The Pattern

What They Say About the Jews

Photo by Timur Shakerzianov on Unsplash

This week’s EconTalk is with David Deutsch, the distinguished physicist at Oxford University. Deutsch has a theory about how the world looks at Jews which he calls The Pattern.

The conversation was recorded at the end of November, weeks before the hunting of Jews on Bondi Beach in Australia, so that tragedy does not get mentioned. But it was hard not to think about what happened in Australia when I re-listened to the conversation this morning.

What is The Pattern? It’s not Jew-hatred or what is sometimes misleadingly and antiseptically called antisemitism. The Pattern is an observation about what people say and feel about Jews and say and feel about violence against Jews. As Deutsch says in our conversation:

The Pattern is a moral perversion which takes the form of compulsively legitimizing (not enacting) hurting Jews for being Jews.

He says that almost everyone is subject to this urge, that it ebbs and flows over time, and that only rarely does it result in the enactment of actual violence against Jews although that sporadic violence is often horrific. But the essence of The Pattern is simple: people excuse and legitimize hurting Jews. They do so especially when actual violence does break out—people on the sidelines who might never actually participate in a pogrom, say, against their Jewish neighbors, will speak up in defense of the pogrom’s legitimacy.

As you’ll hear if you listen to our conversation, I find this thesis quite disturbing. Deutsch has no explanation for why this pattern of behavior exists. On the surface, it seems simplistic to the point of almost a tautology. What is the explanation for why so many people big and small say it’s OK to hurt Jews or that Jews deserve any violence that comes their way? Well, there’s a syndrome people are subject to that we don’t understand that causes people to act that way. This is not so satisfying to a social scientist or even a real one.

And yet.

In the weeks since we recorded our conversation, I find myself haunted by Deutsch’s idea. There’s more to it than just this tendency people have and have had throughout history. Deutsch argues that much of what people say to justify hurting Jews (they killed Jesus, they’re too powerful or rich, they stabbed our country in the back in WWI and so on) are just rationalizations, not causes. Causation actually runs in the other direction: because people want to legitimize hurting Jews, they will find reasons to justify that harm. Deutsch also argues that when The Pattern conflicts with other cultural norms, the Pattern can intensify. This explains why the Enlightenment didn’t end the hatred of Jews or the legitimizing of violence against the Jews—it made it worse, at least for some time.

I also have to concede, that while I find Deutsch’s thesis uncomfortable (really-at some level, attitudes towards the Jews are outside the bounds of rational discourse?), thinking about the Pattern for the last few weeks has brought me some comfort. As I discuss in the conversation, I know too many seemingly normal people who relentlessly post ugly claims about Israel and the Jews. How did they come to be seemingly obsessed with Israel and the Jews? Why do they never retract any statement of condemnation, even when it turns out that the original statement isn’t true? Why did seemingly normal people gleefully tear down posters of hostages including posters of children who were kidnapped? Why do so many people accept statements from Hamas about what has happened in Gaza when they know that Hamas has an incentive to distort the truth?

Why did October 7 lead to an outpouring of justification for what happened on that day? Why did the condemnation of Israel begin before the military response of Israel in Gaza? Why do so few people condemn Hamas for what has happened in Gaza? Or Egypt for not opening its border with Gaza? Why do so few people condemn oppression that is happening elsewhere in the world (No Jews? No news.) How do you make sense of Jews being hunted like animals while trying to light a Hanukkah menorah?

Maybe Deutsch is on to something.

The comfort comes from imagining that the rise in Jew-hatred and violence against Jews in recent years, isn’t because we don’t have enough anti-racism workshops or because Jews and Israelis haven’t done a good enough job making the case in their defense. There’s something deeper going on.

As Deutsch and I discuss in the conversation, this doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time to defend the rights of Jews to live and worship peacefully or to defend Israel’s right to exist or defend itself. But it does mean that you shouldn’t be surprised when what seem to be compelling arguments fall on deaf ears.

I have never liked the idea that Jew-hatred is inevitable, that it is a virus of some sort that always returns. Surely, after the Holocaust, the world’s attitudes towards Jews had changed. I was naive. I have been lucky to live most of my life in a time when Jews were treated, at least in the United States, like everyone else. I realize now that my lifetime experience was an aberration rather than the new normal.

Deutsch and I also discussed how there many non-Jews who do not fit the Pattern. They have stood up and continue to stand up for Jews and for the right of Israel to both exist and defend itself. I am so grateful to them. After I spoke with Deutsch, I emailed him and asked him why some people love Jews and defend Jews against the Pattern. His response: they have moral ideas that are true, and those conflict with the Pattern. in particular, Anglosphere ideas are poison to the Pattern. So it became a genteel version of itself that was compatible with not persecuting Jews.”

David Deutsch is an atheist. I am a religious Jew. There is a strong theme in the Jewish Bible that Jews will not have it easy once the Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed and Jews are scattered throughout the world. For a believer, it is hard not to wonder whether the Pattern is part of the mystical fabric of the way things are. And just as there is this seemingly non-rational way much of the world has of seeing the Jew as worthy of being harmed simply for being a Jew, there is an equally non-rational way the Jew throughout history has stayed connected to the Jewish family and the Jewish religion despite the persistence of the Pattern and the violence that at times comes along with it.

Just as Jew-hatred and the pattern of justifying violence against the Jew has risen since October 7 and spread way beyond Israelis to the wider diaspora, so has the interest and commitment and connection to Judaism and Israel grown among Jews and those who gladly stand by our side. This too makes no sense. Why embrace something that endangers you and your children? The world is a mysterious place and for some reason or no reason at all, Jews are often at the center of these mysteries.