Four digs worth of antisemitism, it is a foot high.  The fifty publications from more than a dozen sources cover a broad range of topics from various perspectives, but when they are laid flat and piled, the corners are vertical; the booklets vary in thickness, but in height and width are all the same size, as if the splinters had agreed on a format, as if they had conspired.  The format is eight-and-one-half by eleven sheets folded, bound, and trimmed, so it could be merely that the antisemites, by choice or necessity, are cheap, but the as-if-they-had-conspired look runs deeper.  The stack is internally consistent as well.

This is not to call it coherent; there is great contradiction in it--not between pamphlets, however, but within each, a consistent set of contradictions.  Few booklets offer a complete set, but where they overlap, they agree.  To any question--and however absurd the answers, these are the great questions--every antisemite gives the same response; they are of one mind.  They are particular antisemites, each with distinguishing quirks of background and preoccupation, but the striking aspect of the literature is the preponderance of the typical.  It will be simpler, in exploring it, to ignore particularity and focus on the typical, as if it were the work of one mind, that of the antisemite.  We need not observe live ones, since we can dissect a dead one--the stack, the antisemitic corpus.

When we cut, we discover that this was an antisemite back in the fold, born again a Christian after years in Europe antichristian.  He believed Jesus was no Jew, but a "blue-eyed, flaxen-haired gentile from Galilee," that to call him a Jew would be to commit "blasphemy against our savior."  He thought the "Jewish Problem" was "an essential aspect of Christianity," since "the Jew represents all of the temptations of animal existence which it is intended that we should transcend during our stay here on earth."  If Israel did not epitomize the wrong choice, we could not make the right one.

Beyond belief, there was spite; he resented his obscurity, felt he deserved celebrity and found Jews blocking the way  "If I submit a story . . .  an ADL staff member, whose salary is paid by the magazine, checks the story for any reference to Jewish activities, and also checks a blacklist to see if my name is there as a critic of the Jews . . .  I must be prevented first, from earning any money from my writings, and second, from reaching an audience."  He felt cheated and knew he would have risen to his rightful place but for the Jews.

Failing, he blamed Israel--and went on to define himself in opposition to Israel, to make the supposed struggle the hub of his life.  He denied, however, that he was antisemitic, insisted the term was "meaningless," spoke of "the so-called antisemites."  Not he but the Jews hated; he could not, was innocent, easily duped by the glibness of the tempter taking over:  "Esau is the code name used in the Jewish publications to represent the gullible tolerant gentile; Jacob is the code name for the Jew, gifted in the art of deception."  Beset by enemies, most of them hidden, the antisemite, a victim, defended himself.  His gullibility had blinded him to the danger, but once alerted ("Wake Up, America!"), he reacted excitedly.

Excitedly but disinterestedly:  "if the truth is what you have indeed been longing for, read on."  He was determined "to be completely scientific and to follow the resolve not to be swayed by emotional judgments" and sought only to clear up misconceptions "in the light of dispassionate and reasoned arguments."  "The Jewish Question" "must be approached on the highest spiritual level."  Once he had approached, the Answer came as illumination; everything made sense.  But not so suddenly:  "For twenty-five years, I have studied the problems of human failure, of falling short of the promise, and of the decay and collapse of great empires . . .  About five years ago, I discovered the common denominator of man's civilizations."  The discovery was simple, but he insisted on its far-reaching application:  "When we understand the theory of the parasite, we are able to understand, FOR THE FIRST TIME, the entire modern Socialist school of thought."  That was his theory, the word "parasite"; there were sweeping implications, but no more theory.  The thesis was an analogy between the discussion of parasitism in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the relationship between Israel and the western nations.

He thought it was central, at the heart of the matter:  "The Jew believes that all of history is Jewish history, as the historian Dubnow claims.  He may be right, insofar as much of recorded history is a series of variations upon the host-parasite theme."  Simplistic as it is, the metaphor has a kind of plausibility.  The Britannica defines parasitism:  "a one-sided nutritive relationship between two organisms of different kinds, a relationship which is more or less injurious, yet not fatal, to the host; a relationship moreover that relieves the parasite from most of the activity or struggle which is usually associated with procuring food and thus tends to favor some degree of simplification or degeneracy."  If history is seen antisemitically, the words fairly bristle with implications; here the chief accusations in the indictment of Israel are reduced to elements of a single phenomenon and scientifically described.

