I was reading Jonathan Freedland's review of Anthony Julius' book on anti-Semitism in England and this excerpt on how former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who converted to Anglicanism before taking office, was treated by the 19th-century incarnation of the right-wing Wurlitzer stuck out to me:
In the manner of anti-Semitic discourse, the abuse was both inventive and stale. Disraeli was a “lump of dirt,” a “Fagin.” He was “Judas,” “Jewish Dizzy,” the “Jewish Chief,” “Sir Benjamin de Judah,” and “Chief Rabbi Benjamin.” He was “a very Hebrew of Hebrews,” the “Jew Earl, Philo-Turkish Jew and Jew Premier” and the “traitorous Jew,” the “haughty Jew,” and the “abominable Jew.” He was a leader of the “Turkophile party,” its “most rabid element” consisting of “the race of Shylock.” He was the premier of a “Jew government.” He was a wizard, a conjurer, a magician, an alchemist. He was a “man of the East,” an “Asiatic.” “For the past six years we have had an Asiatic ruler.” He was a “wandering Jew,” “sprung from a race of migratory Jews.” He was “born in a foreign country [i.e. England],” and raised “amid a people for whose ideas and habits he has no sympathy and little respect.” He was a “sham Christian and a sham Englishman.”... Most cartoons gave him an immense nose and curly black hair; he was represented as Shylock (“our modern Shylock”); many related him to the Devil (“the most authentic incarnation of the Evil One”); two represented him in the act of ritually murdering the infant Britannia, and in one of these Gladstone is the distressed mother, arriving perhaps too late to save her child. And there was a note sounded for the first time, but to be repeated many times thereafter: the Jews want war, against the national interest.
That sounded really familiar, so I took a shot at editing it for modern consumption.
In the manner of anti-Muslim discourse, the abuse is both inventive and stale. Obama is “America's first Muslim president,” “Barry Soetero,” and “Imam Obama.” He is “"a cultural Muslim,” with "Islamist sympathies, "President Jihad" with ,sympathy for the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood” a "traitor who is not loyal to America,” a “Jihadist,” and the “abominable Jew.” He is a "Neocommunist,” "predisposed to advance the cause of Islam in the world.” He is the premier of a “pro-Sharia" government” filled with "terrorist sympathizers." He is an "African Colonial,” who “still woos his Muslim father in the persons of the Muslim rulers that share his bitterness.” For the past two years we have had "A Muslim in the White House," or, if you prefer, an "alien in the White House,” who acts in a “Third World in his sort of way.” He was “born in a foreign country,” and Americans are "concerned to have a president who doesn't share [their] values." He is "divorced from the values of his fellow countrymen.”... And there was a note sounded for the first time, but to be repeated many times thereafter: the Muslims want "stealth jihad," against the national interest, and of course Obama is helping them.
Obviously it's not identical, but leftovers never taste the same as the original dish, either. Just like with Disraeli, Obama's adherence to Christianity is not only regarded as false, it's seen as the Rosetta stone for understanding his motivations even among those who reject, superficially, that Obama is a Muslim but retains a kind of group identification with Islam. That's also not to say that today's Islamophobia is equal to the virulent anti-Semitism of Disraeli's time, but there are echoes of Julius' observation that anti-Semitic prejudice doubles as an alibi for anti-Jewish discrimination, in the kinds of arguments that post Jews should behave differently for "fear of stimulating anti-Semitism," which implicitly suggests that "the very presence of Jews causes Jew-hatred."
Indeed, one might make the same observation about the Park51 project and those who argue that it should be moved because of all the trouble it's caused. Freedland writes that one of the themes of Julius' book is that "anti-Semitic iconography never dies, it just fades away—only to be picked up again, sometimes many years later." As a rhetorical prototype for modern bigotry, sometimes it merely gets picked up and refurbished for use against a different group.
