2026-09-28 Infidel Awareness Month The Pattern: A Quantum Physicist Decodes 2,000 Years of Jew-Hatred
YouTube Infidel Awareness Month channel
Duration: 01:07:23
Richard Landes interviews David Deutsch about the Pattern. Deutsch treats antisemitism as a moral irrationality: a distorted moral reasoning whose constant core is that hurting Jews is legitimate, while the stated reasons change from era to era. They discuss how the Pattern is passed on, often unconsciously, its historical forms, its influence on Western politics and foreign policy, its overlap with contemporary movements, why journalism struggles to report on it, and the minority that opposes it. Topic list from the video’s chapters.
Edited for readability. Verbal fillers, repetitions, and abandoned starts have been removed without changing the substance of the conversation.
Topic guide
Timestamps link to the corresponding point in the recording.
- 00:00 - Introduction and Personal Background
- 00:42 - The Field of Quantum Computation
- 02:51 - Defining Antisemitism
- 05:01 - The Pattern of Antisemitism
- 09:49 - The Moral Irrationality of Antisemitism
- 17:59 - The Transmission of the Pattern
- 22:57 - The Impact of the Pattern
- 32:13 - The Enlightenment and Antisemitism
- 36:58 - The Pattern of Antisemitism
- 37:26 - Unconscious Adoption and Rationalization
- 38:10 - Impact on Foreign Policy
- 38:40 - Historical Manifestations
- 39:09 - The Pattern in Contemporary Movements
- 43:22 - Challenges in Journalism
- 59:54 - Opposition to the Pattern
Transcript
Richard Landes
Welcome to Infidel Awareness Month. For most of this month, we’ve named dangers that announce themselves. Today’s is a stranger, older, and quieter danger, and my guest is the man who named it. The thing the world calls antisemitism, he argues, is not what the word says it is, and we’ll let him tell you what he means.
A word about my guest, because he’s not who you would expect to be doing this. David Deutsch, one of the founders of the theory of quantum computation, the field that may give us the quantum computer, is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a winner of the Isaac Newton Medal, and has two major books: one is The Fabric of Reality, and the other The Beginning of Infinity.
So, David, one of the striking things about your idea is that it’s not as if you were researching antisemitism. You came upon this almost by accident. Can you explain how you came upon the Pattern, and what it is?
David Deutsch
Well, I came upon it… One can never recall, in my experience, exactly when the first inkling of something happened. But I came upon this seriously when I was writing my current, third book, whose provisional title is Irrationality. I was trying to find common threads, like anti-rational memes, which I’ve discussed in my previous book. And I realized something that had been growing on me for a while, actually: that the persecution of Jews, the ancient libels against Jews and so on, the phenomenon which is called antisemitism, is not what the prevailing theories of it say it is. They say that it is a form of hatred, a form of bigotry, a form of racism, a form of fear or hatred of the other, xenophobia, a number of things. And the first thing I realized is that to classify what has happened to Jews over the millennia as an instance of that is worse than superficial. It’s entirely misleading.
Note that the word “antisemitism” was only coined towards the end of the 19th century. Before that, it didn’t need a word, because it was taken for granted. It was part of all cultures, including Jewish cultures: namely, that it is legitimate to hurt Jews for being Jews. And I say “hurt” advisedly, because it’s not necessarily to harm Jews. Think of Holocaust denial. It causes a great deal of hurt to Jews, especially to Holocaust survivors and their families and so on, and it barely harms anyone.
Richard Landes
Harm them physically?
David Deutsch
Yes. Physically, financially: a harm that could be the subject of compensation in a court of law.
Richard Landes
I see.
David Deutsch
The judge would say, “Well, what harm have you actually suffered? Somebody has lied about you. Well, has that affected your reputation? Has it affected your income?” Slightly, yes. But that isn’t the point of it. Similarly, the point of desecrating Jewish graveyards is not to cause the Jewish community the additional expense of restoring the gravestones. That is not the point of it. The point is how it makes Jews feel.
And that is already different from almost all other forms of bigotry, because with other forms of bigotry, if somebody hates a particular group, they would stop thinking about them if the group disappeared, if they succeeded in exterminating the group or whatever. Whereas with Jews, it’s almost entirely the other way round. It’s remarkable.
I remember one of the things I noticed before thinking about this seriously, right back in the 1980s, when I was watching the news about the Solidarity movement and the attempts by the communist government to suppress it. One of the government spokesmen said, and this was repeated in all seriousness on the British news, that the riots had not been caused by any grievance of the workers. It was Jews and antisemites who had caused this. [laughter] Jews and antisemites. And I—
Richard Landes
Anything associated with Judaism?
