with real Christians. In thecase of the Christian majority,
(18:02):
it is sometimes the case thatthe Jews imagined in the
Christian texts are imaginaryJews, and not real ones. Now,
there are other times when thereis a real Jewish community with
whom that author interactsfrequently, such was the case,
for instance, for Martin Luther,but there are other cases,
Augustine might be one of them,where the interaction with Jews
(18:24):
was very limited. And certainly,in some cases, the interaction
with Jews was not at all. Wefind anti-semitism featuring
really prominently in the casesof some Christian authors who
had no interaction with Jews.
And this is one of the featuresof anti-semitism or anti-Jewish
discourse in the West that'sreally worthy of paying
attention to, which is thatbecause of the place of Jews,
(18:47):
Pharisees, the rabbis, startingin the New Testament, and then
the role of that in post NewTestament, Christian discourse,
one need not have real Jews inorder for anti-semitic discourse
to perform important social workin the Christian West. Whereas
for Jews, the Christians theywere imagining were the the real
(19:09):
majority among whom they lived.
I remember being a kid growingup in Arizona, going to a public
elementary school in Mesa,Arizona, and having kids tell me
that I was the first Jew they'dever met. I once had a kid say
that he was, he asked if I hadhorns. Weren't you supposed to,
could I really be a Jew withouthorns? Totally innocently, they
(19:32):
thought this was a fact. Idefinitely had sometimes people
who are older than me say, if itcame up somehow that I was
Jewish, that they would starttalking about Jews and money in
ways that I didn't understand.
Like, I actually didn't knowmany of these anti-semitic
tropes, because that wasn'tsomething we talked about. But
it was something that wasdiscussed in these Christian
(19:52):
communities where the Jewishpresence was minimal, or in some
cases totally absent. And Ibelieve in some of these cases,
what people were saying to me, Iwas the first Jew to whom they
had ever said it. I rememberwhen I was a kid and my father
was the president of oursynagogue in Mesa, Arizona, a
woman came in and stood in theback and demanded very loudly
that we, she was there toinvestigate our practice of
(20:15):
human sacrifice. And I remembersaying to my parents, like, what
is a human sacrifice? I didn'teven know what she was talking
about. But I, you know, I doubtthat this woman frequently
walked into synagogues to dothat. I can guarantee that she
did not have this suspicionabout Jews because of her
experience with observing humansacrifice by Jews. This was a
(20:37):
trope in her own environment inwhich talking about Jews
conspiring to commit sacrificeagainst Christians did something
important or useful for thatcommunity in terms of the ways
they talked about their pressingsocial problems, and where they
identified the source of thatproblem, what was the location
(20:59):
of the cause of that problem,and that Jews were identified as
that location.
Chip Gruen (21:08):
So I want to follow up on this and maybe be a little
more general, but something thatmaybe some of our listeners are
not familiar with, but a frameof reference you've been using
is the idea of a particularsocial work. Not social work,
but Social Work, of culturalwork, right. And the idea that
(21:28):
belief and practice may not justbe sort of benign belief and
practice, but that it doessomething for the people who
believe or who practice. Thatthere is a function, you know,
we might say that there is afunction to the things that they
believe, you know, that doessomething for them or for their,
for their community. And I bringthis up, and I want to sort of
(21:52):
probe it a little bit, becauseone of the things I've been
thinking about, and I'veactually been thinking about
this, as I've been reading someSupreme Court cases on how, how
the court rules on religion, isthat they're very fond of using
this word "sincere," you know,and talking about "sincere
religious belief." And I thinkone of the problems we're sort
(22:12):
of confronting right now is thatpeople very much like the woman
in the back of the synagogue inMesa, Arizona, is totally
sincere in that belief, becauseshe has been the consumer of
really, really bad information.
And, you know, I wonder, again,across time, and in the
materials you're familiar with,do you see distinctions between
people who are sort of, again,consumers of that information
(22:35):
who might sincerely believe it,and people who are using these
sorts of tropes for their ownsocial and cultural gain in a
way that is, you know, that ismanipulative? Or is that a
distinction without a
Hartley Lachter (22:50):
I mean, I think it's an interesting distinction,
difference?
