Adam Kirsch writes at Mosaic (excerpted):
Gary Saul Morson’s characteristically learned and insightful essay on Dostoevsky raises the question of how a writer with such a profound understanding of good and evil could fall prey to such a rudimentary moral failing as Jew-hatred. As Morson says, the implications of this question go far beyond Dostoevsky himself. His example reveals one of the most troubling qualities of anti-Semitism, here and now as in 19th-century Russia: its shamelessness. Many people who congratulate themselves on their benevolence, and would be deeply ashamed of being exposed as racist or homophobic, take a certain pride in hating Jews.
This is not simple hypocrisy. Rather, it is a sign that anti-Semitism is differently constituted from other kinds of prejudice, so that to those who harbor it, it doesn’t feel like a prejudice at all. Instead, it feels like an idea. ...
The German intellectual Wilhelm Marr coined the term “anti-Semitism” in a book published in 1879, the same year that The Brothers Karamazov began to appear as a serial in a Russian magazine. For Marr, anti-Semitism wasn’t a heart-hatred but a principled hostility to “Semitism,” an ideology supposedly espoused by all Jews. In The Victory of Judaism Over Germandom, Marr wrote that “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world,” echoing Dostoevsky’s complaint that Jews were responsible for the triumph of European “materialism.” ...
In treating the Jews as a synecdoche for all the developments in modern civilization that they detested, anti-Semites belonged to a very long tradition. As David Nirenberg shows in his excellent book Anti-Judaism, Jews were being used for this purpose even in ancient times. But it was Christianity that made it one of the fundamental habits of the European mind. Starting with the apostle Paul, who said that Judaism was based on the letter that killeth and Christianity on the spirit that giveth life, Western self-criticism has often taken the form of attacking its own Judaizing tendencies. This useful technique makes it possible to recall Christians to their duty while suggesting that they are not really at fault, since they have been led astray by Jews or Jewish values.
Thus for Dostoevsky, the rise of capitalism in the 19th century meant that Christians were giving into the Jewish vice of “blind, carnivorous lust ... for personal accumulation of money.” Similarly, Marr wrote sarcastically that “the Jews are the best citizens of this modern, Christian state,” meaning that Germany had institutionalized the Jewish vice of materialism. Today, Israel often serves the same rhetorical function for Europeans, who like to accuse the Jewish state of the things they are most ashamed of in their own history, from nationalism to colonialism to genocide. ...
