Ami Isseroff
Chapter 1: WHAT IS IN A WORD? - Judeophobia or Anti-Semitism
You may be wondering why we choose the word “Judeophobia” as the title of our course, as opposed to the well known word anti-Semitism. I think you will see that the quest for the most fitting word will teach us a lot about the phenomenon it describes.
The word anti-Semitism was coined by Wilhelm Marr in Hamburg in 1879. Before that, hatred of Jews was simply called Jew-hatred. Marr had written a pamphlet called The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, Considered from a Non-Religious Point of View. Marr’s aim was to disassociate his hatred from any religious stance, which had long been utilized by Christian Judeophobes.
Marr’s book rapidly numbered many editions. The religious component had been replaced by racism, and the words Jews and Judaism by “Semite” and “Semitism.” Marr introduced the word “anti-Semite” into the political lexicon by founding the League of Anti-Semites (Antisemiten-Liga) .
The problem is that the word is flawed, even misleading. Firstly, Semites do not exist -nor did they exist during Marr’s times. The word “ Semite” may be useful in either anthropological or paleographical studies. There are Semitic languages, but to imply that today there is a racial group called Semites that would comprise, let’s say, Jews and Arabs, is simply absurd. You cannot argue that a Jew from Holland, one from Ethiopia and one from Yemen, for instance, belong to the same “race.”
The second reason to reject the word “anti-Semitism” is even stronger. Semites do not exist today, but anti-Semites never existed! There was never a person, political party, publication or group that wanted to combat Semites. Of course, many were against Jews. This is the subject of our course. But it is misleading to call anyone who hates Jews an anti-Semite. There are even people who hide their hatred by semantic fuzziness. I remember the ambassador of an Arab country once answering an accusation by stating: “How could I be an anti-Semite if I am myself a Semite!”
For the two above reasons, many thinkers, such as Emil Fackenheim of the Hebrew University, proposed replacing “anti-Semitism” by... “antisemitism”! There is indeed some progress in the new spelling: By dropping the hyphen, we imply that “antisemitism” is a noun which describes a specific phenomenon rather than one ideology which stands opposed to another ideology. We’ve gained accuracy. But this change is still inadequate; there is another reason to prefer “Judeophobia” over “antisemitism,” with or without a hyphen -an historical reason.
Three years before Marr the Judeophobe coined his jargon, one of the first ideologues of modern Zionism, Leon Pinsker, used the word Judeophobia in his booklet “Auto-Emancipation” (1882), in which he pointed out the inadequacy of the Emancipation granted to the Jew by modern states, and advocated that Jews take their history into their own hands. How unfortunate that the word created by the Jew-hater became so popular, and yet the word coined by a Jewish scholar was dismissed, although it was absolutely fitting as we shall see.
If you are still not convinced, let me show you that “Judeophobia” has a further twofold advantage over “anti-Semitism.” Firstly, it makes manifest that the Jews are targeted for hatred and not anyone else. Secondly, while the prefix “anti” and the suffix “ism” suggest that their bearer opposes an ideology, the suffix “phobia” implies that we are talking about an irrational phenomenon, and not about an idea or opinion. As Jean Paul Sartre suggests in his book on Judeophobia, let us not allow the Judeophobes to dress their hatred up as ideology.
If before W.W.II you defined yourself as an anti-Semite , even those who repudiated or feared you would dare rebuke you only on these terms: “I disagree with you, but I respect your opinion.” Judeophobia was presented as a rational ideology which could be disagreed with, but was nevertheless regarded as an acceptable tenet. In contrast, after the Holocaust most Judeophobes would not define themselves openly as anti-Semites (semantic progress?) People increasingly realized that we are dealing with social hatred and not with ideas and therefore “anti” and “ism” are inappropriate in its definition.
I hear your objection- you claim that “phobia” is the Greek for fear, and not for hatred. In psychology, we name different fears by that suffix: ailurophobia (fear of cats), claustrophobia (fear of enclosed places), nyctophobia (fear of night ) , and many others. But in the Social Sciences, the suffix “phobia” means hatred rather than fear, as in “xenophobia,” hatred of foreigners.
