"v) Comparisons….

All racisms, of course, involve ‘othering’, elements of scapegoating and often large doses of fantasy/imagination. Although I return to discourses below, these are not the only, or necessarily the most important elements. Firstly, I discuss structural/material manifestations.

i) AntiSemitism in Britain is not, or not systematically manifested in economic terms. Although the majority of British Jews (i.e. descended from eastern European Yiddish speakers) had ancestors who were impoverished, the British Jewish population became predominantly middle class by the end of the 20th Century. In Kosmin’s 1977 study of Redbridge (northeast London) 40% of the sample was white-collar and the rest, skilled working class (Kosmin 1979). In 2002, 54% of working Jewish men and 50% of working Jewish women were in professional or managerial occupations ( Valins, 2002). Another Jewish Policy Research (Institute) survey (Becher, et.al. 2003) found that two-thirds of respondents (of nearly 3000 people surveyed) were in professional or managerial positions.

This contrasts with the situation of e.g. Black and South Asian origin people. In 1997, two-thirds of Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men were in manual occupations (compared with 50% of white men and 52% of Indian-origin men) (Ratcliffe, 2004: 95, citing Modood 1997). For Black and Asian ethnic minority men and women, unemployment levels are over twice as high as for whites in equivalent age groups (Ratcliffe, 1994: 92-3): the gap between black/Asian ethnic minority and white unemployment rates has remained at this level or higher for decades.

ii) Jews are heavily represented in Britain’s political and judicial establishment, a situation opposite to that of other, Black and South Asian minorities whose representation does not match their weight in the country’s population. It is important to re-emphasise that Jews in Britain are not systematically the subject of overt state or judicial actions. This contrasts with e.g. the police stop and search used as social control on Black and increasingly, Asian youth (BLINK/Black Information Link 2005), or the deaths in police custody of a number of Black people, or differential arrests of Black males (Blink, 2005).

This aspect is crucial as mass killings on a systematic scale usually takes place with a congruence of popular action and state policy and bureaucratic mechanisms (Gordon, 1992).

iii) Violence/attacks: The existence of violent attacks against minorities is of course, a ‘bottom line’ of coercion as well as being the most immediately frightening. Violent attacks on Jews and Jewish property (e.g. graveyards, synagogues, businesses) and has increased a good deal. In 2004 there were 532 antiSemitic incidents recorded, the highest since records began twenty years ago (Woolf, 2005). Of these, 83 incidents consisted of serious violence or assault, and 53, of damage/desecration of property (including graveyards). The more visible, strictly orthodox community is most likely to suffer violence and abuse. Attacks and violent incidents were most likely to emanate from the far right but an increasing number took pl[a]ce in the context of political gatherings around Palestine/Israel and the Iraq war (CST, 200- ). In interpreting these figures, both the likelihood that incidents may be recorded and the very small size of the Jewish population (under 300,000) should be noted.

However, the percentage of attacks on other, more visible minorities is far greater: there have been 25 racially-motivated killings recorded in Britain between 1999-2002 (Black Information Link, 2005: www.blink.org.uk/pdescription.asp). The 1999 British Crime Survey reported that 35% of racially motivated attacks were against Black and south Asian people, with Pakistani and Bangladeshi people at the greatest risk of attack (IRR 2002). Recorded racist incidents rose to 52,700 in 2004 (Rayner, 2005) and these are acknowledged to be underestimated. Ethnic minority people are least likely to experience racist incidents in areas with high ethnic minority populations (e.g. London, Leicester); however in more isolated or rural areas, Black and Asian people are over three times more likely to experience serious racist incidents (Rayner, 2005). In London, Jews three times more likely than whites to be attacked, African-Caribbean and Asian people were ten times more likely to be attacked, and attacks on people designated as ‘Arabs’ were even higher (Akhtar, 2004?, http:// www.nusonline.co.uk). .

It is racist violence that is most feared in Jewish communities, for good reason. Despite Jewish assimilation, relative acculturation and the high social status of a number of some, these factors have not prevented expulsions and mass killings in 14th Century Poland (Chesler, 2003); in 15th and 16th Century Spain and Portugal or, of course, in Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, without dismissing the existence or further possibility of antiSemitic violence, this is not on a large scale in the UK.

iv) Jews have been subject to immigration controls (the 1905 Act) and this is similar to the controls exerted over migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and from the Caribbean and Africa, although no doubt contemporary enforcement is both more efficient and more draconian. As immigrants, another similarity is the medicalisation of such immigrants, such that they were/are seen as inherently disease-ridden and likely to import disease/infection/pollution into the body politic. Jews in the 19th and early 20th Centuries were seen as carriers of smallpox and particularly, trachoma (Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit,1998). More recently, Bangladeshis have been seen as potential or actual carriers of TB, and African migrants, of HIV/AIDS. These images exist above and beyond any actual epidemiology – e.g. Jews were likely to have a greater incidence of trachoma than the general population (although it was often confused with conjunctivitis) as it was common among the very poor, although treatable. However, the disease came to stand in for Jewish disease and infection.

v) As noted, Jewish migration to Britain has been characterised by different ‘waves’ since 1656 and has taken place over a longer time scale. Thus the Anglo-Jewish diaspora contains people of different country and regional origins, social class groups, religious affiliations (i.e. within Judaism or secular), and appearance. There now exists a small – but growing – group of people who are both Jewish and mixed ‘race’/ethnicity. However, other diasporic migratory flows also contain people from different parts of a country, or nations within a region, who may share a language, a religion, or a broad cultural affiliation but may differ otherwise (e.g. the constructed categories of ‘South Asian; East Asian in the UK). Other groupings in Britain also now contain a number of mixed-background or ‘mixed-race’ people.