This is why history happened as it did; the Jew did it and acts thus because he is a parasite, and must:  "This is why the Jew MUST control our communications; this is why he MUST control our education; this is why he MUST control our government; and, most important, this is why he MUST control our religion.  If he fails to do this, he endangers his existence as a biological parasite."  We might, if he fails, become aware of his insidious presence, and eject him; it has happened before.

Jewish behavior stems less, however, from a will to survive than from a will to power.  The antisemite stumbled onto a plot, an ancient, pervasive conspiracy, found in "an unlisted Jewish collection in the library of the University of Texas" "the authentic and complete plan of the Zionists for world domination."  The "plan" seems from the description and selected quotations to be an analysis of the sages' attempt in the Talmud to describe the society which is the goal of history, but the antisemite saw through that to a determination to bring the transformation about by violent means:  "The author speaks of 'the righteous' and 'the just.'  He says they shall inherit the earth.  He quotes the prophets, the books of Moses, etc.  Who would suspect that he had political revolution and total conquest in mind?"  The antisemite suspected and had had a hunch it existed ("for years I have felt that somewhere there must be a master plan"), but he "little expected ever to have this ultimate master plan, this chapter beyond the Communist Manifesto, in [his] hands."

Once he had it he saw it all and all he saw was Jews, behind everything.  They were "the subversive forces that have moved through the centuries, changing their form from time to time as governments have been made to heave, totter, cave in, and fall, but always with the same object in view."  "They are found behind all social commotion, as they are at the bottom of all epidemics of immorality . . .  They sell surreptitiously all the crowbars and projectiles that destroy the foundation of faith and morals."

Subversion to ruin is a last-ditch effort, since the parasite depends on the host.  His initial aim is inconspicuous power, "to maneuver things from behind the scenes . . .  in the same manner that the player moves chessmen on the board."  As he moves into control, he "jewifies" society, and citizens sense it:  "This unconscious realization causes the American worker and the middle class to become despondent, because of a deep feeling of alienation, an overwhelming sense of loss.  He knows that it is not his art, it is not his culture, it is not his religion, and it is no longer his country, because an alien has taken over every department of his life."

The antisemite saw enemies conspiring because he was paranoid, and projected his self-hatred.  If the projection was precise, if he saw himself clearly in the mirror, he told us what he was like when he described the Jews.  In that case, he was loathesome--avaricious, vindictive, sadistic, perverse, obsessed with filth--but in any case, to see antisemitism as paranoia does not explain why the image should be projected onto Israel.

Paranoia is xenophobic, and in western history Israel has been the Stranger; antisemitism is the comprehensive form of xenophobia, the one which works as a world view.  It works, though the "Jewish Problem" is an antisemitic fantasy, not objectively related to Jewish behavior (no alternate behavior could obviate it), and in spite of the fact that the theory is replete with absurdity.  Anyone who could believe it could believe anything and, indeed, he was credulous, with a boundless credulity encompassing the laughable ("There is strong suspicion that they are already liquidating the foremost of our anti-Marxist leaders by invisible death, possibly by inducing cancer in a Senator's bloodstream by atomic radiation planted in a chair cushion or upholstery") and the horrific:  "This religious ceremony of drinking the blood of an innocent gentile child is basic to the Jew's entire concept of his existence as a parasite, living off the blood of the host.  That is why he refuses to abandon this custom, even though it has brought him close to extinction many times."