David Deutsch
Yes. And why did he say this? Presumably because he had a constituency that approved of him saying it, who thought it was true or something, and could be persuaded to repeat it. As with many irrationalities, it’s contagious. And it’s weird, because there were virtually no Jews in Poland at the time.
Richard Landes
In Poland at the time. Exactly. So let me ask you, because if I remember correctly, what you found that led you to the Pattern was this: you were looking for patterns of irrationality, and what you found was a moral irrationality.
David Deutsch
Yes. That’s what I ended up realizing: the thing that accounts for all the rather strange features of so-called antisemitism, or persecution of Jews, or sidelining of Jews, is that it is a moral theory. It is a theory about what it is legitimate, or right and wrong, to do. But it’s not about it being right to attack Jews, or to expel Jews, or to hurt Jews. That may sometimes happen because of the Pattern. But the underlying thing, which doesn’t change very much over the centuries, is the legitimacy of it. And saying that something is legitimate, or thinking that it’s legitimate, is a feature of one’s morality. Morality can be thought of as the things that are legitimate: the things where contradicting them is taboo, or not allowed, or outside the Overton window, or immoral.
So my idea is that our moral theories have been improving for thousands of years. They’re still by no means perfect, but the moral theories that prevail in the West are enormously more advanced, and truer, than in previous times. But they’re far from perfect. And one of the imperfections remaining in the West, as it also remains in many other cultures outside the West, is the Pattern.
For individuals, it varies in how strong it is. At a minimum, it may just result in looking at a news broadcast like the one I saw and not realizing that anything odd has been said. The Pattern will make you blind to absolutely ridiculous things, so you don’t see how ridiculous they are. At the other extreme, it is possible for the Pattern to trump every other moral consideration in a person’s mind, and at that point they become something like the Nazis. So there’s Nazism, and there’s Palestinianism, and in earlier times there was the Spanish Inquisition, where it was no good arguing to the King of Spain that actually the Jews didn’t do this, [laughter] because morality is more important than facts in a person’s mind. So that wouldn’t have persuaded him. And similarly, if you’d said, “Spain will lose out tremendously in economic terms, in philosophy, in science, you name it,” he would say, “How can that persuade me about matters of right and wrong?” I mean, he wouldn’t have said that, because to say that very thing would be to admit what the Pattern is. And it hides itself.
Richard Landes
Right. So if I understand, you’re essentially saying that even people who don’t necessarily want to hurt Jews might even say, “I don’t even want to harm Jews,” in the sense of… Well, no, no, you’re talking about hurt. They’re not going to harm Jews physically or economically, but they would even say, “I wouldn’t dream of wanting to hurt a Jew.”
David Deutsch
Yes.
Richard Landes
To hurt their feelings. On the other hand, they somehow feel compelled to allow others to legitimize hurting Jews, and they feel compelled, you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, not to oppose that.
David Deutsch
Exactly. And this issue of what is legitimate and what you would do yourself is well known to be different. Somebody can be in favor of the absolute right of a person to immigrate, and then you say, “Well, do you want to immigrate?” They would say, “No, I don’t want to immigrate. I just believe it’s legitimate to immigrate.” I believe it’s legitimate to marry someone of the same sex. I believe it’s legitimate to do all sorts of things which I have no desire to do. In fact, I would even oppose someone doing them. I would say, “Are you sure that’s wise? You know that you shouldn’t do it. But if you want to…”
Richard Landes
Yes. Exactly. And so here they’re saying… And no, they’re not actually saying it. They’re silently obeying a kind of rule that says: do not stop other people from accusing Jews and legitimizing hurting their feelings.
David Deutsch
Yes. Like in the Polish case.
Richard Landes
Right. So now let’s take the general… Is it fair to call it a glitch in moral reasoning?
David Deutsch
Yes. You could call it a glitch, although when it’s big it’s more than a glitch. But it’s often just a glitch.
Richard Landes
Yes. Right. There was an expression when I was working on millennialism. Somebody said, well, the line was that there is no millennialism before the 12th or 13th century, and I would say, “What about this?” And they’d say, “Oh, that’s as common as fleas.” Well, the thing about fleas is that they’re common, but sometimes you get an outbreak that can be deadly. So, okay, we’re dealing with that. But what is the moral glitch? What is it, specifically, that makes people feel compelled to allow Jews to be legitimately hurt, in a way they wouldn’t for other people?
David Deutsch
Yes. Well, I don’t know, fundamentally. I don’t know what the mechanism of transmission of this meme is. It is a meme. First of all, it’s not inborn. Nobody is born with the Pattern in their brain, so it has to get transferred to them somehow: by their parents, by their culture, by their peers. It has to be transferred, and not by teaching, because although it is often taught, teaching is very much less effective than the transmission of the Pattern. The transmission of the Pattern is near 100% effective.
