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“What do they all want from us?” – is the question Jews ask themselves, knowing that there is no answer. “They” don’t want anything. “They” simply experience: dislike, disgust, contempt, hatred. And feelings don’t argue, at least that’s what experienced psychiatrists say. But that’s where these feelings come from – it’s really worth considering.
What Characterizes Anti-Semitism
Everyone has different inner instinctive urges that are better left unchecked. These motives often do not correspond to public morals and the status of the person, so if they manifest themselves in public, in the eyes of people and in your own eyes you will lose your human face. And a person has to hide them from himself somewhere inside, try to forget or somehow compensate. Thereby protecting the positivity of one’s self-worth from the encroachment of one’s own inner impulses. Psychology describes a number of mechanisms for such psychological defense.
In social psychology there is a view according to which both drives that do not correspond to the name “person” and various mechanisms of protection and compensation exist not only in individuals, but also in entire groups and nations.
Such an interesting phenomenon as anti-Semitism makes it very clear. Compared to anti-Semitism, all other “anti’s” belong to the type of attitudes that are said to be “nothing personal. They always have some more or less understandable basis, a reason for occurrence. Mostly it is usually a feeling of a threat to existence and status. And even such a phenomenon as the repeatedly mitigated xenophobia inherent in everyone is understandable as a consequence of the natural division of the human race into tribes and languages.
And anti-Semitism is interesting because the causes and mechanism of its emergence and action are completely irrational. It grows from somewhere inside, from the level of some “gratuitous existence,” from the collective unconscious, and then seeks and finds justification for itself. That is, he is precisely “personal,” that is, inherent in peoples as individuals. And its manifestations can be just as irrational as its cause: at worst, it encourages the destruction of the Jews at any cost, even at the cost of one’s own life. Our sages framed this inner urge in the image of “Amalek,” a people whose raison d’être for centuries is the destruction of the Jews.
So, with anti-Semitism, it is literally a rebellion of the inner unacceptable impulses of the individual human being. And just as these impulses, which one feels the need to somehow explain them to oneself and to others, so anti-Semitism, a collective phenomenon, is clothed in certain formalized images appropriate to the culture of a given people. And then the usual transformation takes place with these images – they become not just a justification, but a “reason” for the special attitude toward the Jews. And to acknowledge its simple natural, that is, primary in relation to all images and justifications, no anti-Semite would ever agree.
But since something rises from within that is beyond the control of man or the community, something that is not very compatible with the image of the people, civility and morality, so there are mechanisms of psychological defense in the collective subconscious.
Projection
One of the primary and common defense mechanisms is projection, which in anti-Semitism manifests itself perhaps far more explicitly than others. The mechanism is that a person “sends” his unacceptable urges to another in that we usually blame those around us for our troubles. Psychologists point out that projection is most pronounced in immature and vulnerable individuals. Of interest for our consideration is the so-called pernicious projection, which leads to such an erroneous interpretation of reality that in severe cases it causes hallucinations and delusions, when the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality is lost.
In projection, the basic tone of the accusation always corresponds to the traits of the accuser. In short, there is nothing else to create an image of the enemy out of but oneself. For example, a Ukrainian has never traditionally accused Jews of striving to take over the world, because there are no such inclinations in himself. Ukrainians have always been famous for their economic acumen, so the main accusation against the Jews was that they were “cunning” and “greedy. But the Russian man, a loyal soldier of the “Third Rome,” which had taken possession of one-sixth of the earth, saw in the Jews the desire to take over the whole world. It is clear, therefore, that the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” were born in Russia. For an American who naturally and positively perceives that his country has spread its cultural and financial influence around the world-the Jews are bad because they “have too much influence.