that I'm, certainly the woman inthe back my synagogue, from my
memory of being a little kid,this was a long time ago, she
was 100% sincere. She, I thinkwas surprised that this wasn't
just a given fact that this wasa feature of Jewish religious
practice. I imagine, certainly,we can see historically that
(23:16):
there were people who usedclaims of, for instance, ritual
murder, to stay on that theme,to advance their own position of
power. That's certainly thecase. However, it would not be
useful, it would bring themnothing, if it weren't something
that some portion of thecommunity would sincerely
(23:39):
embrace or would regard as beingsimply the truth. And that this
becomes, when developed over along period of time, an easy way
to take broader social problemsthat maybe often, you know,
problems facing societies don'thave simple problems, they don't
have a single location, they arenot resolvable through any kind
(24:01):
of simple action. And therefore,it's very hard to say, "Hey,
vote for me or empower me, and Ican solve your problem" when one
is forced to acknowledge thatthe problem is somewhat
intractable and has complex,hard to identify sources,
causes. By attributing theseproblems to Jews, it does solve
(24:26):
that problem. So I think thatthere certainly are examples of,
you know, the strategicdeployment of anti-semitic
discourse for people to acquirepower, but I think it would
serve no strategic purpose forsuch individuals if it weren't
something that some significantenough portion of the population
(24:48):
were willing to believe. We evensee, I think, in the Middle Ages
something kind of opposite tothis, which is that ritual
murder and blood libel claimswere often categorically
rejected by church authoritiesand by authorities of the crown,
and the church and the statewould not embrace these things,
yet they still had a fair amountof staying power into the modern
(25:13):
period. Magda Teter from FordhamUniversity has written just a
really fantastic book on thehistory of blood libel, and its
ability to stay really relevantinto the, you know, into the
early modern period and themodern period. It's remarkable.
So I while I wouldn't say thatwhat you point out is a
(25:35):
distinction without adifference, I think that it's
all still part of this samephenomenon of anti-semitic
ideas, notions about Jews,performing a social function,
often that in a way that helpslocate and simplify social
problems that are not easily, seasily nailed down
Chip Gruen (25:59):
And those social problems, you know, would be
things like, what economicdownturn, or unemployment or,
you know, general unrest, thosesorts of things are what you're
talking about, right?
Hartley Lachter (26:13):
Yeah, in fact that the malleable nature of
anti-semitism in westerndiscourse is such that almost
any social problem can beattributed to Jews if you have
the right audience to bereceptive to that. So if you
have someone who has deep racistcommitments, and is very
concerned about the notion ofsort of replacement of white
(26:36):
people in the United States, forinstance, if you want to
identify like, what is theconnection between that threat
as they perceive it, the threatof liberalism, the, the threat
of the spread of, I don't know,the gay agenda, for instance, as
they might identify it, and allsorts of other problems, the way
to create a coherent narrativeis to say, all of these things
(26:58):
are actually being secretlyadvanced by Jews in order to
destroy white Christian Westerncivilization, because Jews are
the perennial, perceived as theperennial, enemy of that
civilization. And for suchpeople who embrace such views,
the view of Jews as being thesecret force, this small group
(27:19):
that conspires in aninternational way to disempower
the white Christian majority inthe West, is already a well worn
idea, that's a well establishedtrope. And it has this
explanatory power of saying thatall of these things are part of
the same phenomenon, which isthat white replacement and the
advancement of all of theseother problems in society, the
(27:41):
economic problems in society,all of them are being advanced
by Jews to destroy white Westernculture. And then you end up
with people marching inCharlottesville, saying, you
know, "you will not replace us"and "Jews will not replace us."
The Tree of Life massacre thathappened in Pittsburgh, in the
(28:02):
synagogue in Pittsburgh, theTree of Life Synagogue, that was
also by someone who believedthat Jews were, and Jews
specifically there were,advancing an agenda of white
replacement through thewelcoming of immigrants, and
that he had to do this to stopthis phenomenon as a matter of
(28:22):
addressing his own, and what heperceived to be, believed
earnestly, to believe to be hisexistential dread that was
caused, first and foremost,actually, by Jews as the threat
to whiteness and the whiteChristian majority that he
believes is entitled to power inthe United States. That ability
(28:45):
to tie together all thesedifferent strands, and to say
that all of these things arebeing secretly caused behind the
scenes by Jewish power,manipulating these other forces,
is part of, I think, theexplanatory model for some of
these forms of hatred that Jewsserve. And I think that Jews are
kind of, because of the legacy,the premodern legacy, uniquely
(29:07):
placed to serve, unfortunately,in this, this sort of discourse
of tying together multiple,multiple strands of hatred.
Chip Gruen (29:17):
So where I want to end up today is, and we've
hinted about this a little bitor dealt with it tangentially in
a number of different places,but I want to ask it directly.
Knowing this history, knowingthe contiguousness of these
(29:39):
antipathies, as you put it,knowing this history, how does
this help us be civicallyengaged? Like how does this help
us when we read the news or whenwe see these social movements
happening? When we seedisinformation around Jews and
Judaism, or more generally, howdoes this knowledge of the past
(30:05):
and of these trends help us tobe better informed? And also,
how does this help us sort oftalk about these issues in a
more sophisticated way?
Hartley Lachter (30:20):
Well, I think that the the two things that
this might help us thinkthrough, one is that
anti-semitism is stillunfortunately, a very real force
in Western societies. But it'snot present everywhere, right.
