Perhaps antisemitism does not return because we fail to learn from history. Perhaps it returns because, eventually, we forget why we learned the lesson.

I have been thinking about a disturbing pattern. It is not quite a theory, and certainly not a mathematical one. History is too messy for that. But when looking at the history of Jews, particularly in Europe, something resembling a cycle begins to appear: hatred, persecution, catastrophe, shock, remorse, reparation, human rights, integration, assimilation, Jewish success and visibility, resentment, and eventually hatred again.

At first I wondered whether there was something close to a century-long rhythm to it. There are enough dates to tempt us into seeing one: the massacres of Jewish communities during the Crusades; the expulsions from England, France and Spain; the massacres of the seventeenth century; the Russian pogroms; and ultimately the Holocaust. But the dates do not cooperate neatly enough. England expelled its Jews in 1290. France did so repeatedly, including in 1394. Spain followed in 1492. Eastern European Jewry suffered devastating violence in the seventeenth century. Pogroms swept parts of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then came the catastrophe that makes every comparison inadequate: the Holocaust. There is no hundred-year clock ticking underneath Jewish history. Yet I increasingly wonder whether there is a mechanism, and that may be more important than a cycle.

From catastrophe to integration

Consider what happens after a society witnesses the consequences of extreme hatred. There is horror, shame and the realization that boundaries once considered unthinkable were crossed, usually after years in which smaller boundaries had already been crossed. After the Holocaust, this process occurred on an unprecedented scale. Six million European Jews had been murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators. Antisemitism had not merely produced discrimination or sporadic violence; it had become a central component of an industrialized project of extermination. Europe emerged from the war physically destroyed and morally traumatized.

Three years later, in 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaiming that human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and establishing a framework that would influence subsequent international human-rights law. Something profound had happened. The world had looked into an abyss and attempted to build barriers around it. Antisemitism became socially toxic in much of the West. Racial theories were discredited. Explicit discrimination gradually became unacceptable. Jews entered universities, professions, politics, science, business, culture and public life on terms that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.

This was an extraordinary achievement, but there is a paradox hidden inside that achievement: success can gradually erase the memory of why protection became necessary. The generation that experiences catastrophe does not require a history lesson; it remembers. Its children grow up among people who remember, and their children inherit stories. Eventually, however, we reach a generation for whom catastrophe is no longer memory at all but history. The photographs, museums, ceremonies and books remain, but the emotional knowledge changes. This is not particular to Jews or to the Holocaust. It is simply what time does.

Protections created because a minority was once terribly vulnerable can then begin to look unnecessary precisely because those protections worked. The formerly excluded minority becomes integrated; integration creates opportunity; opportunity produces achievement; achievement produces visibility; and visibility can eventually be mistaken for power. The question subtly changes from “How could society have done this to the Jews?” to........

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