Intro. [Recording date: November 27, 2025.]
Russ Roberts: Before introducing today’s guest, I want to mention something important about when it was recorded.
This week’s episode is about trying to understand violence against Jews and those who justify it. I want to alert listeners that it was recorded before the horrific attacks on Jews celebrating Chanukah at Bondi Beach in Australia–which is why you will not hear it mentioned. It was recorded weeks before that tragedy.
I also plan to post some additional thoughts about today’s thought-provoking episode at my Substack, Listening to the Sirens. Feel free to check that out as well.
And now, on to today’s guest.
Today is November 27th, 2025, and my guest is renowned physicist, David Deutsch of Oxford University. David, welcome to EconTalk.
David Deutsch: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Russ Roberts: Our topic today isn’t the interesting books that you’ve written: The Fabric of Reality, The Beginning of Infinity. We’re going to talk about a theory of yours about why Jews are hated.
I’m a little uncomfortable with this topic for an episode of EconTalk. Many of you who are not Jewish may ask, why is this interesting? Why is it important? But, I think at a minimum, you will get an understanding of your Jewish friends and neighbors that you didn’t have before, and what’s happening in the Jewish community these days. And, maybe something else as well–a better way of understanding how the world works.
I want to start with a story. In 2004, Mel Gibson made the movie The Passion of Christ. It was a controversial film for a number of reasons, but many Jews and Jewish organizations felt it demonized Jews. It showed Jewish mobs, sinister Jewish leaders, a reluctant Pontius Pilate, implying that the Jews played an outsized role, if not a decisive one, in the crucifixion.
At the time the movie came out, I had a position at the Mercatus Center, which is part of George Mason University where I was at the time. And a number of the staffers at the Mercatus Center approached me: They were puzzled by the response of Jewish organizations to the movie, and they asked me if I would hold a lunchtime session explaining Jewish attitudes.
And, these were young men and women who worked as support staff for the scholars in the Center. A number of them were religious Christians.
I confessed I hadn’t seen the movie. I confessed I had no intention of seeing it. But I also said I’d be happy to get together and talk about why I thought Jews were uncomfortable with the movie.
So we sat down over lunch, me and 10 to 15 people in a seminar room. And, I said: Jews historically had been accused of deicide, of killing God–that is, Jesus–and that didn’t seem historically accurate. The Romans crucified him.
But, the main reason I said that the movie made Jews uncomfortable was that it wasn’t the historical accuracy of what happened to Jesus–which is, after all a bit murky–but rather how the charge of deicide had been invoked to justify murdering Jews over time in history.
For example, I explained, when the Crusaders went to the Holy Land in 1096 to Jerusalem to liberate the city from Muslim control–to kill the infidels as they saw it–they stopped along the way in France and Germany and killed thousands of Jews. A different kind of infidel. Just for practice, I guess.
So, in Speyer, in Worms, in Mainz, in Cologne, in Trier, and Metz–they robbed Jewish homes and synagogues. They forced people to choose between conversion to Christianity or death. And they carried out massacres, killing thousands of Jews in 1096 in these different cities. Thousands. There’s a debate historically how many thousands, but it was thousands.
Now, there were a number of motivations. One was to punish Jews for killing Jesus. So, when a movie came out–Mel Gibson’s movie, blaming Jews for killing Jesus–it makes us Jews a little uneasy, let’s say.
So, I was explaining this, and at some point in this very brief history lesson–not much longer than what I just said, maybe even shorter–I stopped and I looked around the room and I saw something extraordinary. Most of the 10 to 15 people around the table weren’t looking at me. They had averted their eyes. Many were literally studying their shoes. They were looking down. They looked extremely uncomfortable.
When I asked what was going on, their answers made clear that they had never heard of this aspect of the Crusades. They knew nothing about it. And, now that they had heard of it, they were deeply ashamed as Christians for the behavior of their Christian predecessors.
Now, I’d learned about the Crusades at some point–elementary school, middle school. My teachers never mentioned the murder of Jews during the Crusades or sometimes called the Rhineland massacres of 1096. Why would they? It wasn’t even a footnote worth putting at the bottom of the page. From the vantage point of history, it’s not even a sideshow.
But, from the vantage point of Jewish history, it was an epic tragedy that mirrored so many similar events throughout our history. Every summer, during the Jewish month of Av, which usually falls out in the Gregorian calendar in August, sometimes July, religious Jews in 2025 fast for 24 hours, eating and drinking nothing, and recite special poems and prayers that commemorate and lament tragic moments of Jewish history. And there are way too many of them.
It begins with the destruction of the two temples of Jerusalem and includes what are called pogroms, events like the Crusades where a rowdy mob is whipped into a frenzy by Jew hatred and sets upon Jewish homes and businesses, and synagogues, setting fires, raping, murdering, and looting. It began 2000 years ago with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. It continued throughout the Middle Ages with Crusades and various blood libels. The false accusations that Jews needed blood from gentile children to make matzahs for Passover–a particularly ugly lie given that Jews are forbidden to consume blood of any kind.
