Scapegoats

Antisemitism is an act of toxic, narcissistic projection.

"Tucker Carlson" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The writer James Kirchick recently published a comprehensive takedown of the execrable right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson in National Review.

As Kirchik notes, Carlson’s turn to antisemitism as well as other demented ideologies—such as World War II revisionism—has already become infamous, prompting talk of the “horseshoe effect” and the emergence of a “Woke Right.” Carlson and the extreme right in general, it is said, now have more in common with the extreme left than with the mainstream right. In the case of antisemitism, this certainly seems to be true.

Kirchick’s demolition of Carlson is far better than anything I could write, so I will not contend with Carlson here. One passage, however, particularly struck me:

Eight decades after the end of World War II, the fading memory of the Holocaust, the rise of identitarian thinking, and the ideological corruption of American higher education have contributed to making our country a place where growing numbers of citizens find it reasonable to blame humanity’s perennial scapegoat, the Jews, for what ails society. Tucker Carlson’s enduring popularity indicates that the cancer on civilization that is antisemitism metastasizes apace.

Kirchick is quite correct in what he says, but what got me thinking was the reference to the “scapegoat.”

The idea that the Jews are society’s scapegoat is a common one. The concept holds that, when in crisis, societies tend to blame the Jews for their problems—from economic discontent to military defeat—leading to horrendous acts of violence.

The paradigmatic example of this is, naturally, Hitler, who claimed the Jews had engineered Germany’s defeat in World War I and its economic collapse under the Weimar government.

Some have disagreed with the scapegoat theory, such as Hannah Arendt, who believed antisemitism was due to other factors, such as class structures and the first stirrings of totalitarianism. Herzl thought antisemitism was a political, not a socioeconomic issue, prompted by Jewish statelessness. Among the religious, antisemitism is seen as a kind of demonic metaphysical force—Amalek—that emerges in every generation to threaten the Jews. Esau, they often say, will always hate Jacob.

Nonetheless, the scapegoat theory persists and, quite often, is seen as the primary driving force behind antisemitism.

I believe there is a great deal of truth in this, but in a somewhat different way than is popularly understood.

Azazel

The concept of the “scapegoat” is derived directly from the Bible, where a ritual of purification practiced on Yom Kippur is described.

In Leviticus 16, Aaron, the first High Priest, is told to take two goats and sacrifice one while using the other to expiate the Israelites’ sins.

The term for the latter is translated as “scapegoat,” but this is not a literal rendering of the Hebrew. In the original, the term used is “Azazel” or “for Azazel.” The text (translation by Sefaria) states:

From the Israelite community he shall take two he-goats for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. Aaron is to offer his own bull of sin offering, to make expiation for himself and for his household. Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before the Lord at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and he shall place lots upon the two goats, one marked for the Lord and the other marked for Azazel. Aaron shall bring forward the goat designated by lot for the Lord, which he is to offer as a sin offering; while the goat designated by lot for Azazel shall be left standing alive before the Lord, to make expiation with it and to send it off to the wilderness for Azazel.

…

When he has finished purging the Shrine, the Tent of Meeting, and the altar, the live goat shall be brought forward. Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness through a designated agent. Thus the goat shall carry on it all their iniquities to an inaccessible region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.

“Azazel” is widely understood as the wilderness itself, whose location and nature are left vague. Indeed, it seems more a symbol of the paradigmatic desolate wasteland than a specific place. It is an image of a scoured place to which the condemned are damned—a kind of hell. Indeed, this meaning has survived into modern Hebrew, in which the phrase “l’Azazel” is a generic curse roughly equivalent to “damn it.”

The significance of this passage today is that, in it, the scapegoat is not an object of blame per se. It is not deemed guilty of the sins of a community that is, in fact, innocent. Rather, the scapegoat is an object onto which the sins of the community are transferred in order to expiate them.

In other words, the community employs the scapegoat not because the community is innocent but because it is guilty. The community, not the scapegoat, has sinned. Indeed, this is precisely why the scapegoat and the accompanying ritual are necessary in the first place.

Monstrous projection

The biblical understanding of the scapegoat is decidedly relevant to the process of antisemitism, including today’s neo-antisemitism: Through scapegoating, the antisemite engages in something akin to Carl Jung’s concept of “projection.”

Unable to bear the reality of his own flaws, failures, and transgressions, the antisemite projects them onto the Jews and then seeks to destroy the Jews in hopes of destroying those flaws, failures, and transgressions as well. Antisemitism is a toxic attempt at the expiation of sins.

The examples of this are legion: Jews are accused of ruling the world, but it is non-Jews, if only by sheer numbers, who rule the world. Jews are accused of war-mongering, but it is the non-Jews who rule the world who make war. Jews are accused of rapacious capitalism, but capitalism was both created and most rapaciously conducted by non-Jews.

Hitler claimed the Jews engineered military defeat and economic crisis, but it was the failed policies of non-Jewish political and military leaders that did so. Stalin asserted that Jews were “rootless cosmopolitans,” but it was his own communist ideology that was forthrightly rootless and cosmopolitan.

Today, extremist Muslims and far-leftists assert that Jews are genocidal, colonialist, and imperialist. But extremist Muslims have engaged in genocide, colonialism, and imperialism for over a millennium, from slaughtering the Jews of the Hijaz to the atrocities of Oct. 7. As for the extreme left, its history is literally drenched in blood from the USSR to Maoist China to Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Most ironically, extremist Muslims and leftists accuse the Jews of racism, but because of their own antisemitism, they have become the most virulent racists in the world today.

This is, in essence, a kind of metaphysical hypocrisy, because there is one aspect of the scapegoat ritual that antisemites studiously fail to practice. The ancient Israelites were well aware of the fact that it was their own sins they were attempting to expiate. They knew they were guilty. Thus, the ritual was essential to Yom Kippur, which is a holiday dedicated to clearing the decks and starting over again in hopes of doing better and becoming better over the new year.

Antisemites have no interest in this. They do not want to do or become better. They want to feel better, about themselves and about the world, and they do not care about the price anyone else has to pay for it. This is, in some ways, the essence of narcissistic psychopathy, and underlines the fact that, ultimately, antisemitism is a psychological disorder, a collective insanity, a folie de tout le monde.

What will not stop until it is stopped

This has very dark implications, because it means that, sadly, antisemitism is very, very difficult to fight. People often desperately need to feel better about themselves and will not give it up for anything.

In the case of psychological projection, they need it with an existential passion. Their narcissistic psychopathy emerges from the darkest and most powerful forces of the psyche; to the point that, as psychiatrists are well aware, narcissists are very difficult and psychopaths all but impossible to cure.

Even finding a scapegoat is never enough to sate these needs and desires. It may be enough for a time, but the need always returns, and more scapegoats must be found and more destruction wreaked.

What this means is something I have often sought to emphasize: Antisemitism cannot be cajoled or educated away. It can only be resisted. Almost always, it will not stop unless it is stopped. If they wish to cease being the scapegoat, Jews must ensure that they can meet the primal forces of antisemitism with equal and opposite force.

Antisemites must not be indulged in hopes of converting them. They will reject the indulgence and refuse the conversion. The only hope is effective self-defense, which alone can ensure that antisemitism can do no more than a minimum of damage and is, in the end, exiled to Azazel, where it can consume itself and ultimately die of its own scorn.