“The term ‘Esau hates Jacob’ symbolizes the world which Jews experience. It is deeply embedded in the Jewish folk tradition.”
C.S. Liebman, “Myth, Tradition and Values in Israeli Society,” 1978.[1]
“Increased rates of paranoid states are commonly found among migratory and immigrant groups.”
Maizel et al., “Folie à trois among two Soviet-Jewish immigrant families to Israel,” 1990.[2]
It surely isn’t coincidental that the two best twentieth-century novels on the theme of paranoia were written by members of the Jewish race. Although differing slightly in approach and direction, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927), with its focus on jealous paranoia, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925), which emphasizes conspiracy-based paranoia, are probably unsurpassed in their dissection and communication of paranoid emotions and associated mental and social disturbance.[3] Both authors, with their schizoid and labyrinthine visions, came to mind recently when I read that Jewish financiers and academics are developing artificial intelligence in order to ceaselessly scan the internet for “hidden antisemitism on social media.” Britain’s The Times reports:
Workers on the Decoding Antisemitism project will write algorithms to find codes such as “Juice” instead of “Jews” and look for anti-Jewish narratives, conspiracy theories and stereotypes that are harder to detect automatically than explicit racism. They hope to develop a tool that can scan websites and social media profiles for implicit antisemitism.
This strange venture is being staffed by a motley of Jews and grant-hungry Europeans, eager for some of the several million Euro donated by the German Jewish Alfred Landecker Foundation, an organisation that is as tragic-comic as its new pet project. The Alfred Landecker Foundation was established recently by the Reimann family, German billionaires who own controlling stakes in Krispy Kreme, Dr Pepper and other major players in the nutrition-devoid, diabetes-inducing goy-feed market. The Reimann’s will initially support the Foundation with an astonishing 250 million euros over the next ten years. The family is not Jewish, but, in what appears to be a new “reparations” tactic to fill the coffers of Jewish “defense bodies,” were subjected last year to what amounts to an international public relations blackmail by several influential Jewish journalists and organisations who highlighted the family’s National Socialist past. Devra First, for example, a Jewish journalist at the Boston Globe, led one of the early attacks with an article titled, “I found out Nazi money is behind my favorite coffee. Should I keep drinking it?”
The New York Times later reported that the campaign resulted in Reimann employees (there are over 180,000 globally) reporting that customers accused them of “working for Nazis.” A boycott campaign then followed, after which the family meekly announced that it was “relieved to have the truth come out” and that it would make large donations on behalf of Jews. In the end, the Reimann’s renamed their family foundation after a Jew “murdered by the Nazis,” handed over control of the Foundation to an “independent” (mostly Jewish) council, and promised it would henceforth be dedicated to fund projects that “honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and of Nazi terror.”
The international organized Jewish community thus found itself, after relatively little effort, with a ready-made, lavishly funded vehicle for their interests. A new website for the Alfred Landecker Foundation says its mission is to educate “about the Holocaust and the terrible price that is paid when intolerance and bigotry reign.” This extremely wealthy foundation now professes that it will employ its considerable financial arsenal against “populism and nationalism.” The Decoding Antisemitism project is merely the latest surreal twist in this rather sordid tale.
What exactly “Decoding Antisemitism” will, or can, achieve remains to be seen. The most that one can say at present is that it’s part of a larger problem. As Gilad Atzmon recently asked, “What is it that causes some to constantly measure how much they are hated?” Jews now not only constantly measure how much they are hated, in the form of the usual surveys and so on, but also dedicate themselves to the innovation of new techniques of measurement. The “Decoding Antisemitism” project is, by any estimation, a form of technologized eavesdropping. And, like most eavesdropping endeavors, it is unlikely to bring much in the way of relief or profit to the eavesdropper. As my mother used to say, “eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves.” Jews fully expect to be hated, and they devote significant resources to proving it to themselves and others, before declaring that “something” must be done about it. This “something,” aside from pushing for mass migration and censorship, inevitably involves further surveys or social surveillance, and thus the cycle of expectation, confirmation, and renewed determination continues. The key to the cyclical nature of this process is the Jewish expectation of irrational and inexplicable hatred from the outsider. In other words, Jewish paranoia plays a significant role in the seemingly endless provocation of anti-Semitism. Paranoia among Jews is therefore surely worthy of some consideration.