So there's many, many non-JewishNorth Americans who just, there,
or people in Western societymore broadly, who don't
(30:43):
experience anti-semiticdiscourse in the environment in
which they function. They don'thave relatives who say these
things or friends who say thesethings they don't consume media,
that attributes all of society'sproblems to Jews. And it might
very reasonably appear thatanti-semitism is more a feature
of the sort of history than ofpresent society. But by
(31:07):
recognizing not only the ways inwhich in certain sectors,
anti-semitism still functions,but that that function that it's
serving is not being createdanew in the current moment, but
that this is actually deeplyencoded in Western culture. If
we embrace the notion that olderideas that have had a long
standing legacy are more easilydeployed to do that kind of
(31:31):
social work, then once they'rebeing created new, then suddenly
you have to create a newnarrative and create a new
audience for that narrative andhave it feel believable, then
anti-semitism, I think, issomething that has a
particularly well establishedpedigree, unfortunately, in the
West, and is always ready to bedeployed in these ways. And that
(31:56):
is, requires a certainvigilance, I think, in order to
counter these claims, andeliminate the eliminate the ways
in which they are serving thatkind of function. Even if there
are people for whom that's notsomething that they're, you
know, hearing every day, but itis something that's, you know,
(32:19):
is happening every day. And it'shappening, because it's a tool
that has long since beenestablished in Western society,
for, at least for some people incertain circumstances,
understanding and making senseof what they understand is the
problems facing them, theiridentity, and and their culture,
(32:41):
their society more broadly. Soat least being aware of that, I
think helps us to pay attentionto, what is the nature of the
phenomenon of anti-semitism,even contemporary anti-semitism,
and what is the the kind ofattention that that one needs to
pay to it? I don't have anycategorical solutions for, how
(33:04):
does one put an end toanti-semitism once and for all?
It strikes me as something thatkind of just needs constantly to
be combated.
Chip Gruen (33:15):
Well, and I think the best solution that you and I
can offer for now is I mean,education, right, that the
education and people beknowledgeable about not only the
history, but how to consumeinformation in a more
sophisticated way is, is alwayshelpful.
Hartley Lachter (33:34):
Yeah. No, when someone talks about the
Rothschilds having a spacelaser, it could strike one as
something between absurd andrandom. But if one realizes that
the idea of a conspiringinternational, sort of financial
(33:56):
network of Jews to manipulatethe broader majority culture to
their disadvantage in order toadvantage some sort of
international Jewish conspiracythat's driven by money and
power, and in this case, secretweapons, that, that is not
(34:16):
something new or random. Thatthat's something that suggests,
is an attempt to tap into thisfeature of how social problems
are understood in Westernculture. And that that makes it
I think, more significant andmore worthy of attention than if
(34:37):
it you know, if we really doencounter these kinds of random
and what might strike one issort of strange claims that are
not connected to a broaderhistory of discourse, then they
seem maybe less, less importantor less, less, less significant.
Chip Gruen (34:52):
Alright, Hartley, thank you very much for sitting
down and talking with us today.
I really appreciate it and I'velearned a tremendous amount and
you know, we'll we'll see youaround at other Institute
events.
Hartley Lachter (35:03):
Thanks so much.
It was a pleasure to be here.
Chip Gruen (35:08):
This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced
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(35:32):
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to seeing you next time.
Welcome to ReligionWise, the podcast where
we feature educators,researchers and other
professionals discussing topicson religion and their relevance
to the public conversation. Myname is Chip Gruen. I'm the
Director of the Institute forReligious and Cultural
Understanding at MuhlenbergCollege, and I will be the host
for this podcast.
(00:32):
Today's episode features myconversation with Hartley
Lachter on history ofanti-semitism. Hartley is
Associate Professor of ReligionStudies at Lehigh University,
and also the Director of theBerman Center. Hartley and I go
way back. He was a professor atMuhlenberg College when I first
started here, and I very muchvalued his collegiality and the
(00:54):
work that we did together. Ourconversation today is about the
history of anti-semitism andwhat it looks like in antiquity,
in the Middle Ages, and today.
And I think that this isactually a really nuanced
conversation, because Ispecialize in the ancient world
and late antiquity, and you haveanti-Judaism, you know, even if
you look in the New Testament,you have sentiments that are
(01:17):
anti-Jewish that, of course, areused in very horrific ways in
the Middle Ages and in themodern world. But some scholars
don't want to refer to those asanti-semitism. Their claim is
that anti-semitism is itself amodern phenomenon that has to do
with modern national identity,rather than something that is
(01:37):
simply the same as anti-Judaismas it exists in the past. So we
talked a little bit about that.
So there's a little bit of thatnuance that goes on about how we
use our vocabulary. And what doscholars mean when they use
these different phrases? I thinkanother thing that's really
interesting to keep an eye on inthis conversation is about when
(02:00):
anti-semitism or anti-Judaismhappens in the presence of Jews,
were there real Jews in thecommunity, and how often Jews
are held up as a foil or assomething that is the, the
scapegoat, if you will, in acommunity that doesn't have its
own Jewish population. So Ithink that there's some really
(02:21):
interesting comparisons there.
So you'll hear us talk a littlebit about fourth and fifth
century North Africa as comparedto 20th century Arizona in that
regard. So without further ado,here's my conversation with
Hartley Lachter.
