Keeping the long hate alive:

Anti-Semitism from the perspective of neuropsychology and evolutionary psychology

Peter Dan Long Island University peterdan13@hotmail.com

Paper presented at the ASN World ConventionColumbia University, 24-26 April 2014

Please do not cite without the author’s permission© Peter Dan

Abstract

The present paper analyzes the phenomenon of the persistence of anti-Semitism from the perspective of neuropsychology and evolutionary psychology. Since eusociality has played such a crucial role in the evolution of the human race, humans have built-in defenses against the use of violence. The areas of the brain that control social behavior and enforce the conformity with moral rules, located in the lateral prefrontal cortex are the newest and most complex brain structures. Yet anti-Semitism very successfully bypasses all the safeguards against the use of violence and makes discrimination and aggression against Jews a morally justifiable, even praiseworthy act. The paper analyzes the mechanisms through which anti-Semitism and by extension all prejudice succeeds in defusing our defenses, as well as the reasons for its evolution and adaptability. Key factors in this process are the strategies employed to avoid cognitive dissonance and distress, the need to explain and justify our own behavior, the need to predict the behavior of others, the brain’s tendency to use routines whenever possible, the brain’s use of narratives as well as the consequences of the awareness of our own mortality. The examples used in the text focus mostly on anti-Semitism in modern Romania in the context of the transition towards an open society, with emphasis on academic anti-Semitism.

Key Words: anti-Semitism, prefrontal cortex, stereotype, theory of mind, cognitive and dynamic unconscious, symbolic immortality, mortality salience, defense mechanisms, cognitive dissonance, psychic numbing, doubling, self-deception, negationism, ketman

Anti-Semitism has been described by Carol Iancu (2003) as “the longest hate,” and indeed it has existed in one form or another since before the advent of Christianity. Indeed, as Josephus wrote in “Against Apion:” The Egyptians began the slander against us.” (1:223, quoted by Niremberg, 2013,p 13) Due to the enmity of the Egyptians and later the Alexandrine Greeks, the anti-Jewish views that had crystalized by the beginning of the Common Era contained familiar themes such as “The Jews are the enemies of all the Gods” and “the enemies of all mankind” who “rule brutally” and have “”practices…which are diametrically opposed to those of all other peoples.” (Niremberg, 2013) Indeed,the stability of these beliefs is remarkable. At the core of anti-Semitic belief system is a small number of memes or “thoughtstopping clichés” (Lifton 1989) which must be accepted as axioms.Among them: that all Jews are bad by nature and share a number of incorrigible negative traits, that they are a threat to the purity of blood, that they are secretive and clannish, that theyconspire to seek world domination and use their disproportionate influence to seek power and monopolize the limited resources oftheir host country.

From the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, enduring processes such as anti-Semitism are linked to behaviors which offered an advantage to the groups that developed and adopted them. Edward O Wilson (2012) has proposed that eusociality is oneof the deciding factors that gave an evolutionary advantage to the human species. Living in small groups implies having rules which govern social behavior. The most general of these are the prohibition of incest, the prohibition of killing in-group members and rules regarding the care and raising of children. These constitute the core of a developing set of values which areinternalized by all group members leading to a shared morality. If Wilson’s assumptions are correct and eusocial behavior does indeed play such an essential role in the evolution of humans, this may provide an explanation as to why relatively large and new structures of the brain are dedicated to the management of social behavior. At the same time the link between one of the most powerful factors enhancing group cohesion -namely religion- and anti- Semitism may explain, at least in part, its

persistence. This is in fact the premise of the present paper: that the adaptive behaviors that characterized successful groups were facilitated by the development of brain structures in the neo-cortex that are dedicated to the control of interpersonal behavior and the maintenance of identity, and that the persistenceof anti-Semitism is a by-product of its connections to the behaviors that enhanced within group adhesion and regulated withinand between group competition.

At the individual level anti- Semitism is a complex cognitive-emotional structure linking the individual to cultural and societal values and playing a role in identity formation and maintenance, the management of aggressive behavior, interpersonalrelations and general worldview. Jews and Judaism have been the negative models used by Jesus, the evangelists and Paul to differentiate and define their own identity. At the conscious level there is significant cognitive dissonance at the core of Christianity created by conflicts around the role and acceptance of the Jews in the new faith. Anti-Semitism and the increasingly dominant religion of Christianity became fused because anti-Semitism is the device through which the cognitive dissonance is silenced and internal consistency is restored. The pre-and unconscious construct that mediates the relationship between belief and prejudice is the autobiographical Self (Damasio, 2010),whose output is fairly fluid and its core, the sense of identity, whose output is much more coherent and consistent, both longitudinally and across situations. Because one’s faith is an important component of identity and anti-Semitism is an integral part of Christianity, for a believer the sense of identity and anti-Semitism are intrinsically connected. As Sartre (1962) stated, anti-Semitism is a matter of self definition. Throughout anti-Semitism’s evolutions from the religious type to the racial type and to the ideological type, it remained always connected to essential components of identity: religious identity, ethnic identity, national and cultural identity.

Neuroimaging studies (Harris, 2006, 2009) support the linkagebetween religion and identity indicating that “religious thinkingis more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation and cognitive conflict in both believers and

nonbelievers, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliantupon memory retrieval networks.”

According to Harris et al. (2009), asking religious subjects if they agreed or disagreed with religious statements activated areas involved in the maintaining of identity and managing social behavior (the prefrontal cortex) and areas which help distinguish between one’s own and others motivations and wishes ( the temporal-parietal junction) Norenzayan and Hansen (2006) found that when faced with an increased awareness of theirown mortality (mortality salience), subjects reacted by increasing their adherence to in-group (ethnic, religious, cultural) rules and worldview. They conclude that the increased reliance on faith reduces anxiety. Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon et al. (1990), found that in condition of increased mortality salience, Christian subjects tended to evaluate Jews more negatively, and tended to evaluate those who held a similar worldview more positively, while at the same time seeing those who disagreed more negatively. Jong et al. (2013) studied the effect of mortality reminders on explicit and implicit religious beliefs and concluded that “mortality salience led to implicit religious belief, regardless of prior religiosity.” This would tend to indicate that the anti-Semitic value system, which is an essential component of explicit or implicit Christianity is automatically activated by the perception of threat, be it realistic or not.