Let us make it clear that Judeophobia is not of the genre of xenophobia. It is something very different and unique, and therefore it deserves separate study as in this course. I’m glad you joined us. I would like to explain this uniqueness next.
THE UNIQUENESS OF JUDEOPHOBIA (so called "Anti-Semtism")
There are at least seven characteristics that make Judeophobia (anti-Semitism) very different from racism, xenophobia, or any other hatred against groups.
1) It is the oldest hatred. Professor Robert Wistrich of the Hebrew University was right in calling his last book on the subject “The Longest Hatred.” There is no other hatred in the history of mankind that you can trace back to the last two or three millennia. We will deal with precisely when Judeophobia started, in the second part of this class. But we shall see that it is at least two thousand years old.
2) Judeophobia is strikingly universal. It has existed in almost every country on earth, regardless of whether it had Jewish inhabitants or how many they numbered. Jews were expelled from almost every European and African country in which they lived, and in most countries of the world in which there was a Jewish community, Jews were at some point harassed or attacked for being Jews. The only exception usually mentioned is China, while even in today’s Japan Judeophobia is rampant, despite its tiny Jewish community.
3) Judeophobia is permanent. Jews were despised and hated , years, decades, and even centuries after they left the country in which they lived. Take England for example. The Jews were expelled from there in 1290 by king Edward II , and after no less than three Jewless centuries had passed, Shakespeare created his stereotypical Shylock, the Jew in “The Merchant of Venice,” a character that was mocked and despised by theatre-going mobs who had never met a real Jew in their lives -nor had their grandparents or ancestors during three hundred years.
Take another example. In 1968 the Polish government launched a campaign against “Polish Zionists” on radio and TV. Twenty years after three million Polish Jews had been murdered by the Nazis, Poles could still feel hatred for a tiny group of old people who constituted no more than 0.1 % of their population.
In seventeenth century Spain, one of the most celebrated Spanish writers of all ages , Francisco de Quevedo attacked his literary rival with allusions to his “Jewish” nose and threatened to anoint his own poems with bacon in order to deter Jews from stealing them... although Jews had been expelled from his country more than one century before.
4) Judeophobia is deeper. As a result of the above points, negative mental stereotypes of the Jew are profoundly embedded. If you consider how, over many centuries, millions of people believed either that the Jews transmitted leprosy, or poisoned wells to kill Christians, or used human blood for their rituals, or killed God, or have a world conspiracy, or constitute a promiscuous race, or are demoniac creatures, or, or, or. No wonder Judeophobes do not have to invest much effort to rationalize, since each has his own mental associations detrimental to Jews. Remember the story told about Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda in Nazi Germany. A sign showed a man riding his bike above the following inscription: “The misery of Germany is due to Jews and cyclists.” The readers wondered... why cyclists? And the depth and breadth of Judeophobia was made apparent.
5) Judeophobia is obsessive. For the Judeophobe, Jews are not an enemy. They are the enemy. He does not speak of Jews; he speaks of the Jews. When Adolf Hitler gave his farewell speech to the German nation from his Berlin bunker where he committed suicide on April 30, 1945, what type of message did he convey? He did not remind his listeners of the glories of Germany, nor did he mention any regrets regarding the bloodiest of wars that he brought upon Europe -he stressed that the Jews had not been totally defeated and therefore implored that the Germans continue the struggle against their “eternal enemy.’’ Although Hitler is Judeophobia in its most extreme expression, Judeophobes share that obsession about the allegedly all-inclusive villainy of the Jews.
