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“What is antisemitism? It is less a doctrine or set of beliefs than a series of contradictions.
In the past, Jews were hated because they were rich and because they were poor, because they were capitalists and because they were communists, because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere, because they held tenaciously to a superstitious faith and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing. The best way to understand antisemitism is to see it as a virus.
Viruses attack the human body, but the body has an immensely sophisticated defense, the human immune system. How, then, do viruses survive and flourish? By mutating. Antisemitism mutates, and in doing so, defeats the immune system set up by cultures to protect themselves against hatred. There have been three such mutations in the past two thousand years (in which Jews were hated for being a nation, hated by Christians as part of Church doctrine, and hated for being supposedly racially inferior), and we are living through the fourth (anti-Zionism).”
(Former Chief Rabbi of England, Lord Jonathan Sacks, obm)
