Internalized Judeophobia: Examining The Myth of Assimilation:

Internalized Judeophobia, Explaining the Self-Hating Jew: Part V

“History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes” - Mark Twain

While assimilation is desirable for many Jews, there is two thousand years of historic evidence that proves that eventually, Judeophobia gets in the way of true assimilation. The only plausible way it works is on long enough timelines. You need generations of populations attempting to assimilate, either by choice or by force. Even then, the exercise of assimilation is wrought with perils, and even the most committed are vulnerable to the whims of the dominant local demographic populations.

The proof cases are everywhere. One of the best examples is the reform movement, inspired by adopting enlightenment values, it was an attempt to blend Jewish life with modernity. One of its goals was a promise of the eventual elimination of prejudice against Jews, or Judeophobia. A valiant goal, but futile.

Indeed, Reform Judaism came about in an era where for the first time in history, religion was being considered a subclass in and of itself. It was separate from a person’s citizenship or their nationality. One of the key outcomes of Liberalism was the separation of church and state.

So 19th-century European Jewish reformers undertook a sincere project - they would position Judaism in the same class as any other western religion. That came directly as a compromise with post-Napoleonic western European society. The walls of the Jewish quarters would come down. Jews were English, French, nationals or Dutch nationals first, and Jewish second. It is a model that has continued until today, even in Israel, religion does not inform citizenship.

Of course, despite their best efforts, eventually the Holocaust occurred and those continental European Jews were offered no protection. Attempts at assimilation did not prevent even the most secular of Jews from the death camps. The promise of religion being a benign characteristic evaporated.

Post Weimar Germany’s succumbing to the appeal of Naziism provides the most tragic lessons.

What is clear is that assimilation was no salve. German Jews are recorded as being,

at the time the most “assimilated” Jews in Europe in the 30s. Reform Judaism was a German concept initially. That blending provided no cover though, as a distinct population, they were scapegoated and targeted for extermination. Survivors sometimes concluded “we didn’t assimilate enough” rather than “assimilation itself failed”. The Holocaust proves that even this complete attempt at abandonment of Jewish identity brought no safety. The decision on what it was to be Jewish was never in their hands in the first place.

This is most particular to the religious observance and practice of the era. Secular Jews were just as targeted as religious Jews in Germany. While short term, certain individuals would have benefited from becoming more German, on a long enough time horizon, that religious abandonment, faith aside, is not enough to prevent discrimination.

While the German example is the most extreme, it is not an uncommon story in history. In part IV of this series, we established the five verticals of assimilation: religious, cultural, values based, political, and ethnic. Ethnic and religious assimilation do not work, as we can see from early modern European history, these can’t ever all be eliminated fully. Thus the asymptote is never reached. These examples are the most famous, but every era has an echo or a rhyme.

One of the most famously represented failures of Jews to truly assimilate is that of 16th & 17th century Spain. Despite being forced to convert to Catholicism, the infamous Spanish Inquisition was established as a kangaroo court devoted to the complete assimilation of course. The irony was that the local Iberian populations didn’t actually want Jews to be equal. Spain established blood purity laws known as limpieza de sangre that existed precisely to leave a divide between ethnic Spanish and Jewish populations. There were “Christians” and there were “New Christians”. Everyone knew the difference. There is a rebuilt church in Lisbon wherein a massacre of “New Christians” occurred in 1506.

This is the template for how attempts to truly blend in and assimilate ever really goes. The host society both denies Jewish practice (we don’t want them to be different) but denies true assimilation (We don’t want them to be us). This can’t be reconciled, and eventually, when the Judeophobes get what they asked for, they do not stop. Rather, they pivot the attack vector.

In modern Iberia, there is a lot of Jewish ancestry showing up in DNA testing, so, on a long enough timeline these barriers erode. Erosion is the perfect analogue though, because it took literally hundreds of years and multiple generations for that distinction to disappear.

With the scientific tools of modernity, we can easily see how even more problematic integrating would be in the face of a crusade like that of the inquisition. In the 16th and 17th century, Spanish Jews could move a few towns over, lie about their papers, and try to blend in. With modern DNA testing for example. The Spanish inquisition would have clear information on everyone’s lineage. The ethnic vertical is the most extreme example, because it is the ultimate blocker. Nevertheless, the other verticals need to be referenced because they demonstrate the self harm and ultimate futility that a yearning to drop the Jewish identity is.

The great 20th century Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, wrote the biography of a German socialite, Rahel Varnhagen. According to Arendt, Varnhagen was all in on assimilation. She converted from Judaism and climbed the social ladder. Only late in her life did she recognize that this abandonment of her culture was considered to have been as her biography put it “the greatest platitude, the most inconceivable meanness”. Varnhagen died before the Holocaust, but she would certainly have fallen victim to it had she been alive. Arrendt knew that assimilation for German Jews was an illusion. Varnhagen was an excellent model, but of course not an isolated case.

