Adorno and Horkheimer were probably right. Anti-Semitism constitutes one of the most macabre images of the involution suffered by the Enlightenment in contemporary society. If we then observe how it is practiced in the best universities of the most advanced democracy in the world, the USA, the feeling grows that something is forever damaged in the cultural future of the West.
Some students at Columbia University in New York (a university for which you can pay up to 60 thousand dollars a year in tuition) have feared the idea of taking to the streets and killing Zionists. More than one hundred pro-Gaza protesters were arrested in Boston. The anti-Jewish demonstrations in Italy complete the terrible chorus, also lining up on April 25th, forgetting the fundamental contribution that many Jews gave to the Resistance (Leone Ginzburg, Leo Valiani, Umberto Terracini, Emilio Sereni, just to name a few).
How did we get to this? The disease of anti-Semitism has origins almost as old as those of Christianity. However, the hope that in today’s advanced and enlightened society such prejudices would be abandoned was alive and strong, especially after the Shoah. This was not the case. Many still believe that Jews drink the blood of children in some terrible ritual, Palestinian children of course. The progress of reason has not eliminated the disease. Enlightenment reason was definitively subverted by the prevalence of emotion, therefore of unreasonableness.
We didn’t think we had to bother Lévy-Bruhl, a great anthropologist of the past who investigated primitive thought, to try to obtain a key to understanding these events. Magical thinking is based on “pre-logical” foundations, that is, refusing to investigate the secondary causes of phenomena or their origin. The primitive man sees a crocodile eating his fellow villager and thinks it is the work of a sorcerer. Likewise, a devastating natural phenomenon must have been caused by an occult force. Above all, claims Lévy-Bruhl, the primitive categorically refuses to get to the bottom of any matterlimiting themselves to an “emotional” understanding of the event.
Perhaps the same happens with today’s anti-Semites. They observe what is happening in Palestine and, far from wanting to really understand anything about it, they absorb the simplified vulgate that sees Israel as the genocidal neo-colonialist state and the Palestinians as poor innocent victims of the fury of the new Nazis. Maybe they’re sick of magic. In the corridors of the most prestigious universities in the world, magical thinking triumphs, the exact opposite of knowledge. Donations from Arab countries count for little in this case. Something cracked in the students’ minds.
The reappearance of hatred towards the Jews is a sign that the crack affecting the Enlightenment ideal of our society has now become a furrow. Deep, perhaps soon full of blood. If anyone has a better explanation as to why such heated anti-Semitism has returned, please send it to us. We, unlike the protesters, want to understand.
Francesco Teodori, 28 April 2024
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