Richard Landes
Wow.
David Deutsch
If the people around you have the Pattern, you usually acquire it. Not absolutely always, and sometimes you acquire it at a lesser level, sometimes at a greater level than them, and so on. So that’s one thing.
Another thing is that, unlike other memes, it’s very rarely explicit. As I said, when people act on the Pattern, in pogroms and so on, they don’t have to [explain] why they’re doing it, except in the sense that, whatever the current ostensible morality is, they have to justify it in terms of that, just as they have to justify everything they do in terms of that, and not necessarily honestly. When the Medici lent money, they didn’t say that they were usurers. They just lent money, even though it was nominally against the morality their society endorsed. And similarly, the Polish guy I keep coming back to didn’t know that he had an agenda here which was more important to him than the facts, more important to him than how he would look to historians, even more important to him than what would advance his political aims.
Because, and this is another thing the Pattern does, because it’s moral, even a small amount of it can do enormous practical harm, because it distorts people’s view of what the facts are. If you think that COVID is caused by the Jews, then you will not pay any attention to—
Richard Landes
That’s the problem with scapegoats.
David Deutsch
Yes. Yes. If you blame the wrong person, you don’t fix the problem.
Richard Landes
Yes.
David Deutsch
Right. So that’s another thing. And also, they don’t behave consistently, even in regard to Jews. Especially in the Middle Ages, though it’s happened both before and after, Jews are expelled from somewhere on the grounds of some hideous reason, which is actually a post hoc rationalization of what they wanted to do for some existential internal reason. And then a generation later, the Jews are invited back. And it’s not that people have realized the Jews weren’t in fact poisoning every tenth person. They still believe that. Well, I say “believe”: they still have the compulsion to say it, by way of legitimizing what people do to Jews. But when it comes to hiring a Jewish doctor, they still hire a Jewish doctor, and then go and write in their book that Jewish doctors kill one tenth of their non-Jewish patients.
Richard Landes
All right. So one of the things you say in your paper is that there’s no reason to believe Jews would be immune to this Pattern. And by saying that, it seems to me (and here, you know, you’re the physicist) it’s almost as if you’re not describing a meme. You’re describing a kind of twisted moral imperative.
David Deutsch
Yes, but as I said, it’s not one that we’re born with. Its features are so consistent over centuries and millennia. There were blood libels in the 12th century, whenever it was, and now there are blood libels in the 21st century. You can see the pattern continuing; that’s why I call it the Pattern. And that pattern is not in our genes. It is in our cultures.
Richard Landes
Well, why do you say it’s not in our genes? I mean, there’s something… From what I read of yours, this is a sort of hardwired attitude that people can’t escape.
David Deutsch
Oh, well, they can certainly escape it. I have certainly diminished it in my own mind by thinking about it, and there are certain people, heroes, who have actively campaigned against it and denied it.
And it’s not the sort of thing that is in genes, because we don’t know how to recognize a Jew. The people who demonstrate in the streets that the Jews caused 9/11 can’t tell the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew who passes them in the street, unless they’re ultra-Orthodox or something. Or they look at someone’s curved nose and say, “That’s a Jew,” and actually it’s an Arab. So the genes don’t know how to distinguish. They don’t know that there is such a thing as Jews.
Richard Landes
Okay, we can come back to that. But for the moment, let’s stick with the point you’re making, which is that there seems to be this very powerful drive, and it’s a moral glitch. And one of the ways you describe it is to say that when Israeli politicians accept demands from the outside world that reflect the Pattern, they are in fact accepting the Pattern. And the example you give is Israel sending aid into Gaza to prove to the world that it’s not trying to starve the Gazans to death, which would be the normal military strategy of any siege in earlier history, certainly premodern history. And they accept this, and in fact feed their enemy, because Hamas is collecting this aid and distributing it to their friends and selling it. They’re literally supporting their enemy in order to live up to a moral demand which reflects the Pattern, and not the consistent morality of the rest of the world. Is that—
David Deutsch
Well, I have very little to say about the actual practice of sending food to the Gazans. That’s a different issue. It’s how the Israeli government, and left-wing Zionists in particular, justify to themselves what they’re doing. Sometimes they say, “We’re the most moral army in the world, and that’s what the most moral army in the world does,” and that’s fine by me. But there has also been, ever since the beginning of Zionism, a tendency to say: we must prove to the world that we are not what they say we are. We must prove to the world that we are ordinary people, who can till the soil and build factories and defend ourselves in war, and do all the things that ordinary people do, which the non-Jews have mocked us for not being able to do. So that was the Pattern in left-wing Zionism. There’s also a pattern in right-wing Zionism. There’s also a pattern in religious—
Richard Landes
Hold on. And that left-wing pattern reflects this moral distortion in which no other people in the world have to prove to the world that they’re normal.