Why, if he could believe anything, should it have been this in particular that he chose to believe?  Because given credulity, which is after all not in such short supply, antisemitism is plausible.  Someone said that it could as easily be asserted that redheads cause all misfortune and yes, that indicates the lack of truth in the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy.  It could as easily be asserted--but it could not as easily be believed.  Antisemitism is easily believed because it makes demands on reality which the antisemite finds met beyond expectation; suddenly he sees.  "As one peruses this evil blueprint, this testament by Satan, he is not only impressed by the evil strategies agreed on by the leading Zionists of the world; but he is impressed by how they apply to what is going on at this very moment."

If the incipient antisemite is to find the theory illuminating when he comes upon it, he must find Jews in positions of power (in "purse, press, and politics")--he looks and there they are, where he never noticed them before.  Hypotheses are validated if they explain the inexplicable and lead the observer to new facts; for a certain type of person, antisemitism does this exceedingly well.  The question is not why people define themselves in opposition to Israel but how it is possible for them to do so; plausibility is the key.  How can opposition to Jewry offer sustenance, purpose?  If the paradigm is unrelated to reality, how does it find such extensive reinforcement in reality?
 

In an old joke a Jew, faced with an antisemite's assertion that all trouble is from the Jews, replies, "Yes, the Jews and the bicycle-riders."  The antisemite asks, "Why the bicycle-riders?" and the Jew, in turn, "Why the Jews?"  There is more here than meets the ear:  Dean Gruber described Eichmann, in Jerusalem, as "a bicycle-rider, head bowed low to his superiors, feet furiously trampling his subordinates."  Gruber may have intended to describe a type of authoritarian, but he pinpointed the personality.  The bicycle-rider has conflicting traits:  dominance and subservience.  They are not, among many traits, two contradictory, but his two central traits defined in opposition to each other.  All antisemites are authoritarian and though there are authoritarians who are not antisemites, they all could be and in this sense, the Jew was right both times.  "Why the Jews?" is the right question and "Yes, the Jews and the bicycle-riders," is the right answer.  Trouble is between Jews and bicycle-riders, in the conflict.

We can draw an axis of conflict:

or, in other words:

The opposition is diametric, and Hitler built his world view on it:

 . . .  Nazism may be regarded, in its broader aspects, as a program to eradicate all Jewish influences in the world--ethical, social, religious--and to enthrone in their place their exact antitheses.

Antisemitism is plausible because it is directly out of phase with reality; from that point of view reality is inverted, but in focus.  To find reality we make a diametric inversion along the axis of conflict, toward Israel.  Reversing the axis does not automatically improve it; inverting a perverse dualism makes it palatable, but might not make it less rigid.  And dualism, in any case, is out of favor.  Fortunately, we can broaden the axis, give it scope and subtlety and reach a higher dualism.  One help is from physics, where similarly related paradigms hold positions as nearly-general and as-far-as-we-can-tell, general, explanations of reality.

Physical laws apply to frames of reference, three-dimensional coordinate systems.  Newton's mechanics assumes that the universe itself is such a system, built on and behaving by universal laws, principally gravitation.  Einstein's relativity, based on opposite assumptions about the nature of reality, is the realization that mechanistic laws do not apply to systems in extreme conditions and a set of laws which claim to apply generally, even in extremity.  Especially there, because under normal conditions Einstein's laws reduce to Newton's; mechanics and relativity apply equally well.  As conditions become extreme, their application diverges, relativity corresponding to reality, mechanics moving gradually, then quickly, out of touch--until it is one hundred eighty degrees out of phase.

The divergence is not apparent to the mechanistic observer; as far as he can tell, his principles remain valid.  Newton in an accelerating rocket would see nothing amiss as he neared the speed of light; though his mass would increase and time would slow, this would happen uniformly throughout the system, and he would not know it was happening.  He would begin to behave, however, in ways detrimental to his welfare, and eventually would self-destruct.  Einstein, in a rocket on a parallel course, would see the crisis approaching and try to alert the mechanic, but he would not get through.  To Newton, the warning would be unintelligible.

If mechanism predicts behavior out of phase with reality in extreme conditions, its assumptions are always out of phase, but somehow, under normal conditions the theory is plausible.  In physics, Einstein and Newton are reality and apparency, diametrically opposed paradigms which we cannot test against each other except in extremity.  If Judaism and antisemitism (and authoritarianism in general) were related thus, this would give us relationships between the paradigms and reality.  We would still, however, have only opposition as a relationship between the paradigms.

