Suffocated by Hate: The Psychological Toll Antisemitism Extracts from Jews

Analysis

By Liah Greenfeld

A prominent French Tunisian filmmaker, an Arab and a Muslim, Said Ben-Said, who insists that “the Arab world is, in its majority, antisemitic” and is ostracized for this within his Arab and Muslim community, estimates that for every Jew in the world, there are at least 100 antisemitic individuals. Specifically, 15 million Jews exist compared to at least a billion and a half anti-Semites; Jews represent 0.22% (less than ¼ of 1%) of the world population, while anti-Semites make up at least 22%, nearly ¼ of the global populace. However, Said Ben-Said’s estimate of 100 antisemites per Jew may likely be an underestimate. According to the ADL numbers, antisemites represent an average of 30% of the world population, with some areas seeing higher or lower figures; in numbers: 2 billion 400 million, over 150 antisemites for every Jewish man, woman, and child! Considering that the Chinese and Indian civilizations – about half of humanity- never developed indigenous antisemitic traditions and hardly understand what antisemitism is, this 2 billion 400 million is concentrated within our monotheistic civilization and represents 60% of its population. This implies that the majority of the people in a civilization rooted in Judaism harbour animosity towards Jews. No other group in humanity is surrounded by so much hatred. Can you imagine the psychological toll it exacts -- on every single one of us who lives among you, every day?

This is so despite the fact that most of the lands covered by this civilization are now Judenrein, that in the 20^th century, Jews have been eliminated from millennia-old centres of their habitation. In the 1940s, Jew-hatred physically destroyed a full one-third of the Jews of the world, before death inflicted on them indescribable suffering – one and a half million of them young children, toddlers, infants. This happened in Europe. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, another million Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries.

Today, about 8 million Jews live in the diaspora (about 7 million in the United States), and another 7 million live in Israel. Israelis are only now becoming aware of the Jew-hatred surrounding us. Before the October 7, 2023, massacre, they were under the illusion that antisemitism was the problem of the diaspora only and that in their own sovereign state, where Jews represented the majority of the population, they would not be the subject of constant targeted hatred. We do not yet know how their disillusionment in this respect would affect Israeli Jews.

This is the effect of ubiquitous anti-Semitism on us, Jews who live among you: constant fear, insecurity, discomfort, feeling of being rejected. In an attempt to escape these emotions, we develop defense mechanisms. Some of us willfully blind themselves to them, pretend anti-Semitism around us does not exist, try every possible way not to attract attention to ourselves as Jews and thus to Jewish problems. This is the reason for Jews being so active in the fight for everyone else’s causes – immigrants from Syria and Latin America, LGBTQAI+, and so on, so fervent against every form of discrimination – Islamophobia, homophobia, and racism – but the oldest racism and phobia, anti-Semitism. Is there any other group in the world so consistently acting for the benefit of others and to the exclusion of its own particular interests? No. This is also the reason for the extraordinary Jewish philanthropy, the financial support of every worthy general cause – generous donations to universities, etc.: in this wealthy Jews behave like beggars, they are willing to give their all to be accepted, liked, treated as if they were not Jewish.

Many Jews go further, justify and excuse anti-Semitism, internalize it, turn into anti-Semites, hate the Jew in themselves, make every effort to rid themselves of this hateful to identity, form and participate in plainly anti-Jewish and anti-Israel organizations. Again, how many groups of African Americans do you know who dedicate their lives to the discreditation of African states, or to the slavish service of racists who demand their eradication? None. How many Poles, Italians, Germans, whose goal in life is to undermine Poland, Italy, Germany? None. But there are many such Jews and Jewish groups. The ubiquitous presence of self-hating Jews, apparently indifferent to the plight of their own people, trying to separate themselves from it, and actively working against it, is an eloquent proof of the systemic, institutionalized, inescapable nature of anti-Semitism in our society.