David Deutsch
Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
Richard Landes
And that no one notices this, right? And no one notices that nobody else has to prove it. And nobody notices that the Jews have to prove it; or they notice it, but they just take it for granted. Of course the Jews have to prove this.
David Deutsch
Yes. And on the whole, the right-wing Zionists do not notice it either, so that is not the focus of their attack on the left wing. In the tradition of right-wing Zionism, it was more like this. When people accused Zionism of violating the rights of the Arab population of Palestine, they said: “Well, we have rights too. And if they object to that, of course they’re going to object to it. We would object to it in exactly the same way if the tables were turned.” And that’s not true. Nobody objects to anybody in the way that the Arabs object to Zionism. That’s not a thing. That never happens. And when the right-wing Zionists say, “Of course that happens; [unclear] them, we’re going to do it anyway,” that is accepting the premise that the Arab objection to Zionism is legitimate.
And if you look back, as I’ve recently been doing, to the history of Britain in Palestine in 1920, ‘21, ‘22, the British were continually baffled. They would say to the Arabs, “Well, we realize you have just concerns, and here’s how we’re going to meet them. You’re going to have your property protected, and there’s going to be economic growth,” and a whole list of things, all of which would be good for them. And then the Arabs said, “No, we reject it,” because Jews. And then the British, whoever it was, the negotiators or the diplomats, came back to London and said, “Well, the Arabs object.” No: the Arabs didn’t object. They didn’t have any objections. We met their objections.
So, yes, and then there are the religious Jews of different kinds. I’m not an expert on religion, but the same Pattern appears in their rationalizations, like Neturei Karta.
Richard Landes
Right. Yes. Okay. So if I understand, one of the arguments you’re making is that in what I call normal time, not apocalyptic time, but normal time, generation following generation, the Pattern can be relatively recessive. In other words, you can have a situation in which everybody understands it’s legitimate to hurt Jews, but people don’t necessarily avail themselves of that legitimate option.
David Deutsch
Yes. They don’t feel the need for it.
Richard Landes
But there are times when there’s a kind of panic, a moral panic, in which the feeling is that the Pattern is under attack and must be defended at all costs. And it’s those conditions that lead to what I would call apocalyptic explosions of violence and hatred.
David Deutsch
Yes. If you like, the paradigm example of that is the Enlightenment, where all sorts of irrationalities were being dropped systematically (in some cases only ostensibly, but people liked to say that they were being driven by reason and practical considerations and so on). So many people thought that, just as this was the end of judicial torture, and the end of the persecution of women for being witches, and all sorts of bad things, the Jews would be fine in this new [world]. All the different versions of the Enlightenment claimed that antisemitism would end. And what actually happened is that there was a tremendous upswing of persecution of Jews. The main proponents of the French Enlightenment, for example, were virtually all virulently antisemitic, as it’s normally put. They had virulently anti-Jewish strands in their philosophy, and they absolutely didn’t see that this was inconsistent with the rest of their philosophy. They had to invent things like “the Jews are inherently something or other.”
Richard Landes
Right. One of the interesting things about that (it’s something of an aside, but I can’t resist it) is that one of the people who was most consistent about applying the rules of the Enlightenment to the Jews was Robespierre. In 1789, Robespierre is fully in favor of the emancipation of the Jews. And yet four years later, he turns into his own kind of moral monster, going not after the Jews but after the aristocrats and the traitors to the revolution. So it’s almost as if he was consistent about the Jews in his morality, but then somewhere else his morality had to melt down.
David Deutsch
As I sometimes say, it’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle. If you were to do a jigsaw puzzle by gluing the pieces down on the table, and you glued one piece down in the wrong place, well, if you’re lucky, all you’ll do is make a small wrong picture. But if you’re unlucky, it will affect the whole picture. It will destroy the whole picture. That’s a general feature of building up logical systems, or systems of thought in general. It’s a thing one has to look out for.
Richard Landes
All right. So one of the ways I applied your theory was to the year 2000. If Arafat had agreed at Camp David, it would have been a major blow to the Pattern, because one of the ways the Pattern survived after the Holocaust was through Palestinianism. The Palestinians had a legitimate gripe against the Jews, so if there was violence against the Jews, if there was hatred, any of those things were okay as long as they were done in the name of Palestinianism. But if the Palestinians had said, “Okay, we give up our grievance against the Jews,” that really would have been a major blow to the Pattern, which would not have had an outlet.
David Deutsch
Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but my guess is they would have thought of something.
