you believed in the Enlightenment values of human rights or in the idea of an unhyph- enated French identity available to all, then you had to be on the side of the Jews, even if actual Jews proved a bit pious and par- ticularist for your tastes. If you didn’t want French-ness to hinge on Catholicism, one of the easiest ways to demonstrate your anti- clericalism or commitment to laïcité (French secularism) was to insist that even a Jew could be French. The Dreyfusards—those who defended French-Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus from a false accusation of treason in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—were not necessarily immune to holding negative stereotypes about Jews. But categorical- ly defending Jews from antisemitism be- came, in that moment, further entrenched as a proxy for defending the secular French
group of particularly colourful white people: more cosmopolitan, intellectual, successful, and intense than their WASPy or preppy Cath- olic neighbours. Jews clustered in cosmopol- itan cities like New York and Montreal. We took piano lessons, we read books or even wrote them, we ate Chinese food despite not (generally) being Chinese ourselves. To many gentiles, this made us off-putting; to others, it constituted our charm. This philosemitism also had a sexual com- ponent. Unlike the 19th century French var- iety, though, the Golden Age exotic Jewish Other tended to be male. In her 2001 essay, “American Shiksa,” American writer Meghan Daum does a good job conveying this fix- ation. In it, she describes a love of Jewish men, those “dark-haired boys who read books and stayed up late, who had circles under their eyes, who looked like wise men, like owls perched up on the highest rungs of the evolutionary ladder.” More than that, Daum writes about enjoy- ing taking on the role of shiksa in relation- ships with these men. After flirting with the idea of conversion, she realizes an “agnostic” like herself isn’t about to do so. “So I decided that if I couldn’t be Jewish I might as well be un-Jewish in as obstreperous and madden- ing a way as possible…. And that meant sur- rounding myself with Jews and being a gen- tile. Blonde. Flaky. Adoring.” It’s a very funny essay, if you’re not easily offended. As Daum presents it, her fixation on life amongst Jews is about fleeing all that is “white trash.” Writes Daum, of her fellow gentile white Americans, “With or without country homes in Kennebunkport or Squib- nocket, we’re all descendants of shotgun culture, of Coke at breakfast, Triscuits for lunch, 4-H champions, horse thieves, and drunks passed out in front of 60 Minutes .” By contrast, Jewish families were restricting processed foods and screen time before it was cool, or at any rate tended not to settle in places where agriculture-themed scout- ing groups are a big deal. (I watched plenty of TV and ate no shortage of junk growing up in Manhattan in the 1980s and 1990s, but I did so in a home without guns or hard liquor, and with no livestock nearby.) In her 2014 book Unchosen: The Mem- oirs of a Philo-Semite , British writer Julie Burchill also frames her philosemtism in terms of an adoration of Jewish men—and a hyperconsciousness of her own unsoph- isticated-in-her-view gentileness. The Jews had become a symbol to me of escape—of
though if you’re a Jew yourself, you probably know others, which mitigates generaliza- tions. But philosemitism, to me, suggests a gulf between philosemite and Jew. You have to be someone who could up and decide you didn’t like Jews after all, or just that you pre- ferred some other hobby, and nothing sub- stantive would change in your life. The fate of the Jewish people is, at the end of the day, not the philosemite’s problem. I n 2011 in The New Republic , critic Adam Kirsch reviewed Philosemitism in History , a book whose topics ranged “from the Chris- tian Hebraists of the seventeenth century to documentaries on West German television.” The review is a synthesis both of philosemit- ism in history—including prior to the coining of the term in the late 19th century, along- side that of antisemitism—and of the signifi- cance of the phenomenon. “It takes pathet- ically little good will toward Jews to qualify for a place in the book,” Kirsch writes. Some philosemites of yore were simply the people who didn’t want all Jews murdered when others were advocating for this. Initially, prior to the 1789 French Revo- lution, philosemitism had little to do with its proponents’ real-life Jewish contem- poraries and far more to do with biblical Hebrews. These philosemites were early modern Christian theologians and Enlight- enment philosophers, who weren’t encoun- tering Jews socially or swinging by the deli for a smoked meat sandwich. Jews were interesting because of their role in Christi- anity’s backstory. The theological place of Jews and Judaism in Christianity still plays a role in philosem- itism, but its significance has waned over time; it is now mainly relevant to Christian Zionism. As the 19th century proceeded, the odds were ever-greater that a non-Jew- ish thinker would have met actual Jews, not just read about them. Their philosemitism, therefore, would be rooted in that more dir- ect experience (though the high levels of integration and familiarity we know today would have been unlikely in most settings until further into the 20th century). Philosemitism’s manifestations in modern European history included everything from fetishization of “Oriental” Jewish women (the belle Juive was a popular trope in 19th century France) to an association of Jews with French republicanism itself. After all, before the French Revolution, there was no concept in Europe of Jews as full citizens. If
If someone says they’re a friend of the Jews, you do eventually have to ask, of which Jews, for we are not all friends with one another.
state. Siding with Jews was a way of re- jecting those who believed only Catholics with the right ancestry could be trusted as loyal compatriots. The North American philosemitism of the mid to late 20th and early 21st centuries was both less political and more stereo- type-driven than the versions that preced- ed it. It was also much more about inter- personal relationships with Jews, a natural reflection of the increasing interactions be- tween non-Jews and Jews. It came out of what Franklin Foer’s much-discussed March 2024 Atlantic article deemed the “golden age of American Jews.” (In May, The Globe and Mail ran a Canadian quasi-equivalent, from Noah Richler: “Is the Jewish moment in North America over?”) Jews were at the centre of things culturally, seen as model minorities, and non-Jews admired us. Let’s call this Golden Age philosemitism. Golden Age philosemitism was organic. Jews were seen—that is, stereotyped—as a
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