Perhaps worst of all is that under the constant pressure of the surrounding hatred, many Jews actually go insane, that is, develop psychotic disorders, such as manic depression and schizophrenia. The rates of these mental diseases among Jews are above those of other groups in the US. Indeed, an American journal Psychological Medicine, asked in 1983 in the title of one of its articles, “Is Manic Depressive Illness a Typically Jewish Disorder?” The explanation suggested was genetic (presuming that Jews were not a religious group, as Americans like to think, but a racial one, after all), but the comparison with Israel, where the rates of mental illness are significantly lower, contradicted that explanation. The evident reason is that, in diaspora, including the United States, Jews live surrounded – and overwhelmed – by hate, while in Israel, though, as a state, also hated by the surrounding population more than a hundred of times its size, as individuals in their daily lives people do not face this hate.

Psychologically, in the diaspora the majority of Jews live in hiding, in a state of crippling fear, and fear often combined with even more crippling sense of self-disgust, comparable to the condition of gay men in the now forgotten, but still recent times, when being gay was a criminal offense and a medical condition requiring brutal intervention. Today, as a society, we are proud that we have let gay men out of their closets, finally allowing them to enjoy life as they are, without denying a part of themselves, but we do not recognize that we still confine to closets our Jewish citizens, men and women, adults and children. Even before the glorification of Hamas butchery on the campuses and near-ubiquitous support of openly antisemitic demonstrations with their calls (addressed to the general public) to “gas the Jews” and (addressed to the Jews) to “go back to Poland,” in the media, Jews felt unsafe. On campuses of liberal democratic societies in Europe and North America, Jews have been routinely denied the right to defend Jewish causes, and, while constantly and tirelessly defending causes of other (larger, more accepted) minorities, denied the right to do this as Jews. As a society, we (you!) consistently make Jews uncomfortable with their identity, forcing us to deny it. I am not even mentioning the antisemitic Bacchanalia of today!

The only group of Jews who in the past could truly escape the psychological toll that this exacted were orthodox believers, whose lives are regulated by the relations between them and God, and who, in effect, withdraw from the concerns of the mundane society. Today, I am not sure that they can even escape it. Other Jewish denominations, Conservative and Reform, which represent attempts on the part of the Jewish community in the modern, secular age to adjust, specifically, to the American society which until now was willing to officially recognize them only as a religion (though it has systemically discriminated against them as a race), could not escape it. And what about truly secular Jews, who cannot seek the protection of organized religion at all? While considered Jews by everyone in their environment, they had never been allowed any identity at all. Can you imagine what it is to live without an identity? So, many of these secular people convert, become Catholics, Lutherans, or Orthodox Christians (I have personally known several examples) but are never fully accepted by the religious communities within which they attempt to find refuge, seek to replace their impossible Jewish identity with sexual minority identities, and commit themselves body and soul to non-Jewish and explicitly anti-Jewish causes. These are psychologically broken, suffering people. A huge number of them require psychiatric help. It is you, as a society, who causes their distress. And today they discover that all their self-destroying efforts have been in vain.

Add to this the pathetic experience of half-Jews, especially children of Jewish fathers married to gentile women, who cannot bequeath their offspring a confident Jewish identity, but necessarily bequeath to them their uncomfortable sense of self, social maladjustment, lack of confidence, and confusion.

I leave the articulation of this tragic theme to future posts, leaving this one, as food for thought, with a question and a prediction: Are you ready, as a society and as representatives of a civilization, to confront and face up to the greatest hatred among you? If not, there is no hope either for your society or for your civilization.

Disclaimer: This paper is the author's individual scholastic contribution and does not necessarily reflect the organization's viewpoint.

Liah Greenfeld is a University Professor and Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology at Boston University, USA. She is an Israeli-American, Russian-Jewish interdisciplinary scholar engaged in the scientific explanation of human social reality on various levels, beginning with the individual mind and ending with the level of civilization.