It seems like we’ve been going through an epidemic of plagiarism scandals for the last couple of decades. (This is a topic I’ve written about a lot.) You see it in the political elite. Where once upon a time Joe Biden’s plagiarism of Neil Kinnock destroyed his presidential campaign (in 1988), politicians, even Supreme Court justices (paging Neal Gorsuch), routinely get exposed for plagiarism, and it doesn’t affect them at all. Same goes for journalists.

For a time, I thought this surfeit of scandal was a sign of a declining ruling class or something. Some loss of a sense of liberal ownership, of the connection between property and self and all that. (Not for nothing, Adam Smith seems to have been inordinately fearful of being plagiarized. You say coincidence? I say capitalism.) Now I just think it’s just one more sign of a growing nihilism.

In academia, it’s more of a mixed bag. There are cases of plagiarism where people don’t bat an eye or the person gets exonerated (the ones I am thinking of involve white men) and others where people, often of color, are brought down. More on that below.

As it happens, in the course of doing all this research for the introduction to this new translation of On the Jewish Question that Alex Gourevitch and I have been working on, I’ve noticed just how central plagiarism and accusations of plagiarism are both to the Jewish tradition and to antisemitism. It’s been eerie to read all these texts and debates against the backdrop of our current moment.

On the one hand, there is a great deal of fastidiousness within the Jewish tradition about plagiarism. Everyone is always citing someone else, and making a note of who it is. Rebbe x says y, Rebbe y says x. It’s part of the culture of dispute and recognition. On the other hand, there’s a sense in which the entire tradition is the product of one book, there’s only one truly creative entity in the universe, and we’re all quoting or quietly quoting the thoughts of someone else. So much so that we don’t need to be always acknowledging it. Without a lot of fetish for questions of intellectual ownership or originality or anything like that.

On the flip side, you have a long tradition among antisemites, particularly in Germany, saying the Jews are not original or authentic, they’re just imitators, the better their German, the more imitative they are. They’re frauds and con artists who are always passing off the true work and thoughts of other people as their own. In fact, that’s the very definition of the Jewish threat to European culture, in this view. Inauthenticity gets passed off as authenticity, copies as originals, imitations and frauds as the real thing. As one Viennese politician complained in 1907, “Culture is what one Jew plagiarizes from another.”

Then you have a problematic Viennese Jew like Karl Kraus, who converted to Catholicism and then de-converted, he said, “out of antisemitism.” Kraus loved to lean in to antisemitism and antisemitic stereotypes. He loved the idea of the inauthentic as the real, the pastiche and the fabricated and the citation as the one original truth. “I am perhaps the first case of an author who simultaneously experiences his writing as an actor,” he wrote. Whenever he writes, he’s just playing a role, speaking the lines someone else has written. Part of the point, the scholar Paul Reitter has argued (and from whom I’ve gotten all these quotes), was not simply to send up antisemitic stereotypes, but also to embrace them, to turn them into virtues, to show that he, Kraus, was not buying into the same scale of values as the antisemites who accused the Jews of being inauthentic.

Kraus is doubly interesting, again, as Reitter points out (and Sander Gilman confirms in his book), because there’s such a strong element in antisemitism of seeing journalism as essentially a Jewish activity. Like the Jew, the journalist is supposed to be someone who is parasitic on the words and ideas of others, essentially offering second-rate copy at dime-store prices. This stereotype arose in the early nineteenth century, again, of course, in Germany, and it continued in twentieth-century Vienna, with the feuilleton. Kraus leaned into that stereotype, too. “To have no thoughts and to be able to express them—that makes a journalist.” He was a journalist.

At a more personal level, I’m both horror-stricken and fascinated by the plagiarist. There’s something profoundly icky about passing off someone’s words as if they were your own. It makes me feel that the other person is a kind of sociopath, an actor who doesn’t realize they’re an actor. On the other hand, I admit to being attracted to Kraus’s fuck you to the demands and claims of authenticity, and the ickiness that often entails, and the idea of thumbing your nose at those who claim that you don’t really speak authentically or truthfully in your own language. That you don’t really have your own language.

Which brings us back to the dimension of racism in some of these academic debates about plagiarism. As I said, I know of cases involving white men, quite public and reported and all that, that ultimately went nowhere. But when scholars of color do it, it raises a similar specter, for their accusers, as the accusation of inauthenticity raised for the Jews coming out of the shtetl and into the world of “Enlightenment.” Essentially, you don’t belong here.

I am not—I repeat, I am not—saying that plagiarism is different if it’s committed by a scholar of color or a white scholar; it’s not, and it should be handled as the serious breach that it is. But I do think the cultural valence that gets provoked, disrupted, imbalanced, what have you, is different for scholars of color accused of plagiarism. In the same way that the more German a Jewish person tried to seem, the more they were accused of being not German, of faking their way through it, so do plagiarism scandals provoke a similar crisis and discourse of authenticity in the context of scholars of color—the idea being, essentially, you don’t belong here in academia—that they don’t arouse in the context of white scholars.

And, then, of course, there’s AI, which could put all of this discourse to bed. Permanently.