Image: Wikipedia]. Thus this prejudice became a superstition, and fixed its roots deeply in the mind — Spinoza, Ethics [1]. In reality, Zionists concern themselves with the survival of a Jewish-majority nation with Jerusalem as its capital in a world where anti-Semitism refuses to go away [4].
Do not be misled. Nor did the international community do much to help the Palestinian Jews many of whom were Holocaust survivors in the Arab-Israeli Wars of and It is hardly controversial to say Jews and their culture have been under erasure for two millennia, starting with the Babylonians and continuing today under the banner of Palestinianism. In a world of gentile suspicion and Judeophobic tropes, the State of Israel cannot escape the long shadow of gentile anti-Semitism that arguably found its most potent literary-cultural form in the notorious character of Shylock, the friendless Jewish money-lender who wants his pound of flesh, a stereotype that still resonates today on the Far Right and in Arab and Iranian propaganda [9].
This superstition has power over a person. The object of hatred must be managed, maybe even destroyed. Moreover, the more we find people who agree with us, the less conflicted we are about having these hateful emotions [12]. It is also a kind of envy. In fact there is a panoply of bad emotions that Spinoza is keen to illuminate.
Using his terminology, we can say that anti-Semites do not live according to the precepts of reason but are at the mercy of bad emotions.
As well as viewing Jewish history in diachronic fashion, Dylan makes this personal: literally. According to Jewish tradition, Jacob experiences many personal struggles both in the land of Israel and out of it, which foreshadow the trials and misfortunes of the Jewish people as they fight for their lives and their collective inheritance in the land of Canaan or Palestine. Furthermore, as a corporate personality, Jacob has his own rights and obligations apart from or separate to his constituents, which means that what may be true for the corporate personality is not necessarily true of his constituents and vice versa.