The cultural stamps of a given nation or civilization sometimes create internal contradictions in people with the need for positive self-esteem. As a result, this often gets dumped on Jews as a projection: I am not like that, they are like that. A similar mechanism is the basis of the infamous “blood libel,” which has been prevalent for centuries in countries where, since childhood, one symbolically took communion by eating “blood. The spiritual symbolism of this rite was too high and inaccessible to ordinary people, could not enter the consciousness. But the feeling that he was “tasting blood” could not help but cause an inner, even unconscious, “scramble. Characteristically, in countries of Islam, where there are no such rituals, there have traditionally been no blood libels.
What is interesting in this case is the role of the cultural factor, that is, it would seem, some external factor. Once adopted by normal people, originally neither cannibals nor vampires, the ritual, having become part of self-identification, became part of the collective unconscious and subsequently required collective psychological protection, including projection – denouncing other people as blood eaters.
One can only assume that such a profound influence of cultural factors can be explained by one of Z. Freud’s theories, according to which the rudiments of culture itself and the foundations of social structure were born from totemism and the tabooing of various objects and aspects of life, which began with the collective killing and eating of the father. That is, from a certain antecedent of all human guilt complex. But, again, this can only be a guess.
Projection: money, possessions, “holy“
There is another example of projection as a collective psychological defense in the arsenal of anti-Semitism, which is more, shall we say, “harmless” than blood libel. One of the most characteristic accusations against Jews is that they are all about money and possessions, that money is sacred to them, that it is “their god. And the discrepancy with reality here is that the end in this accusation is substituted for the means. Money and property have always been no more than a means of subsistence for Jews.
The concept of the “sacred” can be defined as a certain higher level in the hierarchy of values, something for which a person would not spare his life, neither his own nor that of anyone who would attempt to invade this “sacred” thing. Everyone knows what Jews in history have not spared their lives for – for their people, for the right to belong to it. Their money, their possessions never belonged on the list of such things. And the failure of the accusers’ vision of reality reveals something in their inner purposefulness that has been projected onto the Jews in this case.
The entire history of people and communities in their civilizational development is a history of taking, plundering, and encroaching on the property of others. We emphasize: not reduced to them, but they are necessary properties of this development. Other people’s property has always been something for which members of very many nations have not spared the lives of others and have risked their own. In order to limit people’s natural impulses to take possession of other people’s property through deception, robbery, and murder, societies and states were forced to impose strict laws and resort to measures that made the realization of these inner impulses “expensive pleasure,” to sanctify the prohibitions by a certain heavenly authority, etc. As a result, people began to delegate their impulses for property grabs to the collective unconscious. That, on the one hand, represented the legitimacy of any action of their state in relation to others, which facilitated the work of the authorities to govern people. On the other hand, it was a projection of its own motivations, now collective and incompatible with morality and the law, onto the Jews.
In addition to projection, there are several other psychological defense mechanisms that anti-Semitism provides an opportunity to trace in their collective form.
Regression
One of them is regression. This is the name given to the unconscious descent from the type of behavior adopted in the present to an earlier level of adjustment that allows for the satisfaction of desires. Thus, regression often manifests itself in emotional instability, outbursts of emotion and similar, seemingly strange, manifestations. Such outbursts and falls from the socially accepted level of behavior are very typical for seemingly sedate and outwardly cultured citizens who suddenly begin to feel the internal pressure of judophobia. It has often happened in history that a crowd of such law-abiding citizens, giving vent to outbursts of emotion, turned into an unbridled herd of wild beasts.
We should not regard the collective nature of such outbursts as a stretch, an artificial parallel to the defense mechanism of the individual. At such moments in a group of people, the higher, acquired layers of the collective personality and cultural patterns seem to shut down, stop working in the same way as they do in an individual. And in man, the pressure of his inner urges similarly “persuades” the legitimacy of a lower, emotional, display of all his acquired skills, just as the mob effect does to citizens in moments when a burst of judophobia legitimizes murder, humiliation and other uncivilized behavior.
It is characteristic of personality psychology that regression in its pathological form is manifested in mental diseases, especially in schizophrenia.
