David Seymour offers a critical reading of ‘Facing Antisemitism: The Struggle for Safety and Solidarity’, a recent report on antisemitism from the Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading anti-racist think tank. Situating the report in the epistolary tradition, Seymour argues that like previous ‘epistles’ to the Jews, the report predicates the fight against antisemitism on the correction of patterns of Jewish thinking and behaviour. The price for anti-racist solidarity with Jews, ‘as it has so often been in the past,’ he contends, ‘is conditional, and the conditions are unilaterally imposed. And again, the fact that a choice is expected to be made leaves open the question of why such a choice must be made at all.’
The Runnymede Trust is the UK’s foremost independent racial justice think tank. Since its founding in 1968, It has commissioned two reports on antisemitism. The first, ‘A Very Light Sleeper’ (1984) and, more recently, ‘Facing Antisemitism: The Struggle for Safety and Solidarity’, authored by David Feldman, Ben Gidley, and Brendan McGeever.
At first read, ‘Facing Antisemitism’ is a puzzling work. Addressed to the world, it is directed at Jewish people, or rather at some Jewish people. It tells those Jews that their welcome and inclusion into a contemporary universal ‘360-degree anti-racist movement’ is conditional on their recognising and overcoming their own strategic errors and misplaced loyalties. It is these very Jewish particularities that serve as obstacles to an otherwise open-armed embrace by that movement. Until they acquiesce to the demands made in this name of universalism, Jews will not only continue to remain unsafe, but will nurture and contribute to the very conditions that result in their own vulnerability. For Jews to accept the offer of safety that only universal solidarity provides, they have no other way forward other than to accept the terms of the offer.
However, the report is not as puzzling as it first appears. It lies within a long historical tradition, beginning with Paul’s Epistles and is a style that regained currency in 18th and 19th century debates around Jewish emancipation. Each ‘epistle’ in its own way follows the same pattern. Each provides a list of alleged Jewish flaws, negative characteristics and errors that disqualify them from inclusion in the greater universal good and simultaneously serve as a threat or dissolvent to that universal and its promise of redemption (Jewish and not-Jewish). In the present context, it is worth reflecting on the common etymological root, salvus, that connects Paul’s offer to save the Jews with the report’s recommendation of vouchsafing Jewish safety; a promise and vouchsafing that, if refused, will leave Jews both unsaved and unsafe and will contribute to the conditions that have led to their precarious situation. This call on Jews to mend their ways – ‘to hear what they [the Jews] may not want to hear’, as one interpreter of Paul’s Epistle put it – is not matched by any self-reflection or self-criticism on the part of those holding out the promise of inclusion. It is purely one-way traffic.
Locating antisemitism
At this point, it would be quite easy to argue that in locating the report in this tradition, I, or the report, or both, have fallen into the trap of ‘eternal antisemitism’ – the notion that antisemitism is an ahistorical phenomenon akin to a law of nature – or that I am implying that the report itself has allowed what it terms the ‘reservoir of antisemitism’ to seep into its own work. The first point is easily addressed. The critique of the notion of ‘eternal antisemitism’ does not deny the existence of anti-Jewish hostility from the Classical Age to today, but rather articulates antisemitism’s abstraction from the society which generates it and the contradictions that it expresses; including, of course, today’s ongoing and unresolved ‘Jewish question’.
However, as others have argued, the report itself may have allowed the influence of eternal antisemitism in via the back door, so to speak. This criticism turns on the important place the notion of ‘antisemitism as reservoir’ has in its understanding of the nature of antisemitism. Adopted in the report as a critique of antisemitism as individual or personal prejudice (as it was understood in the Runnymede Trust’s previous report on antisemitism, A Very Light Sleeper) and replacing it with the more productive understanding of ‘structural antisemitism’, the report has recourse to the authors’ previous concept[i] of ‘antisemitism as reservoir’. This concept points to the idea that in any conflict with Jews (‘Israel’, ‘finance’), a ‘reservoir of antisemitism’ – that is, a latent, cultural pool of negative tropes and myths that has accumulated over the past – acts as a ‘resource’ from which the protagonists may draw.
The advantage of this approach is that it overcomes the problem of reducing antisemitism to little more than a ‘prejudice’. Its disadvantage is that by treating antisemitism as little more than a discursive resource, it separates the expression of antisemitism from within the social contradictions from within which antisemitism is produced. Antisemitism as reservoir appears as a particular nasty ‘add on’ to an otherwise ‘neutral’ social conflict in which Jews are involved (although why recourse to the ‘reservoir’ should include arguments over finance, does somewhat beg the question)[ii]. The critical point, however, is that like ‘eternal antisemitism’, ‘antisemitism as reservoir’ implies a gap between social conflicts and their anti-Jewish expression. And again, like eternal antisemitism, at least in its attempt to explain structural antisemitism, ‘antisemitism as reservoir’ leaves uncriticised the very society in which it is rooted.