Welcome Hartley, I'm so glad youcan join me today for this
(02:43):
conversation. So what I reallywanted to talk to you about is,
I know that you have a couple ofdifferent things that you're
working on, one you did a classat Lehigh called Anti-Semitism
Past and Present, where youthink about not only material
from from your work, medievalKabbalah, and that his response
(03:04):
to anti-semitism, but alsothinking about how those tropes
and how ideas that are, that arespawned in that period and some
of the polemic that comes fromthat period, reaches into the
contemporary world. And then asI mentioned, this also connects
to your research interest on onKabbalah and thinking about
social and cultural functions ofanti-semitism. So I'm really
(03:26):
interested in the intersectionof those things. So we'll start
off with your work and we'll seehow, how it goes. And we'll ask
that question of "so what" as wemove forward.
Hartley Lachter (03:35):
Well, thanks so much. It's a pleasure to have
this conversation, especiallywith a friend and colleague who,
we had offices next door to eachother for many years at
Muhlenberg. So thanks for havingme. So yeah, I taught this
course it was actually the firsttime I've taught this particular
course as an introductoryoverview of the history of
(03:57):
anti-semitism or anti-Judaism inWestern culture going, as you
noted, past to present. And itdoes stem from the work that
I've done on how medieval Jewishmysticism or medieval Kabbalah
engages some of these ideas thatwere just part of Western
(04:18):
Christian culture, regarding thenature of Jews and Judaism and
their role in history. And I'mworking on a book now that's
very interested in howKabbalists understood the
meaning of Jewish history, sortof post Second Temple, and even
post Rabbinic Judaism howKabbalists understood the fate
of medieval Jews, and what thetheological implications of that
(04:42):
were. And the reason why thiswas a conversation they couldn't
avoid was twofold. One, ofcourse, was that the sort of the
tragic events that, that wouldoccasionally happen to Jewish
communities throughout theMiddle Ages, especially during
the 14th and 15th centuries inWestern Europe, demanded an
explanation in terms of how thatfits into the theology of
(05:04):
covenantal theology, what werethe signs of divine abandonment?
Why were these things happening?
What does this have to say aboutthe relationship of Jews to God
and the sort of biblicalpromises the covenant between
God and the people of Israel. Sothere's the events themselves
demanded explanation, but therewas also a long standing polemic
between Jews and Christiansabout the meaning of Jewish
(05:28):
history, and that Christiantheology also spent, and
medieval Christian thinkersspent, a lot of time thinking
about the meaning of Jewishhistory and that the fact of
Jews living in exile, and thefact of Jews being in servitude
to non-Jewish, and oftenChristian majority power was a
(05:48):
confirmation of the doctrine ofsupersession, or the notion that
the mantle of biblical Israelhad passed to the followers of
Christ, and that the Jewishpeople, who were regarded as
guilty for the death of Christ,had been rejected by God. And
their role was to serve asthese, as a cautionary tale, a
(06:08):
kind of living reminder of whathappens to those who reject the
message of Christianity, andthat this is the the function
that Jews serve, building onAugustine's doctrine of the
Jewish witness, that Jews bearwitness to the truth of
Christianity by living inservitude, as a subjugated
minority to other nations. Sothere was this theological
(06:32):
meaning attached to the lack ofJewish autonomy, and Jews needed
some kind of way of respondingto this challenge. And in many
respects, this becomes part ofhow, out of the Middle Ages, out
of the crucible of thisconflict, Jewish identity and
Christian identity are actuallyformulated in conversation with
(06:53):
each other, about the the natureof the meaning of Jewish
history. But over the course ofthat, lots of new tropes were
developed regarding anxietiesabout Jews within the broader
majority culture, fears thatJews might in fact be very
powerful, that they function asa secret group or a secret
(07:15):
cabal. Even the word cabalactually comes from Kabbalah and
the notion of a secretive groupof powerful Jewish men with a
powerful doctrine or mechanismfor undermining the majority
cultures in which they live,which led to all sorts of really
unfortunate notions such as theidea of the blood libel, or the
(07:37):
notion that Jews would murderChristian children and take
their blood, that they wouldutilize this blood for ritual
purposes, in particular, for themaking of unleavened bread, or
matzah on Passover. Othernotions about Jewish
manipulation of power thatdeveloped in the Middle Ages,
fears of Jews poisoning wells orhaving been the cause of the
(08:01):
bubonic plague in the 14thcentury, thinking about plagues
this semester was very relevant,which would lead to these
outbreaks of violence sometimesat the hands of the Christian
power, but often sometimes atthe, against what Christian
rulers would have wanted interms of social unrest and mass
acts of violence. And it led meto think about violence against
(08:25):
Jews in the 20th century or inthe contemporary period, and
that the Holocaust was not theonly event of mass violence
against Jews, of course, it wasthe most catastrophic in terms
of its scale. But in 1391, inSpain, 100,000 Jews were killed
over the course of one summerthrough what was essentially a
public uprising against the willof the Royal authorities or the
(08:47):
church. But 100,000 people beingkilled, essentially by hand, in
a sort of mass public, whatmight be called a pogrom, or act
of violence, these things demanda kind of explanation in terms
of what is the social work thatis performed in Western
Christian culture, byattributing society's problems
(09:11):
to Jews, Jewishness, and Jewishpeople. So I would just pay
homage to David Nirenberg, whohas, I think, a really
interesting observation about animportant feature of
anti-semitism, or anti-Judaism,which is the notion that it's a
form of discourse thatattributes pressing societal
(09:34):
problems to Jews or Jewishnessand that suggests that that
problem can be resolved throughthe removal of Jews or
Jewishness or Judaism from thatsociety or from culture. And
that continues to be, I think, areally relevant feature of
anti-semitism today.