This persecution and murder continued through the Khmelnytsky massacres in 1648, in what is now Ukraine, when tens of thousands of Jews were murdered–tens of thousands–by marauding Ukrainian Cossacks; to the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 in Bessarabia, part of the Russian Empire, where roughly 50 Jews were murdered, hundreds injured, thousands left homeless. Through Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938, when hundreds or maybe thousands of Jews died in a single night, 267 synagogues were set on fire, many burned to the ground, 7,500 Jewish businesses were vandalized and looted, Jewish homes invaded, plundered, numerous cemeteries desecrated. To the Holocaust, with six million dead; through October 7th when something like 800 Israeli civilians were murdered, women were raped, houses burned to the ground by Hamas, and 251 people were abducted and held in tunnels for hundreds of days.
Those are just the famous ones, among Jews. There are dozens–dozens–of other examples where Jews throughout history were murdered in significant numbers by their neighbors on what are called pogroms–mobs, whipped into a frenzy.
So, the Crusades, for Jews, they’re not some kind of weird little historical moment. And, I think it’s hard for non-Jews to understand how these historical episodes are part of Jewish cultural DNA. We don’t forget. And it would be foolish to forget. Vigilance is a good idea. We remember because we fear that this time is unlikely to be different.
Russ Roberts: And that brings us to you, David. You have an unusual perspective on this long history of Jew hatred and violence against Jews, which you call the Pattern.
So, I’d like you to describe what that is, and you’re also free to react to my little story and introduction if you’d like.
David Deutsch: Yeah. Well, there are a few things in your story that I would actually disagree with.
Russ Roberts: Go ahead.
David Deutsch: I don’t think it began with the destruction of the Temple. I think it began long before then. And, one of the remarkable things about it, which made me start thinking about it, is the way it has been consistent over millennia, unlike almost any other meme that I can think of. So, that’s one thing.
Secondly, you mentioned the Crusaders massacring Jews because the Jews killed Jesus. And, I think it’s the other way around. I think the impulse to massacre Jews came first, and the Jews killing Jesus was an excuse invented afterwards, after that impulse, in order to legitimize it.
And, the fact that this excuse absolutely doesn’t make sense, that is the beginning of what I want to understand, the pattern I want to understand–which is not the pattern of pogroms and massacres. Those are things that only happen occasionally. The thing which happens all the time, which I call the Pattern, is the impulse to legitimize hurting Jews, which is the reaction of the other people, for example. The pogroms and so on almost always are a bottom-up phenomenon. They come from the people, not from the authorities. We’re sort of misled by the fact that in the most famous examples, like the Holocaust and the Inquisition, it was top down; but far more often, it was bottom up.
Sometimes the authorities tried to stop it. Sometimes they didn’t care. Sometimes they approved retrospectively until it got too out of hand and cities were being burned down and that kind of thing, so then they tried to stop it.
But, it was a moral perversion to legitimize hurting Jews, usually not to the extent of actually doing so. That was the normal state of affairs, and it continues to be the normal state of affairs in our society today. This is the thing that’s very hard to point out. Therefore, I also don’t think it’s hatred. You called it Jew hate. I think Jew hate is another one of these symptoms of it which arise occasionally, but are not typical.
The thing is, this impulse to legitimize hurting Jews conflicts with a lot of other morality that exists in various cultures, not least Christian cultures. So, it has to be accommodated because it’s not going to go away by itself. I think it has been diminishing very slowly over the centuries, but it has to be incorporated into the worldview, into the normal worldview of societies.
So–who was it?–Saint Augustine said, ‘Yes, Jews have to suffer, but they must not be killed.’ That was a piece of advice he gave to some ruler of some country who had asked him for advice. And, from his point of view, it was a pro-Jewish thing to say, because he wanted to take for granted the legitimacy of hurting Jews, but make that consistent as far as he could with other moral ideas that he had.
The way that the Pattern works is that the actual violence–the pogroms as you put it–the pogroms break out not when people believe the Pattern more or less, or whether it grips their minds more or less, because I don’t think the Pattern changes much over the timescale of a lifetime. It’s when there appears to be a threat to the Pattern: when the moral rationalizations don’t seem to be working and the society seems to be going the other direction, that’s when the violence breaks out.
So, for example, with the Enlightenment–with the 18th century Enlightenment in Western Europe–and again, with the rising of the Anglosphere in Britain, well-meaning people thought, ‘Oh, well, this is going to be the end of antisemitism. This is going to be the end of Jew hate,’ because just as it’s the end of witch burnings and all sorts of other forms of violence and other forms of discrimination and so on, it’s going to go away.
It did not go away. It got worse. And, in my explanation of this, that is normal. It got worse because the legitimacy of hurting Jews for being Jews was being threatened by another current of morality in society, which was the Enlightenment.
And so, there were ups and downs over the centuries. But, the other great moment when the opposite happened to what people thought would happen, is the foundation of Israel. The Zionists thought that once they had a state and had the legitimacy of a state for existing, where there were all sorts of taboos against using violence against a state that had been introduced in international law and world morality, that the Jews could then settle down and be a nation like any other, which didn’t figure in the fantastical inventions of the people. But they were wrong. The reverse happened.
