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The Urgent Need to Study Islamic Anti-Semitism
By NEIL J. KRESSEL
For many decades, social scientists of every disciplinary stripe have placed themselves in the forefront of the battle against bigotry. On the basis of that record, one might expect to find psychologists, sociologists, and others hard at work studying the dynamics of Jew-hatred in the Muslim world. But that is far from the case.
These days, more than a few leading Muslim clerics routinely denounce Jews with dehumanizing rhetoric. For example, in April 2002, Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi of Egypt, one of the most important Sunni clerics, described Jews in his weekly sermon as "the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs." Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, the imam of the most important mosque in Mecca, similarly sermonized that the Jews are "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs." The imam further advised Arabs to abandon all peace initiatives with Jews and asked Allah to annihilate them. Many leaders of Muslim countries enthusiastically greeted former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's similarly racist ranting.
Yet social scientists have essentially remained mum concerning a problem that President Bush, in a speech in November, has placed high on the world agenda. "Europe's leaders, and all leaders," he said in London, "should strongly oppose anti-Semitism, which poisons public debates over the future of the Middle East."
The image of the president of the United States pressing ahead in the battle against bigotry while social scientists lag far behind is, to say the least, unusual -- especially when one considers the mountains of research that have addressed past anti-Semitism and racism in Europe and the United States.
An examination of PsycINFO, a leading online index of psychological studies, shows 458 entries on anti-Semitism since 1940, 99 of which have appeared during the past 10 years. But not a single one deals directly with hatred of Jews by Muslims or Arabs in the contemporary world. At most, a few psychologically oriented authors, like Mortimer Ostow, have touched tangentially on Muslim anti-Semitism in studies focusing on Jew-hatred in other contexts, and a few political historians, like Bernard Lewis and Robert Wistrich, have offered some social-scientific speculation on the topic.
An analysis of Sociological Abstracts tells much the same story. Since 1963, 130 entries in the database have dealt with anti-Semitism, but none center on the hatred of Jews among Arab Muslims or others in the broader Muslim world.
The failure of social scientists to confront this dangerous form of contemporary bigotry is particularly curious in light of the past prominence of sociologists and psychologists in the study of anti-Semitism. The list of important studies is long and includes, among many others, books by Nathan Ackerman and Marie Jahoda (1950), Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz (1964), Charles Glock and Rodney Stark (1966), George Kren and Leon Rappoport (1994), Robert Jay Lifton (1986), Gary Marx (1967), Harold Quinley and Charles Glock (1979), Gertrude Selznick and Stephen Steinberg (1969), and Charles Stember (1966). Indeed, several seminal studies in mainstream social psychology --
The Authoritarian Personality, by Theodor Adorno and his colleagues;
The Nature of Prejudice, by Gordon W. Allport; and
Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram -- had their roots, in part, in the desire to understand manifestations of anti-Semitism.
So what's going on? Why have social scientists neglected the study of Muslim anti-Semitism?
Some say there is no need to study the phenomenon, and that the charge itself is merely a sneaky ploy to fend off criticism of Israel. For example, the columnist Norman Solomon purports to explain the "strategy" used by supporters of Israel: "To quash debate, just smear, smear, smear. Instead of trying to refute critiques of Israeli policies, it's much easier to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism -- a timeworn way of preventing or short-circuiting real debate on the merits of the issues."
Sheikh Tantawi, of Egypt's Al-Azhar University, offers a more extreme form of the argument, holding that "the charge of anti-Semitism was invented by the Jews as a means of pressuring the Arabs and Muslims, and with the aim of implementing their conspiracies in the Arab and Muslim countries. It should be disregarded."
While the question of where legitimate criticism of Israel ends and anti-Semitism begins can be a tricky matter, whether one looks at bombings or rhetoric it is clear from a review of recent events that much Muslim hostility to Jews is old-fashioned bigotry, plain and simple.
Another attempt to end the discussion of Muslim anti-Semitism before it starts can be found in the contention that Arabs cannot be anti-Semites because they
are Semites. Bernard Lewis put that specious semantic argument to rest when he explained in his 1986 book,
Semites and Anti-Semites, that "the term
Semite has no meaning as applied to groups as heterogeneous as the Arabs or the Jews, and indeed it could be argued that the use of such terms is in itself a sign of racism and certainly of either ignorance or bad faith. ... Anti-Semitism has never anywhere been concerned with anyone but Jews, and is therefore available to Arabs as to other people as an option should they choose it." In any event, nothing is gained from applying the "anti-Semitism" label to anti-Arab discrimination, abhorrent in its own right, except to confuse matters and take attention away from anti-Jewish hostility.
Part of the real explanation for the lack of research on Muslim Jew-hatred is that social scientists who wish to conduct empirical research on anti-Semitism in Arab countries and many other parts of the Muslim world face nearly insurmountable obstacles, starting with the critical problem of access.
Few countries in these regions welcome indigenous or Western interviewers -- whether social scientists or journalists -- who are apt to ask pesky questions. Recently, a Palestinian mob attacked the research center of a well-known Palestinian social scientist whose findings did not square with the local political agenda: Khalil Shikaki, of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, had conducted a survey that found that only a small percentage of Palestinians would exercise a "right of return" as part of a peace settlement.
In addition, nondemocratic regimes in much of the Muslim world tend to place strict limits on journalists and social scientists. They are especially likely to prohibit Jews and those suspected of sympathizing with Israel from conducting their professional activities. Such people are, of course, among the most likely to study anti-Semitism.