6) Judeophobia is more dangerous. With appalling ease this particular hatred transforms into physical violence. In most countries in which they lived, at some point in history, Jews were killed for being Jews. That is why any Judeophobic expression is potentially more dangerous than hostility towards other groups. It quickly slides into abuse and murder. Take the example of humor as an aggressive outlet against minorities. In almost every country there are jokes about another group which is depicted as dumb. In England these are Irish jokes, in America Polish jokes, in Sweden Norwegian jokes, in Brazil Portuguese jokes, and so on. Jewish jokes can be as inoffensive as the others, and no one should be particularly concerned about them. But on the other hand, had it been possible to suppress Jewish jokes in Europe during a century or two before the Holocaust, the virulence of Judeophobia may have been diminished and the Nazis may have found less support for their genocide. After all, Judeophobia is transmitted in gestures, jokes and generalizations rather than in lectures. Jokes and gestures can be fatal.
7) Judeophobia is chimerical (based on fantasy). This could very well be the main point. Hatred against any minority group usually develops out of a misinterpretation of reality. If a Frenchman hates an Algerian because he pollutes French culture, or if a German hates a Turk because he is taking away his job, in both cases there is a misinterpretation of reality. There may indeed be unemployment in Germany, but it is not true that the Turks are to blame. The case of Judeophobia is different, because there is no such misinterpretation, but sheer fantasy. Jews can be hated for having eaten non-Jews in the past, or for dominating the world in the present; for having killed God or for being the source of war, slavery or evil, or for fabricating the Holocaust. How can you contend with these kinds of arguments?
Even if you find types of hatred that share one or two of these characteristics, you will not find one that has these seven characteristics together. Judeophobia is unique and as such it should be studied and confronted.
We have explained why this is an object deserving of study, and how it should be named. Now let us discuss when it started.
THEORIES ON THE BEGINNINGS OF JUDEOPHOBIA
We can postulate six theories about the beginnings of Judeophobia. Namely:
1) It started with the Jews, with the first Hebrews about four millennia ago.
2) It started with the Egyptian bondage, about three millennia ago.
3) It started with the Return to Zion, about two and a half millennia ago.
4) It started with Alexandrian Hellenism, about twenty-three centuries ago.
5) It started with Christianity, about two millennia ago.
6) It started with the reaction to Emancipation, about one century ago.
Our next step will be to refute 1), 2), 3) and 6) , and concentrate on 4) and 5) as the most plausible theories.
To say that Judeophobia started with Abraham is incorrect both historically and theoretically. Historically, because it is not true that Jews have suffered from persecutions for so long. There are several biblical verses that show a tinge of Judeophobia, but as with the Bible as a whole, it can provide us more with archetypes to facilitate understanding, than with historic data. For example Abimelech, the king of Gerar in the Negev, said unto Isaac “Go away from us; for thou art much mightier than we” (Genesis 26:16). This statement could be considered either as the first case of Judeophobia and thus traced to patriarchal times, or, more validly, as an archetype of Judeophobic arguments, especially since the Hebrew original could be rendered into English “Go away from us, for thou becameth powerful at our expense.”
To say that Judeophobia was the main motivation of the Egyptian Pharaoh, is also to take the Bible too literally. It is true that the Egyptian ruler states a second argument used frequently by Judeophobes, that Jews are a fifth-column in the countries where they reside. Thus says Pharaoh: “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; come on, let us deal wisely with them lest they multiply and that when there falleth out any war, they join unto our enemies and fight against us” (Exodus 1:9-10).
But on the other hand, it would be more acceptable historically not to attribute to the Egyptians any specific hatred against the Jews, rather a xenophobic attempt to enslave a whole people, a common practice in ancient times.
Having discarded hypotheses 1) and 2), let us explain number 3), namely that Judeophobia started during the Return to Zion. Here we have the most known Biblical archetype of Judeophobia, Haman. Indeed, many consider Judeophobia to have originated in the fifth century b.c.e. , during which king Xerxes I of Persia lived. Xerxes is thought to be the King Ahasuerus whose vizier Haman planned a genocide against the Jews, as reported in the book of Esther. Again, historical veracity of Haman’s story is not certain but his words became a chorus for Judeophobes of all times: “There is a certain people scattered through all the provinces... and their laws are diverse from all people, neither keep the king’s laws... Let it be written that they may be destroyed” (Esther 3:8).
