Anti-Semitism is commonly regarded as a variety of racism, but the prolific English historian Paul Johnson suggests that it should be seen as a kind of intellectual disease, fundamentally irrational and highly infectious. It exerts great self-destructive force, Johnson wrote in a notable 2005 essay, severely harming countries and societies that engage in it. In a pattern that has recurred so predictably that he dubbed it a historical law, nations that make Jewish life untenable condemn themselves to decline and weakness. For example, Spains expulsion of the Jews in the 1490s, and its subsequent witchhunt of the converted New Christians who remained behind, meant a loss of Spanish financial and managerial talent at the very moment the New World was being opened up to lucrative colonization. That had a profoundly deleterious impact, Johnson argued, plunging the hitherto vigorous Spanish economy into inflation and long-term decline, and the government into repeated bankruptcy. More than 500 years later, Spain — where, incidentally, Valls was born and lived until his teens — still regrets that self-inflicted wound, and has looked for ways to rectify it.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 12:09:17 +0000
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