Jewish Safety, Jewish Errors and Vertical and Horizontal Alliances
The report’s epistolary character can be found in its litany of Jewish errors; errors that not only fail to deliver Jewish ‘safety’, but also increase Jewish vulnerability. Although the report never quite spells out or names this unsafety, the implication is that these errors are responsible for the ongoing social reproduction of contemporary antisemitism. The report focuses its attention on what it identifies as two primary contemporary errors: first, the politics of anti-antisemitism, and, second, a misplaced abiding commitment to ‘Zionism’ and the State of Israel.
First, the Jewish error in adopting the politics of anti-antisemitism by seeking a ‘vertical alliance’ with the state displays not only the contingent and unstable nature of the safety on offer, but that allying itself with a state riddled with racism and Islamophobia (in the case, the report argues correctly, of Britain), allows a perception (and confirmation) of a hierarchy of racism to ferment. This hierarchy then attracts the ire of those who do not share the same alleged state-privilege as Jews, and are either excluded or oppressed by that same state. These two points crystallise around the state’s presentation of ‘the Jews’ as a ‘model community’ (both in terms of ‘integration’ and of being an economic boon to the country) as a stick with which to beat other minorities (most notably, Muslims) who are at best criticised for not following the Jewish ‘role-model’, or, at worst, deemed incapable of doing so. The report notes, moreover, that this imagery glosses over the state’s own history of antisemitism, and by presenting Jews as ‘good at business’ draws from the ‘reservoir’ of latent anti-Jewish myths and tropes.
It is around recognition and commemoration of the Holocaust that the report maintains that the vertical alliance of the politics of anti-antisemitism has its most deleterious effects, both for the formation of an alternative horizontal alliance (a Jewish alliance with other marginalised and opposed minorities) and the consequent solidarity deemed essential for secure Jewish safety.
The shortcomings of the criticised vertical alliance – the state’s cynical manipulation and playing off of Jews against other minorities and the resulting fragile veneer of Jewish safety – comes most clearly into view in the discussion of what the report refers to as the state’s ‘Holocaust consciousness’. The report sees the state’s focus on the Holocaust as coming at the expense of historical and ongoing harms suffered by other British minority groups, especially those harms committed by the British state directly. These crimes include, inter alia, the state’s, ‘role in slavery and the slave trade, with the realities of British colonialism’ as well as contemporary forms of racism (notably Islamophobia). The report continues by making the stronger claim that, ‘irrespective of intention’, the state’s ‘Holocaust consciousness’, ‘functions to replace any serious reckoning’ with these and other state-based crimes.[emphasis added] The report concludes that the negative consequences of the politics of anti-antisemitism and the strategy of a vertical alliance results in a ‘competitive victimhood’ to such an extent that it offers confirmation of the perception of a hierarchy of racism, thus driving a further wedge between Jews and those who would otherwise offer safety in solidarity.
With the Jews’ vertical alliance with the state not only failing to provide safety but also exacerbating Jewish unsafety, the report offers the alternative of safety through solidarity brought about by a horizontal alliance between Jews and other marginalised and oppressed minorities. In arguing for this alternative, the report notes that the Jewish alliance with the state is a strategy that dates as far back as the 11th and 12th centuries, arguing pithily that, ‘Jews enjoyed the protection of the state – until they didn’t.’ This contingent and unstable protection is contrasted against an alternative, more recent radical Jewish tradition, beginning in the age of mass politics during the 19th century. This Jewish radical alternative refused the lure and strategy of state protection proposed by Jewish leaders. Citing the cases of the 1905 Aliens Act and the 1936 anti-fascist Battle of Cable Street, the report describes how, contrary to the wishes of the Jewish establishment, which sought to ameliorate the Act’s effects through quiet government lobbying, and who told Jews to remain at home, it was the construction of a meaningful horizontal alliance that brought these historic successes. Speaking of Cable Street, the report concludes the ways in which Jews were ‘supported by Communists, trade unions and dockworkers’ under the anti-fascist slogan no pasaran.
While these successes cannot and should not be denied, the epistolary character of the report brings with it an absence of self-reflection on its own positions. It lacks, in other words, a critique of the ambivalent nature of these historic alliances. It does not take a great deal of imagination to simply reverse the normative claims that the report makes on behalf of the horizontal and vertical alliances respectively. A few examples can suffice.