Richard Landes
All right, they would have thought of something. But I’m working on your theory about the anxiety produced in people who are afraid that the Pattern is going to be lost, and how important it is to hold on to it. And so, the reaction of the media: Arafat says no, Arafat starts the intifada, and the reaction of the media is to side with him, almost as if they shared this anxiety that if he did say yes, it would be, I don’t know, the end of history.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Well, the end of the Pattern… or at least, the creation of Israel was, I think, the most extreme danger to the Pattern in history.
Richard Landes
Yes. Still is.
David Deutsch
The second most extreme one was the Enlightenment, especially the British Enlightenment. So the real point at issue between the Zionists and the anti-Zionists is the Pattern. The theories, especially theories in Western politics, about how to solve this thing are, as I said about the British in the 1920s: how to solve it is to ask, what are the grievances? Let’s see how we can meet those grievances so that they are reduced or go away, and other good things are substituted in return, and that’s how the problem is solved. But there were no grievances. The actual thing in dispute was whether it was legitimate to hurt Jews.
Richard Landes
Okay. So you’re arguing that not only is this unconscious, in other words, people adopt it without realizing that they’ve adopted it, but even more, it must remain unconscious. You can’t bring it to consciousness, because that would expose the glitch, the inconsistency—
David Deutsch
Yes. There have mostly been people who are compelled to do something in support of the Pattern, or to act on it, or to invent explicit rationalizations, and such people usually don’t know what they’re trying to hide. However, it has been known. I think one interesting case is Wagner, who wrote this diatribe against the Jews where he invented really amazingly silly stuff about Jews and music not being compatible, the same thing really.
Richard Landes
Yeah. Yeah. Voltaire.
David Deutsch
Yeah. So he says, unlike Voltaire, we don’t know why we’re doing it. I forget whether he says it’s an instinctive thing, but it’s just a thing that is in our minds, regardless of our opinion about things like emancipation. Voltaire was in favor of emancipation. You tell me that Robespierre was also in favor of Jewish emancipation. That really has nothing to do with it. You can have emancipation and it can still be legitimate to hurt Jews. And that was the prevailing view for a couple of hundred years on the continent of Europe, even in Britain.
The reason there haven’t been pogroms in Britain until now is not that the Pattern was weaker in Britain, although I think it was a little bit weaker. It’s because [British political culture] is inconsistent with pogroms. British political culture did not accept political movements adopting violence to get their way. It could not accept a pogrom, and it also could not accept violence that was not authorized by the state.
Richard Landes
Okay.
David Deutsch
So if people had a riot against the Jews in Britain, the police would arrest them. And this is not because the British were somehow well disposed towards the Jews. It was because the British were well disposed towards themselves. They thought of themselves as having certain rights and duties and privileges and ways of doing things, and a pogrom was more or less the ultimate in alienness to the British way of life. So there weren’t pogroms. And I think even today, the pogroms that have suddenly broken out throughout the Anglosphere are not very much legitimized by people who identify with British political culture. It is the enemies of British political culture, and of Anglosphere political culture.
Richard Landes
So somebody like, what’s his name? Jeremy [Bowen]… no, not… the one who’s the head of BBC Middle East…
David Deutsch
Oh, I don’t know.
Richard Landes
Anyway, he’s the one who said that al-Ahli Hospital was flattened, and when told it wasn’t, he said, “I don’t care.” So, you know, he’s clearly a prisoner of this kind of thinking. But what it seems to me you’re getting at here is that people have put the cart before the horse. People have been looking at antisemitism in terms of its visible manifestations, but really there’s something underneath that must be addressed, and until you address it, you’re basically misdiagnosing and therefore mistreating. And one of your examples is the degree to which foreign policy is affected by the Pattern. The example you give in your paper is Iranian nuclear ambitions. Can you explain how not getting the Pattern leads to self-destructive, call it own-goal, diplomacy?
David Deutsch
Yeah. I think a clearer example, because it’s further away from present considerations, is what was happening after the Balfour Declaration. I said a few minutes ago that the British were stuck in treating this problem of enmity as if it were about grievances, or aspirations, or that kind of thing, whereas it was about the legitimacy of hurting Jews. It wasn’t about anything else, and everything else was a rationalization of that.
So the British at that time basically decided to go back on the Balfour Declaration, and the first thing was to reduce Jewish immigration into Palestine, which, if we go forward another couple of decades, greatly enabled the Holocaust. The Holocaust would have been much less severe if the British hadn’t stopped immigration.
