Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [82]
Spanking the Scapegoat
Nonetheless, we can gain insight into the appeal of the International Jew by investigating the archetype’s anti-Semitic roots. Fear of Jews preceded anti-Semitic global conspiracy theories by many centuries. During the Middle Ages, superstitious Europeans often blamed Jews for various calamities. For example, when the Black Death spread through Europe in the 1300s, Christians accused Jews of poisoning drinking wells, and slaughtered their Jewish neighbors by the tens of thousands. (Between the plague and the pogroms, the fourteenth century was not a good time to be a Jew in Europe, not that the rest of the millennium was particularly rosy.)
While Jews seem to have a particular knack for collecting blame, the tendency to hold innocent scapegoats responsible for unexplained misfortune is one of those universal and horrible aspects of human nature that we seem unable to evolve out of—like kidney stones. The origin of the term scapegoat is biblical, more or less. The Old Testament book of Leviticus commanded Moses’s brother Aaron to select two goats, one for God and the other for Azazel. After sacrificing God’s goat, Aaron was supposed to confess all of the Israelites’ sins while holding the head of the second goat and then send it out into the wilderness to find Azazel.bp Biblical scholars are not sure who or what Azazel is. Some say it’s the Devil. Some say it’s a mountain. Some say it’s some kind of magic goat genie. But everyone agrees that the folks who brought us the King James Bible got it completely wrong when they translated the Hebrew word Azazel as “scapegoat”; that is, a goat that has escaped. Nonetheless, the name stuck.1
Scapegoating occurs in communities as small as a group of friends and as large as a global religion. The victims are usually marginal members of the community. In small groups, scapegoats might be unpopular or eccentric individuals. In large communities, scapegoats tend to be members of cultural, religious, or ethnic minorities. For example, the first three women accused during the Salem witch trials in 1692 included a homeless beggar, a widow who did not attend church and was suspected of promiscuity, and a Caribbean Indian.
Part of scapegoating’s enduring appeal is its fusion of two rather important human sentiments—suspicion and curiosity. Suspicion of strangers was an important survival trait back in the days when marauding tribes would routinely rampage through the countryside. Primitive humans who ran off when the club-wielding ruffians showed up probably survived a bit better than those who greeted them with pretty garlands.2 Attesting to the primal source of xenophobia, primatologist Jane Goodall observed that even chimpanzees exhibit “inherent dislike or ‘hatred’ of strangers.”3
On the other hand, curiosity underlies the human desire for knowledge. When something happens, particularly when something bad happens, we want to know why. By working out the causal connections that determine our environment, we can establish some sort of control over that environment. We can build fires to cook our meat, make clothing to warm our bodies, and develop drugs to fix our erectile dysfunction.
But, unfortunately, we humans are not nearly so smart as we think we are, and we often discover causal connections that don’t actually exist. We’re particularly prone to embrace the wrong answer when it provides some psychological benefit. For instance, a Puritan in colonial Salem could satisfy his dark suspicions of a strange