And so, every other country like India and Pakistan, and dozens of countries which were founded at the same time, and all of them gained increased legitimacy for their own thing. And, unfortunately, people like the Kurds suffered the backlash of that because not getting a state meant that nobody cared about their sovereignty or their integrity. But, with Israel, it was the other way around, as it always is.
So, yes–what was the other thing? Oh yes, so, hatred. Yes.
Russ Roberts: Well, hang on. We’ll let it out, this little–I want you to clarify this a little bit. And maybe you can’t. I would just say that, I’m fascinated by those addenda and corrections to my little historical narrative, and I’m intrigued.
The puzzle remains: Why would the world–in its incredible diversity, cultural diversity–why would the world in its cultural diversity, its economic diversity over time and over space at any moment in time, who would think of legitimizing the murder of a particular group? Why would that be of a thing in the air? Why should there be such a pattern?
I agree with you empirically. There appears to be such a pattern, and what you’ve just added is quite fascinating about its response to other moral and cultural trends. But, how does this get started? Where does it come from? It’s insane.
David Deutsch: It’s certainly insane in the normal meaning of the word, but I don’t think the sufferers from it are particularly insane by any other standard. I think the Pattern is, in some degree, present in almost everybody. One used to say: Well, almost everybody in Europe and the Near East. But since the globalization of ideas, it’s really almost everybody anywhere in the world.
Normally it’s at a very low level and does not give rise to violence or persecution, or anything like that. It just gives rise to rather indirect things, like how people respond to the small amounts of violence that are still occurring. So, it’s something that is inexplicable at that level, as well as the level of violence.
So, where it comes from, why it exists, I’m afraid I don’t know, as you guessed. I don’t know where it comes from; but I think it’s more important initially to understand what something is than to explain why it is.
For example, it was necessary to understand that the planets move around the sun before Newton could come up with the reason–an inverse square law. It would have been impossible to come up with the inverse square law to explain Ptolemy’s cosmology. And, I think the standard way of thinking about the persecution of Jews or the violence against Jews and that kind of thing, while trying to force it into the mold of other forms of irrationality, like racism or fear of the other, or envy.
And people say, ‘Of course, people envy Jews, and they hate people that they envy.’ First of all, people don’t always hate people that they envy. Secondly, they didn’t always envy Jews. Just before the Enlightenment and before the emancipation of Jews, the stereotype of Jews was that they were primitive, superstitious people. That’s why Voltaire said he hated them. He particularly hated Jews because they had not accepted the Enlightenment. Then when Jews accepted the Enlightenment, people switched around and said that they were foreigners infiltrating society and becoming rich and becoming powerful, and so on. Even though there were still places where Jews were poor and downtrodden and not very advanced at all.
And, most of the Jews whom the Nazis killed, for example, were below average income, although the Jewish shopkeepers in the Polish villages were perhaps a little better off than the peasants. But they were not better off than the elites who then justified murdering them.
But, let me just say this, too: I don’t think the origin of it–you said, ‘Where did it come from? Where did it come from 2,500 years ago?’ That’s the earliest that I can find sort of evidence of it. I don’t think we need to know that because I don’t think the vast majority of people who are gripped by the Pattern have any idea about that. They don’t know where it came from. They don’t know what attributes of the Jews initially–or whatever, randomness or whatever–initially led to it.
There’s sort of a Freudian impulse to go to the psychological root of the phenomenon. But, I don’t think it’s true in psychology, and I don’t think it’s true in understanding history either. It’s a persistent phenomenon, and it’s remarkably persistent.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. But, you’re a man of science. Not just a man of science. I like to think of myself as somewhat rational, but you’re a very serious physicist who has made many, many serious contributions to our understanding of the world and to the discipline of physics. And, to just posit something that seems without any rationality–I mean, economists would say things like, ‘Well,’ and you hear this argument, ‘the Jews would have positions of power or economic success.’ And so, of course, it was in the incentive of various groups to push them out or to bar them from certain professions, or to force them into particular occupations where they wouldn’t have to compete with them, and so on.
And, I accept your point that that argument is lovely as far as it goes in some particular country and some particular century. But it can’t be a good explanation for the whole phenomenon, which is a deep–very simple, by the way–insight, fantastic application of Occam’s Razor. I mean, it’s a beautiful place to start. But you’ve got nothing else for me, other than–and I’m giving you a hard time for fun, about something that’s not funny.
But, you’re basically saying–I’m just going to try to repeat it in my own words and for people who are hearing this for the first time and their head is kind of reeling, maybe. You’re saying that throughout almost all of civilization and certainly over the last thousand years, 2,000 years, 2,500 years, people are comfortable with the idea that Jews deserve to die.
David Deutsch: Deserve to be hurt.
Russ Roberts: To be hurt. Or, beat up, brutalized, or murdered.
