If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive.
Interpretation
This quote views anti-Semitism as a distinct form of racism that has unique and destructive characteristics.
Paul Johnson categorizes anti-Semitism not merely as a subtype of racism, but as an 'intellectual disease' that is both highly infectious and capable of causing widespread harm. He emphasizes that its specific traits necessitate a unique classification, as it extends beyond typical racial prejudice, impacting thought processes and societal interactions in profound and detrimental ways.
In practice
During a speech on cultural tolerance, one might quote this to stress the unique dangers of anti-Semitism.
Indeed it is the protean ability of Western civilization to be self-critical and self-correcting - not only in producing wealth but over the whole range of human activities - that constitutes its most decisive superiority over any of its rivals.
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.
The image of the scientist who puts the pursuit of truth before anything else has been shattered and replaced by a man on the make or a quasi-religious enthusiast who wants to prove his case at any cost. Science is becoming the tool of campaigning warfare, in which truth is the first casualty.
What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense.
Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.
One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.
Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.
In Christ there is no East nor West.
To suggest things may be going on in our brains that we aren't fully conscious of, that we unknowingly make classist, sexist and racist presumptions... Well, there just aren't many comfortable ways to take that. And in the face of discomfort comes the mask of defence.
Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.
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