Anthropologist Robert Redfield (1953) argued that we structure our social world using two essential dichotomies: We/They and Human/Nonhuman. Redfield referred to the small groupsof early human evolution; however at the individual level the Me /Non Me dichotomy may precede the We/They one. We may also add a Living/ Nonliving dichotomy. A necessary feature of life in a small group is the ability to understand what others think and feel – what is called a ”theory of mind.” This ability has developed from the capacity to classify and process movement. Frith (2003) and Kandel (2012) argue that because an area of the brain (in the superior temporal sulcus) differentiates betweenthe movement of people and animals on one hand and the movement ofobjects on the other hand, and because areas of the temporal-

parietal junction help us differentiate between our own movements and those of others, these abilities are probably an “evolutionaryand developmental precursor of the theory of mind. The fact that the superior temporal sulcus, our biological motion detector, is adjacent to the region of the brain used for the theory of mind seems to imply that they may work together for some common purpose. The ability to infer goals and emotional states from a person’s actions has been called the intentionality detector and it is thought to be a component of the brain’s ability to read others’ mental states.” (Kandel, 2012, p. 416) In other words, the neuropsychological data provide arguments in favor of Redfield’s dichotomies. The development of a theory of mind offered considerable evolutionary advantages since for a long time of their history humans were their own worst predators, and recognizing another’s intention was essential for survival.

The theory of mind network.

The theory of mind is processed by a neuronal network (Kandel calls it a “known neural mechanism”) rather than by a single location, and it is activated whenever we are thinkingabout others’ feelings, thoughts and intentions. The colored areas indicate increased activity.

Source: Kandel, 2012, p.419\

Hamlin, Wynn and Bloom (2010) have found that infants as young as three month show evidence of using a theory of mind to predict behavior, indicating how fundamental the need to be tuned to the behavior of others is for our species.

Generally speaking, in a small group setting the rules concerning interactions followed the We/They dichotomy, allowing aggression toward people who were not part of the group and forbidding it when directed against group members. Sherif’s studyof ad hoc group formation (Harvey et al. 1961) has demonstrated that the mere awareness that another group exists leads to increased group cohesion and intense between group competition, and Elliot’s seminal “blue eyes/brown eyes” experiment (Bloom, 2005) has demonstrated the speed with which prejudice is formed based on perceived physical characteristics said to signify the superiority of one group over another. Harris and Fiske’s (2006) brain imaging studies have shown that social out groups characterized as “the lowest” are seen as incapable of acting according to societal norms and beliefs or experiencing the normal range of complex emotions, resulting in "extreme discrimination revealing the worst kind of prejudice: excluding out-groups from full humanity." Their results indicate that conscious or unconscious prejudice causes the brain to process extreme out-groups as less than human.

The development of attitudes towards Jews follows the same dynamic. As Pagels (1966) writes, from Mark to Mathew to Luke toJohn, the Jews are increasingly associated with Satan, even as Pilate’s role in the death of Jesus is increasingly downplayed. At the same time, as Niremberg (2013) remarks the scribes and Pharisees, the initial opponents of Jesus, are increasingly being replace by the generic “Jews” who are in fact the spawn of the Devil and his accomplices: “You are from your father, the devil, and you prefer to do what your father wants.” (John, 8:39)This has the effect of moving the Jews from the “They” category toward the “Nonhuman” category, lifting the moral restrictions governing the use of violence against them. In other words, as

“you should not kill group members” became “Thou shall not kill” (human beings) Jews started being considered less than human and in the end not human.

N. C. Paulescu was a world renowned Romanian physiologist and virulent anti-Semite. His case was selected because I consider it emblematic of the evolution of attitudes from approval and praise during the right wing totalitarianism to oblivion during communism dictatorship, to rehabilitation in the post-communist era accomplished by emphasizing his scientific merits and downplaying his anti-Semitic writings and politics. Hewrote in 1923: ”Great Romania is a splendid fruit of astonishing beauty. But she carries in her bosom a newcomer parasite which sucks all of her vigor. This worm that never sleeps is the kike, who poisons her sons in countless pubs, who kidnaps her virgins and makes them barren, who by all kinds of machinations steals the bread from the mouths’ of poor Romanians” (The source for this and other quotes from Paulescu and A.C. Cuza is “The Paulescu Controversy: Science, Politics, Memory.” P. Manu and H. Bozdoghina, 2010) Paulescu and Cuza were not run- of- the mill anti-Semites but ideologues, the founding fathers of “scientific anti-Semitism” whose work paved the way for the Iron Guard’s savagery and ultimately the Romanian participation in theHolocaust : ”Eliminating the kikes from the midst of other peoples, putting an end to their parasitic, unnatural existencebased on anachronistic principles contrary to civilization and quietude of all nations…is the duty of civilization… (Anti-Semitism) represents a natural self-defense of the other nations against the kikes” who try to enslave them and destroy them. ( A.C. Cuza, Nov 11,1928).

This type of portrayal of the Jews has several functions. It activates moral anger, which, according to Prinz (2007) “is central to morality because many of our moral rules are prohibitions against rights violations and injustice. Such rules concern victims; they always involve threats or harm to people.” In order to be able to summon moral anger, the anti-Semite has tobe able to see himself as a victim rather than victimizer. “The use of “controlling images” (Lifton, 1986) such as the Jew as Godkiller, the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, the Jew as

bloodsucker, as parasite or as an infection help the anti-Semite achieve this rationalization and generate feelings of righteous anger and indignation. This apparently minor and frighteningly simple mechanism of projection, namely the reversal of the roles of victim and victimizer acts as a fuse for the unhindered expression of anti-Semitic beliefs, and undermines moral qualms. Furthermore, assuming the role of victim lowers sensitivity to others as Luo et al. (2013) indicate: “reminders of mortality decrease neural responses to others’ suffering and this effect ismediated by the subjective fear of death.” The Iron Guard had a cult of martyrs and “the holy legionary death” was considered itshigh point, thereby maximizing the effects of mortality salience.As Norman Manea stated (2014) “The Romanian extreme right emphasized the cult of death. Death was seen as man’s greatest achievement. The moment of culmination was death.”