It’s such a strange idea. And, so many people listening are going to say, ‘Well, I don’t feel that way, and I don’t know anyone who feels that way. Sure, there are people who are critical, say, of Israel, to take an important example, but they don’t want Jews to be killed. They’re just offended by what Israel does, say, against Gazans. And, that’s what’s explaining what’s going on now.’ And, you’re saying, if I understand it correctly, and I want to give you a chance to clarify, you’re saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no. That’s a smokescreen. That’s a red herring, that’s a distraction. It’s in fact, causation runs the other way.’ In their desire to hurt Jews, they’ll cook up a reason: Oh, this time it’s Israel. Another time it’s deicide. Some other time it’s economic exploitation. It’s: Jews are landlords, they’re exploiting the poor renters, and that’s why we looted their shops. They stabbed us in the back at World War I–that was the German explanation. If you said to a Nazi in 1938, ‘Why did Kristallnacht happen?’ they would say, ‘Well, the Jews deserved it. They ruined the country back in World War I.’ And then, Jews, by the way, respond very, quote, “rationally” and say, ‘No, no, no. We served in the German army. We were decorated. We were decorated at a higher rate than the average soldier.’ Fill in the blank. I’m making that up. I don’t know if it’s literally true. But it’s sometimes true in these stories that the facts literally don’t make any sense.
So, you’re just saying that something twisted in the hearts of human beings, is a lack of empathy for a particular group of people to the point that they are comfortable with them being hurt and might even urge it on or carry it out themselves.
David Deutsch: Yeah. Well, carry it out themselves is very rare. As you said, there are dozens and dozens of cases in history, but that’s over thousands of years.
Russ Roberts: True.
David Deutsch: So, normally, it’s a matter of legitimizing. Not of hurting Jews. It’s a matter of legitimizing hurting Jews.
You mentioned the stabbed-in-the-back myth at the end of World War I in Germany. But, that myth carried over to England as well. And, an English newspaper–I’ve forgotten the name, Morning Post or one of the main English newspapers–carried an account of Jewish perfidy in World War I, which kind of reversed this.
So, they didn’t say, ‘Wow, the Jews helped us by stabbing the Germans in the back. We should thank them.’
It was, ‘The Jews caused the war and prevented it from stopping.’ Whereas the Germans were saying, ‘The Jews caused the war and made it stop.’
By the way, contradictory in itself.
And, this is–the illogicality of the accusations that are formed as rationalizations of the Pattern is itself a characteristic of the Pattern. It’s a bit like the phenomenon of cults or religions. Cults and religions often have credos–shibboleths–where to be a member, you have to assert something illogical. And it’s a badge of membership.
Russ Roberts: Yup.
David Deutsch: So, in some situations, the more illogical the shibboleth is, the stronger it becomes as a badge of membership.
So, another kind of illogicality, similar to the World War I in Germany, Britain, and then in America, by the way, Henry Ford and Father Coughlin.
Russ Roberts: We’re hearing it right now because America gives $4 billion–which is a large number to me, but not a large number to Israel or to the United States budget–because Israel accepts $4 billion in foreign aid, which is used to buy American arms and has strings that it–it’s basically a subsidy to American weapons manufacturers. ‘Because of that, America is being ruined.’ That’s a very common meme in the Internet right now, and it’s irrational. It doesn’t make sense.
David Deutsch: It is, as are many other things in this complex of ideas.
Russ Roberts: I just want to say, by the way, I’m against American aid. I was against it when I was living in America. Now that I live in Israel, I’m still against it. I don’t think America should be giving aid to Israel. Israel’s GDP [Gross Domestic Product] is about $550 billion dollars. The $4 billion it gets through the United States, it could easily finance on its own, and I think it should. So, I just want to get that in. Sorry, carry on.
David Deutsch: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it’s an irrelevant issue, and I think everyone knows it’s an irrelevant issue.
So, a similar thing–another one that just came to my mind. Again, there are dozens and dozens of these things. Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, wrote three books about how bad the Jews are. I haven’t read them, but I understand that they are very virulent. And, I know that one of the things he says there is–and he repeats a very common trope at the time–that Jewish doctors kill their patients. So, one version–
Russ Roberts: They’re non-Jewish patients, presumably–
David Deutsch: They’re non-Jewish patients. Sorry. Yeah, quite right. Yes. One of the versions said that they have a pact that they must kill 1 in 10 of their gentile patients. I think Martin Luther didn’t say how many, but the University of Vienna said that it was 10%. So, that was a common form of the libel.
But, Martin Luther pointed out, without himself realizing what he was saying, he pointed out as a kind of, ‘Look how irrational we are,’ he was kind of saying, ‘because we know that they do this, and yet we still hire them as doctors.’
Now, he was pointing out something which is perfectly true. And, again, a more widespread thing at the time was that Jews were expelled from various cities for various imaginary crimes. And then, a few years–at most a generation–later, they were welcomed back in. And, it wasn’t that people said, ‘Oh, they didn’t commit those crimes.’ They just said, ‘Oh, well, the Jews can come in now. They’ll be useful in X, Y, and Z, in trade, in medicine, and whatever.’