Understanding Jewish Paranoia
Gaining an evidence-based understanding of mental pathology among Jews is surprisingly difficult. Victor Sanua has noted the fact that although “mental illness among Jews has been a subject of interest and controversy for centuries,” the “dearth of studies on the mental illness of Jews is striking when compared to the number of Jewish professionals in the field.”[4] The reluctance of Jewish psychologists and psychiatrists to turn an analytical gaze inwards corresponds with the general pattern of Jewish interpretations of anti-Semitism, which is overwhelmingly portrayed as originating independently of Jews and their behavior. Jews are notable for their strong aversion to considerations of personal or group-level wrongdoing, and the fact that there are few studies of Jewish mental health is also confirmation of some of the findings of those studies that have taken place; namely, that Jews score significantly lower on guilt-associated pathologies, especially those involving self-criticism and suicide.[5] In this area, Jews more closely resemble populations with higher levels of psychopathy, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian sub-continent, rather than populations with higher levels of anxiety and conscientiousness like Europeans and East Asians.[6]
Open hostility to the idea that Jews are particularly prone to certain mental illnesses is often conveyed within Jewish academia and psychiatry, something that further stifles discussion of the subject and the gathering of evidence. Sander Gilman, for example, an historian of medicine, has accused Jewish psychiatrists who studied Jews and mental illness of being self-hating Jews and complicit in the advancement of anti-Semitism:
In differentiating himself from the Jew as madman, the Jewish psychiatrist reified his own tenuous position in the power structure of medicine. The doctor and the patient are not to be confused, especially not by the doctor. The myth of the madness of the Jew can serve as a means of exploring how groups react to rhetoric aimed at them from their primary reference group.[7]
Although presented in Marxist terminology, what Gilman is essentially arguing is that Jewish psychiatrists betrayed their racial origins by producing studies that agreed with what Gilman believes to be little more than racist tropes — the idea, current from the 1860s to the present day, that certain mental illnesses are more prevalent among Jews than other populations. The major problem with Gilman’s 1984 study is that it fails to explore even a fraction of the relevant literature, simply making the assertion that the early twentieth-century studies were prejudiced and proceeding from that to a sweeping narrative of internalized anti-Semitism.
This is not to say that certain historical medical beliefs about the tendency of Jews toward some mental illnesses were always rooted in reality. For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was commonly believed that Jews were more predisposed to schizophrenia than Europeans, something that scholarship had reversed entirely by the 1930s.[8] (In 2013 a genetic mutation was found that makes Ashkenazi Jews more prone to schizophrenia compared to other Ashkenazi Jews but this does not imply that Ashkenazi Jews are more prone to schizophrenia in general.) Misinterpretation, or poor cultural contextualization of data, has also led to the development of new tropes. For example, much of the scientific literature on an alleged link between Jews and hypochondriasis has been based on army recruitment data, with Jews and Italians noted as much more likely than Irish, British, or German recruits to report apparently non-existent illnesses or to exaggerate pain or incapacity.[9] Hypochondriasis can hardly be considered an appropriate diagnosis in such a context, however, given the well-known, and deeply historical, tendency of some young men to wish to avoid military service through simple malingering. As discussed in Derek Penslar’s Princeton-published Jews and the Military, Jews have a very long tradition of malingering in order to evade serving in the militaries of host nations, including acts of self-mutilation. Thus the link in the psychiatric literature between Jews and hypochondriasis based on army recruitment data is extremely naive.[10]
What does emerge from the existing literature on the mental health of Jews is a rather clear tendency towards forms of manic-depressive psychosis, a tendency toward paranoid siege mentality at the group level, and a generally very poor level of psychological adjustment to living among Whites. Ball and Clare (1990) found that Jews “are prone to suffer from affective disorders,” and added that “the possibility of a genetic contribution to the genesis of these illnesses must be considered.”[11] Halpern’s very early study of Jews in Palestine (1938) also found manic-depressive psychosis and paranoia to among the most marked manifestations of mental pathology among Jews.[12] Cooklin (1983) noted, like Ball and Clare, that there were significant differences in manic-depressive psychosis between Jews and non-Jews, and also made the argument that this difference was most probably genetic in origin.[13] In 1999, Kohn et al. responded to counter-arguments from individuals like Sander Gilman who advanced arguments that there was no scientific basis for the belief that Jews differed from non-Jews in terms of mental health. After employing a historical review and meta-analysis, Kohn et al. demonstrated conclusively that Jews had at least a “20% greater risk for affective disorders than non-Jews.”[14] In the recently-published Anti-Semitism and Psychiatry (2020), Loewenthal and Marcus add that “there is evidence that Ashkenazi Jews are more likely than others to possess genetic variations that may or may not predispose to heritable psychiatric syndromes such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.”[15]