The emotions evoked by the controlling images are componentsof the Contempt-Anger-Disgust (CAD) model in moral psychology. According to Rozin et. al (1999) “autonomy violations tend to beassociated with anger, purity violations with disgust and community violations with contempt.” It seems evident that different anti-Semitic stereotypes target specifically the above mentioned violations, in order to activate the entire CAD system:the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world provokes anger, seeing Jews as agents of infection provokes disgust and Shylock is treated with contempt.” (Dan, 2010)

Paulescu touches on all these hot button issues when he accuses the Jews of spreading venereal diseases, poisoning the men through alcoholism, robbing the nation of its vitality by providing abortions which result in infertility, with the final purpose “to steal the country.” In order to succeed in this endeavor, the Jews invent ideologies which will provide the framework for action: “Liberalism was invented by Freemasons and was preached by kike economists,” “Socialism is a kike doctrine,”“Bolshevism is the total expression of the kike mentality.” (1910) By switching from religion and nationality to ideology, Paulescu retraces the steps in the evolution of anti-Semitism, covering all bases.

An enduring stereotype based on flimsy premises

As social groups became larger, expanding the “We” and “They” from tribes to nations, to alliances of nations, to all co-religionists, the management of social behavior became increasingly individualized, dependent on self- monitoring based on a culturally shared internalized moral code. Anti-Semitism can be a concrete or abstract hate (since it can exist in the absence of Jews) and needs concrete or abstract (the mythical Jew) targetsin order to mobilize. Being able to identify who is a Jew is essential. This is a relatively new problem, one related to the notion of “crypto-Jew.” European Jews have been forced to wear distinctive clothing or insignia at least since the Fourth LateranCouncil of 1215. However, those who converted to Catholicism (conversos or marranos) were exempt. The Fourth Toledan Council of 1449 established the principle of “purity of blood” thereby makingit necessary to unmask the “secret Jews,” and the signs by which can identify them coalesced in a stereotype. The anti-Semitic literature is replete with descriptions of the alleged physical, psychological and social characteristics of the Jews.

In his 1886 anti-Semitic tract “La France Juive” Edouard Drumont describes the Jew as a polar opposite of the Aryan: ”The Semitic race can be recognized almost exclusively by negative characteristics. It lacks a mythology, an epic, science, philosophy… a civil life, all in all an absence of complexity, ofnuance, of feelings.” (1886, p.11) Drumont goes on to describe the physical characteristics of the Jew, foremost among them the hooked nose, salient ears, and the “soft and melting hand of the hypocrite or traitor.” (1886, p. 34) The Jew is “of the earth”, cowardly, has substituted violence with cunning, has the cult of money, is mercantile and miserly, gets rich at others’ expense, has the temperament of an oppressor, lacks any creative faculty and exploits the inventions of the Aryan. Paulescu has adopted and repeated these views wholesale, substituting “Romanian” for “Aryan,” and added his own distorted views on the “degeneracy of the kike race,” proven by the fact that ”all kikes have abnormal brains” smaller than the average and deformed “with shorter frontal lobes” which proves that “all kikes, without exception

are insane.” He also stated his conviction that if he was allowedto dissect the brains of the “kikes Einstein and Bergson” he would find similar deformities. Both Einstein and Bergson were alive at the time of the statement.

In his 1911 monograph “The Jews. A study of race and environment” – and before most of Paulescu’s ranting- Maurice Fischberg systematically compared all the alleged physical and pathological characteristics of the Jews to those of the host ethnic group. His conclusion, succinctly stated is that Jews differ among themselves more than they differ from the host group(the within group variance is larger than the between groups variance). This only confirmed the earlier work of Stanhope Smith(1787) on the variety of Jewish appearance:” In Britain and Germany they are fair, brown in France and Turkey, swarthy in Portugal and Spain, olive in Syria and Chaldea, tawny or copper-coloured in Arabia or Egypt” (1965,p. 42, quoted in Gilman,1991) In other words, the stereotype of the Jew based on identifiable physical characteristics and blemishes lacks a basis in reality.In fact, one is certain to visually identify a person as being Jewish only if the person is wearing traditional garb signifying their faith. Within the cultural context of Romania, Oisteanu (2009) has identified and described so many different representations of “the Jew” as to make identification based on single stereotype meaningless. Rather, identifying someone as a “Jew” in order to unleash anti-Semitism is a process akin to a projective test: the very vagueness of the identification is allowing the needs, conflicts and the belief system of the anti-Semite to provide structure to the situations, shaping the expectations and conferring meaning to the ensuing interaction.

Fischberg’s view of the situation of Romanian Jews is particularly damning. He writes that of the whole of Europe, Jewslive under medieval laws only in Romania and Russia Most of the founding fathers of modern Romania (Kogalniceanu, Conta, Eliade Radulescu, Alecsandri among others) justified their anti-Semitism by describing the Jews as aliens who refused to assimilate. Fischberg refutes this:” When we studied the Jewish problem in Roumania during the summer of 1907, we were surprised

to find that all young Jews speak Roumanian even in the intercourse among themselves …. (that) their dress … does not atall differ from that worn by other city populations…that they aredoing their best, in spite of all the laws to keep them isolated to assimilate with the general population.” (1911, p. 425)

From a different perspective, Gilman (1991) writes about thesocial and cultural implications of the abiding physicalcharacteristics attributed to the Jews by stereotype (the Jewishbody, the Jewish nose, the Jewish foot etc.) Commenting on thepolice sketch of the suspect in Jack the Ripper’s case, whichappeared in the Illustrated Police News in September 1888, Gilman(1991) notes how anti-Semitic stereotypes have been used tocreate the image of an alien, murderous Jew: the description ofJack the Ripper printed in the press: “dark beard and moustache,dark jacket and trousers, dark felt hat, spoke with a foreignaccent” was modified in the accompanying published portrait bythe addition of a hooked nose, thick eyebrows and prominent ears,bringing it much closer to the anti-Semitic stereotypical imageof the Jew.

Jack the Ripper sketch, Illustrated Police News, September 1888

From Sander Gilman “The Jew’s Body” p.115

Gilman also comments on the contemporary social consequencesfor “sounding too Jewish” or on the typicality of “the Jewish voice.” His observations indicate that the anti-Semitic stereotype is enduring and has not been changed by the accumulation of countervailing facts.

