Hatreds Entwined

In January 2003, during anti-globalization protests in Davos, Switzerland, an AP photograph taken of the event showed several demonstrators carrying a golden calf. One of them wore a mask with the face of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon; another, a mask of American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The Rumsfeld figure wore a large Star of David.

In that photograph is a convergence of the recurring themes of European anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. Consider the golden calf, the first betrayal by the Jews of their divine mission, that biblical moment intimating that God had chosen the wrong people. And, crucially, it is a golden calf, resonant with Marx’s phrase that money is the Jews’ “worldly god”—a charge often leveled by European intellectuals at Americans. Finally, it is Rumsfeld, not Sharon, who is wearing the Star of David—and the notion of Jewish domination of Washington is precisely what defines the latest permutation of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.

A key characteristic of those hatreds is their entwinement: one is often an expression of the other. And they have been nurtured by similar resentments and fears. There is jealousy: both America and Israel, each in its way, are extraordinary success stories. There is cultural contempt: both Jews and Americans have been portrayed in European and Muslim intellectual discourse as crass, money-grubbing hypocrites.