Antisemitism persisted as ideology after losing its social grounding

Evidence

It has been recently noted that antisemitism survived the populations it had been ostensibly targeted against. In countries where the Jews have all but disappeared, antisemitism (as sentiment, of course, married now to practices related primarily to other targets than the Jews) continues unabated. Even more remarkable is the dissociation between the acceptance of anti-Jewish sentiments and any other national, religious or racial prejudices, with which it was thought to be closely correlated. Neither are the antisemitic feelings related today to group or individual idiosyncracies, and particularly to anxiety-generating unresolved problems, acute uncertainty etc. Bernd Martin, who explored the Austrian case of ‘antisemitism without Jews’ has coined the term cultural sedimentation to account for a relatively new phenomenon: certain (usually morbid or otherwise unprepossessing or shameful) human features or behavioural patterns have come to be defined in popular consciousness as Jewish. In the absence of practical tests of such conjunction, the negative cultural definition and the antipathy to the features to which it refers feed and reinforce each other. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 226 (#expands, via linked claim)

In our global village, news travels fast and wide, and culture has long become a game without frontiers. Rather than a product of cultural sedimentation, contemporary antisemitism seems to be subject to the processes of cultural diffusion, today much more intense than at any time in the past. Like other objects of such diffusion, antisemitism, while retaining affinity with its original form, is on the way transformed – sharpened or enriched – to adapt to the problems and needs of its new home. … Judeophobic stereotype offers a ready-made intelligibility to the otherwise puzzling and frightening dislocations and previously unexperienced forms of suffering. For instance, in Japan it has become in recent years increasingly popular as a universal key to the understanding of unanticipated obstacles in the path of economic expansion; the activity of world Jewry is proposed as the explanation of events so diverse as the over-valuation of the yen and the alleged threat of fall-out in the case of another Czernobyl-style nuclear mishap followed by another Soviet cover-up. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 227 (#expands, via linked claim)

This is just one example of how hate against Muslims is not only burning out of control in the United States, but also how it threatens to (and does) jump from group to group, in the same way a wild fire can jump from house to house. … According to award-winning British columnist Jeff Sparrow, one reason for this phenomenon is that the ongoing “war on terror” global narrative has effectively normalized anti-Muslim rhetoric, and this rhetoric has replicated “all the traditional tropes of anti-Semitism” that white supremacists had used before. It’s just directed against Muslims now. — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 210 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Tribal antisemitism severed hatred of Jews from any actual experience of them; Antisemitism peaked after Jews had already lost economic influence; Antisemitism survives and re-targets other populations after Jews disappear — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 226 (+12 more)

Related

• Antisemitism survives and re-targets other populations after Jews disappear (similarity 0.89)
• Contemporary antisemitism spreads by diffusion and adapts to local anxieties. (similarity 0.88)
• Antisemitism peaked after Jews had already lost economic influence (similarity 0.87)
• Tribal antisemitism severed hatred of Jews from any actual experience of them (similarity 0.82)
• Antisemitism persisted even after its economic basis vanished (similarity 0.81)
• Antisemitic myths persist only when they can still articulate real anxieties (similarity 0.78)
• Antisemitism thrived where Germans had almost no contact with Jews (similarity 0.78)
• The Jew-capital link survived because later movements absorbed and refashioned it (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Antisemitism survives and re-targets other populations after Jews disappear #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 226
• Contemporary antisemitism spreads by diffusion and adapts to local anxieties. #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 227
• Anti-Muslim hate replicates anti-Semitic tropes and spreads between targeted groups #exemplifies (0.80) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 210