Chip Gruen (10:00):
So something that we had talked about leading up to
this conversation that I justwant to sort of drive home and
think about a little bit, andthat you mentioned just now, you
mentioned these, these, thesetropes, or these sort of common
places that Christian ideologywould sort of come back to, or
that these, these polemics woulregister the idea of thes
(10:21):
powerful men with the secreknowledge and so forth being i
control. And obviously, tharesonates very strongly in th
contemporary world with thkinds of tropes that are presen
in the 21st centuranti-semitism as well. And so
know that, you know, as we'vtalked about this, you said tha
a lot of modern historianimagine or construct an idea o
(10:45):
anti-semitism as a moderphenomenon, something tha
develops with the development othe nation-state, in the 19t
and the 20th century. But whayou're saying is that a lot o
these elements can reach muchmuch, much further back, whic
sort of calls into question, thidea of anti-semitism bein
something different from maybwhat modern Jewish historian
(11:08):
would refer to as aanti-Judaism from an earlie
stage
Hartley Lachter (11:11):
Yeah, it's a re lly interesting and very rele
ant question right now, in termof the study of this phen
menon, and there are good reasns for seeing the modern peri
d as being very different fromthe premodern, seeing anti-semit
sm as a category of politcal discourse that drew upon
(11:31):
different structure of powr that develops in the mod
rn period with the devlopment of the nation-state, tha
it draws upon race science andother kinds of things that are
features of modernity. And sonti-semitism, they would su
gest is well, you know, it's nt to suggest that there was no
(11:53):
antipathy towards Jews in the prmodern world, that it just, i
functions differently becausethe context is differe
t. And those differences are cerainly worthy of our attenti
n. On the other hand, what isthe more illuminating way of
nderstanding or categorzing this phenomenon, when a
ember of the United States Congess attributes a forest fi
(12:15):
e to a "Jewish space laser,"hich also happened as I was te
ching this class, so that was iteresting food for thought. Is
this because of a very moern way of thinking about Jews
nd attributing this tohe Rothschild family, t
at there's the notion that powrful economically, you k
ow, that wealthy Jews, who hve a kind of secret power, are a
(12:40):
le to manipulate the majoity society for their own econo
ic benefit, and that this is pat of a kind of international co
spiracy? Is that way of thinkinabout Jews really distinctly m
dern, and that there was nothng contiguous with the
premodern, that we should get btter, we are better able to u
(13:02):
derstand that as part of somehing that's a kind of clean brea
from the premodern. Or is thee something more useful
that we gain from seeing howhis is connected to a broade
trend, because it was certaily the case that blood libel
claims, for instance, in theiddle Ages, often attribute
the murder of Christian cildren by Jews, to an internati
(13:25):
nal conspiracy among Jewishleaders to select the place and
the time when a Jewish child -ahristian child- would be sacr
ficed ritually by Jews. Ad so these ritual murder claim
were part of a claim about sot of secretive internati
nal Jewish conspiracy that wasbeing done to the detriment of
(13:47):
the majority cultures in which tey lived for some sort of intern
tional secret Jewish beneft. And that Jews were conspirin
in this fashion. This is anolder, this is an older trope. A
d if we think of it as an oldething, I think the one possi
ly beneficial outcome from thatis the ability to see this as p
(14:10):
rt of a broader structure of thconstruction of identities i
the West, and the way that scietal problems are identi
ied, and that Jews dothey are one of the location
for the scapegoating of socil problems, even for the s
apegoating of something likeildfires in California, but of
all kinds of problems, economicproblems, political problems th
(14:35):
t can be, come to be attribued to Jews. And that i
we understand this is not a sot of fairly recent phenomenon, t
is is not a sort of contempoary blip, but that it
s part of a broader trend, we'rebetter able to identify the wa
that this has performed socialwork for a longer period of ti
(14:57):
e in Western culture, and juste more aware of that as a po
ential problem within Western sciety.
Chip Gruen (15:09):
So this might be a little tangential, but given
that your work really stemsfrom, you know, these texts that
emerge in medieval Spain, theseKabbalistic texts, so obviously,
you're dealing with real Jewsand real Jewish communities who
are responding to real problemsand real historical situations.
(15:32):
I know in my field, and thinkingabout the Roman Empire, whenever
we read a text in which there isthis anti-Judaism, you know, not
New Testament, because that'ssort of a different, we're
talking about Jewish communitieswho were writing those texts.