Some of the scientific literature also provides greater insight into the tendency of Jews towards conspiracy paranoia. This is certainly relevant because the received wisdom about the nature of anti-Semitism has, since the late 1950s, essentially embodied paranoid Jewish thinking about the conspiratorial nature of out-groups. A particularly interesting aspect of the work of the Frankfurt School is the way this thinking on the part of Jews was reflected back onto a supposedly pathological out-group culture. In fact, as Jay (1980) notes, in such works as Prophets of Deceit and The Authoritarian Personality, the Frankfurt School presented Jews as victims of “paranoid projection.” The work of the Frankfurt School stunned many socialist contemporaries because of the manner in which it abandoned classical Marxist theory in favor of an almost obsessional dedication to psychologizing the out-group:
The generally psychologistic orientation of the work as a whole led some observers to believe that the Frankfurt School had abandoned its Marxist past entirely. Moreover, nowhere in the work was an attempt made to see anti-Semitism in essentially class terms.[16]
The available scientific literature strongly suggests that projection in fact operated inversely in this instance, with maladjusted Jews constructing paranoid narratives about non-Jews, in this case, European Americans. Rinder’s (1963) exploration of psychological adjustment in American populations, for example, found that Jewish “assimilation” only worsened the neuroses and mental health of Jews:
Every Jewish generation group scored lower in adjustment than the matched Gentile group on obtained Rorschach scores. The inner maladjustment of American Jews, on the basis of this evidence, seems to be greater than that of their Gentile peers, and the greater the Americanization, the greater the maladjustment.[17]
Some of this Jewish maladjustment is expressed in what Maizel et al. (1990) describe as “socially shared psychopathology,” with the additional comment that “increased rates of paranoid states are commonly found among migratory and immigrant groups.”[18] Jews have been noted as a unique “middleman minority” population that continues to behave culturally, economically, and politically, as if in a permanent state of transience. This is precisely the fertile context for socially shared psychopathology to develop.
Jews are also strongly ethnocentric, and their behavior in a diaspora condition corresponds closely with what Bar-Tal et al. (1992) found in their study of siege mentality among Israelis.[19] In this study, it was discussed that paranoid siege mentality emerges when “a significant and influential part of the group believes that outsiders have intentions to do wrong to or inflict harm on their group. … the crucial focus of the belief is on the rest of the world or out-groups.[20] This dovetails very well with the fact that Jews score very low on self-criticism or guilt-based emotions, and associated behaviors like suicide. This critical focus on the rest of the world or out-groups also explains the very strong reaction of Jews towards any sign of self-criticism within the group (e.g., accusations of “Jewish self-hatred”), and further explains the extraordinary tendency of Jews to obsessively develop theories psychologizing or pathologizing host populations, even in times of relatively peaceful co-existence, and to engage in endless monitoring of the attitudes of the out-group.
Paranoid siege mentality beliefs have serious behavioral implications, which in turn have very serious repercussions for intergroup relations. Bar-Tal et al. remark that “individuals and groups behave in ways which are consistent with their beliefs. … They may take drastic measures, even out of the range of the accepted norms for the intergroup behaviors, to prevent possible danger and avert the threat.”[21] Such drastic measures are clearly in evidence throughout Jewish history where, in bids to obtain maximum profit or security, Jews have engaged in high-risk aggression towards European masses (e.g., requesting harsh punishments from monarchs, assisting enemy armies). These measures have only ever been successful for as long as Jews could maintain strong links with a powerful elite. In times of weakened reigns or transitional stages at the top level, Jewish fortunes have suffered significantly, in the form of outbursts of violence or expulsions.