Now, what would have happened? First of all, as I said, this was based on a fantasy: that the Arabs had a grievance, and that if this grievance were met, appeased, then the Arabs would befriend the British. But the Arabs were never going to befriend the British. The British needed the pretense that they were going to, in order to rationalize their decision to do the completely ridiculous thing of basically abandoning the Balfour Declaration. There were some people who saw this at the time, but they didn’t manage to make their case. Even Churchill was kind of equivocal about this. He was a Zionist. He was in favor of Jews immigrating, because he thought of it in historic terms: this was a historic achievement which was called for, and there was no reason to oppose it. But what he didn’t do was oppose the fantasy that had gripped the Foreign Office and the whole British establishment, which wasn’t true.
And if that fantasy hadn’t gripped them, there would have been mass immigration of Jews into Palestine. Israel would have been formed sometime during the 1930s. And by the time it came to the Second World War, there would have been a massive pro-British army in Palestine, in one of the most strategic locations of the Second World War, which would have been fighting in North Africa, fighting to defend the Suez Canal, and so on. They wouldn’t have had to bring ANZAC forces from halfway across the world and leave strategic interests in the Far East unprotected, or less protected, and so on. It would have been a massive rational boost, rational just from the point of view of pure imperial interests, British imperial interests.
Richard Landes
But the argument they would make is that this has nothing to do with the Pattern. The reason we’re appeasing the Arabs is that they have the oil.
David Deutsch
Yes. Well, the thing is, this is a rationalization. “They have the oil” envisages a world that has never existed: a world in which the Arabs can switch oil on and off, and in which we are dependent on their cheap oil. But in fact, whenever they’ve switched it off, which has happened very rarely, the West has recovered very fast. The market always recovers from things like that, just as—
Richard Landes
They need us as much as we need them. So the British Foreign Office and the American State Department and the French Quai d’Orsay all accepted this argument that we have to appease the Arabs because they have the oil, even though that was both self-destructive in terms of foreign policy and not true, in the sense that they were in a much stronger bargaining position. They adopted a losing bargaining position in order to conform to the Pattern.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Richard Landes
Yeah. Okay. All right. There are a couple of things I want to get at before we turn to some kind of conclusion. One of the things I’d like to deal with is this. You say it’s not genetic, but it seems to me that when I think about the Pattern, the unspoken thing, and the reason it must be unspoken is that it’s so embarrassing, the unspoken driving force behind it is: “I need to be able to put down the Jews, because they make me feel insecure.”
David Deutsch
Yes, morally insecure, right? The moral universe that I wish to live in is threatened by the illegitimacy of hurting Jews. The moral universe I’m okay with is one in which it’s legitimate to hurt Jews.
Richard Landes
One of the things my father used to say to me (I remember really disliking it as a teenager, but I’ve come to learn that he was right) is that you don’t make yourself look bigger by making other people look smaller. And yet the Pattern is literally that it is legitimate to make Jews look smaller, because even if it doesn’t make us look better, bigger, it makes us feel better.
David Deutsch
Yes. I don’t think it has anything to do with wanting to feel bigger. One of the many theories of antisemitism is that it’s caused by envy: Jews are successful. But the Pattern has existed in lots of places where Jews were spectacularly unsuccessful, like the dockyards of Greece before the First World War and after, and in the Pale of Settlement. When Jews were dirt poor, and were not the richest people in their communities and so on, exactly the same rationalizations happened, and pogroms happened.
Richard Landes
But you’re pointing to economic well-being as the source of envy, and I’m working off your argument that this is moral envy.
David Deutsch
Yes. I’ve also heard the theory that the Jews invented morality: the Jews invented morality as we know it, and the world has never been able to forgive us. Now, whether that’s true or not (I think there are a number of fallacies in that argument), even if it’s true that the Jews invented morality and gave it to the rest of the world, most people don’t know this. Most people are completely unaware of it. When people go out in the streets and smash the windows of Jewish shops, it’s not because they think the Jews invented morality. People like Nietzsche have made a big thing of this; in his case it was “the Jews invented Christianity, and we’ll never forgive them for that.” And yet there are people repeating Nietzsche’s tropes in the street, smashing those windows. I don’t think it makes sense to adduce a logical reason, even one rooted in bad emotions, in psychology.
Richard Landes
I think we’re going to have to disagree on that one, because I really do think… One of the ways I look at it is this. There’s a famous, contested letter from Napoleon to the Jews saying, “Come back.” I think his phrasing is genuine, and I think it’s a genuine Enlightenment moral statement: “Come back and repossess the sovereignty which the nations have until now so shamefully deprived you of.” So he’s talking about how both Christianity and Islam have made it the core of their ideology that there cannot be an autonomous Jewish state in this area between the river and the sea, as shameful. They’re shameful expressions of what my father would call making yourself look bigger by making other people look smaller. So he comes around and makes this very clear statement: it’s shameful to deprive you of sovereignty.