Rationalization
Following regression, it is interesting to mention such a most common mechanism of internal self-protection as rationalization. It is a defense mechanism that justifies thoughts, feelings, and behavior that are unacceptable in society. Humans in general tend to explain their behavior, thus rationalizing it. Rationalization should not be confused with deliberate lying and pretending.
Rationalization helps to maintain self-respect and avoid feelings of responsibility and guilt. Therefore, it is useless to look for manifestations of this defense mechanism in people who are not burdened by the morals and conventions of society.
And it is clear that this mechanism of internal protection becomes more in demand the higher the intellectual and cultural development of the individual and society. Social groups and societies in which humiliation and murder were the norm have left behind no sign of the rationalization of the Judophobic attitudes that reigned within them. As society evolves, cultural artifacts confirming such sentiments appear more and more frequently: proverbs and sayings, folk pictures and oral histories, prejudices against Jews, etc.
The whole mass of such cultural potential worked to legitimize a particular pejorative attitude toward Jews and was an expression of the need to rationalize the internal pressure of Judophobic motives. The fact that many such artifacts created an image of the Jew in a humorous or satirical way “lightened,” belittled the image of the Jew, than made the idea of harming him acceptable. Not to mention the fact that many of them reflected a protective mechanism of projection of one’s own aggressiveness, which presented the consumer of these products with an image of the Jew as an enemy – of him personally, or of his people, or of the entire human race.
It is interesting that rationalization in this case worked to justify exactly the thoughts and feelings, as a preemptive factor in relation to subsequent possible actions, rationalizing them in advance. This is very characteristic of the mechanism of Judophobia, when the development of anti-Semitic sentiments sooner or later leads to a series of single acts or collective actions – humiliation, robbery or murder of Jews; it is at the first stage that people need the rationalization of hatred. And its mechanism works so successfully that then the actions themselves – pogroms, looting and murder – do not, oddly enough, need further rationalization, all the more for those whose goal was simple looting. On the contrary, people then seek these actions as a kind of catharsis, as a necessary resolution of the inner contradiction between human dignity and savage urges.
Intellectualization
Another mechanism of psychological protection – intellectualization– is closely connected with rationalization. It involves an exaggerated use of intellectual resources to eliminate emotional experiences and feelings. There is no point in enumerating here the whole mass of philosophical, literary, research, both professional and amateur, essays on the negative role that, according to the authors, Jews have played in the history of countries, peoples and all mankind, and on the legitimacy of hatred and contempt for them among other peoples. These scriptures, as they are called, do not number.
Two other curious points are worth noting. The peculiarity of intellectualization as a mechanism of psychological protection of the positive image of society from the bestial urges of Judophobia that rage within the public consciousness is that it may be the only psychological mechanism that is able to present a special attitude toward Jews as “nothing personal. All other mechanisms, while protecting the civilizational skills and perceptions acquired in the process of development from the internal pressure of Judophobia, which clearly contradicts civilization, do not deny the special, coming from somewhere inside, nature of Judophobia. Intellectualization, characterized by replacing the experience of feelings with talk about them, by verbose justification of the contempt and hatred that the Jews have “brought upon” themselves, brings the root of the problem outward, thus denying its intrinsic nature.
Another peculiarity of intellectualization is that it, like the village folk healer, “heals the wound,” and the contradiction between the dignified image of society and the savagery of Judophobia pressing from within is no longer so annoying.
Compensation
It is also worth briefly considering a type of psychological defense often mentioned in everyday life and culture – compensation. This is the name given to the unconscious attempt to overcome real and imagined shortcomings. And its socially unacceptable kind is the most noticeable, when these shortcomings are compensated by rudeness and aggressiveness.
Societies and peoples whose foundations of civility and public morality are based on Abrahamic religions compensate with anti-Semitic attitudes, rulings and actions for the inevitable sense of the secondary, subsidiary nature of their “union with God” in relation to that which, according to the biblical account, the Jews were graced with.
