My woodwork teacher in a Johannesburg high school, Mr Richards, a small, blond-haired man with a ginger moustache, occasionally admonished the boys (mostly gentile) not to complain ‘like little Jewboys’. So too did his fellow manual training teacher, Mr Swart (Captain Swart in another life), a rugged Afrikaner. Otherwise, I was blissfully unaware of antisemitism among the teaching staff.

At primary school I remember one little boy yelling ‘bloody Jewboy’ as he cycled past me, but that was unusual. Or perhaps I was unusually innocent, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, antisemitism was like a well-fed crocodile, lurking out of sight in the watery depth. Somehow, I knew that I had to keep my Jewish identity hidden from my predominantly gentile friends.

Today, the very word ‘Jew’ has a faintly pejorative ring to it. The plural, ‘Jews’, is slightly more acceptable, but it is still considered by gentiles more delicate to refer to ‘a Jewish person’, or ‘the Jewish people’. The term ‘Jew’ has even crept into the vernacular as a verb. A man in one of my therapy groups once informed the group that he had been ‘Jewed’ out of something, meaning ‘cheated’. Confronted about this, he pleaded innocence to the charge of antisemitism, claiming that the term was common parlance in his part of the country.

Charles Dickens helped to popularize the myth of the cunning, thieving Jew with his vivid portrayal of Fagin. The pages of Oliver Twist are littered with references to ‘the Jew’, and even though Dickens later recanted and offered by way of atonement a benign, insipid Jewish character in ‘Our Mutual Friend’, a novel which nobody has read, he could not erase the powerful image of the hideous, criminal Jew which he had earlier created. Later efforts to jollify Fagin as the all-singing, all-dancing Jew we know from the musical ‘Oliver’, did nothing to dispel Dickens’s original incarnation of the archetypal Jew as an evil being.

In mitigation, Dickens claimed that he knew some good Jews and that it was wrong to generalize about bad Jews. He was evidently an early purveyor of the disclaimer that ‘some of my best friends are Jews’.This implies that, while the majority of Jews may not be very nice, there are some Jews who have somehow escaped the taint of their people and are deemed worthy of friendship. Nowadays, however, the irony behind the assertion has become so blatant that only boneheaded antisemites deploy it.

Educated antisemites would find no shortage of euphemisms and circumlocutions with which to smear Jews. In posh British circles, for instance, the term ‘Hebrews’ was current at one stage, as was ‘the chosen race’, spoken in mocking tones. A British diplomat of my acquaintance, apparently unaware of my own Jewish identity, remarked that an ill-mannered, conspicuously Jewish neighbor of his ‘should have known better, considering how long those people have been in our country’ and a British Member of Parliament once hinted at a senior politician’s Jewish identity by referring to him as ‘having something of the dark arts about him’.

It was once thought, optimistically, that with the establishment of the State of Israel, antisemitism would disappear. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. If anything, it has sprouted even more vigorously, like dragons’ teeth. The term ‘Zionist’ has displaced ‘Jew’ as the supreme term of vilification in the lexicon of antisemites, whose ranks, previously comprising mainly neo-Nazis and fascists, have been swollen by Muslim extremists and left-wing ideologues.

Antisemitism, along with other forms of prejudice, is endemic in the human race. All we can hope for is that the present tsunami of worldwide antisemitism will recede, and the best we can do whenever we encounter it is to call it out. Naming the sinister language in which it is often expressed and exposing the innuendos which often disguise it are an important part of the task.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)