#rorschach test

The Jew is a sort of Rorschach test. People see in the Jew whatever suits their agenda. Banker, radical, victim, conspirator, communist, capitalist... Just never quite human.

I know Jumblr prefers the pithy, but I want to extend the metaphor.

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The Rorschach test, as you might know, was meant to be a way to identify or classify difficulties of the human mind.

The patient was shown a series of inkblots, ambiguous shapes without any fixed meanings. The therapist would then invite the patient to describe what they saw in the inkblot shapes. Since the shapes were ambiguous, what the patient saw in these shapes, wasn't ever about the shapes themselves, but a means to supposedly reveal the structures of the patient's own psyche. Pareidolia as a diagnostic tool.

The Jew as a Rorschach Test: Antisemitism as Projection

How a society sees Jews has almost never actually described the Jews of that society as much as it has revealed something about the society itself.

The Jew, because he is not actually understood by the society, is, like the inkblot, ambiguous. Since he is other and unknown, he is subject to wildly divergent interpretations, none of which reflect the Jew's life/beliefs/practices/values. Instead, what a society sees in the Jew reflects that society's needs, fears, and crises.

In medieval, Christian Europe, the Jew was the other - falsely accused of killing Jesus Christ, desecrating the host, and poisoning the wells. These accusations were baseless and absurd, but they must have felt true and valid to those whose world was defined by the overwhelming, omnipresent Christian binary dualities of the place and time: good vs. evil, salvation vs. damnation.

The Jew, as the outsider, wasn't just not-a-Christian, but a Christ-killer. He was an inkblot in which the medieval Christian's guilt, anxiety about sin, and need for a scapegoat was projected. The very ambiguity of the way the Jew existed within Christendom without being part of it, made Jew the perfect surface for unconscious projection.

Just as one person sees a butterfly in an inkblot while another sees a bat, Christians saw in Jews either satanic enemies or (more rarely) proof of divine mercy. Either way, what the observer saw in the inkblot wasn't based on any reality about the inkblot itself, but based on the fears of the observer.

The modern period generated a new set of anxieties: urbanization, financial abstraction, and political revolution. The Rorschach Jew here reflected contradictions at the core of modernity itself. In 19th century Europe, Jews were simultaneously seen as both the faceless financiers of capitalism and the radical firebrands of socialism.

This is the classic Rorschach dynamic, isn't it? Contradictory accusations projected onto the same ambiguous stimulus. How could Jews be categorically both hoarding wealth and fomenting class war?

Such a thing was only believable because the image of "the Jew" was not based in reality, but in the social psyche.

Like an inkblot, the Jew became a surface onto which irreconcilable social and economic tensions could be emotionally "resolved."

The 19th century also brought us Modern Nationalism. The Rorschach test was also supposed to measure boundary confusion, how people respond to ambiguous figures that blur inside and outside, self and other. That's what the Jew was in the European 19th century nation state.

Jews in Europe and elsewhere were frequently depicted as simultaneously hyper-assimilated (too much like us) and radically other (an alien threat among us).

This duality in which the othered Jew was simultaneously the ultimate insider and the ultimate outsider provoked a special kind of nationalist panic.

Antisemitism here operates like a defense mechanism against that ambivalence and national identity anxiety. The Jew becomes the inkblot where cultural boundaries are tested and violated. The fear isn't of Jews themselves, but of what they symbolize: the failure of clear categories.

Haviv Rettig Gur talked about the advent of the new mass societies of modern nation states as social constructs in the 19th century.

And in this world of new Mass Societies, in this shift from small, agrarian, maybe religious identities to Mass National Identities...they develop these ideologies of nationalism that try and police the boundaries of these identities to firm them up, make sure that they stay strong.

The Nazi problem with the Jews, says Haviv, is seen in Mein Kampf, and was driven by insecurity about German identity.

If Germanness is tribal and blood and ancient and biological and we can measure it by testing your skull...and a Jew in the morning can be a German in the evening...?

[Hitler believed] the boundaries of germanness are hard, the membrane is impermeable. It is biology, it is real- and what is the Jew doing? He's popping in and out all the time! He's perforating the membrane of germanness! If a Jew could be a German and something else, if you can have layers...you can't have absolute identity. And if you can't have absolute identity what is the German? The Jews endanger Germanness!

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Rorschach dynamic persisted. The image of the Jew in the West becomes morally saturated: a figure of sacrosanct victimhood for some, a lightning rod for resentment in others. In each case, the actual Jewish person disappears, and what remains is a symbol - an inkblot onto which guilt, denial, and moral discomfort are projected.

Read Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews. Horn argues that the world's love for "dead Jews" is a form of perverse moral posturing, a way for societies to affirm their own virtue by honoring Jewish suffering...but this only works if Jews are no longer alive to complicate the ego-saving narrative.

Horn notes how the Holocaust is sanitized, depoliticized, and turned into a universal morality tale that erases real Jewish lives, culture, and ongoing challenges. She contends that many memorials and educational efforts, while well-intentioned, often serve to comfort non-Jewish audiences rather than confront uncomfortable truths about antisemitism or support living Jewish communities.

Some in the post-Holocaust world, especially after 10/7/23, accuse Jews of "playing the victim" or "controlling the narrative." Again, these reactions say less about Jews and more about the viewer’s need to process trauma, responsibility, and historical shame.

Today, in both far-right and far-left discourse, the Jew remains a shifting inkblot: billionaire globalist or Zionist oppressor, cultural subversive or imperial power broker. In conspiracy theories, Jews are often imagined as orchestrating both migration and ethnonationalism, feminism and patriarchy, capitalism and Marxism.

This incoherence is diagnostic. It reveals the deep psychological fragmentation within those projecting the image. As in a Rorschach test, the lack of internal logic is not a bug, but a feature. The more the image can absorb contradiction, the more effective it is as a projection surface.

To treat the Jew as Rorschach test is to shift the analytical gaze from the image to the viewer.

It is the society looking at the inkblot - the anxieties, disavowals, and desires which are revealed in what it sees when it gazes on the inkblot and sees itself.

Antisemitism, in this metaphor, is not about Jews or anything Jews believe or do.

Understanding antisemitism through this lens allows us to see that no amount of Jewish integration, explanation, or visibility can resolve the problem, because the Jew is not being seen as a person. They are being looked through, like an inkblot, revealing the shapes of other people’s fears.

I suspect that Israelis generally understand this better than those of us in the diaspora.