That paranoid siege mentality is a driver of the cyclical nature of anti-Semitism is more or less suggested implicitly within the scientific literature. Sanua (1992), for example, found the psychological profile of Jewish political radicals in the United States to be “paranoid-masochistic” with “the expectation of victimization seen as justifying aggressive acting out.”[22] The trend was also noted even among some Jewish psychoanalysts, with Stanley Rothman and Howard Stein suggesting that Jews, especially aggressive Left-leaning Jews, were beholden to group fantasies and had “developed a shared repetition compulsion rooted in the need for punishment.”[23]
Especially interesting in light of the recent move by Jewish groups to create software in order to monitor even the most nuanced of discussions of Jews on social media, Bar-Tal et al. remark that a key feature of paranoid siege mentality is the development of “special sensitivity to cues indicating negative intentions emitted by out-groups.”[24] There is probably no ethnic group on earth that has so finely developed its sensitivity to cues indicating negative intentions omitted by out-groups than the Jews.
Equally important to note is that this phenomenon is not indicative of low self-esteem on the part of the paranoid group. In fact, the trend again is towards low self-criticism and psychopathic levels of high self-esteem. Bar-Tal et al. explain:
Not surprisingly, Siege Mentality is related to Ethnocentrism. The belief that the world has negative intentions towards the group indicates its evil, malice, and aggressiveness. In this context, the group not only feels victimized and self-righteous, but also superior to the out-group.
Conclusion
One of the remarkable aspects of anti-Semitism is its repetitive nature. The surveyed literature offers some valuable insight into the etiological factors of anti-Semitism, especially the ways in which supremacist Jewish paranoia about anti-Semitism justifies, and operates in tandem with, aggressive behaviors against out-groups. This aggression then provokes real anti-Semitism, which consequently offers further impetus for the “shared repetition compulsion” to continue. Jews unquestionably differ from non-Jews in terms of their psychological profile, a fact that is increasingly being attributed to genetic differences, and they appear to remain significantly psychologically maladjusted to life among Whites. The continued dedication of “significant and influential” Jews to the close monitoring of out-groups, in the form of surveys, software, and government surveillance, and the intense involvement of Jewish groups in restricting the freedoms of host populations, suggests that Jewish paranoid siege mentality is in fact worsening, even entering the phase of “drastic measures” in an effort to obtain what is perhaps an unobtainable level of psychological comfort and security. Certainly these measures go “out of the range of the accepted norms for the intergroup behaviors.” A reasonable prediction, based on historical precedent, would therefore be that the further acceleration of this trend, and the ongoing neglect of the real causes of anti-Semitism, would lead to genuine intergroup conflict and the continuance of the cycle of Jewish history.
[1] C.S. Liebman, “Myth, Tradition and Values in Israeli Society,” Midstream, 24 (1978), 44-53, 44.
[2] Maizel S, Knobler HY, Herbstein R., “Folie à trois among two Soviet-Jewish immigrant families to Israel,” British Journal of Psychiatry (1990), 157, 290-292, 290.
[3] Proust’s father was apparently native French. His Jewish mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was a descendant of wealthy Alsatian moneylenders. Harold Bloom comments that Proust’s “love for his Gentile father was real, but his passion for his Jewish mother was overwhelming.” See H. Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 369. Proust’s Jewish identity was complex but strong. See I, Ebert, “Le Premier Dreyfusard”: Jewishness in Marcel Proust,” The French Review, 67(2), 196-217; J. Hyde, “Proust, His Jews and His Jewishness” The French Review, 39(6), 837-848; and J. Brami, “Strange Jewishness: Essay on the Treatment of Jewish Identity in Proust,” in A. Benhaim (ed), The Strange M. Proust (New York: Routledge, 2009).
[4] Sanua, Victor D. “Mental Illness and Other Forms of Psychiatric Deviance Among Contemporary Jewry 1.” Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 29, no. 3 (January 1992): 197–233., 197-8.
