Antisemitism: The Banner of Hatred

The following is an excerpt of the essay “Antisemitism is the Devil’s Flagpole,” taken from Andrew Klavan’s new Substack “The New Jerusalem.“

One of my favorite Hollywood stories comes from Scott Eyman’s biography “John Wayne: The Life and Legend.”

When Wayne was lying on his death bed, a group of friends came to visit him. One friend, named Al, was Jewish. Knowing the Duke was forever being accused of bigotry, Wayne’s son joked, “The reason Duke didn’t want to see you was because Al is a Jew.”

The ailing Wayne smiled and pointed at the ceiling. “It’s the other Jew I don’t want to see,” he said.

As the saying goes: It’s funny because it’s true.

Antisemitism is the Devil’s Flagpole. It always marks the place where evil dwells. It adheres to no one political party, no particular race or nation. But wherever and whenever it appears, it is a signal that something is going very badly wrong in that place and time.

There’s a simple reason this is true. The antisemites think they hate the Jew in front of them, but it’s that other Jew they really hate.

Because the soul of the West was indelibly shaped by Christianity, the God of the West is the Jewish God, the God of Abraham made incarnate in Jesus Christ. Western ideas about God — that he made both men and women in his image, that he identifies with the least among us, that his personality is centered on forgiveness and love — these ideas were all gifts of I AM to his Chosen People. So too were the laws carved on the stones of Sinai and etched over slow centuries into the animate substance of the Jewish heart. Ultimately, the ideas underpinning these laws became the ideas of everyone who followed Jesus Christ.

That is why Saint John Paul II, in his 1986 speech at the synagogue of Rome, said the Jewish religion was “intrinsic” to Christianity. He added to his Jewish audience: “You are our dearly beloved brothers.”

The process by which this natural brotherhood metamorphosed into the long and shameful history of Christian Jew hatred is too long and complex to reconstruct fully here. It had its beginning in history. The hostility of a sclerotic first century Jewish priesthood to Jesus’s preaching, their attempts to suppress the upstart Christian cult, St. Paul’s mission to universalize Christian beliefs, and the destruction of the Jewish state by Rome in 70 AD, which made it dangerous for Christians to identify too closely with their origins — all these played a part. All served to drown out St. Paul’s reminder that Christians were branches grafted onto the root of Judaism and they should therefore “remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you.”

In most cases, history moves on, and old rifts are mended over time. But in this instance, a different and more enduring hatred attached itself to the ancient disputes.

With the fall of the Roman empire, the Christian religion spread among the barbarian tribes that swept the old Latin world away. These went on to form Western Christendom, which eventually became the nations of Europe. We’ve all noted that certain tribal traditions were Christianized during this process. Our Christmas tree, for instance, might well be the old Yule Tree repurposed for the new religion.

But of course, Christianization went far deeper than that. The primacy of love, the rights of women, the holiness of charity only gradually infiltrated the pagan mindset. The struggle between the values of the old gods and the demands of the new one became internalized in the converted heart. This struggle was then projected onto the old division between Christians and Jews. Antisemites caricatured Jews as the reflection of their own hidden selves: merciless, corrupt, the murderers of God.

There followed centuries of anti-Jewish brutality. Throughout Christian Europe, Jews suffered oppression, expulsion, ghettoization, hateful libels, and murderous pogroms. These left a wound on Jewish memory that has been difficult to heal. When I, born and raised a Jew, began to acknowledge Christ as my Lord and Savior, this blood-soaked history made me hesitate before I approached the baptismal font. I had to learn to separate the cruelties of Christian men from the love and forgiveness of the Christian God.

Today, twenty years after my baptism, when my relationship with Christ has become the radiant center of my life, Jew hatred is on the rise again throughout the West. I am shocked, but not at all surprised. As long ago as 1980, I wrote a novel in which I referred to my generation as “holiday Jews.” For decades, Western shame at the satanic evil of the Holocaust had made even the hint of antisemitism socially unacceptable. But I always knew that holiday would end.

Why? Because it seemed obvious to me even then that there was one Jew the Jew-haters hated most of all — that other Jew the dying John Wayne was in no hurry to see. The atavistic habits of some of the converted were at war with the Jewish God who had colonized their hearts and culture through Jesus Christ. That inconvenient deity who demands care for the weak, forgiveness for the sinful and sexual decency and fidelity for all does not settle easily into the toxic soul of fallen man.

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Read the full essay “Antisemitism is the Devil’s Flagpole” on Andrew Klavan’s new Substack “The New Jerusalem,” where he and son Spencer Klavan chart an alternative path toward life in the 21st century and beyond.

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Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. He is the bestselling author of the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The third installment, “The House of Love and Death,” is now available. Follow him on X: @andrewklavan

The views expressed in this satirical article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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