The second help comes from the joke.  The bicycle-rider himself is a diametric opposition--between dominance and subservience.  If we were to make this opposition a subaxis, it would be at the pole, perpendicular to the primary axis;

Our first impulse is to balance it:

This yields immediate results, though the correlation is, yet, superficial.  The authoritarian personality is an entity with two apparently opposed halves, and so is Israel:  a unity with an apparent opposition between Orthodoxy and Reform.  The oppositions, since there is an axis between them, are opposite:  the tension in the authoritarian is destructive; that in Israel has been creative.

Dominance and subservience are distinct halves of a personality; Orthodoxy and Reform are the poles of a continuum which extends beyond both  The comparison between the subaxes is more precise when we oppose Judaism with authoritarianism--a continuum, an apparent opposition between absolutism and relativism.  Absolutism is the extension beyond physics of the mechanistic world view; it is the assertion that one culture (a social frame of reference) should prevail, one set of norms be applied generally, that the world should become a single coordinate system.  Relativism, in physics, would be the theory that there are no generally applicable laws, only laws for particular systems.  Since this would be a denial of physics, a relativistic physics is unthinkable--and at any rate there is Einstein, who asserts that there are universal laws and provides them:  "The laws of nature preserve their uniformity in all systems when related by the Lorentz transformation."  Beyond physics, it is otherwise; relativism, the assertion that there are no cross-cultural norms, no means of comparison by which we might know that one culture is superior to another--relativism runs rampant, since norms smack of absolutism, which has blood on its hands.

For the absolutist the ideal society is one in which everything is understood, nothing uncertain.  The ideal for the relativist is that nothing should be understood, nor preconceived.  Relativism rants against restraint (but depends on it to rebel against, is not a movement towardanything); absolutism is the science of restraint.  Defined in opposition to each other, they are halves of a unity:  the preoccupation with power.  Manifested culturally, they make a continuum.

In poetics the poles are classicism and romanticism, an emphasis on form and one on freedom.  These are the concerns of art, and works of art are on this continuum, made up of form and freedom in various proportions.  There are, however, two other positions:  symmetry [is beauty] and formlessness [is freedom].  Symmetry sees itself as proform, but is anti-freedom, defined in opposition to freedom.  Formlessness sees itself as profreedom, but is antiform.  The poetic axis is thus:

form		symmetry
freedom		formlessness

Form and symmetry look alike (especially to formlessness, which sees them as one thing, sees no value in form, sees any defense of form as reactionary protection of lifeless symmetry), but since there is a diametric inversion between them, they are opposites.  This is also true of freedom and formlessness (symmetry sees them as identical, sees a move toward freedom as toward anarchy, and tries to nip it in the bud), and the unities form/freedom and symmetry/formlessness.  Along the axis we have the objective equivalence of opposites.

Form and freedom look like opposites, but are halves of an entity:  art.  Symmetry and formlessness seem opposite, but are halves of antiart.  The apparent oppositions are again opposite, creative and destructive.  Across the axis (along each subaxis) we have an apparent opposition within unities.

We can apply the axis to history, the conflict between theism and politics:
 

Judaism		right
humanism		left

The right says power is for the elite, says it selects the best to rule; the left says power is to the people, says it lets the mass make up its mind.  Their states are the same, however (dictatorship by the few) and the extremes are identical:  individual totalitarian rule, national socialism and socialist nationalism.  The conflict is destructive:  Hitlerism/Stalinism was fifty million dead.

The theistic polarity can be defined in similar terms.  Judaism gives absolute autonomy (omnipotence) to God, but puts the weight of responsibility on man, and allows anything to be said to God--on behalf of man.  Humanism gives autonomy to man, and seems to deny God, but its ethic, at its best, is equivalent to the Judaic, that a man should act as if there were a God.

