ne of the very exceptional things regarging the Catholic Church is its acknowledgement of its own historical hostility towards Jews.  This started with Vatican II and culminated in the work of Pope John Paul II.  Has the Catholic Church done all that any Jew would like?  Probably not.  Yet, it can be said that the Church’s shift in its attitude towards Jews went farther many a Jew would have expected.  When John Paul II referred to Jews as the Church's “Elder Brothers” that was tantamount to a veritable iceberg of ideology fully changing course. 

What felicitous terminology !  An Elder Brother is someone from whom one can learn as well as disagree with.  In either case, the person is always one’s brother whom one respects, at least ideally.  This is the very excellent move made by the Catholic Church vis à vis Jews: We Christians do not need to agree with Jews in order to respect them, and there is much that we can learn from them notwithstanding our differences.  This is a most radical shift from the view that Jews are incapable recognizing moral truth owing to their willful rejection of Christ. 

This brings us to what is very deep about antisemitism and to what makes it a very special species of racism. 

In the absence of religion, antisemitism would be absolutely impossible.  Quite simply, antisemitism is the view that Jews are evil owing to their willful rejection of the path of righteousness—the path of righteousness that had been first shown to them.  There are passages in the Qu’ran that can be read in this way; and there are passages in the New Testament that can be read in this way.  It may very well be that a very careful reading of either sacred text yields a very different view of Jews.  But the truth is that the average person (Christian or Muslim) does not have this very careful reading of the sacred texts.  Indeed, the Catholic Church, itself, most certainly did not. 

Racism, by contrast, is not tied to religion as such, because it is not tied to blacks having willfully rejected a conception of the path of righteousness that had first been shown to them.  Racism generally refers to inferiority, as such, rather than evil.  A person can even be morally inferior without being able.  That is, it may be that a person is absolutely incapable of achieving the moral excellences that it is expected of people; yet the individual is by no means evil.  Suppose that Sam does little more than get drunk and waste his money gambling.  Needless to say, he thereby exhibits very little moral excellence.  Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to characterize him as evil.

Typically, though, racial inferiority implies that the people in question are intellectually inferior.  And in the case of blacks, this has been the primary way in which blacks have been configured by racism.  Can they dance or sing well?  Absolutely !.  But if you are looking for genuine insight about a matter, look elsewhere.  For breathtaking intellectual horsepower, don’t expect it from a black. 

Jews as a people are never seen as intellectually bereft.  Blacks as a people are never seen as intellectually talented.  This brings us to something very important.

The characterization of Jews as evil entails not only that they have rejected the path of righteousness, but that they are quite clever people—people who are quite capable of beguiling others.  A stupid person, after all, really can’t be an evil person, at least not in terms of masterfully deceiving others and plotting against others.  For blacks, there is nothing equivalent to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

So getting rid of Jews is often characterized, as Hitler himself did, as work on behalf of righteousness itself.  For Jews, by their continual existence, are an impediment to the spread of righteousness because Jews consciously and willfully do things that undermine righteousness. 

No one characterizes blacks in that way.  To be sure, it has been said that blacks can get in the way of people doing what is right, because blacks appeal to the baser instincts of human beings.  But the thought is not that blacks consciously and willfully do things that undermine righteousness.  Blacks are not thought to be intelligent enough for that. 

Starting with the Enlightenment era, Jews have often been deemed too evil to be slaves—a sentiment which had its fullest expression in the Shoah.  Blacks, on other hand, have often been seen as quite appropriate for slavery, provided that one can get to them before bad habits set in.  So a Final Solution for blacks has never really been a major concern throughout the world. 

The number of blacks in the world enormously dwarfs the number of Jews in the world.  Yet, it is Jews—and not blacks—of whom people have sought to rid the world. 

Leaving aside the case of Jew for Jesus (there are no Jews for Allah, curiously), part of what it means to say that one is a Jew is that one has an in-principle rejection of Christianity (and Islam), which is quite different from saying that one simply does not share that point of view.  There are lots of points of view that I do not hold, but against which I am not opposed as a matter of principle.  Many Jews do not appreciate this.  Being a Jew is not like choosing carrots rather than celery from the menu.  No, it is rather like saying that as a matter principle one eats only carrots, say, rather than celery.  Needless to say, this view of eating carrots changes everything. 

To be black, on the other hand, is not to be against any religious view as a matter of principle.  One can be black and be Jewish or Muslim or Christian.  And so on.  At this point and time in the United States it is typically assumed that a black is a Christian, as the popularity of black gospel music would suggest.  Islam, however, is gaining ground.  But one is not more or less black on account of this choice.  No one expects Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson to convert to Islam because blackness requires it. 

Antisemitism against Jews and racism against blacks both pertain to a warped view of the group question.  But the two warped views here are far from being identical, precisely because the former is tied to religion whereas the latter is not. 

Religion gives views Jews a visibility that they would not otherwise have.  Like it or not, Christianity and Islam have a religious debt to Jews.  And it is not implausible to argue that much of antisemitism is, in various ways, anchored in opposition to that unshakable religious debt.  No one has a religious debt to blacks.  Speaking textually, there is no religion whose texts gives blacks visibility on the intellectual and social map; whereas Jews feature prominently in the religious text of Christianity and Islam.

I have not claimed that antisemitism is worse than racism.  After all, both antisemitism and racism have endured down through the ages and have both taken rather vicious forms.  I have merely pointed out that it is a mistake to suppose that antisemitism is but racism that has Jews as its objects rather than, say, blacks or Asians.  For what we have with antisemitism is a difference not in degree (racism and antisemitism can be equally evil and obnoxious), but in kind (as antisemitism, unlike racism per se, presupposes religion).