Last weekend I read a rather extraordinary article in the Weekend Australian. It was an edited version of another article from the Jewish Quarterly, called Viral Prejudice and the Jews and written by one Simon Schama. A taste of its dubious pleasures:
Likewise, vaccines could be seen as an instrument of alien invasiveness, a mass poisoning purporting to be a salutary prophylactic. It is predictable, then, to find those arch-cosmopolitan people, the Jews, featuring in the suspicions and conspiracy theories that hold the virus itself and vaccination programs as insidious.
Not all anti-vaxxers are anti-Semites, but the latest wave of fanatical populism engendered by a reaction against lockdowns and curfews includes anti-Semitic illiberalism in its repertoire. The demonisation of Jews as, simultaneously, adepts of esoteric medical knowledge and vectors of disease goes back to the earliest expressions of Judeophobia.
But suspicion of Jewish doctors and the clinical science of their vocation, coupled with a conviction that there are times when scientific knowledge should submit to some larger imperative — political or religious — is not a monopoly of non-Jews.
The article rebounds with sneering contempt for any objections to the prevailing orthodoxy surrounding the Covid virus. Such objections are labeled under crazy people who believe in conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, or simply both.
To understand how Schama has drawn this rather long bow it is necessary to examine the curious way in which he begins his article.
In late July last year, American pharmaceutical company Pfizer, in collaboration with German company BioNTech, founded by the husband-and-wife scientific team Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, began the phase three clinical trials that would result, four months later, in the announcement of the first COVID-19 vaccine ready for manufacture and distribution.
Pfizer’s chief executive is Albert Bourla, born and educated in the Thracian metropolis of Thessaloniki (erstwhile Salonica), while his two Turkish collaborators come from families who immigrated to Germany. Both their family histories, not to mention their research partnership, run spectacularly counter to the populist anti-immigrant rhetoric that has driven hard-right nationalism in Germany for the past decade. While not making a great show of the fact, Bourla and his two Turkish partners have been content to allow their transnational collaboration to establish its own exemplary significance for an inescapably interconnected world.
You would assume, then, that a partnership across historically adversarial national frontiers, a collaboration based on the universal imperatives of science, would deal a blow to nationalist intransigence. But modern times being what they are, you would be mistaken. There is another fact about some of the leading scientist-entrepreneurs responsible for developing and delivering RNA messenger vaccines with a speed and urgency hitherto thought inconceivable, a fact that has not escaped the attention of the preternaturally suspicious: many of the most prominent among them are Jewish.
The chief medical officer of Moderna is Tal Zaks, an Israeli living in the US; the chief scientific officer of Pfizer, Mikael Dolsten, is a Swedish Jew — his father a two-generation resident of Halmstad, his mother an Austrian Jew who escaped the Holocaust. Bourla, who, like Dolsten, lives in New York state, is by origin a Greek Sephardi Jew from one of the few Jewish families to survive the Salonica Holocaust that took the lives of 95 per cent of the 56,000 Jews living in that ancient city of Jewish settlement.
The crux of his argument is that because Jews are disproportionally overrepresented in the design and production of these vaccines, thus any objections to their use on the world’s population is in of itself anti-Semitic. Not all anti-vaxxers are anti-Semities, buuuuut …
We are used to having any criticism or even observations about Jews resulting in the interlocutor being labeled as an anti-Semite. But this latest accusation of anti-Semitism by broad association is not just ludicrous, but sinister. It seems that not only is no criticism allowed of any aspect of Jews or their behaviour in a micro or macro sense, but anything that they engage in is now in of itself unimpeachable. In this regard, movie critics had better give the next Woody Allen film five stars or their anti-Semitism will be plain for everyone to see. Or whites who refuse to take out loans with Jewish lending institutions will be similarly tarred. If I am wrong, where is the distinction? Where is the point where anti-Semitism ends and the freedom to choose for oneself begins? I doubt that anyone can give me an answer to that question, Jew or otherwise, which in of itself is telling.
To be fair, I don’t care about any of this. The accusation of anti-Semitism has been levelled at me before without any basis, and I ignored it. I simply don’t care. But what I do find interesting here is how in his effort to browbeat whites into getting the vax by threat of Jewish condemnation, he has inadvertently shone a light on the high level of Jewish involvement in the Covid vaccines, something of which I was before unaware. That together with the implied threats remove any doubt that the basis of these poisons is benign. A greater example of an own goal I find difficult to remember.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.