[5] Ball, R. A., and Clare, A. W. “Symptoms and Social Adjustment in Jewish Depressives.” British Journal of Psychiatry 156, no. 3 (1990): 379–83, 379, 381-2. Israel has historically had a very low suicide rate, in contrast to nations like Japan which have a culture high in self-criticism. Sanua (1992) found that Jews in Britain had a suicide rate roughly half that of British non-Jews.
[6] Lynn, R. “Racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality,” Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 32, Issue 2, 2002, 273-316.
[7] Gilman, Sander L. “Jews and mental illness: Medical metaphors, anti‐semitism, and the Jewish response.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 20, no. 2 (1984): 150-159, 158.
[8] See, Halpern, Lipman. “Some data of the psychic morbidity of Jews and Arabs in Palestine.” American Journal of Psychiatry 94, no. 5 (1938): 1215-1222, 1218. A survey of the literature found that international rates of schizophrenia (from highest) were predominantly northern European: Ireland, Norway, Scotland, Switzerland, England, Sweden, NY State, Denmark, Germany, Russia, and Finland.
[9] See, Ball, R. A., and A. W. Clare. “Symptoms and Social Adjustment in Jewish Depressives.” British Journal of Psychiatry 156, no. 3 (1990): 379–83, 381.
[10] Penslar, Derek J. Jews and the Military: A History. Princeton University Press, 2015. Malingering and service-avoidance are discussed on pages 11, 27, 29, 30, 31, 38, 45, 46, 48, 256.
[11] Ball, R. A., and A. W. Clare. “Symptoms and Social Adjustment in Jewish Depressives.” British Journal of Psychiatry 156, no. 3 (1990): 379–83, 379, 381-2.
[12] Halpern, Lipman. “Some data of the psychic morbidity of Jews and Arabs in Palestine.” American Journal of Psychiatry 94, no. 5 (1938): 1215-1222, 1220.
[13] Cooklin, Ruth S., A. Ravindran, and M. W. P. Carney. “The Patterns of Mental Disorder in Jewish and Non-Jewish Admissions to a District General Hospital Psychiatric Unit: Is Manic-Depressive Illness a Typically Jewish Disorder?” Psychological Medicine 13, no. 1 (1983): 209–12, 211.
[14] Kohn, Robert, Itzhak Levav, Stacey Zolondek, and Michaele Richter. “Affective Disorders among Jews: A Historical Review and Meta-Analysis.” History of Psychiatry 10, no. 38 (June 1999): 245–67, 261.
[15] Loewenthal, K. M. & Marcus, B, “Jewish Stereotypes in Psychiatric Diagnosis and Treatment,” in Moffic, H.S. (ed) Anti-Semitism and Psychiatry: Recognition, Prevention, and Interventions (New York: Springer, 2020), 186.
[16] Jay, Martin. “The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory’s Analysis of Anti-Semitism.” New German Critique, no. 19 (1980): 137-49, 141-2.
[17] Rinder, I D. “Mental health of American Jewish urbanites: a review of literature and predictions.” The International journal of social psychiatry vol. 9 (1963): 104-9, 108.
[18] Maizel S, Knobler HY, Herbstein R., “Folie à trois among two Soviet-Jewish immigrant families to Israel,” British Journal of Psychiatry (1990), 157, 290-292, 290.
[19] Bar-Tal, Daniel, and Dikla Antebi. “Beliefs about Negative Intentions of the World: A Study of the Israeli Siege Mentality.” Political Psychology 13, no. 4 (1992): 633-45.
[20] Ibid, 634.
[21] Ibid, 643.
[22] Sanua, Victor D. “Mental Illness and Other Forms of Psychiatric Deviance Among Contemporary Jewry 1.” Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 29, no. 3 (January 1992): 197–233., 212.
[23] See, Stein, Howard F. “Judaism and the group-fantasy of martyrdom: The psychodynamic paradox of survival through persecution.” The Journal of Psychohistory 6, no. 2 (1978): 151; Rothman, Stanley (1978). “Group Fantasies and Jewish Radicalism.”Journal of Psychohistory 6:211–240.
[24] Bar-Tal, Daniel, and Dikla Antebi. “Beliefs about Negative Intentions of the World: A Study of the Israeli Siege Mentality.” Political Psychology 13, no. 4 (1992): 633-45, 642.