And yet what I see, particularly in the 21st century, with horrifying clarity, is that it is really hard for people to live with the idea of free Jews. That Jews should have sovereignty, that they should be allowed to defend themselves, seems to be almost an affront to people. So you get the Jews defending themselves against a genocidal jihad, and people are screaming at them for being genocidal.
David Deutsch
Yes. The ostensible reasons are never the actual reasons, because the ostensible reasons are rationalizations. And to some extent, a rationalization survives better as a meme the more ridiculous it is, because then it becomes a badge of membership of the group which is asserting the legitimacy of hurting Jews.
Richard Landes
Right. So call it genocide. And if you don’t call it genocide, you can’t run for office.
David Deutsch
That’s right. Or [play a] stadium music concert, or anything. And yes. But I don’t see how this big-small dynamic would work in the case of Jews themselves. You would have to say that it’s some Jews [unclear], right?
Richard Landes
No. Let me say something, because one of the things I noticed, when I first started working on the al-Durah affair back in 2003, was that the people working on it were furious with the government, because the government wasn’t doing what they wanted. And I began to realize that there’s a whole bunch of Jews out there who are major critics of Israel because Israel isn’t doing what they think it should do. And in that sense, they’re making themselves look bigger by making the Israeli government look smaller: “I know. If they listened to me, things would be right and there would be peace, and because they don’t listen to me, they’re awful.” Wouldn’t that comply with the Pattern?
David Deutsch
Yes. I think there’s an additional thing happening. We haven’t even mentioned the rise of woke. This is another thing that has happened to Western culture. One of the things about woke is that it also has this identitarian character, where you have to be a member or not a member, and so on. And it is a general feature of the Pattern that anything that gets sufficiently evil merges with the Pattern. Woke arose as a rather silly interpretation of epistemology, and became a political movement and so on, and therefore it became more and more evil, because it was advocating against Western values and against science and against truth, and so on. [Its] silly epistemology is postmodernism: there is no objective truth, and everything is relative. When the strength of that exceeded a certain amount, virtually every member of this movement had the Pattern very high on their moral agenda. It was once possible, but nowadays it’s almost impossible to be woke and, for example, be pro-Israel.
And you say critics, Jewish critics of Israel. I think there are very few critics of Israel. I very rarely see one. Sometimes I see on X or something, “Good heavens, it’s an actual criticism of Israel.” But usually it’s just libel. And what’s more, it’s not just any old libel. It’s ridiculous, absurd libel. It’s sadistic libels.
Richard Landes
Sadistic as well. “Mass starving this population,” when you’ve been mass-starved. “You’re committing genocide,” when you’ve been genocided.
David Deutsch
Yes. So there’s something sadistic about the moral assault on Israel.
Richard Landes
And you’re right, and I think that’s one of the reasons why the IHRA definition of antisemitism includes attacks on Israel, because so many of the attacks on Israel have nothing to do with reality.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Yeah.
Richard Landes
Okay. Wow. So, all right, let’s conclude. If we were to focus on the Pattern rather than on its epiphenomenal manifestations, what policies, for example in journalism, would we adopt?
David Deutsch
Well, two things, I think. One is just to expose the Pattern. If I’m right, then it’s important to expose that the Pattern exists, and to understand what it is, so that it becomes harder for people to construct rationalizations.
But the other thing is that, like woke (and I think they maybe can’t be separated anymore; they’ve merged quite a lot)… Woke is an attack on the Enlightenment. It’s an attack on Western values, and particularly on Anglosphere values. And the Anglosphere has gone into a funk and has adopted a policy of absolutely not opposing this.
Richard Landes
Right. Right. In fact, adopting it. So, yes, [unclear] is obeying the Pattern.
David Deutsch
He’s definitely obeying the Pattern. But, as I said, the Pattern comes in degrees. There’s the degree of Mr. Miliband, but the degree of Mr. Goebbels is higher than that.
But as I said, the other thing that obviously needs to be done is to defend Western values, to defend Anglo values in particular. You talked about newspapers. Newspapers have an ostensible ethos of seeking the truth and speaking truth to power and so on. They have detailed recipes, policies to follow, to ensure that errors are corrected and so forth. And these have been absolutely set aside in regard to Israel. And now they are also set aside in regard to Jews not in Israel. So defending British values, defending Anglosphere values and Western values ought to be a no-brainer, as they say. The culture is under attack, and it’s going to fail if it’s not defended.
Richard Landes
Right. And so that gets us… In a sense, as I listen to you, I imagine somebody who’s got a compass, slowly spinning a large globe, and the compass is telling him where north is. And then, when it hits Israel, it starts spinning wildly.