Stereotypes are a ubiquitous cross-cultural phenomenon, a consequence of the need to categorize and recall information withefficiency and of the need to speedily anticipate the reactions of others. They are sub-routines that facilitate the work of the “intentionality detector” described by Kandel by providing promptly information that helps anticipate the reactions of others. Since only a single event can occupy the content of consciousness at a given time, the brain tries to routinize tasksif possible and run the routines at the preconscious level, monitoring only if they function adequately. This frees up neurons that can be included in the ”conscious global workspace: a neural network whose content corresponds in each moment to the mental representation which occupies the conscious experience” (Dehaene & Naccache 2001 , Naccache,2008,p.272). Of the many competing networks only the one amplified by attention constitutes the conscious global workspace and becomes the content of awareness

However, the stereotype is impervious to cognitive dissonance and tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What does not fit the stereotype is considered “the exception that confirms the rule” allowing the stereotype to remain unchanged byadverse information. Therefore the conscious check on the accuracy of the preconscious sub- routine that is the stereotype is moot and the falsity of the prejudice underlying the stereotype is seldom integrated in awareness. Like the theory of mind, this process also starts early in the developmental sequence: Onishi and Baillargon (2005) have shown that fifteen moth olds can form expectations about a person’s behavior based of false beliefs.

This fact is significant when one considers the processes underlying the identification of a person as a Jew. The image formed in the visual cortices is relayed to the extrastriate body

area of the occipital lobe which is activated by images of the human body, including the fusiform face area which is specialized in the recognition of faces (Kanwisher, 1997, 2000 )

Face recognition areas

The fusiform face area specializes in the recognition of the whole face, the occipital face area in the recognition of facial parts, and the superior temporal sulcus (STS) face area in the recognition of intentions. Source: white.stanford.edu

In temporal sequence we detect the expression of a face before we recognize it because the appraisal is made at the level of the core Self (Damasio, 2010). Fright is detected first, since it may contain information relevant to dangerous situations. “The importance of understanding how facial expressions of emotion arerepresented in the brain reflects the significance of attributingmeaning to stimuli in the environment. When processing signals that are important for survival, perception needs to be prompt and efficient. Categorical representations of expression are optimal for making appropriate physiological responses to threat.The more categorical representation of facial expressions of emotion in the amygdala is consistent with its role in the detection and processing of stimuli pertinent to survival “(Harris, Young & Andrews, 2012) In other words, the more survival is at stake, the more face perception tends to become

categorical rather than continuous, leading to a less nuanced, more reflexive response, based on pre-learned dispositions.

Zeki and Romaya (2008) studied the neuronal networks activated by hate. Their results indicate that viewing hated faces activates similar areas in subjects, suggesting the existence of a “hate network” which includes the right insula (involved in self referential thinking) the pre-motor cortex (preparing the body for action) the medial prefrontal gyrus (involved in executive and voluntary activity) and the putamen, adeeper structure in the forebrain that activates cortical areas when primary emotions are involved. (Not surprisingly, the hate network shares common area with the love network) The involvementof the putamen is important because it signifies that assessmentsinvolving hate are made at the level of the core Self and are fast, un-modulated, and less subject to prefrontal cortical control. Since hate is a component of anti-Semitism, behaviors based on it may be subject to weaker social controls as well.

According to Bloom (2013) “adults automatically encode three pieces of information when they meet a new person: age, sex and race.” He argues that it is easy to see the evolutionary reasons why we consider gender and sex , namely suitability for mating, but that “race is the odd man out” since contact with other racesin the course of our evolution was too rare an event to lead to the development of a specialized neural network. Kurzman, Tooby and Comides (2001) argue that race is only a stand-in for the We/They dichotomy and the underlying concept is “coalition.” This conclusion is supported by studies which show that white babies prefer white faces, Chinese babies prefer Chinese faces and African babies prefer African faces. The effect tends to diminish and disappear for babies brought up in racially integrated environments

In the case of easily identifiable racial differences, Forbeset al. (2011) found that negative racial stereotypes interfere with the regulation of emotions activated by the recognition of a face belonging to a member of another race. We perceive the color of an object (in visual area V4) before its shape, and as stated above, the expression of a face before we recognize it. This means

that we react faster to members of another race, and that we tend to rely more on stereotypes and appraisals originating in the coreSelf (Damasio, 2010) which are emotional and reflexive. Kubota et al. (2012) describe a network involved in generating involuntary, implicit racial attitudes and in the control of race based decisions.

The network responsible for implicit race based decisions. ACC= Anterior cingulate cortex, DLPFC = Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Source: Kubota et al 2012

It is very likely that in the case of the ant-Semite a similar network is activated when the identification of Jews is involved. However, because identifying someone as a Jew based solely on visual information is questionable, the uncertain information is relayed to the visual association area in the occipital lobe described by Zeki (1993), whose function is to makeus understand what we see. There, by the way of “convergence-divergence zones” (Damasio,2010), which form multiple-level bidirectional connections it may link to the stereotypical representation of the Jew which is the gateway to the full anti-Semitic stereotype and will activate the network that maintains

it.. This transforms the processing from “ bottoms up” to” top down,” from analytical to inferential, from deductive to inductive. As already mentioned, in the case of the anti-Semite, the uncertainty of the identification and the top down processing make this process akin to a projective test. The cues provided bythe anti-Semitic stereotype activate nodes in the memory network, and the information represented by these nodes is more easily retrievable. The persistence of prejudice maintains these nodes activated, structuring and distorting both the recalled and the incoming information by a process called “priming,” ensuring the self-consistency and longevity of the stereotype.

Apart from physical characteristics, the anti-Semitic stereotype contains a number of narratives that propose various outcomes for interactions with Jews. These contain the basic tenets of the belief system and are activated if someone is identified as a Jew. The narrative templates also have the function of moving the assessment of the situation from the level of the autobiographical Self (Damasio, 2010) to the level of the core Self. This is accomplished by increasing the mortality salience through the perception of threat: “they killed the son ofmy God” “my people are in danger” “my country in danger,” “my culture is in danger,” resulting in a less modulated, more emotional reaction. The anti-Semitic narratives distort the theory of mind and short circuit the “intentionality detector” posited by Kandel offering a prediction based on prejudice. The brain stores narratives in a highly compressed form, and recalls them to facilitate anticipation by comparing them to the perceivedsocial situation. Kahneman ( 2011) has proposed that the brain is a hypothesis testing machine: it provides differing assessments ofthe situation , predicts different outcomes presented as scenarios, and then tests them out by implementation in behavior.Gazzaniga (2005) on the other hand, has argued that in the left hemisphere there is structure he named “the interpreter” whose function is to help explain our behavior to ourselves. As his split brain experiments have shown, our need to find a reason for our behavior is so compelling that even having a false reason is preferable to not having any. In this context, in order for the behavior “to make sense” it has to conform to internalized moral

norms. The decision regarding the meaning of a social situation and the action to be taken is the outcome of the comparison between the outputs of the “hypothesis tester” and “the interpreter,” between the need to predict the behavior of others and the need to explain their-and our- behavior. The anti-Semitic stereotype distorts the output of the “hypothesis tester” by substituting the outcome of the assessment of the situation with ready-made narratives, and alters the output of the “interpreter”:the actions of the Jews are seen as hostile and dangerous, while the actions of the anti-Semite are seen as righteous and justified.

