Jon Chait chides me for believing anti-semitism is a hatred of something intrinsic about Jews. "Anti-Semitism can take the form of animus against all Jews, but it doesn't always, or even usually, do so," he writes. "The variety of anti-Semitism represented by the Protocols usually holds that most Jews are innocent, but tiny number of them hold vast, secretive, malevolent powers. It's not an attack on Jews per se, just the tiny handful of Jews who are responsible for engineering wars and other international disasters...if we're going to be debating anti-Semitism, we need to understand what it is."
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are also a czarist forgery responsible for endless sets of pogroms, discriminatory laws, and other acts that affected all Jews, not a small minority. But before we get into that, is Jon's definition correct? Does he understand what anti-semitism is?
Wikipedia offers a couple scholarly definitions of anti-semitism. The Holocaust scholar Susan Fein describes anti-semitism as "a persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collective." Professor Dietz Bering's definition speaks more directly to the interpretation of The Protocols, as it says that anti-semites believe "Jews are not only partially but totally bad by nature, that is, their bad traits are incorrigible. Because of this bad nature: (1) Jews have to be seen not as individuals but as a collective. (2) Jews remain essentially alien in the surrounding societies. (3) Jews bring disaster on their 'host societies' or on the whole world, they are doing it secretly, therefore the antisemites feel obliged to unmask the conspiratorial, bad Jewish character." Neither fits Jon's description.