Russ Roberts: Finance. Yeah.
David Deutsch: Finance, yes. Oh, yeah. Well, there was the thing that only Jews were allowed to participate in finance. Officially. Of course, in reality, everyone participated in finance; and the Medici were not Jews.
Russ Roberts: I want to give an example from the current moment to both get your reaction and challenge my own skepticism about your thesis. And again, I have to say, there’s something deeply offensive about your claim. It’s disturbing. It is unacceptable. And yet, in fact, for most of my life–we are the same age; I’m 71, you’re 71–we’ve lived in a time with very little overt examples of violence against Jews. Trivial amount through most of my life, trivial amount of any kind of antisemitic words, anything. But, people would say, ‘Oh, but antisemitism, it’s like a virus. It just kind of mutates and spreads.’ And, I’d say, ‘That’s not a satisfying answer as a social scientist.’ And, it’s hard to understand how it could be true.
So, I’ve always been skeptical of it. Until the last two years, with the war in Gaza. And, I want to give an example from modern times. And, listeners, I’m not going to name names, and you can speculate all you want, and I’m not going to confirm or deny anything, but I follow a number of people on Twitter, on X, who have millions of followers. These are smart people, deeply thoughtful, interesting people. Some of them are extremely talented. Most of them are highly educated. Until October 7th, I would have said they are incredibly rational, nuanced, and sophisticated thinkers in weighing evidence, and so on.
And yet, since October 7th, the following is true–and it’s a small number of data points, in my own personal experience; but I know they are representative of a larger group–these folks have never said anything about the hostages. They have said nothing about Israel’s horrible moral dilemma of having 250 of their citizens kidnapped and dragged into tunnels. They’ve never suggested what Israel should do, instead of what they claim is genocide. They use the word ‘genocide’ to describe a terrible tragedy, but it’s a tragedy of war, not what was defined as genocide recently, until recently.
They only post anti-Israel–they post about a few things. But, when they post about Israel, which is regularly, they only post critical things, many of which are not true. I don’t mind if they post things that are true [?about?] Israel: many things it’s done that I’m ashamed of, that Jews are ashamed of, that deserve criticism. That doesn’t bother me. You can argue that Israel has made a terrible tactical error in responding the way it does. You could say it’s made a moral error. That’s fine. I’m open to any of that if you make an argument.
But, a significant portion of what they post are lies. When those lies are uncovered, they never apologize. They never tell their followers, ‘Oh, I exaggerated. I posted a video claiming that it was a video of Jews–of Israelis–on a tourist trip to watch the bombing of Gaza. That actually didn’t happen. There weren’t any, and I probably shouldn’t have posted it.’ That doesn’t happen. They just put it up. And, I’m not going to detail all the things I think are dishonest. Again, I don’t mind, people don’t agree with Israel, disagree with Israel. This has nothing to do with that. This is a relentless posting of grotesque things that are not true, demonizing Israelis.
And I wrote one of these people because I know them well. And I said, ‘You know you’re endangering me and my children. I don’t mind if you’re critical, but by demonizing me,’ which is the Pattern, ‘by saying that I am a savage, that I am a supporter of genocide, you are justifying hurting me. You are justifying hurting my children. Please don’t do that. Be nuanced. Be critical. But please do not only post things, many of which are not true.’ Now, we got into an interesting back and forth about what’s true and what’s not true, and that’s a discussion for another day.
But, this phenomenon of a thoughtful person who I respect, posting relentlessly critical things of Israel–until I talked to you, David, I liked to think that, ‘Well, they just have so much empathy for the Palestinians,’ and they struggle because their feed, like my feed, has been programmed to make me happy or really mad. Those are the two things that your feed on social media does: it either is designed to make you feel comforted or enraged. So, of course, those, so they got a bad feed. They’ve watched too many videos that aren’t true, and as a result, that’s all they see. And, their love for the poor Palestinians, which I also empathize with–the people of Gaza, I think it’s a terrible tragedy, what they’ve endured since October 7th at the hands of Israel. But, their own leaders have, I think, bear immense, if not most, of the moral responsibility for their faith. But, we can debate that.
But, I like to think, well, this person who is acting on the Internet–and I’ll say someone publicly, Tucker Carlson, whose theories of the world continue to morph into stranger and stranger conspiracies about Israel and Jews–they’re just so compassionate. They’re so empathetic for the state of the Palestinian people, which I can relate to. So, it’s not so surprising that they’re anti-Israel right now.
But, you’re saying that’s really a misreading of what’s going on. You want to elaborate on that? Or agree with–am I getting this right?
And, I have to say, even though I don’t like your theory, it does explain this perverse behavior of people I know are rational everywhere else.
David Deutsch: Yes. Well, I’m not going to say whether I like the theory or not, because I think that is irrelevant. I’m interested in what’s true, and I try to pursue what’s true, rather than what I like to be true. By the way, before I get onto your friends who are consumed by the Pattern, I just want to point out that Jews are not exempt from the Pattern.
