The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep! is the title of an 1878 essay by the British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) in which the author critiques contemporary anti-Jewish attitudes in Britain. She writes, for example, “[I]t would be difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Jews] which has not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.”
Eliot also uses the essay to voice her support for Zionism two years after the publication of her pro-Zionist novel, “Daniel Deronda.”
The “Hep! Hep! Hep!” in Eliot’s title is a cry believed by some to have been shouted by marauding Crusaders as they attacked and slaughtered Jews, mainly in French and German territories, on their way to the Holy Land. The cry is widely interpreted as an acronym of the Latin Hierosolyma est perdita, “Jerusalem is lost,” referring, of course, to Muslim control of the city and of the wider Holy Land (seized from the rule of Byzantine Christians four centuries before the first crusade), which the Crusaders were aiming to undo.
Although Eliot does not explicitly reference it, she was no doubt aware of another modern “Hep! Hep! Hep!,” the reprise of the cry in the so-called Hep-Hep Riots, pogroms in parts of the German Confederation during several months in 1819. The riots were precipitated largely by contemporary political disputes over the extension of civic rights to Jews in the German states and, more particularly, the question of whether to continue or roll back the rights granted to Jews in a number of German states that fell under French sway during the Napoleonic wars. The riots were also influenced by the rejection of France’s post-revolution conception of the state as properly the product of a social contract between the government and its citizens. Those in the German states who rejected this formulation embraced the concept of the state as being based on citizens’ ties of blood and ancestral culture, and they attacked Jews as falling outside such ties. The Hep-Hep Riots most prominently engulfed a number of German universities.
“The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” is also the title of a 2004 essay by Cynthia Ozick in which she cites Eliot and also references the 1819 riots. She does so in the course of drawing on her unique literary powers to provide a stark, unvarnished tour d’horizon of the sick societal rot of Jew-hatred, its monstrous spewing of lurid anti-Jewish libels and their inevitably recurring sequelae of orgiastic butchery across the millennia, from the anti-Jewish indictments conjured up by the cultic priest Manetho in third-century BCE Egypt to, at the very time of Ozick’s writing, Islamist suicide bombings in Jerusalem and the depraved Jew-baiting “art” of New Jersey’s poet laureate and high priest of a contemporary anti-Jewish cult, Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones).
Of the unendingly recurring question, “Why the Jews?” Ozick writes: “There are innumerable social, economic and political speculations as to cause: scapegoatism; envy; exclusionary practices; the temptation of a demographic majority to subjugate a demographic minority; the attempt by corrupt rulers to deflect attention from the failings of their tyrannical regimes; and more. But any of these can burst out in any society against any people, so why always the Jews?” She quotes the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, writing in the early 20th century, who remarked of Jew-hatred to a friend, “You know as well as I do that all its realistic arguments are only fashionable cloaks.” Ozick notes that those sporting that fashionable cloak in 2004 were “mainly on the left in the West, and centrally and endemically among the populations of the Muslim despotisms.”
The same is true even more so 20 years later, following additional cross-fertilization—the red-green alliance—between these two fonts of hate. The current donning of the fashionable cloak reflects a post-modern fusion of Islamist and university-incubated, far-left themes that attack Jews as lesser beings. They are cast as uniquely unfit for nationhood in their land of origin, or for equal citizenship and equal rights in a polity that categorizes them as undeserving by virtue of racial taint (in this case, whiteness), unfair success and commitment to abhorrent meritocracy. The former condemnation echoes the medieval crusader’s “Hep! Hep! Hep!” model, targeting nonbelievers for the control of Jerusalem. The latter condemnation echoes the model of the students in 19th-century German universities, targeting those not of the right blood and values.
This Jew-hatred is post-modern in its explicit rejection of modern Western mores, with both the progressive left and the Islamists casting the Jew as the representative and beneficiary of that rejected system. And so when the Islamists, as they did on Oct. 7, partake of their orgy of murder, rape, mutilation and burning alive as the expression of their religious rejection of modernity and the kaffir Jews’ place in it with cries of Allahu Akbar (“God is great” in Arabic) as their “Hep, Hep, Hep,” their leftist campus allies in America cheer them on. They call for more such unbridled bloodbaths in Israel, and they attack Jews in classrooms and in the streets and burn Israeli and American flags in solidarity with their Islamist compeers, with “From the river to the sea” and “Death to Israel,” and “Death to America” as their en rapport “Hep, Hep, Hep.”
And in America, members of university faculties join the rioters, while university administrators are too cowardly to counter the ugly Jew-hate mayhem or are themselves too enamored of the fashionable cloak to do so. Worse still, federal executives only tsk, tsk at the mayhem and issue boilerplate condemnations. But fearful of the political cost of responding more effectively by, for example, applying anti-bias laws to rein in their subsidizing of the academic centers descending into cesspools, they abstain from such measures and allow the rioters to march on towards their obscene visions of a post-modern, post-American, post-Israel Jerusalem. “Hep! Hep! Hep!” indeed.