At the same time, the notion, common among contemporary secular and assimilated Jews and their sympathizers, that antisemitism is compensation for envy of the so-called “Jewish mind,” talent, and ability to reach goals is unlikely to be correct. The roots of anti-Semitism are so natural and deep that even all the civilizational changes of the last two centuries could not add anything new to its internal causes.
In short, anti-Semitism is rooted in a deep layer of the collective unconscious, where the primal impulses to self-knowledge and knowledge of the truth, the seeds of the need for them, are just maturing, and consists in a subconscious feeling that the truth lies with the Jews and that without them it cannot be reached. But this feeling is compensated for in external, seemingly contradictory manifestations. Just as in personal development, a child who has a natural piety for his father gives him some inner knowledge that he is right, yet does everything against him, denying his father’s experience and often becoming angry with him. He does it himself and in his own way, even if wrongly, because without this “wrong” independence he cannot then truly discover the truth that already exists.
In this respect, anti-Semitism in general can be characterized as a socially unacceptable kind of collective compensation for an internal sense of Jewish priority in “copying the truth.
Denial
It is a defense mechanism for rejecting thoughts, feelings, desires, needs, or reality that are unacceptable on a conscious level. The behavior is as if the problem doesn’t exist. This phenomenon was observed in those societies whose ideology included various forms of internationalism or multiculturalism. That is, the beginning of it was given from the outside, the official ideology, but then, for a certain time, the effect of negation as a defense mechanism in the public consciousness itself was achieved. In order to trigger the mechanism of denying the intrinsic nature of Judophobic motivations, official ideologies went in forgeries and falsifications. Thus, Soviet ideology denied the existence of the Jewish people in the modern world at all. The widely known definition of “Jews” from the BSE is: “the general ethnic name of the nations historically descended from the ancient Jews.”
Offset
It is a mechanism for redirecting emotions from one object to a more acceptable substitute. For example, the characteristic of a person who is brutally exploited shifts aggressive feelings from the employer to his family members or other objects. Thus, the Jews in history have always been the traditional victim of this kind of displacement, to which any, even small, dissatisfaction with life and its hardships is transferred.
And even though Jewish humor, with its inherent softening of paradoxes, responded with the proverbs “if there is no water in the tap…” and “the elephant is tortured,” it did not reveal the internal reasons for the shift in aggression specifically toward the Jews. It wasn’t that the Jews were always on hand. Always “at hand” was the slow-burning perception within the collective subconscious of the Jews as an alien element in a world of ordinary urges: to reach, to know, etc. How alien and hostile is he who already owns that for which you toil and suffer.
It is characteristic that displacement often appears in phobic reactions when anxiety from the latent unconscious conflict is transferred to an external object. This very accurately conveys the reason why anti-Semitism sometimes takes on a completely savage character: the Jews, the external object, are the focus of all the tension of the inner conflict between the collective need for a decent image of society and the inner, totally uninvolved need for that part of the population, or humanity in general, not to exist.
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Thus, knowledge of the psychological causes and mechanisms of antisemitic motivations allows us to understand where the specific feelings that a very large number of people in our world have toward Jews come from.
System-forming factor
Nevertheless, one of the main “Jewish” issues remains unresolved. It was mentioned at the beginning of the article, and it goes like this: what do they all want from us? It is worth noting here why the word “Jewish” is put in quotes. The fact is that this question-what people of other nations want from the Jews-is not “Jewish” at all, but one of the really important questions in the life of humanity.
Let’s explain. When we consider humanity as a system, we must identify the so-called “system-forming factor” in it. That is, a factor that contributes to the fact that the mass of individual elements form into a system.
Here is the definition P.K. Anokhinawhich seems the most promising for our consideration. He writes: “…such a decisive and only factor is the result, which, being insufficient, actively influences the selection of exactly those degrees of freedom in the components of the system, which in their integration determine the full-fledged result in the future. And if we consider humanity not just as a set of people, peoples and states, but as a system of trends and phenomena of development, we will come to the conclusion that the main, system-forming, pointing directly to the result, it was the Jews who set the trend.
