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Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11906035_1
The Anti-Semitic Disease
(Commentary) Paul Johnson - As a historian, I would call anti-Semitism an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive. It is a disease to which both human individuals and entire human societies are prone. Anti-Semitism is very ancient, has never been associated with frontiers, and seems impervious to change. What strikes the historian is anti-Semitism's fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense. In the whole of history, it is hard to point to a single occasion when a wave of anti-Semitism was provoked by a real Jewish threat (as opposed to an imaginary one).