There’s a trap that I keep hitting when talking about anti-semitism, whether historical or present day: the fact that it touches my identity as a Jewish woman causes others to be suspicious that I can’t be trusted to describe the pattern and what it means without bias.
This piece was cowritten with Claude, both to sidestep that tried-and-true dismissal and to check my own blind spots. It’s anchored in philosophies of history and human nature I’ve long subscribed to, so it’s not neutral; no honest argument is. But every claim is sourced and every step is one you can check yourself. Pressure-test it on those terms.
Smart Claude
The Oldest Machine in Politics
There is a thought that runs through a century of writing about hatred, and it is more unsettling than the simple observation that people scapegoat: the scapegoat is not chosen for what they did. They are chosen for what blaming them accomplishes. And what it accomplishes, above all, is power — for whoever does the pointing.
Writing in 1946, in the rubble of occupied France, Jean-Paul Sartre studied the antisemite and concluded the hatred came first and the reasons came later. The antisemite did not examine Jews and reach a verdict; he arrived with the verdict and went looking for someone to hang it on.
“Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience.”
“If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”
The enemy is not a discovery. The enemy is a need — the need to turn ordinariness into superiority, to create an elite of the ordinary. You need not achieve anything to belong to the club of the pure. You need only point at the impure.
René Girard turned this into a theory of how societies cohere at all. Communities seethe with rivalry; tension climbs toward open conflict; and the scapegoat discharges it. The crowd unites against a single target, expels or destroys them, and feels the relief of sudden peace. Because the peace is real, the crowd concludes the victim must have been guilty. The lie becomes sacred. And the trick only works while it stays hidden:
His darkest warning was that even the language of protecting victims can be turned into a weapon.
“Victimism,uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.” The demagogue rarely says “let us persecute.” He says “let us protect ourselves from them.”
Same machine, better packaging.
The throughline is power. The one who names the enemy is the one who rises. An enemy is efficient in a way no policy can match: a solution takes competence, compromise, and time, and might fail; an enemy takes only a finger and a crowd, and never fails to unite, for a while. Then the relief fades, the problems remain, and the machine needs feeding again. So it asks for a new enemy. It always asks for a new enemy. That is why the faction so rarely fixes the thing it claims to be furious about: fixing it would end the emergency, and the emergency is the source of the power. The enemy is not a means to the solution. The enemy is the product.
How a Grievance Becomes a Fire
No one joins a mob by deciding to hate. They join by catching it.
This is the part that does the real damage, and it almost always begins with something true: a genuine injustice, a real harm, a wrong that deserves anger. That is not the flaw in the mechanism; it is the fuel. The process rarely starts with a lie. It starts with a legitimate grievance and then does something to it.
What it does is spread. Girard’s insight was that we imitate one another not only in what we want but in what we reject – and indignation is the most contagious feeling there is, because it is the cheapest to join. To share an outrage you need none of the experience or stake behind it; you need only catch the feeling and point. The outrage compounds: each person’s anger becomes proof to the next that the anger is justified.
And no one in the crowd feels like a persecutor; everyone feels righteous, because, as Girard observed, “no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone.” The specific content burns off. “This policy is unjust” thins into “these people are the problem,” and finally into something that no longer references the original wrong at all.
That is the mutation, and it has a signature. A legitimate grievance stays attached to conduct and remedy: it names an action, names what would set it right, and can take yes for an answer – some outcome at which the anger is satisfied and stands down. The mutated version has detached from conduct and fixed on essence. It is no longer about what the enemy did but what the enemy is. The tell is simple: it cannot take yes for an answer. When every action by the hated group reads as proof of guilt – when they are damned for advancing and for retreating, for fighting and for surrendering – you are no longer watching a grievance but a projection that has found its screen.
Why the Jews, Specifically
Across two thousand years and unlike societies, the same people keep being cast in the role — Alexandria in 38 CE, the Rhineland in 1096, Spain in 1492, Dreyfus in 1894, and the industrialized version that needs no date. If the enemy were truly arbitrary, this would be a staggering coincidence. It is not.
The explanation sits not in the Jews but in the societies doing the choosing. A reusable scapegoat has to satisfy a strict and unusual set of conditions. It must be inside the society — present, woven in, blamable — yet visibly distinct enough to attack without the persecutors feeling they attack themselves. It must be associated with the abstractions a frightened majority resents — money, law, text, mobility — rather than with soil and blood. And it must be a minority small enough to strike safely. Few groups in history fit that slot. A people dispersed without a state, keeping their own law and texts and refusing to fully dissolve into the host nation, fit it nearly everywhere — not from any quality that justifies the hatred, but because the slot recurs wherever majorities organize around blood-and-soil belonging. The vulnerability is not a property of the Jews. It is a property of the societies that need an internal-yet-foreign enemy and find one to hand.
And it works as misdirection. While the crowd trains its eyes on the designated puppet-master, the man who pointed builds his actual apparatus in the open, applauded as the people’s protector. He is granted power as the reward for warning against power. By the time anyone notices that the accuser was the one consolidating the banks, the press, the courts he claimed the enemy controlled, the hunt has done its work and the consolidation is complete. The scapegoat is the distraction. The pointing finger is the hand that takes.
The Girardian logic seals it. A visible enemy can be beaten, and being beaten, releases the crowd and ends the leader’s mandate. An enemy defined by hidden essence can never be finished — there is always one more, somewhere, concealed — so the hunt need never end, and the accuser’s gathering power need never be examined. That is the authoritarian’s ideal instrument: an emergency without conclusion, pointed permanently away from himself.
Sources
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946; trans. George J. Becker, Schocken Books, 1948), p. 13 — “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him,” and the surrounding passage on experience and the “elite of the ordinary.”
René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde, 1978; trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, Stanford University Press, 1987) — the mechanism “becomes recognizable only with the development of sufficient critical intelligence.” https://www.sup.org/books/religious-studies/things-hidden-foundation-world
René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair, 1999; trans. James G. Williams, Orbis Books, 2001) — “Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power”; “no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone.” https://orbisbooks.com/products/i-see-satan-fall-like-lightning
Overview of Girard’s mimetic theory and the scapegoat mechanism: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “René Girard.” https://iep.utm.edu/girard/
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Part One: “Antisemitism” — the critique of the scapegoat theory and the “perfect innocence of the victim.” (Harcourt / Schocken editions.)
Philo of Alexandria, Against Flaccus (In Flaccum) — the sole eyewitness account of the 38 CE Alexandrian riots. On the scholarly debate over reading the events through specific local causes rather than as proto-antisemitism, see Sandra Gambetti, The Alexandrian Riots of 38 C.E. and the Persecution of the Jews (Brill, 2009), reviewed in Bryn Mawr Classical Review: https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010.12.63/