First, we could point to occasions where the modern British state has stood firm in standing against both antisemitic and racist movements and giving them no quarter in its defence of rights under equality and the rule of law. Here, it is worth recalling the swift action taken against last summer’s Southport anti-migrant racist riots as well as today’s response to similar events in Ballymena.
Secondly, what the report says about the instability and unpredictability of the state can be applied, with little effort, to the anti-racist alliances. We could say, without fear of contradiction, that the Communists at Cable Street supported the Jews ‘until they didn’t’. Likewise, although ultimately the TUC came out in opposition to the 1905 Aliens Act, the matter as presented in the report glosses over the many anti-refugee and anti-Jewish positions adopted by working-class movements and parties.[iii] Likewise, as much as the state’s image of Jews as the perfect immigrants and economic motivators, we also see the image of Jews as the radical leftists and outsiders swimming around in the reservoir.
Finally, there is the matter of the state’s Holocaust consciousness. It is of course correct that other crimes and harms are not recognised in the same way as the Holocaust. But the reasons for that have little or nothing to do with the politics of anti-antisemitism. The backlash against acknowledgement, or even discussion, of the specifically anti-Jewish dimensions of national socialism and the Holocaust pre-dated state-based ‘Holocaust consciousness’. More often than not, such acknowledgement was framed in the language of ‘Jewish privilege’ (a forerunner of the far more recent ‘hierarchy of racism’). Often, but not always, emerging from the far-right spectrum of politics, it was accompanied by the claim that that ‘privilege’ served also to silence, justify or deflect claims of Jewish and/or Israeli wrong-doing and human rights abuses. It was only with state recognition of the Holocaust however, that these themes have gained credence today within certain sections of the left.
More pertinent in the immediate context of the report’s arguments for a ‘horizontal alliance’ is that the late 1980s’ early 1990s’ Holocaust commemoration was intimately linked with celebration of the collectivity of a diverse civil society in overthrowing the statism of East European Soviet domination. In this latter context, it is worth noting that the (belated) emergence of Holocaust remembrance at more or less the same time had little, if anything, to do with the politics of anti-antisemitism. It was more an attempt to legitimise the burgeoning of post-Community, post-modern, neoliberal globalisation. It is these developments that explain the timing of UN votes for public recognition of the Holocaust and, in both Europe and the UK, were tied to then ascendant EU-centred, ‘European Project’.[iv] The irony here, of course, is that this recognition of the Holocaust – presented as it was as a ‘universal moral symbol’ – further enforced the pre-existing resentment that targeted Jewish attempts to commemorate the particularity of Nazi antisemitism within that universal; a resentment the report leaves in place uncriticised.[v]
The point is, of course, that reversing the respective calls from one form of alliance to another does not escape the confines of the epistolary approach to understanding contemporary antisemitism. What it does tell us, however, is that presenting the matter in such a binary manner, not only leaves one side of the equation uncriticised, but also leaves uncriticised the nature and contradictions inherent in the society and its social relations in which contemporary antisemitism arises. To understand that question means, of course, accounting for why, two centuries or more after emancipation, we can still speak of Jews, or, rather ‘the Jews’, and antisemitism as political and/or social questions in search of an answers. It is a question that, for all its shortcomings, the previous Runnymede Trust’s A Very Light Sleeper attempted to address.
Jewish Safety and the Conditions for Solidarity
Along with the listing of Jewish ‘errors’ and its lack of self-reflection, the report also displays the third characteristic of the Epistle. Like Paul’s and like the epistles of emancipation some thousand years later, the price of entry into the universal is the requirement that Jews correct their ‘errors’ and misplaced loyalties, which are not only unacceptable in themselves, but which also present a particular and particularist obstacle antithetical to the otherwise welcoming universal – in this instance, the 360-degree antiracist movement.
It is the report’s focus on Zionism and the State of Israel that serves as the contemporary conditions of the offer to Jews of safety through universal solidarity. The Introduction’s concluding comment – its ‘not only, but also’ – along with the final words of the report as a whole respectively, are illustrative of this centrality. It
[C]alls for a new approach to combatting antisemitism that is based on building alliances between Jewish people and other racialised minorities and employing a 360-degree anti-racism. That is to say, anti-racism must inform what we do, not only when confronting antisemitism in the UK but also when we address the status and treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, the Occupied Territories and Israel.