Defusing the moral defenses against violence

As already mentioned, one of the essential components of anti-Semitism is the ability of the anti-Semite to portray oneself as a victim of the Jews, be it at the individual level, ethnic level religious or cultural level, defusing the moral prohibitions against the use of violence. I have shown previously (Dan, 2007) how from an evolutionary psychology point of view, participation in evil is the unwanted, but inevitable result of the interaction between adaptive processes whose primary purpose is to optimize information processing, alleviate suffering, facilitate group inclusion and help us cope with the awareness ofour own mortality. Processes such as psychic numbing and doubling(Lifton) insulate us from the emotional consequences of our own actions. That is the reason for the failure of moral defenses to preclude participation in evil. I believe that in the case of anti-Semitism a neuropsychological perspective can offer further insights in the nature of this process.

We know that mirror neurons facilitate empathy by building anetwork that models the person we are interacting with, and that the insula, which provides data regarding self-reflection, allowsus to anticipate others’ reactions to our actions, including violent ones. As Wilson (2012) wrote, when we commit aggression against another human being our brain is divided against itself.

The question is how does anti-Semitism override all of our built in defenses with such ease?

Since the famous case of Phineas Gage it has been known thatinjury to the lateral prefrontal cortex results in significant changes in social behavior. These have been described by those who knew him as “Gage no longer being Gage.” He became impulsive,unable to keep a steady job or to carry out long term planning. By identifying the affected areas and documenting the changes in Gage’s behavior, scientists were able to make inferences about their functions.

Phineas Gage and the trajectory of the iron rod through his brain

Damasio (1994) and Macmillan (2000) have shown that while damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex leads to impaired decision making in real life, it does not lead to poor results ontests of intelligence, executive function and moral reasoning. Bechara et al. (1996) suggested that the underlying cause is emotional and Koenigs et al. (2007) confirmed it in a study of six patients with bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontalcortex, an area that is involved in generating emotions, specifically social emotions. Greene (2009), writing about the “cognitive neuroscience of moral judgment” further emphasized the

role emotion plays in moral development: “It seems that such patients make poor decisions because they are unable to generate the feelings that guide adaptive decision-making in healthy individuals.”(Greene, 2009, p.4) Emotional experience plays an important developmental function, since patients who sustain prefrontal cortex injury as children differ from those who are injured as adults. The former “developed into “sociopathic” adults who, in addition to being irresponsible and prone to risk-taking, are duplicitous, aggressive, and strikingly lacking in empathy…The early-onset patients… lacked the emotional responses necessary to learn the basics of human moral behavior.” (Greene, 2009, p.4)

Solms (1999, 2006) noted the functional similarities betweenFreud’s structural model and neurological mapping studies. Since Damasio has shown that input from the prefrontal cortex’ ventromedial area can inhibit the emotional output of the amygdala, Solms ( 2006) argues that it corresponds roughly to thefunction of the Superego controlling the Id. “The dorsolateral region of the prefrontal cortex, which controls self-conscious thought, and the posterior sensory cortex, which represents the outside world correspond roughly to the Ego. Thus Solms finds that the crux of Freud’s dynamic system seems to have held up reasonably well: the primitive, instinctual emotional systems areregulated and inhibited by higher executive systems in the prefrontal cortex.” (Kandel, 2012, pp.346-347)

Solms representation of the correspondence between brain areas and Freud’s structuralmodel. Source: Kandel 2012

Because religion plays an important role in the development of moral norms, and because anti-Semitism is closely linked to religion, it is possible, even likely that it plays a normative function in the neural network that manages social behavior, specially so if its value system is learned at an early age. Rather than inhibiting violent behavior, it may become part of the anti-Semite’s Super-Ego, making the hatred against Jews a moral imperative and their destruction a laudable goal.

Neuroimaging studies supoport this pont of view. Westen et al. (2006) compared the functioning of self identified Republican

and Democrat subjects who were asked to make a decision after being confronted with facts contrary to their beliefs. Westen described the findings in an interview with Emory University press as follows: "We did not see any increased activation of theparts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning. What we sawinstead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts. Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

Schreiber et al. (2013) confirmed Westen’s findings showing that evaluative processes depend on political orientation, and that “ that the neural processes of evaluation themselves are distinct, perhaps reflecting differentiable values, as well as differing preferences for issues, candidates, and parties.”

“ Republicans and Democrats differ in the neural mechanisms activated while performing a risk- taking task. Republicans more strongly activate their right amygdala, associated with orienting attention to external cues. Democrats have higher activity in their left posterior insula, associated with perceptions of internal physiological states. This activation also borders the temporal-parietal junction, and therefore may reflect a difference in internal physiological drive as well as the perception of the internal state and drive of others.”(Schreiber et al. 2013)

Anti-Semitic beliefs are embedded in both religion and certain ideologies. Westen and Schreiber’s findings suggest that there is a similarity between the role of ideology and religion, that they may be processed by the same networks and become part of the normative structures that manage social behavior. They facilitate the bypassing of reasoning in favor of emotionally satisfying solutions, while maintaining the illusion of rationality. From a different perspective Haidt (2012) calls thisprocess “the rationality delusion. I call it delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.” (2012, p.28)

In turn, Berns et al. (2012) have shown that decisions made basedon principle are processed differently from decisions made on thebasis of cost-benefit analysis.

“Blood flows to different parts of the brain in utilitarian (green) and matter of principle (yellow) decisions.” Source Berns et al./Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B. 2012”

Since anti-Semitic beliefs are connected to religion, ideology or both, the above results suggest that for the anti-Semite, conflicts involving interactions with Jews are processed differently from regular interpersonal conflicts which do not involve Jews. The perception of threat resulting from the reversal of the roles of victim and victimizer narrows the evaluation of intentions from continuous to categorical, and by amplifying the mortality salience increases the need to comply with the prejudiced value system, decreases the ability for empathy, helps dehumanize the potential targets and punishes dissent. The decision is made based on emotions, not on analyzingthe facts and it is rationalized as being the result of a decision made on principle rather than cost analysis.

