My sister, that dedicated tourist, that leader of multitudes, brought us to Venice the other day. As always, there were plenty of tourists, but perhaps because it was December 26th, it was much more humane than other times. Cold, but much emptier. Cold and crisp. And one could see the Alps, really far away, covered in snow. It was beautiful.

We took the vaporetto along the Grand Canal to San Marco, walked around, stopped to look at totally overrated and overpriced Murano glass souvenirs, and did what one does in Venice. Some—evidently with my sister in the lead—went to see the basilica. By late afternoon, the place was getting full, and we were more pressed to try to look for smaller streets, avoiding places with signs pointing to San Marco. This is what led us to the ghetto. The ghetto is a nice, but in the grand scheme of Venice, pretty anonymous neighborhood. An island of peace.

Every time I go to the ghetto, I have been moved. Since there is not too much to see, it is just the power of the word that moves me. I am guessing that for the being this word means, if anything at all, something along the lines of “la banlieue” in French or “the projects” in the US. I think of the Warsaw ghetto. But not really. The Warsaw ghetto was a perversion of a perversion. The Venice ghetto makes me think of the history of European antisemitism.

Now, I like history very much. I think that knowing it is important, whatever that word might mean. At the same time, I think that when it comes to judging people or societies, whatever happened before my parents were born is ancient history. I am no total idiot, and I see that this is a pretty arbitrary time, and that somebody else’s mother can well be older or younger. But everything has changed so much since my mother was born that it seems to me patently stupid to judge anybody for whatever their forefathers did or thought. It is even more idiotic when one is not talking about the Porsche-Piech family, but rather about somebody who just happens to live in some place, or to speak the same language as some people who did horrible things. The same if one is talking about somebody who is just a citizen of a state that has developed from some other state that acted criminally. I mean, I am neither Chinese nor Iranian, but I have vastly more in common with Minikun and Hossein than with anybody living in Spain during the Civil War. Life in Tokyo or Marrakech today is much more understandable to me than life in Madrid or Perlora would have been at the time my grandmothers went to school. And a generation previous to that is just unimaginable. My daughter thinks that my childhood was in black and white.

At the same time, I evidently see that some traumas and narratives are transmitted, inherited, and have real effects. The history of slavery and segregation has an effect. Knowing that people around your grandparents were starved by the Soviets has an effect. Stefano might be a pretty absolute pacifist, but I am just guessing that his feelings might be less absolute if we are talking about the partisans fighting Mussolini’s fascists in Italy. The story of the Danes helping the Jews escape during WWII probably makes Danish society more cohesive. I am sure that my politics are colored—together with many other factors—by those of my grandparents. I believe that the European sense of superiority toward many other peoples comes from the, by now ancient, history of imperialism.

Seeing these narratives survive over time, seeing them influence how people act—people who in reality live on a different planet from that in which this or that event took place—is one of the things I find fascinating about history. None of them is more fascinating than that of antisemitism.

Evidently, antisemitism has been the motor behind some of the most horrible crimes in history, but this is not the reason why I find it so fascinating. What fascinates me is its durability and the fact that it is even less comprehensible than all those narratives are per se.

First, although pretty much diluted in modern European societies, antisemitism really exists. Now, you might claim that there is no antisemitism, that there is only outcry toward the pretty horrible way that Israel treats Palestinians. You might point out that it is the Jews/Israelis who conflate being Jewish and supporting Israel, that every criticism of Israel means that one is about milliseconds away from being labeled as an antisemite, as being somebody who–maybe unconsciously–hates the Jews, or of being accused of making Jews responsible for all bad things possible while discounting what is done to Jews. You might point out that often Jews/Israelis take the most extreme point of view about what is antisemitism, being in that respect the most purist wokes the world has seen, while not coming anywhere close to applying the same standards when it comes to other groups—groups that, in reality, are much more discriminated against. In my opinion, you would be right on all accounts. And incidentally, it is pretty clear to me that Jews (even, maybe especially, Israeli Jews) are not doing themselves any favors by devaluing so much the word antisemitism and linking themselves so closely with Israel and hence with Israeli politics. But it is clear to me that antisemitism exists.

It is definitely much less intense than Jews/Israelis claim, but it exists. Jews/Israelis seem to see it everywhere, but especially in the way the Israel-Palestinian conflict is talked about. Now, I mostly disagree with this view, because the same papers that dedicate pages and pages to whatever new horrible thing is going on in Gaza or the West Bank also write much more about a few missiles falling on Tel Aviv than on many more falling on Tehran. There were also pages upon pages about what happened on October 7th, the rapes, the most heartbreaking stories, the hostages, and so on. Some asshole painting swastikas on a synagogue gets more attention than victims of domestic violence. Then, different papers publish different things and have different slants—this is even more clear when one compares between papers from different countries. Even within any given paper, there are opinion pieces of all kinds and sorts. I guess that, in the same way that you notice much more the shoe in which there is a little stone than the other one, Israelis/Jews see much more the critical reporting than the rest. And there is, as I put it earlier, the ultra-wokism with which many Israelis/Jews treat anything anybody says about them or about what they do. But they have a point. They have a point when they ask why we are all so interested in what goes on there while we ignore many other things.