Yet from this difficulty an opportunity arises: an opportunity to conjoin Jewish support for anti-racism with a diaspora commitment to justice for Palestinians as well as to equality for Jewish people. This will require a renewed multidirectional politics of anti-racism capable of addressing the specificities and harms of antisemitism as well as the racism of the Israeli state. Holding those conversations and building these bridges will take work and persistence. In the recent past we had only the will for such a coalition. Today, however, there are tentative signs that a social force capable of making it a reality is coming into view.
What, then, are these ‘tentative signs’?
[A] growing number [of Jews] are increasingly alienated from Israel and Zionism. Today, between a quarter and a third of Jews define themselves as either non-Zionist or anti-Zionist… This development indicates the potential for a new direction within Jewish politics. This growing minority of non and anti-Zionists is a key political actor today. It is here that a more multidirectional opposition to antisemitism is being cultivated, one that is coupled to a wider anti-racist politics.
Then, as now, the price of entry into the universal was that the Jews reject their self-understanding as a ‘national people’. In the present context, the irony here is that in meeting this condition of emancipation, Jews were obligated to reformulate, and ultimately reject, their self-identity as members of a distinct, historical Jewish nation. This condition was accepted by large swathes of Jews. However, at the same time, a small and, with the rise of nationalist anti-Jewish sentiment, an increasing number refused this demand. It was from this refusal that a new or rejuvenated national consciousness developed into what we now know as modern Zionism.
This latter point connects with a further epistolary characteristic. Like in the previous iterations, the content of what is to be rejected comes not from Jewish self-understanding, but from an image imposed by those setting the condition. The most obvious illustration of this point can be found again in the epistles of emancipation in which the ‘Judaism’ which was to be rejected was defined in purely negative terms as ‘unethical’, ‘immoral’ and overtly legal. These, taken together, were deemed not only responsible for Jewish ‘backwardness’ but also as an obstacle to Jewish ‘regeneration’ which would make them ‘capable’ of entering the universalism of modern society. Likewise, the report’s presentation of Zionism and ‘the State of Israel’ (rather than the present government) as ‘racist’, as constituting ‘apartheid’ and as ‘genocidal’ is not only premised on a selection of (contested) sources but, correspondingly, overlooks the meanings and definitions of both Zionism and Israel to which the majority of Jews are attached (critically or otherwise).
Finally, and again, we see the one-way traffic and the lack of self-reflection and self-criticism on the part of those setting the conditions. These absences appear in the report in the context of a Jewish separation from the antiracist movement because of their own nationalist commitments to Zionism and Israel. Although there is some recognition of the recent incidents and ‘crisis’ on the left as well as moments in which elements of the ‘reservoir of antisemitism’ have seeped into some of its adherents, primary responsibility is placed on Jewish particularism. This point again is illustrated in the report’s conclusion where, contrasting with those anti- and non-Zionists who are ‘building bridges’:
Increasing numbers of British Jews are having to grapple with the glaring contradiction between the ideas and practices of anti-racist politics in the UK and the policies and actions of the State of Israel. There are a range of responses to this fundamental tension: some Jewish people have become further entrenched in political activism in defence of Israel, and in doing so have severed their links with anti-racist politics, in some cases with a heavy heart.
Within the epistolary tradition in which this report lies, blame remains almost exclusively with ‘the Jews’. It is their errors and their misplaced loyalties that, taken as harmful particularities, obstruct and undermine both their own need for safety along with the solidarity and safety that not only helps guarantee Jewish safety, but the safety of all. Yet, the guarantee is achieved not without cost. The price, as it has so often been in the past, is conditional, and the conditions are unilaterally imposed. And again, the fact that a choice is expected to be made leaves open the question of why such a choice must be made at all.
[i] See Ben Gidley, Brendan McGeever, David Feldman, ‘Labour and Antisemitism: a Crisis Misunderstood’, The Political Quarterly, Vol. 91, Issue 2, April–June 2020, pp. 413-421.
[ii] See David Seymour ‘“Reflections on the Reservoir: The Abstraction of Antisemitism” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, vol. 6, no. 1, 2023, pp. 49-62
[iii] See also the antisemitic ‘Rothschild’ and related conspiracy theories propounded by the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation and other left groups during the Boer War. See Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War: A History (2013), I.B.Tauris.
[iv] See Cousin, G., & Fine, R. (2012). A COMMON CAUSE: Reconnecting the study of racism and antisemitism. European Societies, 14(2), 166–185.
[v] See, David Seymour, ‘Holocaust Memory: Between Universal and Particular’ in The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Contesting/Contested Memories (Routledge Studies in Cultural History); Eds David M. Seymour and, Mercedes Camino, Routledge, London (2016) – available at https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/15796/4/Holocaust%20Memory%20Between%20Universal%20and%20Particular.pdf