Varnhagen’s attempt at assimilation was beyond simply religion, it was complete and it was cultural. It included everything from the language she used to the foods she ate to the mannerisms she employed. However, she was unable to escape her deep seated Jewish values or political inclinations. That subconscious throughline continued to guide her and set her apart from her peers. At the end of her life, she had regrets about that path. It wasn’t worth it. This is intuitive and self evident. It is absurd to imagine any Jewish person at the end of their life wishing they had abandoned their culture more. No, the reverse is almost always true - it is basic collective wisdom that attachment to family, charity, and cultural roots only become more significant with age. You cannot really leave behind your originating culture and values. It is your source code.

The verticals of politics and philosophy are the flip side to the Varnhagen case. There are some who might acknowledge that the path to assimilation is by hiding their Jewishness in plain sight. Perhaps by acknowledging and glossing over that origin, in the context of it being something that they have moved on from, they can assimilate. In Isaac Deutscher’s book, The Non-Jewish Jew (1968) https://www.amazon.ca/Non-Jewish-Other-Essays-Isaac-Deutscher/dp/0192111892 he traces a lineage of famous thinkers (Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Freud) who tried to transcend their Jewishness. They declared publicly that they had moved on. These were great philosophers that espoused revolutionary worldviews. They changed the way the world thought about itself. There are two ironies at play here though. The first, according to Deutscher is that these world views were grounded in and worked as successor values systems to their Jewish heritage. These were functionally attempts to abandon a set of Jewish values by establishing new ones. The second irony is that with the long view of history, they all are remembered, and were attacked in life and posthumously specifically as Jews. Despite their best attempts to gloss over this piece of their identity, it remained a vulnerability. So we see how philosophy cannot depart the individual.

In a similar vein we can examine the attempted political escapees. Leon Trotsky specifically had a demise that highlights the futility to abandon Jewish principle via politics. His political allegiance was to Marxism. He was integral in establishing what became the Soviet Union. Inevitably though, Trotsky was eventually exiled and assassinated by the Stalinists.

Despite feeling completely assimilated and having renounced any semblance of his own personal connection to Judaism, his political enemies were able to weaponize his Jewish roots.

Stalin for his part, did this by utilizing code words to appeal to antisemites with the lure of semantics. He associated Trotsky and his followers with “rootless cosmopolitanism”, “foreign intellectualism”, and “bourgeois elements”. This is alarmingly not so different from modern uses and applications of terms like the “globalist elites,” the “Epstein class,” or the “Zionist entity.” Stalin was a master at propaganda via dog whistles. The tip of the Judeophobic spear today leverages this exact same model. It is a back door injection of a dose of antisemitism. It is the trojan horse of what we might call the self-hating Jews with internalized Judeophobia.

The Spanish, the Nazi’s, the Soviets. These are the most famous and the most tragic examples. They need to be heeded as warnings of the futility of true assimilation. Jewish populations have remained distinct throughout history precisely because they cannot ever truly blend in and hide their Jewishness.

The conclusion that must be made therefore is ultimately that the only path forward is for Jews to incorporate their Jewish identity proudly and on their own terms. This does not mean blindly accepting all tenets of Judaism or all philosophical or political viewpoints of the mainstream Jewish line of thinking. To not identify with a mainstream opinion or custom is one thing. To succumb to the outside pressure though, to walk into the open arms of Judeophobes and allow oneself to be tokenized because of that contrary opinion, is another thing entirely. That tokenization is a classic behaviour of an aspiring assimilator. It never ends well.

We will explore tokenism and tokenization in a later edition of this series, but the use case is clear. To debate with Rabbis and other Jews about whether the laws of keeping Kosher are valid and right is one thing. To become a public figure that actively works to destroy the institute of Kashrut for their own personal gain is a treacherous act.

This line of thinking is clear and obvious, but when we apply this same line of thinking to Jewish politics or a Jewish state, the systemic Judeophobia manifests as making this line of attack excusable. It blurs the line and enables rhetoric that would not apply to other populations. The public performative vitriol is somehow excusable. This is a trick that Jews play on themselves in the name of assimilation.

Of course, a far higher percentage of Jews identify with Israel rather than believe in keeping Kosher. Surely, being critical of one’s own beliefs is warranted and encouraged, both in western society as well as Judaism. But attempting to question and change the establishment views by building internal coalitions and debate, is not the same as joining an invading army or opening the portcullis to Judeophobes.

There is one subset of the Jewish population that has been missing from our examination thus far, Mizrahi Jews. In the next entry of this series, we will look at the way the changing demographics of Judaism in the west interact with the attempt at assimilation. It is the final piece of context that needs to be established before we finally turn towards the mechanics and manifestation of internalized Judeophobia.