According to the Telegraph, anyway. Oddly, some of the more virulent anti-semites in history have been Jewish. Karl Marx, notoriously ("We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element..."). Adolf Hitler was alleged to have a Jewish grandfather. And today, we have guys like Noam Chomsky (who lovingly endorsed a book by a Holocaust denier), Norman Finkelstein, and numerous political types like George Soros (who helped the German National Socialists) and many other "progressive" Jews who, less directly, tend to enable anti-Zionist / antisemitic movements.

Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: "This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about him. Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith. By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society."

A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that "jian" ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. "He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents had," said the Iranian-born Jew living in London. "Sabourjian is well known Jewish name in Iran."

This particular revelation makes me wonder, naturally, how much hatred against the Jews has come from, or been fanned by, so-called "self-hating" Jews. (Who are not self-hating at all, just willing to demonize and scapegoat innocent people to promote their own social standing.)

Hannah Arendt (1970) described the Jews of Germany as having an unrequited love affair with German culture. The tragedy for such Jews was that the culture, which they embraced so passionately, was routinely anti-semitic. The same was true for the German speaking Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Those, who were enthusiastic to be culturally German, adopted many of that culture's prejudices against things Jewish. The bourgeois, assimilating Jews directed these prejudices against the ghetto Jews of the eastern Europe, the Ostjuden, who displayed overt, and shameful, characteristics of Jewishness... [source]

I don't think it's a co-incidence that contemporary Jews who are most serious about their religion also tend to be the most politically conservative (and those least so, "progressive"). This fact undermines the argument that the essence of Judaism finds itself in 'liberal' political thought. Rather, it presents a picture of a Jewish community, divided (as communities will) on the question of religion: those who find their religion in Torah, and are willing to endure persecution for it, and those who fervently embrace a substitute religion based on completely alien precepts (Marx, Mohammad), at least partially in an attempt to protect themselves from the prejudices of the surrounding culture.