Russ Roberts: Correct. That’s true, too. Yeah.
David Deutsch: And, I’m not referring to only to so-called self-hating Jews, who, they’re a category by themselves, like Neturei Karta or those kind of people. I’m talking about ordinary people–as you say, rational people, caring people. And, again, I’m not going to name names, but Jews, Israelis, everybody, there is no category of people who are immune from this–I don’t know what you call it, a mind virus. It’s not like other instances of that kind of thing. So, I hesitate to use generic categories for it.
Russ Roberts: It’s not a conspiracy theory about some–yeah, it’s different.
David Deutsch: Yeah. Yeah. It’s very different. But–but–I don’t think that the people you’re talking about are moved by compassion or empathy. I don’t think they have that. Claiming to have that is, again, a rationalization.
You can easily tell, as is often pointed out on social media and so on, that if they were empathic or compassionate, they would be compassionate with other Palestinians. For example, the ones who are being mistreated in other countries or who are expelled from other countries. And some–
Russ Roberts: Or with other tragedies in the world that aren’t related to Jews. They don’t say a word about them.
David Deutsch: Yes, exactly.
But the most extreme example of this is that they don’t care about other Palestinians. They don’t care about Palestinians who are being killed or harmed or hurt by people who aren’t Jews. That never appears in the public discourse. So, it’s not compassion.
Russ Roberts: But, don’t you find it kind of condescending? I do. But it’s growing[?] on me. Isn’t it a kind of condescending to say–and people say about me all the time, they say, ‘Well, he’s a Zionist, so he’s an idiot.’ So, what you are suggesting is that when I look at these people I respect or used to respect and I’m trying to understand their behavior, there’s a certain–I mean, it’s not really cheerful, but there’s a certain smugness of saying, ‘Well, they’ve got this disease and they can’t help it. It’s pitiful, it’s sad, but they’re just misguided beyond–‘ They’re in the throes of a mental illness, is what you are effectively saying. It’s a disturbing way to look at other people.
David Deutsch: It would absolutely be illegitimate to look at other people like that in the course of an argument. If somebody says, ‘Israelis have committed genocide in Gaza,’ to reply to that by saying, ‘You’re irrational’–
Russ Roberts: Yeah, ‘You just hate Jews.’ Yeah–
David Deutsch: That’s an invalid argument. That’s an ad hominem argument. Which should not be used in any circumstances, especially not ones where people’s lives hang in the balance.
So, when one is making an argument for or against some proposition, one can’t use the attributes of the person putting forward the argument as part of your argument.
Russ Roberts: Correct.
David Deutsch: That’s not legitimate.
Russ Roberts: Correct.
David Deutsch: But, nevertheless, irrationalities do happen. And, this isn’t the only irrationationality going around. I have been on the anti-irrational side of several different arguments. And, when I say that, for example, inductivism is a philosophy that is incredibly seductive and which enters into people’s worldview when they don’t know–they would deny that they are an inductivist.
And, I have to–I can’t say, ‘Yes, but you secretly are.’ I have to say, ‘This thing you are saying is false.’ Never mind whether it is, quote, “inductivism.” Nevermind that. I will argue against your particular position. That’s if I want to argue with them–which I often do if they are careful thinkers who, in other respects, I have reason to understand arguments and change their point of view according to them.
Russ Roberts: So, let me ask you a related question. Early in this war, in Gaza, many people complained that Israel is doing a very bad job with what is sometimes called hasbara–which means communication, making its case–and that Israel needed to do a better job. And obviously, the world’s opinion was spiraling out of control negatively against Israel ‘because Israel was doing such a poor job.’ This is an old story. It goes back 77 years. People have always said Israelis are blunt. They are overconfident; they are dismissive of others. A form of the Pattern already. But, that, of course, this is a cultural flaw of Israel, is one of the reactions. And, I’ve never believed that. It’s not clear that it would make any difference.
However, I’m on X, that’s the social media platform I spend too much time on. I’ve recently started removing it from my phone. I put it back on again. It’s like smoking. It’s an addiction. And then I take it off for a while–which is good, by the way. Like smoking and stopping smoking, every cigarette unsmoked is probably a benefit, health-wise. It may have other costs.
So, on X, there’s this war that goes on. And, I look at it sometimes from 30,000 feet. Here’s the war. Somebody says something that’s not true. Again, I don’t want to debate whether some of these things might be true or kind of true, but let’s say it’s an actual–a misstatement of fact.
So, the hasbara people pile on and correct so and so. Is this a reasonable thing to do? Should we continue to play whack-a-mole with people who are the most crazy victims of the Pattern? Or should I just say, ‘Well, they’re a little bit crazy–or maybe very crazy–and that they’re victims of this mind virus. I’m not going to waste my time trying to dissuade them or to dissuade others.’ But, what’s your thought on that?
David Deutsch: Well, you made several points there. First of all, as far as the hasbara goes–even before that, let me say that the fact that anti-Jewish rhetoric has risen, even among people who do not themselves participate in persecution or violence against Jews, that always happens. That’s a feature of every pogrom. Again, it’s an odd feature of pograms: that, the result of it is that bystanders side with the perpetrators rhetorically, even if they don’t join in. Which most of them do not. So, that’s one thing.