In order to effectively subvert morality, anti-Semitism hasto be incorporated in “elementary morals” (Morar, 2011) the kernel of values learned early in life out of which morality unfolds. Haidt (2012) identified six “fundaments of morality” constructed around polar dimensions: care-harm, liberty-oppression, fairness-cheating, loyalty-betrayal ,authority-subversion, and sanctity-degradation. The memes that support and spread anti-Semitism place the Jews at the negative pole of each dimension: the Jews are harming the host nation, they are trying to oppress it and they use dishonest methods to achieve their means, they are disloyal, or at best they have divided loyalties,they subvert authority by their support for socialism, communism etc., and they have degraded God by killing his son and refusing to accept his sacrifice.By default, the anti-Semite is placed opposite to the Jew, at the positive pole of each dimension. In this manner anti-Semitism manages to infiltrate the normative structures which control social behavior. As a result, actions based on anti-Semitic beliefs are seen as morally acceptable, even desirable.

Please note that anti-Semitism in Romania, be it in its early version linked to national identity or in the later ideological version discussed below was a creation of the intellectual elite. Romania was one of the poorest, predominantlyrural countries of Europe. In 1930 79% of the population was

employed in agriculture, and more than 50% were illiterate. For this majority of the population, anti-Semitism was fueled by the teachings of the Orthodox Church, xenophobia, and jealousy for the economic success of the Jews, and took the form of a dull, generalized resentment rather than the militant versions that ledto the formation of a genocidal mentality. The relevant question here is the degree of emotional investment in anti-Semitic beliefs and their importance in the moral value system of the persons holding them. For the rural population these beliefs wereimplicit rather than explicit, latent rather than manifest. The middle class, according to historian Boia  was composed of relatively few Romanians and contained a large number of cosmopolitan foreigner city dwellers: Hungarians, Germans, Turks, Greeks  in addition to Jews. They had relatively little interest in fueling xenophobia. The ideologicalanti-Semitism and the acceptance of its more virulent mutations originated in the 19th century elite’s need to  define the Romanian national character and in the  1920’s  iconic “golden generation’s” desire for a national renewal, and its readiness tomorally compromise with the extremist Iron Guard.

Because the Jews are seen as a threat to “symbolic imortality”(Dan, 2007,2008) numerous arguments have been made presenting anti-Semitism as a moral imperative. While holding more nuanced views than Paulescu’s visceral anti-Semitism, the iconic “golden generation” of Romanian intelligentsia – Nae Ionescu, Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade , Constantin Noica- have allmade such arguments while wholeheartedly supporting the extreme right “Legion of Archangel Michael “ or as it was called later “Iron Guard” movement. For example Emil Cioran wrote:” The judaicinvasion of the past decades of the Romanian rebirth have mado anti-Semitism the essential characteristic of our nationalism.” Later in the same text: “If I was a Jew, I would kill myself immediately…If the number of Jews in a given country does not rise over the dose of poison necessary to any organism, they canbe accepted as a regretable statistic, even treated with a certain indifferent sympathy.” (1937) In the same vein, Nae Ionescu wrote: “Judaism and Christianity are more than just religions; they represent a formative conception of life….there

are Jewish and Christian values in every walk of life…In any areathere is an essential incompatibility bertween Jews and Christians. This being the case, the difference that I identifiedbetween Jews and Christians goes further: the latter sense the former not only (being) willingly isolated, but also being a danger to the Christian order.” (1938)

Mircea Eliade, defended his mentor Nae Ionescu against accusations of anti-Semitism, by arguing that his statements are based on a religious argument: “Mr. Nae Ionescu’s foreword is notanti-Semitic. It appears to be so because it contains bitter pages about the Jewish destiny…. To be anti-Semitic means to takea decisive attitude against ther Jews,to consider them inferior, crooks, dangerous etc. We cannot find this intransigent attitude towards Jewry in his foreword.” As Z. Ornea notes (1995) this defense falls flat: the foreword in question was much more than “an intransigent attitude towards Jews.” Norman Manea (2014) comments: “Putting aside the anti-Semitism, what Nae Ionescu wrote in the preface was not completely different from what the book said. The book (by Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian) tries to demonstrate that there is no solution to the Jewish problem. The Marxist solution, with its Utopian dreams, the Yiddish solution of staying within the parameters of Jewish folklore, the Hebrew solution of reading the Torah and moving to Israel, the Stalinistsolution — none of these solutions worked! And assimilation didn’t work either, because you would always remain more or less a suspect in your own homeland.” Sebastian had raised the issue if a Jew can ever be accepted as a Romanian; Nae Ionescu, in his foreword, declared that such a thing is impossible based on principle.

Constantin Noica commented on the differences between the scientific anti-Semitism of A.C. Cuza and the developing legionary (Iron Guard) ideology: “ What did cuzism discover? Thatin the bossom of Romanian society there is a parazite. Being a beneficiary but at the same time falsifier of the life of our nation this one had to be removed…What did legionarism (the Iron Guard movement) discover? As far as we can undestand it from our position,it discovered a parazite within the being of the

Romanian. The legionarism will hit the outside villain as well…but what is remarcable in its doctrine is that it knows to discover the inner villain and fight against him.” (1938) This idea, namely that the elimination of the Jews is a small price topay for the re-birth of the Romanian nation, was the common rationalization used by all the luminaries of the “golden generation.” It consolidated the basis for a genocidal mentality the ultimate expression of which was the Romanian participation in the Holocaust.

(The discussion of Romania’s participation in the Holocaust is outside the scope of this paper. Radu Ioanid’s (2000) “The Holocaust in Romania” and The Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (2005) are excellent sources.)