But, when you talk about later,I mean, you mentioned Augustine
and contemporaries, that one ofthe questions we really ask very
(15:56):
often is, are they responding tothe idea of Judaism or are they
responding to Jews? Anddepending on who you talk to,
you'll have very differentanswers on whether, you know,
Judaism becomes sort of thisboogeyman that people can point
to, and so it becomes thisscapegoat in the absence of
evidence, or whether there arereal communities that are, you
(16:18):
know, that they're interactingwith, and that they're
struggling with. And I'll tellyou, a lot of the times in the
texts, you'll see when there's areal Jewish community, they'll
talk about how, isn't it greatthat we share the Psalms, or
something like that, that therewill be sort of an idea of sort
of a shared culture. And thereason I asked this is that in
(16:38):
the contemporary world, theplaces where there is any kind
of phobia around, whether it beJews or minority communities or
other, other communities, as youput it earlier, or immigrant or
whatever, that very often thoseend up being the most
homogeneous communities thatdon't have access to the, you
(17:01):
know, other identities that arethe target of their hatred. I
mean, how do you think aboutthat, the imagined Jew versus
the real Jew both in in yourtime period and and in the
modern world?
Hartley Lachter (17:15):
So that is such a terrific question, because one
of the things we talked aboutall the time was the gap that
occasionally exists. One of thethings we talked about in my
class is this way in which therewas a sometimes a significant
gap between the imagined Jew, insome forms of Christian
anti-Jewish discourse in thepremodern world, and real Jews.
(17:38):
I'll give you a what I think isa helpful, giant
overgeneralization, which isthat for the most part, the
texts that are composed bymedieval Jews living in
Christian territories in themedieval West, the Christians or
Christianity imagined in thosetexts are based on interactions
with real Christians. In thecase of the Christian majority,
(18:02):
it is sometimes the case thatthe Jews imagined in the
Christian texts are imaginaryJews, and not real ones. Now,
there are other times when thereis a real Jewish community with
whom that author interactsfrequently, such was the case,
for instance, for Martin Luther,but there are other cases,
Augustine might be one of them,where the interaction with Jews
(18:24):
was very limited. And certainly,in some cases, the interaction
with Jews was not at all. Wefind anti-semitism featuring
really prominently in the casesof some Christian authors who
had no interaction with Jews.
And this is one of the featuresof anti-semitism or anti-Jewish
discourse in the West that'sreally worthy of paying
attention to, which is thatbecause of the place of Jews,
(18:47):
Pharisees, the rabbis, startingin the New Testament, and then
the role of that in post NewTestament, Christian discourse,
one need not have real Jews inorder for anti-semitic discourse
to perform important social workin the Christian West. Whereas
for Jews, the Christians theywere imagining were the the real
(19:09):
majority among whom they lived.
I remember being a kid growingup in Arizona, going to a public
elementary school in Mesa,Arizona, and having kids tell me
that I was the first Jew they'dever met. I once had a kid say
that he was, he asked if I hadhorns. Weren't you supposed to,
could I really be a Jew withouthorns? Totally innocently, they
(19:32):
thought this was a fact. Idefinitely had sometimes people
who are older than me say, if itcame up somehow that I was
Jewish, that they would starttalking about Jews and money in
ways that I didn't understand.
Like, I actually didn't knowmany of these anti-semitic
tropes, because that wasn'tsomething we talked about. But
it was something that wasdiscussed in these Christian
(19:52):
communities where the Jewishpresence was minimal, or in some
cases totally absent. And Ibelieve in some of these cases,
what people were saying to me, Iwas the first Jew to whom they
had ever said it. I rememberwhen I was a kid and my father
was the president of oursynagogue in Mesa, Arizona, a
woman came in and stood in theback and demanded very loudly
that we, she was there toinvestigate our practice of
(20:15):
human sacrifice. And I remembersaying to my parents, like, what
is a human sacrifice? I didn'teven know what she was talking
about. But I, you know, I doubtthat this woman frequently
walked into synagogues to dothat. I can guarantee that she
did not have this suspicionabout Jews because of her
experience with observing humansacrifice by Jews. This was a
(20:37):
trope in her own environment inwhich talking about Jews
conspiring to commit sacrificeagainst Christians did something
important or useful for thatcommunity in terms of the ways
they talked about their pressingsocial problems, and where they
identified the source of thatproblem, what was the location
(20:59):
of the cause of that problem,and that Jews were identified as
that location.
Chip Gruen (21:08):
So I want to follow up on this and maybe be a little
more general, but something thatmaybe some of our listeners are
not familiar with, but a frameof reference you've been using
is the idea of a particularsocial work. Not social work,
but Social Work, of culturalwork, right. And the idea that
(21:28):
belief and practice may not justbe sort of benign belief and
practice, but that it doessomething for the people who
believe or who practice. Thatthere is a function, you know,
we might say that there is afunction to the things that they
believe, you know, that doessomething for them or for their,
for their community. And I bringthis up, and I want to sort of
(21:52):
probe it a little bit, becauseone of the things I've been
thinking about, and I'veactually been thinking about
this, as I've been reading someSupreme Court cases on how, how
the court rules on religion, isthat they're very fond of using
this word "sincere," you know,and talking about "sincere
religious belief." And I thinkone of the problems we're sort
(22:12):
of confronting right now is thatpeople very much like the woman
in the back of the synagogue inMesa, Arizona, is totally
sincere in that belief, becauseshe has been the consumer of
really, really bad information.
