(Jewish Group) Why 'the Jews'?
There are “the Jews,” and then there are the Jews, and they are mostly not the same. The Jews live next door or in the next village over. Some are helpful and friendly, others are aloof and greedy. “The Jews,” however, live nowhere in particular. They are a creature of cultural and psychological myth, living in people’s individual and collective minds. “The Jews” of myth also carry a stigma: They excel at communal action, secretive projects, and serve their own interests at the expense of others. At their most dangerous, “the Jews” are a successful conspiracy. When Jews are persecuted, it is usually because the persecutors are aiming at those “Jews” of conspiratorial myth, even as the blows fall on the heads of the local Jews, the ones without quotation marks.
This conspiratorial justification for the persecution of Jews is an important part of the larger, more familiar species of “Jew hatred.” Here is a useful anecdote. Matt Collins, a British neo-Nazi turned informer, described his former buddies in a 2019 New Yorker profile as sitting in a pub in Northern England aiming to “Get pissed, make threats, blame the Jews and go home.” Blame which Jews? It must have been the mythic ones, because in Warrington, England, Jews are thin on the ground; the Collins group might not have even known any real ones. They were ready for action, though.
“The Jews” is also a meme, a bit of information that has the ability to spread like a virus among various populations, to become highly visible, and to serve as a target for a generalized mood of hostility and violence. The meme of “the Jews” is not encumbered by actual Jews, who are impeded by gravity, time, and traditional means of travel. Because it is a cultural phenomenon rather than a local reality, “the Jews” meme can leapfrog freely from one geographically disconnected but culturally networked community to another—from Christianity to Islam to communism—and hibernate for long periods.
It is an unusually adaptable meme, too, and finds a way to wiggle into every social, political, and cultural crevice. Its core message—that Jews have a unique capacity for collective agency—is the part that gives it such resilience across time and place. The varied, seemingly inconsistent charge sheet of offenses—from deicide and plague to racial pollution and financial manipulation—makes it adaptable in every temporal, social, or political context.
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