Consider, for example, the significant roadblocks encountered by the reporter Caroline Glick, a U.S. citizen, when she arrived in Kuwait in 2003, just before being embedded with an American military unit in Iraq. She also held Israeli citizenship and intended to send her dispatches to two papers owned by Hollinger International: the
Chicago Sun-Times and the
Jerusalem Post. Despite strong Kuwaiti support for the war, Kuwait's harsh treatment of its Palestinian population, and heavy American diplomatic pressure, the pro-Western and relatively open country refused to accredit her unless she signed a document promising not to report for any Israeli media outlet. Credentialing war correspondents is, of course, a somewhat different matter than permitting leeway for studies on anti-Semitism, but Glick's case illustrates problems likely to be encountered in the Middle East by Jewish researchers with a pro-Israel orientation.
Assuming access, financial support, and successful navigation of linguistic problems, there remains, simply, the danger involved in such research -- what might now be called "the Daniel Pearl effect." Probing questions directed to the wrong people can be fatal. It would require uncommon bravery for Western or indigenous social scientists, especially Jewish ones, to embark on serious empirical studies of anti-Semitism in the Middle East.
Beyond all of that, however, I suspect that there is some political motivation to avoid the topic -- even among those who are not, themselves, the least bit anti-Semitic.
Most social scientists approach current disputes in the Middle East with a perspective similar to that articulated by the influential Columbia University social psychologist Morton Deutsch just after the 9/11 attacks. Speaking to "those of us who have been working for a just, peaceful, humane, and sustainable world," he urged cooperation with Muslim religious authorities "in de-legitimizing violence against civilians whatever their religious background" and in encouraging "leading Islamic religious figures to broadcast statements that people who engage in terrorism are not acceptable in the Islamic community." He further maintained that Islam, like all of the other major religions, respects the sanctity of human life, and that only a small group of "deviant radical 'fundamentalist' groups" condone or encourage politically inspired violence against innocent victims. The highest goal, according to Deutsch, is to prevent the "conflict with terrorism" from escalating into a "conflict with Islam or Muslims." In all those regards, his goals were not so very far from those of the Bush administration.
Gaining the cooperation of Muslim religious leaders, however, has proved far more difficult than expected, and hostility toward the United States appears more broad-based than initially believed in the days following 9/11. In that context, attempts to focus attention on mass hatred emanating from large segments of the Muslim and Arab world may be seen by some social scientists as fanning the flames of conflict by identifying negative characteristics of a population with whom they seek to get along.
Thus, well-intentioned observers may have sensed that it is best, at this historic moment, to leave this stone unturned. But by doing so, they may be shielding a significant danger from scrutiny and doing an injustice to their disciplines' proud history in the war against hate.
The historians Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer may well be correct when they suggest in the introduction to their recent book,
Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate From Antiquity to the Present, that large segments of the billion-strong Muslim world may now endorse a full-blown anti-Semitism, replete with home-grown Islamic themes, new and old, as well as hate imagery imported from the Christian world. Such hatred does not seem to be limited to fringe elements, and it is not constrained by the geographical confines of the Middle East.
Still, conclusive data about the extent and distribution of this hostile ideology are lacking. For example, how does hostility vary by country, level of education, social status, income, occupation, political ideology, and other characteristics? Where are we most apt to find moderate and tolerant people? What is the impact of variations in socialization and education? How do Middle Eastern Muslims differ from those outside the region in their feelings about Jews and Israel? In those same respects, how do Christian Arabs differ from Muslim Arabs? It would be especially helpful to explore the relationships among Muslims' anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Hinduism.
From a psychological perspective, it would be useful to construct a functional typology of anti-Semitism in the Muslim and Arab world. For some people, presumably, the ideology is centrally important, serving some key personality function. For others it is more peripheral, grounded in a social-adjustment function. Anti-Semitic ideology involves a wide range of irrational thought processes that might fruitfully be elaborated from a cognitive perspective. Psychoanalysts have offered many commentaries -- some insightful, some of limited value -- on European anti-Semitism; it may be possible to speak meaningfully about the psychodynamic underpinnings of Muslim anti-Semitism as well. Moreover, as I argued in
Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror, hateful behavior is generally best understood as an interaction between personal dispositions and situational pressures. We know very little about how those determinants interact to produce or inhibit anti-Semitic action in the Muslim world.
Some of those questions may be addressed from a distance. Others require access to local populations and, for the reasons noted here, are far more difficult to explore. Still, one should not presume to understand the foundations of Muslim anti-Semitism on the basis of studies conducted in other contexts. Extrapolations from research on European and American anti-Semitism are not likely to apply. For example, a substantial body of American research shows that anti-Semitism is least apt to be found among the highly educated. That, I suspect, would not be the case in the Muslim Middle East. Anti-Semitism has always been an idiosyncratic form of bigotry; consequently the very large body of research on American racism is even less likely to offer useful guidance.
There are those who argue that the dangers of Muslim anti-Semitism are not so severe. Hazem Saghiyah, one of the few Arab writers to address the topic (albeit from an anti-Israel viewpoint), believes that "Arab anti-Semites lack the functional modernism of Nazism, the Nazi order, and the racist ideological adherence of European anti-Semitism. ... Our anti-Semitism is uncivilized and totally idiotic, even in the mouths of flashy politicians and journalists." Thus he denies much important political potential for Jew-hatred in the Muslim world.
That position strikes me as unjustifiably sanguine. The warning signs surrounding Muslim Jew-hatred are too ominous to ignore. The dehumanizing rhetoric used to denounce Jews in the Muslim world is precisely the sort that alarms scholars who study genocide and mass atrocities. Surely the problem of Muslim anti-Semitism merits the attention of Western social scientists.
Neil J. Kressel, author of Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror
(Westview Press, 2002), directs the honors program in social sciences at William Paterson University of New Jersey.
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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 50, Issue 27, Page B14
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