And, you know, I wonder, again,across time, and in the
materials you're familiar with,do you see distinctions between
people who are sort of, again,consumers of that information
(22:35):
who might sincerely believe it,and people who are using these
sorts of tropes for their ownsocial and cultural gain in a
way that is, you know, that ismanipulative? Or is that a
distinction without a
Hartley Lachter (22:50):
I mean, I think it's an interesting distinction,
difference?
that I'm, certainly the woman inthe back my synagogue, from my
memory of being a little kid,this was a long time ago, she
was 100% sincere. She, I thinkwas surprised that this wasn't
just a given fact that this wasa feature of Jewish religious
practice. I imagine, certainly,we can see historically that
(23:16):
there were people who usedclaims of, for instance, ritual
murder, to stay on that theme,to advance their own position of
power. That's certainly thecase. However, it would not be
useful, it would bring themnothing, if it weren't something
that some portion of thecommunity would sincerely
(23:39):
embrace or would regard as beingsimply the truth. And that this
becomes, when developed over along period of time, an easy way
to take broader social problemsthat maybe often, you know,
problems facing societies don'thave simple problems, they don't
have a single location, they arenot resolvable through any kind
(24:01):
of simple action. And therefore,it's very hard to say, "Hey,
vote for me or empower me, and Ican solve your problem" when one
is forced to acknowledge thatthe problem is somewhat
intractable and has complex,hard to identify sources,
causes. By attributing theseproblems to Jews, it does solve
(24:26):
that problem. So I think thatthere certainly are examples of,
you know, the strategicdeployment of anti-semitic
discourse for people to acquirepower, but I think it would
serve no strategic purpose forsuch individuals if it weren't
something that some significantenough portion of the population
(24:48):
were willing to believe. We evensee, I think, in the Middle Ages
something kind of opposite tothis, which is that ritual
murder and blood libel claimswere often categorically
rejected by church authoritiesand by authorities of the crown,
and the church and the statewould not embrace these things,
yet they still had a fair amountof staying power into the modern
(25:13):
period. Magda Teter from FordhamUniversity has written just a
really fantastic book on thehistory of blood libel, and its
ability to stay really relevantinto the, you know, into the
early modern period and themodern period. It's remarkable.
So I while I wouldn't say thatwhat you point out is a
(25:35):
distinction without adifference, I think that it's
all still part of this samephenomenon of anti-semitic
ideas, notions about Jews,performing a social function,
often that in a way that helpslocate and simplify social
problems that are not easily, seasily nailed down
Chip Gruen (25:59):
And those social problems, you know, would be
things like, what economicdownturn, or unemployment or,
you know, general unrest, thosesorts of things are what you're
talking about, right?
Hartley Lachter (26:13):
Yeah, in fact that the malleable nature of
anti-semitism in westerndiscourse is such that almost
any social problem can beattributed to Jews if you have
the right audience to bereceptive to that. So if you
have someone who has deep racistcommitments, and is very
concerned about the notion ofsort of replacement of white
(26:36):
people in the United States, forinstance, if you want to
identify like, what is theconnection between that threat
as they perceive it, the threatof liberalism, the, the threat
of the spread of, I don't know,the gay agenda, for instance, as
they might identify it, and allsorts of other problems, the way
to create a coherent narrativeis to say, all of these things
(26:58):
are actually being secretlyadvanced by Jews in order to
destroy white Christian Westerncivilization, because Jews are
the perennial, perceived as theperennial, enemy of that
civilization. And for suchpeople who embrace such views,
the view of Jews as being thesecret force, this small group
(27:19):
that conspires in aninternational way to disempower
the white Christian majority inthe West, is already a well worn
idea, that's a well establishedtrope. And it has this
explanatory power of saying thatall of these things are part of
the same phenomenon, which isthat white replacement and the
advancement of all of theseother problems in society, the
(27:41):
economic problems in society,all of them are being advanced
by Jews to destroy white Westernculture. And then you end up
with people marching inCharlottesville, saying, you
know, "you will not replace us"and "Jews will not replace us."
The Tree of Life massacre thathappened in Pittsburgh, in the
(28:02):
synagogue in Pittsburgh, theTree of Life Synagogue, that was
also by someone who believedthat Jews were, and Jews
specifically there were,advancing an agenda of white
replacement through thewelcoming of immigrants, and
that he had to do this to stopthis phenomenon as a matter of
(28:22):
addressing his own, and what heperceived to be, believed
earnestly, to believe to be hisexistential dread that was
caused, first and foremost,actually, by Jews as the threat
to whiteness and the whiteChristian majority that he
believes is entitled to power inthe United States. That ability
(28:45):
to tie together all thesedifferent strands, and to say
that all of these things arebeing secretly caused behind the
scenes by Jewish power,manipulating these other forces,
is part of, I think, theexplanatory model for some of
these forms of hatred that Jewsserve. And I think that Jews are
kind of, because of the legacy,the premodern legacy, uniquely
(29:07):
placed to serve, unfortunately,in this, this sort of discourse
of tying together multiple,multiple strands of hatred.
