Daily Inspiration Quote by Theodor Adorno

Adorno’s line lands like a scalpel: anti-Semitism isn’t an argument, a “position,” or even a coherent hatred so much as a social medium - a rumor mill that doesn’t need Jews as real people. It needs “the Jews” as a floating character, an all-purpose explanation that can be passed along, embellished, and believed precisely because it thrives on distance from fact. By calling it rumor, Adorno demotes anti-Semitism from ideology’s self-serious posture to something more banal and contagious: hearsay with consequences.

The intent is diagnostic. Adorno, writing in the shadow of European fascism and the Holocaust, is tracing how modern mass society turns prejudice into common sense. A rumor works by laundering desire into “information”: envy becomes “they control,” anxiety becomes “they’re plotting,” economic frustration becomes “they’re behind it.” The content is interchangeable; the function is stable. Rumor is portable, anonymous, and self-sealing - it cites “everyone knows” as evidence, making proof irrelevant and rebuttal feel naive.

The subtext is also about modernity’s failure. For Adorno, enlightenment rationality didn’t eradicate myth; it repackaged it. Anti-Semitism becomes a mythic story dressed in quasi-empirical claims, circulating through institutions, newspapers, chatter. Rumor doesn’t merely misdescribe Jews; it organizes the speaker’s world, offering a cheap map of power and blame. That’s why it persists even where Jews are absent: the rumor is about the society telling it, its need for a target, its hunger for simplification, its willingness to outsource guilt.