Turning back to the question of ‘characteristics’: historically, one of the charges against Jews was of their ‘essential’ inassimilable nature. (This begs the question, of course, the highly problematic nature of ‘assimilation’.) Given the extent of intermarriage today (44% for men in 1996: Miller et. al. 1996 ), however, this image may now be less common for Jews. It could be argued that the vision of inassimilability is now focussed much more strongly on Muslims and perhaps to a lesser extent on Roma people, although other groups are by no means exempt.

The most common way to categorise racisms is along the ‘black/white’ axis, as noted.
Here I suggest another line of comparison: anti-Asian, Islamaphobic and anti-Jewish racisms share certain characteristics, while anti-Irish and anti-Black (i.e. African or African-Caribbean origin) racisms share others. Both Black and Irish-origin people in Britain are envisaged in stereotype as having ‘childish’ characteristics; easily dominated but at the same time with criminal tendencies, rebellious but overtly so; emotional, charming and with a sense of humour, embodied (i.e. for Black people: facility at sport, at physical activities); with facility for music; hyper-fertile (Cohen, 1988; Mac an Ghaill 1999) (Does the undermining and demeaning nature of these social imaginaries perhaps underlie the disproportionate percentage of both Black and Irish people diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’ in Britain? (Pilgrim and Rogers, 1993))

In contrast, Jews, Muslims and other Asians tend to be seen as ‘contained by culture’: inward looking, insular, traditional. Not only Jews but also Asian (both ‘south’ and ‘east’) as well as Muslim ‘others’ are constructed - in Orientalist form - of being devious, ‘clever’ and greedy: not to be trusted and difficult to control due to their subversive nature.

More parallels could be drawn, without losing the insight that racisms do to some extent have different histories and different signifiers; nevertheless continuities also exist.


[...]

Antisemitic conspiracism mainly flourishes on the far right (e.g. the idea of a Zionist Occupation Government or ZOG (Berlet, 2004) or the ‘Jew’ World Order, a contemporary incarnation of the Protocols. However, such conspiracy thinking is at times also taken up on the left and has appeared in the anti-globalisation movement. For some (see accounts in Rifkin, 2003; Strauss, 2003), globalisation is seen as a(nother) Jewish conspiracy, in pursuit of Jewish financial interests and world domination. The fact that there is a disproportionately high percentage of Jewish people who participate in anti-globalisation movements (as well as many other left movements) is not capable of puncturing such mythological thinking. The globalisation ‘movement’ is of course a coalition and therefore contains many disparate elements. Some elements incline more towards cosmopolitan democratic views based on human rights; others are more populist in orientation and many campaigns are single-issue based (e.g. original people’s rights movements). Certainly for some, however, Jews as such are identified as arch-globalisers. As Naomi Klein wrote “…every time I log on to activist news sites like Indymedia.org which practise ‘open publishing’ I am confronted with a string of Jewish conspiracy theories about September 11 and excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Such aspects of movements which hold to ‘progressive’ ideas are little-analysed (e.g. see Mayo 2005) or else passed over as insignificant, and it is unusual for this to be taken up outside media oriented to Jewish readers/viewers. (However, see New Internationalist October, 2004; see Kiely 2005).

Again, many roads including that of the anti-globalisation movement lead back to Israel/Palestine. The situation is brutal, complex and encompasses much racism on both sides (Agbarieh, 2004). But it is necessary to state that it possible to support Palestinian rights and independence and to oppose the Israeli occupation, oppression of Palestinians and militarised violence without descent into antiSemitism, overt or covert.


vii) Some concluding/continuing thoughts:

This short review has attempted to show that antiSemitism, as one form of racism in Britain and internationally, has varied manifestations, contains a number of deep underlying myths and emanates from different sources in social and political terms. Within the left including some anti-racist circles, there exists a deep malaise about this issue such that it is painful and difficult to discuss. (Many Jews and some non-Jews raising this issue find their voices being suppressed as an embarrassment , or facing the [age-old….] accusation of ‘taking over (Jewish peace activist workshop 2004); many then lapse into silence.)

Although there exist many reasons for this, an (in part) understandable one is that anti-Jewish racism in Britain, as this paper has emphasised, is less dominant than other forms, particularly against Black, Asian and Muslim people. However, it is important to situate racisms in their context, and not to pit one against another (`who has suffered the most?’). Each has specific and usually intricate dynamics. Discussion of one type of racism does not preclude discussion of other types, or indeed discussion of forms of discrimination other than the ethnic/racialised.

This discussion finds that there is no completely clear disjuncture between anti-Jewish racism and other forms; rather, many linkages and similarities exist. At the same time, the history of religious antiSemitism and the images/imaginings this has left, along with political conspiracy theories have given this form of racism a great persistence, power and ‘migratory ability’. Work is needed to make detailed links between forms and expressions of different types of racism in Britain.
Doing so may help move beyond a static multicultural model to one of greater complexity and inclusiveness."

Complete text here:

 http://www.surrey.ac.uk/Arts/CRONEM/Conference-2005-papers/SusanJacobs.doc