Chip Gruen (29:17):
So where I want to end up today is, and we've
hinted about this a little bitor dealt with it tangentially in
a number of different places,but I want to ask it directly.
Knowing this history, knowingthe contiguousness of these
(29:39):
antipathies, as you put it,knowing this history, how does
this help us be civicallyengaged? Like how does this help
us when we read the news or whenwe see these social movements
happening? When we seedisinformation around Jews and
Judaism, or more generally, howdoes this knowledge of the past
(30:05):
and of these trends help us tobe better informed? And also,
how does this help us sort oftalk about these issues in a
more sophisticated way?
Hartley Lachter (30:20):
Well, I think that the the two things that
this might help us thinkthrough, one is that
anti-semitism is stillunfortunately, a very real force
in Western societies. But it'snot present everywhere, right.
So there's many, many non-JewishNorth Americans who just, there,
or people in Western societymore broadly, who don't
(30:43):
experience anti-semiticdiscourse in the environment in
which they function. They don'thave relatives who say these
things or friends who say thesethings they don't consume media,
that attributes all of society'sproblems to Jews. And it might
very reasonably appear thatanti-semitism is more a feature
of the sort of history than ofpresent society. But by
(31:07):
recognizing not only the ways inwhich in certain sectors,
anti-semitism still functions,but that that function that it's
serving is not being createdanew in the current moment, but
that this is actually deeplyencoded in Western culture. If
we embrace the notion that olderideas that have had a long
standing legacy are more easilydeployed to do that kind of
(31:31):
social work, then once they'rebeing created new, then suddenly
you have to create a newnarrative and create a new
audience for that narrative andhave it feel believable, then
anti-semitism, I think, issomething that has a
particularly well establishedpedigree, unfortunately, in the
West, and is always ready to bedeployed in these ways. And that
(31:56):
is, requires a certainvigilance, I think, in order to
counter these claims, andeliminate the eliminate the ways
in which they are serving thatkind of function. Even if there
are people for whom that's notsomething that they're, you
know, hearing every day, but itis something that's, you know,
(32:19):
is happening every day. And it'shappening, because it's a tool
that has long since beenestablished in Western society,
for, at least for some people incertain circumstances,
understanding and making senseof what they understand is the
problems facing them, theiridentity, and and their culture,
(32:41):
their society more broadly. Soat least being aware of that, I
think helps us to pay attentionto, what is the nature of the
phenomenon of anti-semitism,even contemporary anti-semitism,
and what is the the kind ofattention that that one needs to
pay to it? I don't have anycategorical solutions for, how
(33:04):
does one put an end toanti-semitism once and for all?
It strikes me as something thatkind of just needs constantly to
be combated.
Chip Gruen (33:15):
Well, and I think the best solution that you and I
can offer for now is I mean,education, right, that the
education and people beknowledgeable about not only the
history, but how to consumeinformation in a more
sophisticated way is, is alwayshelpful.
Hartley Lachter (33:34):
Yeah. No, when someone talks about the
Rothschilds having a spacelaser, it could strike one as
something between absurd andrandom. But if one realizes that
the idea of a conspiringinternational, sort of financial
(33:56):
network of Jews to manipulatethe broader majority culture to
their disadvantage in order toadvantage some sort of
international Jewish conspiracythat's driven by money and
power, and in this case, secretweapons, that, that is not
(34:16):
something new or random. Thatthat's something that suggests,
is an attempt to tap into thisfeature of how social problems
are understood in Westernculture. And that that makes it
I think, more significant andmore worthy of attention than if
(34:37):
it you know, if we really doencounter these kinds of random
and what might strike one issort of strange claims that are
not connected to a broaderhistory of discourse, then they
seem maybe less, less importantor less, less, less significant.
Chip Gruen (34:52):
Alright, Hartley, thank you very much for sitting
down and talking with us today.
I really appreciate it and I'velearned a tremendous amount and
you know, we'll we'll see youaround at other Institute
events.
Hartley Lachter (35:03):
Thanks so much.
It was a pleasure to be here.
Chip Gruen (35:08):
This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced
by the Institute for Religiousand Cultural Understanding of
Muhlenberg College. For moreinformation and additional
programming, please visit ourwebsite at
religionandculture.com. There,you'll find our contact
information, links to otherprogramming, and have the
opportunity to support the workof the Institute. ReligionWise
(35:32):
is produced by the staff of theInstitute for Religious and
Cultural Understanding ofMuhlenberg College, including
Christine Flicker, and CarrieDuncan. Please subscribe to
ReligionWise wherever you getyour podcasts. We look forward
to seeing you next time.
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