The fact that this rising always happens and has got nothing to do with Israel or its public relations or anything like that.
Having said that, I think that Israel’s public relations, as well as the well-meaning efforts of Jewish organizations or anti-antisemitism organizations, it’s not that they have got bad PR [Public Relations. It’s that they have the wrong theory of what they’re conflicting with.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. Yeah. Explain. Explain.
Russ Roberts: They think it’s an education problem.
David Deutsch: Yeah. Yeah. Or, that this is a form of prejudice or a form of racism and a form of–there are all these things that it’s blamed on.
Russ Roberts: A few good workshop sessions will clarify things and clear this up.
Russ Roberts: Get the right facilitator in there.
David Deutsch: Whereas, I think–I don’t know how to do this. I’m not a public relations person at all.
But, I can’t help thinking that if they had the right theory of what they are combating, they would do better at combating it.
And, I think there’s no single answer to whether one should respond to factual falsehoods. I sometimes do on X; and it’s because I’m thinking of the people who are just new coming to this–a 16-year-old who has just gone on X and suddenly encounters this torrent of facts saying that there was a Palestinian state that the Israelis invaded in 1948–just to say, ‘Well, that isn’t true.’
And, then to point out–and usually the allegation comes along with some emotional taint as well. So, then I often also point out that what’s really happened is that this person is legitimizing hurting Jews for this. And, it wouldn’t be a valid legitimization even if it were true. But it isn’t true. Like, you know: ‘The Jews killed Jesus’ is not–people pretend to believe, or rather make themselves believe because it’s part of their religion, that a crowd of Jews filled the square in front of Pontius Pilate. And when he said, ‘Who shall I kill?’ They said, ‘Kill Jesus, and we’ll take the responsibility for His blood on us and our children.’
Now, first of all, crowds don’t speak in unison. Secondly, if they did speak in unison, no crowd in history has ever said that they and their children should be punished to the nth generation.
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
David Deutsch: No one has ever said that. That scene didn’t happen. It was made up for the purpose of being an illogical allegation that it was a badge of membership–in this case of Christianity–to endorse.
So, now, this applies also to Jewish people who are gripped by the Pattern. By the way, I think ‘gripped’ is perhaps the wrong word because most people in whom the Pattern is part of their psychological makeup, which by the way, included me before I began to realize what’s going on. Most people are not overwhelmed by the Pattern.
The moment of being overwhelmed by the Pattern is quite visible. It’s when the person can’t stop talking about Jews. As Douglas Murray has pointed out. And that’s when people say, ‘Oh, this is a mental illness.’ But, it’s not a mental illness. It’s an irrationality. In that respect, there are many other irrationalities that are like that. And, I mentioned inductivism, which is one that I have [inaudible 00:51:56]–
Russ Roberts: It’s not one of the worst, I would just suggest. There are others that are worse.
David Deutsch: Right. But, this one is particularly harmful politically. It is a thing that can destroy cultures. It can destroy empires. So, for that reason, it is important to combat it.
But, combating it doesn’t necessarily mean eradicating it as a moral perversion. Because, for example, I said that its clash–the formation of the state of Israel was one of the enemies, one of the great enemies of the Pattern. And, it, in fact, exacerbated the Pattern at the time, as did the Enlightenment. But, the Enlightenment and the formation of Israel are good things.
And, similarly, the Anglosphere is a very good thing, but it is the place, as Max Nordau pointed out in his address to the first Zionist Congress, which I always recommend to everybody–
Russ Roberts: We’ll link to it–
David Deutsch: Right. The Anglosphere is the place where all these things that he talked about in the way that the emancipation of the Jews was hypocritical and led to the opposite, and so on. That didn’t happen in the Anglosphere. Notably. But it’s not because people got less, quote, “antisemitic.” It’s because the actions of hurting Jews conflicted with the actions required by the Anglosphere morality.
And, that is why Britain was an exception to–I must always say, and the Netherlands–and Britain and the Netherlands were an exception to the upsurge of pogroms and antisemitic persecutions that followed the Enlightenment. And then, to America, it was a bit too early for Nordau to mention America as well, but if he were speaking today, he would say, ‘And, America.’
Russ Roberts: Explain that again. Say that again about Nordau’s thesis and why England was different.
David Deutsch: Yes. So, he said, and I think this is extremely perceptive of him at that time, 1897–
Russ Roberts: This is 1897–
David Deutsch: Yeah. He said, ‘You would think that the era when the Jews were emancipated, when they got to be allowed for the first time to participate in society, to [inaudible, crosstalk 00:54:46]’–
Russ Roberts: Come out of the Ghetto–
David Deutsch: Yeah. ‘Get out of the ghetto, attend university, engage in business, become bankers, and so on, that this would just normalize the age-old pattern, but it made it worse. And, that’s because the people implementing the Enlightenment, building Enlightenment polities were not sincere,’ as he puts it. Whether they were sincere or hypocritical or not, I don’t know whether one can say that in regard to unconscious ideas, unconscious motivations. But, anyway, they weren’t.