This moral compass… Some people call it Israel derangement disorder. So this kind of disorder, but it’s so common, it’s so assumed, that you can have a whole profession of journalists more or less taken over by observing the Pattern, by making it legitimate. If a Palestinian source, even Hamas, says, “Israel killed 500 people in a hospital,” then you repeat that, and later you apologize, mumble an apology or not, for having gotten it completely wrong: it was a jihadi rocket, and it killed maybe a dozen people at most.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Richard Landes
You repeat it not just by way of being gullible. You repeat it with anger, with rage, right?
David Deutsch
Right. Indignation.
Richard Landes
Indignation. So, wait. In some senses, take us out of the pessimistic, downward spiral you’re describing. Does it have to be that the Jews get the, you know what, kicked out of them before the Pattern is willing to relax its grip and start over? Or can they do [it] without the Jews getting smashed?
David Deutsch
I don’t think there’s anything the Jews can do more than any other decent person can do, namely to oppose the Pattern. First of all, as I said, to recognize that the Pattern exists, and that it exists in ourselves. None of us is entirely free of it, because it’s in the culture. It’s in the air we breathe. And we can oppose its manifestations. As I said, the manifestations, namely pogroms (I use the word “pogroms” widely, to refer to actual violence against Jews spurred by the Pattern): suppressing the pogroms has been extremely effective at suppressing the pogroms. So one can start there. And I think that for a couple of hundred years (no, more than a couple of hundred), within Britain there hasn’t been a pogrom, between when Oliver Cromwell readmitted the Jews and the murders [last year].
Richard Landes
1289, before they got kicked out.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Since they were kicked out in 1289, in a pogrom that killed a bunch of them, there hasn’t been one. Now there is, but it’s mostly the immigrant Muslim population. So—
Richard Landes
And woke.
David Deutsch
Right. And woke urging them on.
Richard Landes
So, I mean, one thing is this. Here are the Jews, who have this idea that everybody should be treated equally: equality before the law, the dignity of manual labor, everybody’s a moral agent, you want to empower the people, and so on. All of these are good liberal principles that get worked out in secular form, but they come particularly from the Hebrew Bible, more than the New Testament, which has a much more extreme version of these values. So you have a situation in which countries, not thinking that it comes from the Jews, adopt these values, these egalitarian principles, which in principle they should then apply to the Jews. But they can’t do that. There’s something about applying them to the Jews that makes them stop in their tracks.
David Deutsch
Well, yes, that’s the most… you know, that’s level seven or something of the Pattern. It doesn’t always make them stop in their tracks. More commonly, it perverts and warps things, including non-moral ideas and so on. As I said, sometimes with disastrous effect, but more usually with just a slight effect. So, yes.
Richard Landes
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as you say in your paper, because of the Pattern, Westerners have been slow to view threats to Israel as threats to them. So Iran is allowed to have nuclear weapons because, if you believe they want to use them, they’ll only use them against Israel, which isn’t true, but which does produce a policy that allows them to get nuclear weapons. Maybe you have some thoughts on this. We’re of the same age. We remember that up until the 1990s, the anti-war, the anti-nuclear movement was really powerful. And then, when you get into the 21st century, you get Arab countries that want nuclear bombs, and we didn’t hear a peep from the anti-nuclear [movement]. When was there ever the anti-nuclear gang out there to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? You would have thought [unclear].
David Deutsch
One could infer that there never was an anti-nuclear movement. There was only an anti-Western movement, which seized upon the anti-nuclear issue, because that’s what, for example, the Soviet Union wanted to happen. They wanted the West to disarm unilaterally so that they couldn’t be opposed.
Richard Landes
Right. And that also explains Judith Butler saying, “We embrace Hamas because they’re anti-imperialist.” The only imperialism that Hamas opposes is American imperialism, and their imagined paranoia about Israeli imperialism. Here she is embracing the most ferocious imperialists on the planet as her allies, because they’re against America. The anti-war movement was against America at war. It wasn’t against Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t against Yasser [Arafat].
David Deutsch
Yes. Yes. So woke is the anti-Enlightenment and anti-Western movement. It has not been caused by the Pattern, but it has merged with the Pattern, as evil things always do.
Richard Landes
Any last words of encouragement?
David Deutsch
It’s up to us. One can’t prophesy the future. One can only try to correct errors as one finds them. And it’s all to play for. All we have to do is decide that it shall end, and it will end.
Richard Landes
Well, I think that’s possibly excessively optimistic. But we’ve got your essay up on the website, and we welcome people’s responses: formal responses, not just tweets and thumbs-ups. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your time. And I must say, I found your paper one of the most interesting and challenging ones I’ve read.
David Deutsch
Thank you for having me, and thank you for that.
Richard Landes
Welcome. All right. Very good.
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