Anti-Semitism in communist and post-communist Romania

Almost immediately after the end of World War II, Romania, aright wing totalitarian society became by force a left wing totalitarian one. In any totalitarian society we can distinguish four groups: the overt supporters and opponents and the passive supporters and opponents. The later groups comprise the great majority of the population, which remained obedient throughout the regime change; the groups simply switched their relative positions vis-à-vis the regime. Milgram’s (1968) seminal study has examined the dynamics of obedience to authority. He identified the “agentic state”- a cognitive restructuring of the situation by which the subject sees himself freed for responsibility for the actions carried out at the behest of a perceived higher authority, and showed that roughly two thirds ofthe population can be manipulated into hurting their peers. Zimbardo’s (1972) “Stanford Prison Experiment” also showed how quickly and easily average people can be induced to oppress theirpeers. Ruff et al. (2013) studied the biological mechanisms involved in both voluntary and punishment induced compliance withsocietal norms. They found that the right lateral prefrontal

cortex is implicated in both voluntary and non-voluntary compliance:” Social punishment is thought to have played an important role in the evolution of human social behavior and cooperation. Our results show that the influence of punishment threats on human social norm compliance depends causally on neural activity in the rLPFC (right lateral prefrontal cortex). This suggests a neural mechanism involving the rLPFC that aligns behavior with social norms when punishment is possible. The more pronounced involvement of this mechanism for genuinely social punishments concurs with suggestions that during human brain evolution, the steep increase in the complexity of social interactions may have shaped specific neural processes for socialbehavior” (Ruff et al. 2013)

Berns et al. (2005 ) studied the brain activity of subjects participating in a variation on the Ash social illusion experiment, in which the subjects face the choice of selecting the wrong answer and continuing to go along with an ad hoc group,or selecting the right answer and disagreeing with the group. In Asch’s original experiment two thirds of the subjects selected the wrong answer in order to conform. What Berns et al. wanted toknow was whether the subjects misperceive the stimulus or make a conscious decision to go along. In order to control for the humanfactors, half the subjects were included (unbeknown to them) in agroup of the examiner’s cohorts, while the other half knew that the “group” answers come from computers. The findings in the caseof the subjects facing a human group, showed little activity in the areas involved in decision making but a lot of activity in areas involved in perception; the opposite was true for the subjects facing the computers. Berns et al. concluded: “We’d liketo think that seeing is believing but the study shows that seeingis believing what the group tells you to believe.” In other words, the subjects’ brains deceive them to perceive things according to group norms. This is an unconscious process, but self-deception can also take place at a preconscious level.

In a totalitarian society using self-deception becomes “almost a moral prerequisite for survival.” (Arendt,1961. Adjustment also requires the use of several adaptive strategies

of distortion and deception: “ketman” defined by Czeslaw Milosz(1991) as the public assumption of positions contrary to one’s genuine beliefs in order to deceive and survive in a totalitariansociety; “double think” (Orwell), “groupthink” (Janis) and “psychic doubling” (Lifton). The widespread use of these strategies created huge zone of ambivalence and moral ambiguity which facilitated the public sharing of the essential lie (lebenslűge) on which such societies are based. In turn,” this undermined the authenticity of the collective memory. The memories changed by self-justification and self-deception were successfully substituted to reality because the individual could claim post factum any political identity as long as he claimed to have utilized “ketman” to various degrees in a group that collectively used the same strategy.” (Dan, 2013) Worse, the authenticity of memory was further undermined by reverse ketman, or” namtek”: claiming publicly that you had used ketman, therefore your convictions and actions were the opposite of what they appeared to be under the communist regime. In a totalitariansociety the past is fluid and uncertain, because it is modified to fit the needs of those in power, who control the present. The namtek strategy distorts the past, achieving the same result in post totalitarian society. The combined use of both strategies allowed for the significant distortion of reality through rationalization and self-deception and rendered the guilt and shame inefficient as means of controlling social behavior, because by diffusing responsibility one also diffuses the guilt. To quote Arendt (1972) “Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.”

Anti-Semitic attitudes underwent considerable change during this process. As Tony Judt wrote, in Eastern Europe “thereare too many memories, too many pasts that people cling to, usingthem as a weapon against somebody else’s past.” (2005) With the advent of the communist dictatorship the topic of Romania’s role in the Holocaust vanished from the public sphere. The discussion of the Romanian role in the Holocaust was made impossible during communism because, as the Final Report of the Wiesel Commission

(2005) notes, Roller’s “History of Romania,” the officially sanctioned, definitive version which had to be followed to the letter, had replaced the true victims of the Holocaust, namely Jews and Roma, with communists and Romanians, and ignored anti-Semitism as a defining trait of Antonescu’s dictatorship. Overt anti-Semitism could get one labeled as a fascist, so it was hidden. The fact that Jews were over represented in the upper echelons of the communist regime created resentment. But, as Radu Ioanid (2012) writes, “to state that the majority of those who implemented communism in Romania were Jews is an anti-Semiticcliché” and demonstrably false. Nonetheless, the communist dictatorship’s destruction of rural communities and culture resulted in a large population of uprooted people which felt victimized by communism and was looking for a scapegoat, providing a fertile ground for the spreading of anti-Semitism After Stalin’s “campaign against cosmopolitanism” the role and prominence of the Jews in the party elite declined precipitously,but as immigration to Israel increased, a new anti-Semitic accusation sprang up: the Jews had betrayed communism, which was adopted even by those who opposed the communist regime. The paradoxical result was that people who allegedly hated Communism blamed the Jews for betraying it.

The official Romanian strategy in the communist and post-communist periods alike has been described by the Wiesel Commission (2005) as “selective negationism”; not a denial of theHolocaust per se, but a denial that Romania had a role in it. Schafir (2002) has identified several types of negationism used by countries which have participated in the Holocaust and try to deflect the guilt without denying the Holocaust outright. In bothcommunist and post communist Romania the blame was apportioned tothe Germans, the Iron Guard, and the Hungarians. As a consequence, bringing the topic of the Holocaust into public awareness triggered a renewed effort to deflect the guilt by putting emphasis on the perceived negative qualities and guilt ofthe Jews. While diminishing the reality of the Holocaust itself, this approach blamed the Jews for the communist terror. Thus the increased awareness of historical truth led, paradoxically, to anincrease in anti-Semitism. The function of the re-emerging anti-

Semitism is to alleviate the guilt and cognitive dissonance caused by the awareness of Romania’s participation in the Holocaust and the Romanians’ complicity in communism “The same inhibitory mechanisms had banished from the public dialogue both the topics. After the fall of communism, both topics resurfaced in the public dialogue, because the inhibition was lifted. The price we pay for being able to discuss publicly Romania’s role inthe Holocaust is the re-birth of overt anti-Semitism.” (Dan, 2013) As Kovacs (2011) and Shafir (2012) have shown there is also a dynamic of overt versus latent anti-Semitism, allowing oneto maintain his/her attitudes without having to state them openly. The widespread and insidious latent “daily anti-Semitism”passes almost unnoticed but permeates routine social interactionsand is more difficult to unmask and counter than the overt variety.

