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After the Holocaust, after Auschwitz, that is, after the ultimate stage in the destruction of the Jewish soul—a process which lasted for centuries in Europe—Europe is shattered, many of its elements are dead, but it also has a bad conscience; it knows it is guilty. Since then, Europe has looked for and found in the Palestinian cause the expiation for its guilt. It is from this that the uncritical and Manichean attitude toward the Palestinian cause emerges—it is, primarily, the last heroic (European) adventure. Further, the more the Jews are presented as being the evil party, the bad ones, the less difficult it is to carry the responsibility and the guilt. This is a process of collective psychology. From such a perspective, there essentially is no difference between France, for example, and Spain… It is unbelievable how Europe continues to hate its Jewish soul, even after it has expelled it!

This is so profound, I had to read it several times. I have thought much the same for years but never been able to articulate it. I hope this book has some serious impact.

There's a flip side to this. There is a certain point where individual Jews come to accept this hatred as a fact of life -- as something constant, unchangeable in the short-run, and quite possibly permanent. They stop apologizing for being Jewish and for doing what is necessary to survive as Jews. It combines the best aspect of Ayn Rand -- I will live my life for myself -- and throws a religious aspect -- And for God -- on top of it.

I think the majority of Israeli Jews have come to feel it. I think it is a growing attitude among American and other diaspora Jews. I like to think I have it -- I am certainly developing it. And it scares the excrement out of the Anti-Semites.

I agree with the interviewer. I don't think this is a Spanish problem, it's a problem of the European intellectuals. Sure, Spain expelled the Jews in 1492, but it did so mainly because it saw them as Fifth Columnists for the Muslims who were still threatening their coasts--forerunners of the Barbary Pirates. So the greater antipathy historically was toward Islam.

If you look at actual history, some Jews bear some responsibility for modern antisemitism. It didn't all simply come down from older Christian antisemitism. For whatever reason, Jews in Russia, Poland, and Europe gravitated to the visionary left, to anarchism, syndicalism, Communism, and all sorts of revolutionary movements. A Jew assassinated Tsar Nicholas II, and Jews were in the vanguard of many of the violent Communist revolutionary groups that multiplied over Europe and Russia. Trotsky and Linvinov were two prominent Jews involved in the Leninist revolution. In the 1930s a good deal of violence was committed on innocent people by Communists as well as Nazis. The atrocities of the Jewish revolutionary dictator Bela Kun in Hungary are one instance.

As these things usually work out, people everywhere got angry at being terrorized and assassinated by revolutionary Jews, but unfortunately they took vengeance on the much more visible religious Jews with their distinctive clothing, although these Jews had nothing whatever to do with the atrocities of "progressive" Jews.

Please note that I am not saying that modern antisemitism was justified, or that for the most part the Jews who were the targets of antisemitism were guilty of anything, but that to a degree antisemitism was provoked by the activities some very prominent Jewish revolutionaries.

By contrast, absolutely nothing explains the antisemitism of the left today, beyond sheer ideology and idiocy. It just seems as if the left always has to hate and blame somebody, and the Jews have simply drifted into their gunsights.