Now, a few observations about that. For myself, I can explain why I am personally much more interested in what Israel does than in what happens in Sudan. I just know many more people there, and have been there a few times and really appreciated what I got to see of Israeli society. I read quite a bit of Amos Oz and like very much what I call the Hebrew University kind of mathematics. Besides, I believe that God returned to Earth, but this time as a cook instead of as a carpenter, in the form of Ottolenghi, an Israeli cook. And so on. And I don’t have any of those associations with Sudan. That might not be a morally sound reason to explain why I care more about what is going on in Israel than in Sudan, but it is a reason. Now, it also feels pretty morally sketchy when Jews/Israelis ask why we are all much more obsessed with what Israel does than about what is going on elsewhere, a bit like asking why we are such Spaßverderber that we decide to focus on crimes happening there instead of ignoring them as anywhere else. Besides that, I do not think that European antisemitism is a very strong force. At the end of the day, Israel commits enough crimes to warrant it being really controversial when Israelis are allowed to participate in things like Eurovision. Nobody supports banning Jewish participants per se. In fact, there have been plenty of Jewish participants—30, if I counted right—who didn’t represent Israel, and this was never controversial.

But Jews/Israelis have a point when they think of the oversized importance that we give to everything Israel does as antisemitism. I mean, most people can’t try to explain their Israel obsession by arguing that they like the math people do there. And everybody would have a hard time explaining why Greta Thunberg’s flotilla gets more attention than those sinking in the Mediterranean, filled with people from Sudan trying to make it to Europe.

I ascribe the Israel obsession to antisemitism because it seems to me that it reflects the fascination with the other. And not with the other in general, but with what has personified the other in history. The adjective “Jew” is not neutral. It is neither positive nor negative, but people react to it differently than to left-handed, blond, tall, fat, Japanese, or Argentinian. There is a visible fraction of a second after saying that somebody is Jewish or Israeli that shows it is taken as something meaningful. Neither positive nor negative, just meaningful. Whatever meaningful might mean. In any case, this is not the reaction if you say that somebody is Chinese, Uyghur genocide here or there.

What I find really fascinating is how it is possible that Jews still represent the other. More than 500 years ago, Spain did a really professional job expelling the Jews. Now, I am not going to defend it, but it seems to me that condemning it, or apologizing for it, is something between performative hot air and utter stupidity. I mention that Jews were expelled from Spain just because it means that after that there were simply no Jews at all. As late as 1900, there were 1,000 of them in Spain. I had never met a Jew before I went to Germany. Now, Spain was really efficient, but it was only one of the many countries that expelled Jews at some time or another: France, England, Austria, Portugal, Lithuania, etc. In fact, in many places, there were very few Jews. Jews made up less than 0.6% of the population of Venice when the ghetto was established. And Venice was much more tolerant than most other states. For comparison, 0.5% of the current Italian population is Chinese.

How is it possible that so few people managed to become such an obsession? How is it possible that the adjective judío is still not neutral when most Spanish people have never encountered one? I have no idea. I guess that for a long time, this could be explained by religion, by the association of Jews with the crucifixion. I guess that the insistence of Jews to keep up different traditions from the bulk of the population—the reason why Jews still survive as a group, if you ask me—also marked them as the other. But all of those effects have no force now. But being Jewish is still a more meaningful characteristic than being Calvinist or Belgian. Moreover, European societies still produce a certain—very small—percentage of assholes who go desecrate Jewish graves. Nobody seems to be desecrating Chinese cemeteries, not that I am calling for it. I really do not understand how it is possible that antisemitism is a thing.

I understand much better—but evidently do not condone—why there are anti-Muslim prejudices: in recent years, there has been a large influx from Muslim countries, and these people, having arrived very recently, look and act different. Besides, a few criminal assholes regularly claim to do horrible things in their name, in Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Nice, etc. By contrast, very few people in Spain know a Jew, and if they do, they most likely don’t know that they do. How is it possible that antisemitism is a thing?

Antisemitism, as watered down as it might be, really bothers me. It guess that in part it bothers me for the effect it might have on people I like, but mostly it bothers me because of what it says about society. Or rather, about human societies at large. I am pretty sure that ghettos, pogroms, expulsions, and gas chambers are something of the past, but the fact that such an atavism as antisemitism still exists at all seems to me to be the best proof of the dark irrationality of society. One of those things that shows that the layer of civilization is much thinner than one wants to believe. I see it as proof that we are really three missing meals away from civil war and societal collapse. There are surely many more pressing problems than antisemitism, but being something so patently unbased in reality, I see it as a reminder that we cannot take things for granted, that we must work to keep up what we value, to keep up rationality and human decency.

The being is a very nice human being. Really very nice. Not like me. She is very sensitive and very empathetic. But I am waiting for the moment when she comes back home and tells me something about the Jews. About how Jews are or are not. What Jews do or do not. I am waiting for her to speak of them as the other. The being being the being, I do not expect anything too ugly, but that day I am booking a trip to Auschwitz, so that she sees to where things can lead. That trip will not be because of guilt—I feel none, and it would be even more ridiculous if she did. It will be neither a trip in memory for the Jews who were murdered there, nor for those who are alive, but rather for her. So that she sees the horror to which baseless, pointless ideas can lead. So that she is warned and understands what dangers lie where.