In order to understand this, it is necessary, of course, to determine what should really be the result of the development of a system composed of human beings, each of whom is a being who possesses consciousness and who feels the suffering and pleasure associated with the satisfaction or non-satisfaction of his needs. Such a result, it is clear, can only be the state of the system that will ensure that each individual lives a life with the highest development of consciousness, devoid of suffering and satisfying all his needs. And it was the Jews in their day who formulated the condition and form of interaction of the elements in the system of humanity which, alone, can ensure the achievement of such a result.
Màxima
This requirement for the components of the system is: “Love your neighbor as yourself. The finality of this condition was confirmed as early as the second century A.D. by Rabbi Akiva, who called it the quintessence of Torah, that is, of all Jewish teaching. There is no doubt that it was this maxim that shaped human civilization. Meaning, of course, that part of the world’s population in which the tendencies to become a system most quickly manifested, with further inclusion of the entire population of the earth. This is primarily the so-called “Western civilization,” but not only.
The value of the Jewish factor for the result can be judged by the fact that even the contributions of ancient Greece and Rome–democracy, statehood, the concept of human worth–cannot be called phenomena leading to the aforementioned result.
At a certain stage of development, in the crisis of the ancient world, the Jewish maxim as a condition for the result of development began to enter consciousness and life-at first in the form of religions. The concept of love as the basis of life and the world in general-“God is love”-was impossible to conceive of in previous stages of the system’s development. At the same time, the idea of a happy society, whether in the form of an afterlife or on earth, as a community where people live in love with one another, which relieves suffering and provides for all needs, permeated the public consciousness in various forms.
At the same time, Jews, being scattered in many countries, lost the opportunity to live as one nation, implementing this principle in practical life. And over time it became, unfortunately for them, just one of many religious injunctions. At the same time, their energy as a natural system-forming factor, and the preservation of the links between them, led to the fact that their contribution also became in many ways a “know-how” that promoted the purely material side of development: science, finance, scholarship, and commerce.
Need
Human civilization in general, in its material development, has also not been guided by the “transformation formula. And the maxim itself has been distorted in its many interpretations and has been used purely selfishly. And as civilization began to enter more and more crises, it began to cause more and more need for the right path to the desired result. Which people strive for purely intuitively.
The elements and parts of the system, scattered, the connections between which have been formed quite differently from those which dictate the desired result, are suffering. And feel the need for a system-forming factor, which is the embodiment of the result, according to the thesis of P.K. Anokhin, and the embodiment of the action of the only possible principle by which the connections between the elements and parts of the ideal system are formed. In our case, the principle is “love your neighbor.
It is clear that internal searches of people, groups, as elements of the system, point in one way or another to the Jews as such a factor. It happens far below the level of consciousness and conscious search, but unmistakably. Just as subconsciously, but unmistakably, people seek each other out in an hour of distress, or for self-realization, for the betterment of the community, of society. Consciously, however, without understanding the real causes of their suffering, both the peoples of the world and the Jews, who have forgotten the importance of the fundamental principle of development, explain their hatred of the Jews by a multitude of reasons completely external to the true development model of the system.
Awareness
It is clear that the role of the system-forming factor can neither arbitrarily, nor as a result of one’s own or even common decision, assume any other of the elements that make up the system. The only way to argue otherwise is to make the mistake that causes mankind more and more suffering–to see itself as separate from the general nature, a “system of systems,” a nature that does not change its principles.
That is to say, sad as it is, neither the people of the world nor the Jews themselves can understand the inner reasons for the anti-Semitism, the animosity, hatred, disgust and contempt that everyone feels toward the Jews. And only the Jews’ awareness of their role as a systemic factor in humanity, that is, the need to become an embodied result, and their efforts to create relationships in their environment based on the “Jewish maxim” can not only rid them of anti-Semitism, but also bring all of humanity into a state of a real, healthy system, in which its components are devoid of suffering and provided with stable connections and everything necessary for life.