Britain, which was the last major European country to emancipate the Jews legally, that was precisely because they were serious. They waited to emancipate the Jews until they had resolved the conflict of the ancient patterns of persecution, the conflict between that and the new ideas of the Enlightenment and the Anglosphere, as we would now call it.
Once they resolved that in the middle of the 19th century, then they emancipated the Jews. And it was no big deal. Even though a little bit before Gladstone–the Great Liberal–was railing against emancipating the Jews, allowed. But, even then, he was railing against allowing them into Parliament as MPs [Members of Parliament]. There were Jews who were ready to be MPs who would have been voted in and who weren’t allowed by the rule that you had to swear on the Bible–on the New Testament. So, that requirement was lifted at the time when the country was ready to accept that conflict between some of their previous values and some of their present values.
So, that was how England was different. And still is different.
And, the fact that people still believe nonsense that they see on the Internet has got nothing to do with that, because they do not enact it. The Pattern is a moral perversion which takes the form of compulsively legitimizing–legitimizing, not enacting–hurting Jews for being Jews. And, that can go up and down in a society. But what people do, especially in strong societies like the Anglosphere societies, what people do is more regulated by their political and social traditions than by their gut morality about different people.
Russ Roberts: That’s fascinating. And, I have to say, my earlier unease with your claim is softened by your observation about that people in the grip of this increasingly focus on the Jews. That would be true of–to take a modest historical example, Adolf Hitler. But, it would be also true of people in today’s world who–puzzling it seems, as you point out, and as I’m pointing out with my examples from social media–it’s all they write about sometimes. And increasingly, to the extent it’s not all they write about, the proportion grows over time.
And, I will say, since the return of the hostages and the least temporary, mostly end of the war, some of the worst posters and re-posters that I’m talking about have quieted down. But others have ratcheted it up.
Russ Roberts: Let me ask you a question about how to respond–well, I’d like to turn to the general question–how to respond to this. I’m pretty sure you’re an atheist–
Russ Roberts: And, I am a practicing Jew. You can’t see it on Zoom, but I’m wearing a kippah, and I do my best to lead a serious Jewish life in the normative sense of Orthodox Judaism. So-called modern Orthodox would be my flavor, more or less. In the face of this reality, would you favor–I asked the same question of Sam Harris, by the way, who is also a very famous atheist, as I think you are. It’s a funny phrase, ‘famously atheist,’ but, meaning: It’s well known. It’s not, like, a quiet thing I’m broaching here. Isn’t the solution to the Pattern, the right response to the Pattern given your atheism, favoring assimilation?
So, Herzl in 1897, beginning before that, but certainly in the first Zionist Congress, is making the case for a Jewish state where we’ll have a haven, a sanctuary, we’ll be safe.
Hasn’t turned out quite that way. You could debate whether it’s been good for the Jews or not. But, that’s one answer. You could argue historically it’s not been a complete success. I have to admit that.
But, a different answer would be: Let’s go the opposite direction. Instead of creating a home for this crazy group of people who are–stand out in every society they’re in–which is also interesting–and are identifiable, despite the fact that they have mostly in the West, look a lot like the people around them; but it doesn’t matter. So, it’s not a skin-color thing in the West, somehow.
Shouldn’t the solution just be to fade away? If you’re any kind of utilitarian–I’m not, but you might be, and many are–shouldn’t, isn’t the solution to this horrible suffering that comes from the Pattern, just get rid of Jews? Not exterminate them, God forbid, but: Let’s fade into the woodwork. Let’s change our names to less Jewish names. I’m Roberts, used to be Rabinowitz. That’s a step in the right direction. Take off your kippah, don’t keep the Sabbath. Just merge, baby. That’s another way to cure the disease. Instead of debating people that they shouldn’t hate us, let’s just stop existing as a distinct category. Do you feel that way, ever?
David Deutsch: Absolutely not. So, I think that this idea that assimilation is the solution to pogroms was believed by many people in the 19th century and was tried by many people, and the place where this extermination of the Jews began was the place where they were most assimilated–
Russ Roberts: Yeah, it’s awkward–
David Deutsch: in the whole of Europe.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. Yeah.
David Deutsch: Probably the second choice, if you’d been told in 1900 that some time in the coming century the Jews of Europe will be–one of the nations in Europe is going to try to wipe out the Jews–the first choice of most people would have been France.
Russ Roberts: Yeah, the Dreyfus–.
David Deutsch: Germany, perhaps Austria, would have been second, third. If you allow Russia as part of Europe, they would have said Russia or Poland.
Russ Roberts: Poland. Yeah.
David Deutsch: They would not have said Germany. Germany was the place to which Jews fled during the pogroms of the First World War. Even though the Kaiser was deeply gripped by the Pattern; but that didn’t affect the policies of the state. So, the Jews took refuge in Germany. [More to come, 1:03:42]
