The thing to keep in mind about George Soros’s remarks blaming President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon for European anti-Semitism is Mr. Soros’s role in the presidential election now getting under way. His pledge to spend $10 million of his own money in a dodge of the campaign finance laws was the topic of an editorial in Monday’s number of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reckons that Mr. Soros is becoming one of the Democratic Party’s two most important power brokers, “nearly as crucial to regaining the White House as the party’s Presidential nominee.”But the billionaire’s spending plans take on an even more ominous aspect when they are combined with his insistence that the only way to deal with the anti-Semitism is to change the policies of the governments of Israel and America.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with ruminating on the factors that contribute to anti-Semitism. Over the years, it has been explained by referring to Christian theology, to medieval anti-usury laws that left the task of money-lending to the Jews, to both Jewish weakness and Jewish power. Such factors come and go. The hatred of Jews likewise ebbs and flows. But sadly it always seems, somehow, to endure. Our own view — which we sketched in the first number of this newspaper — is that the hatred of Jews feeds on itself. While external factors may contribute to it, at its core it defies logic. Blaming the Jews or their allies for it is a moral error to the extent that it shifts the blame from where it belongs, on the haters.

Mr. Soros, in remarks made to a meeting of Jewish philanthropists and first reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, sought to blame not Islamic extremism or the long-running hatred of Jews that has poisoned much of Europe but the Bush administration and the government of Ariel Sharon. His clear aim was to argue for a change in the policies of both administrations. “If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish,” the JTA quoted Mr. Soros as saying. And in an aside that struck a number of leading figures as bizarre, even poignantly sad, Mr. Soros seemed to agree with Malaysia’s anti-Semitic former prime minister, Dr. Mahathir, who has sought to blame Mr. Soros and other Jewish financiers for the troubles of his own country and no doubt others.

An aide to Mr. Soros, Michael Vachon, told The New York Sun yesterday that Mr. Soros also said that the resurgence of anti-Semitism was of concern to him, but, “not everyone who is critical of those policies is anti-Semitic. I’m critical of those policies and I don’t think I am anti-Semitic.” But no one accused Mr. Soros of being himself an anti-Semite, though there was much muttering about how his remarks were a case of what might be called the Soros Syndrome, a powerful figure coming to identify with the thinking of his people’s oppressors. It’s hard for us to see what Mr. Soros’s aide is talking about when he says the billionaire’s remarks were taken “out of context.” The JTA is a highly credible wire.

In any event, all Jews, all decent Americans are going to be watching now to see how the Democratic Party’s front-running candidates deal with this canard. Where will be Howard Dean, who let it be known at one point that he wants America not to take sides in the war between Israel and her enemies? Where are Senator Schumer and Senator Clinton? An idea is now loose in their party, and it is going to be a test of the mettle of the Democratic leadership.

The White House called Mr. Soros’s remarks “ridiculous.” And Senator Santorum, a Republican of Pennsylvania, made the essential point at a dinner in New York of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America: “When we have won the war against terror, I think we will see a drop in the level of anti-Americanism and its ugly half-brother, anti-Semitism,” Mr. Santorum said. “The Nazi version of anti-Semitism was discredited both by the Holocaust and by the thorough defeat of Germany by the forces of freedom in the Second World War. In like manner, a thorough defeat of the jihadists today will discredit their Nazi-like doctrines.”