Novelist Dara Horn talks about this at some length in her recent book, People Love Dead Jews. Jewish culture, she argues, has long been marked by a devotion to literacy, a willingness to be different, a sense of the social obligations that freedom brings — ideals that are anathema to the book-banning, tyranny-loving authoritarians who tend to be most flagrantly antisemitic. “The insane conspiracy theories that motivate people who commit antisemitic violence reflect a fear of real freedom,” Horn notes, “a fondness for tyrants, an aversion to ideas unlike their own, and most of all, a casting off of responsibility for complicated problems.”

Thus a nation or culture that rejects the values the Jewish community has historically lived by, a nation in which antisemitism is becoming endemic, is a danger to itself. In such a nation, sophisticated intellectual inquiry has been abandoned for the false consolation of simplistic thinking, and toleration of difference has given way to conformity and the rage of the mob. Antisemitism thrives in countries where the wheels are coming off, countries that are collapsing into ignorance, xenophobia, and dysfunction.