Recently Oded Faran and Walter Block published an opinion piece in the ‘Jerusalem Post’ titled ‘Schrödinger’s Jew: How antisemitism is more absurd than quantum mechanics’ that riffs off of a point made via an anti-Semitic meme common on X/Twitter called ‘Schrödinger’s Jew’.
They ‘explain’ it as follows:
‘To describe the absurdity of the superposition principle in quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger devised a thought experiment, now known as Schrödinger’s cat:
A cat is sealed in a box with a mechanism that might kill it. Until the box is opened and the cat is observed, it can be thought of as being in a superposition. Alive and dead at the same time.
Only when the box is opened, and the cat observed, does the superposition collapse. The cat is seen to be in the “state” of alive or dead.
Schrödinger’s cat is now used to describe the unintuitive nature of quantum mechanics, but antisemites use a similar idea to justify their incoherent reasons for Jew hatred:
A Jew, in their view, is a superposition of many different qualities, and when it suits them, the Jew collapses into the state that maximizes hatred towards them.’ (1)
Did you notice the manipulative little tweak that Faran and Block added?
It is this bit:
‘Schrödinger’s cat is now used to describe the unintuitive nature of quantum mechanics, but antisemites use a similar idea to justify their incoherent reasons for Jew hatred:
A Jew, in their view, is a superposition of many different qualities, and when it suits them, the Jew collapses into the state that maximizes hatred towards them.’ (2)
This is typically dishonest since Faran and Block here are claiming that ‘anti-Semites make jews collapse into the state that maximizes hatred towards them’ which is simply wrong because the idea of ‘Schrödinger’s Jew’ is the opposite: ‘jews collapse into the state that minimizes hatred and/or maximizes acceptance/love of them.’
Faran and Block act like this is a new observation when it is not: the same basic argument was made in favour of the jews by Marcus Eli Ravage in his twin 1928 articles in ‘Century Magazine’: ‘A Real Case Against the Jews’ and ‘Commissary to the Gentiles’. While the jewish writer Maurice Samuel made not a dissimilar case in his equally famous 1924 book ‘You Gentiles’ where he observed that jews demand to be called ‘American’, ‘British’, ‘German’ but still remain jews among themselves and then – in essence – retreat into jewishness or their ‘American’, ‘British’, ‘German’ (etc) identity as it suits them. (3)
This is easily seen by pointing to the literature on jewish achievement where any jewish ancestry whatsoever is seized upon to claim that the individual concerned is jewish and therefore the ‘invention’/’discovery’ they are responsible for thus must – per force – be the responsibility of the jews. (4)
The problem is this doesn’t work the other way around with the defences of the jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution and their prominent role in the subsequent atrocities of the Soviet Union being usually rooted in the defence that the jews involved ‘weren’t practising jews nor were rooted in their jewishness’ or ‘weren’t representative of most jews’. (5)
You’ll hear this same argument made about jews as diverse as Leon Trotsky – even thought it is manifestly untrue and everything Trotsky did was in fact rooted in his jewishness – (6) and notorious NKVD (and long-time de facto OGPU) head Genrikh Yagoda (who was purged by Stalin in March 1937) with their atheism and ‘cultural distance from the jewish community’ often emphasized.
The problem with this – as J. Otto Pohl has repeatedly observed – is that you can apply exactly the same argument to Zionist atheists like David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan because they are arguably just as much ‘not representative of the jewish people’ and also didn’t believe in Judaism at all.
What is the difference?
Well jews don’t want to claim Trotsky and Yagoda were jews because of their enormous body counts and close association with the terror inflicted on Eastern Europe by Lenin and Stalin’s successive governments, but they want to claim Ben-Gurion and Dayan because they are the ‘creators of Israel’. When in truth either Ben-Gurion, Dayan, Trotsky and Yagoda are all jewish or they are all not jewish.
This is the nature of ‘Schrödinger’s Jew’ in that:
‘Jews collapse into the state that minimizes hatred and/or maximizes acceptance/love of them.’
We can see this in practice with no less a figure than Karl Marx in that jews have openly sought to make Marx out to be a ‘Protestant’ with Jerry Muller writing in 2010 that:
‘To regard Karl Marx as a Jew is in many respects fallacious, as he neither knew much about Judaism nor thought of himself as a Jew, having been baptized a Lutheran as a child.’ (7)
Muller is being dishonest here since biographers of Marx have long-known that his father was purely nominally Protestant, his mother Henrietta Pressburg stayed faithful to Judaism until her father (and Marx’s grandfather) – who was a rabbi – passed away and that Marx stayed in close contact with his openly jewish extended family for most of his life when his jewish uncle-in-law Lion Phillips – Phillips’ similarly jewish wife Sophie Pressburg was Marx’s mother’s younger sister – ensured Marx’s revolutionary activities got funded via his family’s legacy circa 1863. (8)
The point however remains because all of a sudden now that Marx is no longer popular jews and their supporters are engaging in a game of ‘Schrödinger’s Jew’ by claiming that Karl Marx ‘wasn’t jewish’ but yet Muller wants David Ricardo – who actively converted to be Unitarianism after eloping to marry a Quaker girl in 1840 – to be jewish (presumably because he is viewed positively as an ‘early capitalist economist’) on the same logic. (9)
This is essence of ‘Schrödinger’s Jew’ in that it is not ‘anti-Semites’ who keep changing who is and who is not jewish dependent on the winds of (real and/or perceived) popularity but rather jews themselves!
Hence Faran and Block are being completely dishonest here and claiming that ‘anti-Semites’ are doing what jews are in fact the ones doing when all ‘anti-Semites’ are actually pointing out the ‘Schrödinger’s Jew’ meme is how jews constantly play a shell game with jewish identity in order to ‘minimize hatred and/or maximizes acceptance/love of jews.’
That is the reality of ‘Schrödinger’s Jew’ and it is neither a ‘myth’ nor ‘illogical’ -v as Faran and Block claim – (10) but rather ‘anti-Semites’ observing reality and using the analogy of ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ to explain how jews engage in aggressive mimicry as an evolutionary strategy designed to exploit the weaknesses of non-jewish – and specifically European – societies.
References
(1) https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-881885
(2) Idem.
(3) Maurice Samuel, 1924, ‘You Gentiles’, 1st Edition, Harcourt, Brace and Company: New York, pp. 203-209
(4) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/why-jewish-achievement-lists-are
(5) This is the implied argument in Orlando Figes, 1997, ‘A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924’, 1st Edition, Pimlico: London, p. 676 and Jeffrey Herf, 2006, ‘The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust’, 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, pp. 95-97
(6) Cf. Joseph Nedava, 1971, ‘Trotsky and the Jews’, 1st Edition, Jewish Publication Society of America: Philadelphia
(7) Jerry Muller, 2010, ‘Capitalism and the Jews’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, p. 114
(8) David McLellan, 1973, ‘Karl Marx: His Life and Thought’, 1st Edition, Granada: London, pp. 3-4; 173-174; Robert Payne, 1968, ‘Marx: A Biography’, 1st Edition, W. H. Allen: London, pp. 18-21; Francis Wheen, 1999, ‘Karl Marx: A Life’, 1st Edition, Fourth Estate: London, pp. 8-15; 28; 52
(9) Muller, Op. Cit., p. 114
(10) https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-881885
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