The newly re-emerging anti-Semitism is focused on several central topics: Holocaust denial, frequently quoting Garaudy or Finkelstein as authoritative sources, the rehabilitation of Marshal Antonescu or legionary leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the reflexive defense of the “golden” 1927 generation of intellectuals, and the continued accusations against “the corrupting Jews” culminating with the assertion that “they are trying to steal the land.” The Jews are accused of having broughtthe Holocaust upon themselves, for example in “The Red Week” of noted ex-dissident Paul Goma, or of having bought communism to Romania. The old accusation of “Judeo-Bolshevism” has been revived, for example in “ZydoKomuna” by Julian Apostu, an obsessively compiled list of Jews in the nomenklatura. The authordoes not address the fact that the Romanian Communist Party had 4million members and the Securitate (Political Police) had over 800.000 informants, the overwhelming majority of them Romanian.

German World War II poster entitled “Bolshevism without a mask” The revived anti-Semitic meme “Judeo-Bolshevism” very effectively uses the resentment of communism to activate latent anti-Semitism and justify past and present persecution and relieve guilt. Source:calvin.edu

The fake moral equivalency between the Holocaust and the “red Holocaust” (the carnage perpetrated by the communists and the Gulag) links both issues. The concept of the “red Holocaust” is toxic and has become a very effective anti-Semitic meme. It isthe gateway to another effective meme, namely “Judeo-Bolshevism,”which manages to imply that the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves while at the same time accusing them of participation in the communist terror, alleviating the Romanians’ guilt for participation in the Holocaust and providing a rationale for harboring anti-Semitic attitudes today. Together with negationismit is the lynchpin that gives anti-Semitism in those ex-communistcountries that actively participated in the Holocaust its distinctive character, as can be seen from the present situation in Romania and Hungary.

The Romanian blogosphere is of a particularly venomous variety, and abusive commentaries full of invectives are unleashed against anyone challenging these views as exemplified by the reaction to Iepan’s documentary “Odessa” or to the aforementioned book about Paulescu by P. Manu and H. Bozdoghina. Norman Manea’s (1994) essay “Felix Culpa” regarding Eliade’s lackof public repentance about his support for the Iron Guard was met with sharp criticism from the intellectuals of “the new Romanian right” and with anti-Semitic slurs and thinly veiled threats. A similar reaction accompanied the publication of his critically acclaimed novel “The Return of the Hooligan,” which described from a very intimate point of view his experiences during the Holocaust, during communism and the reaction to bringing those memories back to life in the post-communist era. Conversely, when a blatantly anti-Semitic act takes place, the response is focused on the reaction to it and “the Jews and theirallies” are accused of over reacting and trying to limit the freedom of speech of the offenders.

Recent examples include member of Parliament and later Minister Dan Sova denying any Romanian participation in the Iasipogrom, the standing ovation given by the Romanian Academy to a Holocaust denier, the controversy around the definition of the word “kike” in the official dictionary of the Romanian Academy, defined as being an alternative word for “Jew,” without mentioning the fact that it is derogatory, or very recently the airing of a Christmas carol that contained the words “ the kike is good only as smoke in the chimney.” This was defended as beinga genuine 100 year old piece of folklore despite the obviously newer reference to burning Jews, and collected 50 years ago, during the Ceausescu era, which is highly unlikely.

Paulescu has been fully rehabilitated, being made a post-mortem member of the Romanian Academy in 1990. In addition; the media has been strongly promoting the myth that his discovery –analternative method of extracting insulin- had been “stolen” by Canadians Banting and MacLeod, who were awarded the Nobel prize for medicine in 1923. . Despite the fact that this version of events has been fully discredited by Manu and Bozdoghina (2010),

the media drumbeat goes on unabated today with full support from members of the scientific community. Furthermore, when the unveiling of a Paulescu memorial plaque in Paris was stopped in August of 2000, after an article in “Le Monde” detailed his anti-Semitic past, the blame was placed on obscure “pressures from across the ocean.” The president of the Romanian Academy, Eugen Simion, declared that “doubtlessly” Paulescu has been “wronged” by the Nobel Committee, but acknowledged that he has written “a few” anti-Semitic articles. As William Totok comments in his foreword to the Manu and Bozdoghina’s book, Paulescu has used hisstatus as a world renowned scientist to confer credibility to tens of virulently anti-Semitic books, pamphlets and articles, not just a few. In fact, he was one of the architects of the IronGuard ideology. This effort to minimize the anti-Semitic past of notable Romanian intellectuals while emphasizing their accomplishments is entirely consistent with the pattern describedby Westen (2006) Haidt (2012) and Schreiber (2013): when the subjects are faced with information discrepant with one’s beliefsthey do not attempt a resolution by reasoning but rather they deconstruct and restructure the events in order to fit deeply held ideological and/or religious convictions and thus generate maximum reward.

Haidt (2012) quotes the Chinese sage Mencius and David Hume in arguing that “moral sense” has sensibilities analogous totaste, and that we react reflexively to what “tastes“ morally wrong to us. The problem, as I see it, is that anti-Semitism doesnot taste universally morally repugnant. To the contrary, according to the Pew Research Center and the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) anti-Semitic attitudes and incidents areon the rise. In previous works ( 2008, 2010) I compared anti-Semitism to a computer virus: It is transmitted through memes inextricably embedded in larger belief systems such as religion or ideology which serve as cultural vectors, and has the ability to “mutate,” as for example from the religious version to the nationalist and to the ideological one. Traditional themes continue to be sounded in the frankly anti-Semitic works of MacDonald (2002), which use the terminology of evolutionary psychology to accuse the Jews of using adaptive strategies that

are so successful that they endanger Gentiles. In a similar vein,J. Biro (2011) attributes the high proportion of Jewish Nobel prize winners to “J-bias” – that is pro Jewish bias based on clannishness, unfair competition and a mercantile mindset. In their latest iterations anti-Semitic memes are disguised as legitimate criticism of Israel. Constructs such as “pinkwashing” and “greenwashing” which accuse Israel of using its good record on gay rights and the environment to hide its mistreatment of Palestinians, and the frequent comparison of Israelis to Nazis are good examples. The extreme adaptability of anti-Semitism, andby extension of racism and other forms of discrimination including those based on ideology is due to their connection to adaptive mechanisms that emerged during our evolution which influenced the development of our newest and most complex brain structures. Just like our ability to participate in evil, they are the unintended consequences of our need for belief in transcendental values, of our need for symbolic immortality, of our need to belong, of our need to anticipate the behavior of others and our need to make sense of our own behavior while insulating ourselves from the pain and stress we caused. Since these are fundamental needs, I am afraid anti-Semitism will continue to exist under one form or another until it starts leaving a bad taste on our moral palate.

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