Reform is in neither direction on the political axis, but as that subaxis is enlightened (into democracy, parliamentarianism) by Judaism/humanism, and shifted toward the theistic pole.  The form of the axis still enables the same conflicts along the same lines:  the political struggle and a religious and humanistic critique of the political process.  But the ground rules are different; there is a reduction in the level of force permitted, and a reduction in the courage required for the critique.

What sort of reality does the axis imply?  It is able to accommodate a host of interpretations, reinforce them with complexity; it does not under any conditions (remember Newton in the rocket) force upon an observer the realization that his assumptions are flawed.  Between reality and the observer is the paradigm through which he sees; this puts his world within his mind, makes it his fantasy.  A culture's paradigm is a fantasy held in common, and its commonality gives it, for most members of the community, a givenness they never question.

The logic of the paradigm is simple:  the primacy of concept over observation.  Concept precedes observation and concept implies observation; we don't know what to look for until we know what to look for, and once we know what to look for, we see it.  This is true positively (knowing what to look for, we will see something which is there) and negatively (if we think something is there, we will see it).  Paradigms are lenses which focus reality; we cannot see without one, but each comes equipped with blinders so that it both permits and limits our vision.

Each of the axes is a continuum, so their interrelationship creates a field, itself a continuum with an infinite variety of possible positions, none of which reality will disavow.  But there are within the field areas of apparency, positions whose paradigms will, if hit upon, be reinforced more fully.  Movement toward them feels like a coming to clarity; intellectually, it is a coming to simplicity and consistency--a smaller body of assumptions is able to correlate a broader body of facts.  Einstein described the process in The Evolution of Physics:

. . .  he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions."  Discovery is a deblinding movement by intuition (what Einstein calls "the inspired guess") toward illumination, but that which we suddenly see is likely to be plausible rather than true, a look at reflections of reality rather than reality itself.

We cannot set off toward it, do not know which direction to go, but we know where we would just have been if we got there.  "That nocturnal event" was night of a particular day and as we approached the gates at dusk we would be leaving the Reich or, rather, would be at its midpoint entering its other half, the night side.  The day side has been called a "dream," better suited to aesthetic than historical categories; surreality is a dream of Germanic form whose detail is personal.  The Reich is Hitler's fantasy, daydream and nightmare; surreality and sidereality are concentric.  We can begin our journey in his mind.

We have begun, since it was in most respects typically antisemitic and its divergence from the typical was not toward the particular but the extreme.  A loser in Vienna, the Antisemite saw the light, stumbled onto a plot, went from "softhearted cosmopolitan to out-and-out antisemite."  Still failing, he was saved by the war (time out of joint and in his spite he saw himself as born to set it right).  Defeat was general, and for him this cosmic shame was Jew-wrought.

He closed his mind in Mein Kampf with the fateful, weighted words:  "There is no bargaining with the Jews, only the hard either/or.  I decided to go into politics."  His uniqueness as an antisemite (and he pointed it out himself) was that he was both programmatic thinker and politician.  The politician did what the antisemites had long dreamt of doing, showed the world that they will go as far as they threaten to.  The programmatic thinker defined himself in opposition to Israel, evolved a synthesis he reduced to three assumptions and their implications:  value is in the race, struggle fathers all things, leadership is inborn and decisive.  "The bases of my program are blood, fire, and personality."  Before these attained their "positive" form they were antagonisms to humanism, pacifism, democracy--whose sources he saw as the Jews.

This has been called a "grab-bag of dogmatized third-rate editorials."  The ideology of National Socialism was largely expedient and the movement did center in his person and not his theory, but there is no doubt that Hitler believed to the bitter end that he had found the truth and revealed it.  The certainty is predictable, since the experience had been equivalent to Einstein's; faced with a chaos of contradiction in a world where traditions had been shaken and long-held assumptions destroyed, he had found simple assumptions generally valid.  Their validity is the extreme of the plausibility of antisemitism, Hitler opposing everything and seeing everywhere Jews:
 
 

Thus his synthesis.  His personality was along the same axis . . .