Nonetheless, two events during this fifth century b.c.e. do seem to point the genesis of Judeophobia. One in the land of Israel (the attack against the rebuilders of Jerusalem) and one in the Diaspora (the destruction of the Temple of Elephantine in Egypt).
When Nehemiah led the Return to Zion from Babylon in the year 445 b.c.e., his attempt to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem met with the opposition of Sanballat I , called “an enemy” (Nehemiah 6:1,16).
At that time there was a Jewish community in Elephantine, a small island on the Egyptian Nile, where the Jews had erected a temple around 590 b.c.e. This temple was destroyed in 411 b.c.e. by the priests of Khnub with the help of the Persian commander Waidrang. But it was more a fanatic act done by Egyptians who resented Persian domination, than a Judeophobic outburst.
We can conclude that the Sanballat and Waidrang episodes were isolated and left no Judeophobic trace in history. Both attacks were the results of national tension between two groups, with no clear signs of particular Jew-hatred. Judeophobia had yet to be born.
This bring us to the three remaining theses, that is, 4), 5) and 6). The last one is put forward by Hannah Arendt in her book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in which she claims that “anti-Semitism is a nineteenth century secular ideology,” “evidently” different from the religious hatred towards the Jews. This conclusion is simplistic. Of course Judeophobic political parties rose in Germany in the 1880’s, and that was the first time a regime used Judeophobia as a calculated means to gain power. However, the question is not when Judeophobia was first used as a political tool, but rather how did it first come into being so that it could be harnessed for political use. True, the nineteenth century brings a new form of Judeophobia, but the phenomenon is unique precisely in its adaptability to different historical contexts. This characteristic shows both its permanence and its singularity.
We thus remain with the two acceptable theses 4) and 5). Judeophobia’s roots are either in Hellenism or in Christianity. In the next two chapters we shall explain the rationale of each .
Gustavo Perednik
Next - 2- Pagan Judeophobia - Jew Hate (anti-Semitism) in the Ancient World the previous chapter you read why Judeophobia is unique. It is important to bear this singularity in mind in order to avoid a feeling students frequently express, who suggest that by stressing Judeophobic danger we are overlooking discrimination and persecution against other groups.
I think they miss the point. We should naturally repudiate every kind of group hatred, racism and persecution, but Judeophobia is and remains the longest hatred, the most permanent, deep, obsessive, universal, dangerous, chimerical hatred on earth. If we dilute it into a sea of discriminations and hatreds we will understand less.
Our second point was the genesis of Judeophobia. After presenting (and refuting) five hypotheses, the two remaining ones demand explanation.
One, that Jew-hatred was born within Hellenism, is held among others by a contemporary historian of Judeophobia, the American priest Edward Flannery, whose book “The Anguish of the Jews -Twenty -Three Centuries of Anti-Semitism,” gives us his answer in its subtitle.
In his attempt to single out the first historically documented hostility against the Jews, Flannery traces Judeophobia back to Alexandria in the third century b.c.e. Let me acquaint you with that famous town.
ALEXANDRIA AS THE CRADLE OF JUDEOPHOBIA
Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great, a disciple of Aristotle who was to be the most renowned conqueror of all times. Apparently Alexander was well disposed towards the Jews. He allowed them to build a Jewish area in the town, where they were active in commerce and became very prosperous. Alexandria became the commercial and intellectual capital of the ancient world. At the beginning of the common era, Jews occupied two-fifths of the city and already numbered 100,000.
Egypt was both the heart of the Jewish Diaspora, and the most advanced centre of Hellenization outside Greece itself. And it was not an exception to the rule that, in general, the pagan world was very tolerant towards religious diversity. After all, if each family worshipped several gods, what harm could be attributed to further deities others choose to worship. That atmosphere allowed the Jews to freely practice monotheism. Indeed there were many prominent figures who thought highly of the Jews as a group. Three examples are Clearchus, Theophrastrus and Megasthenes, at the beginning of the third century b.c.e. The first two were disciples of Aristotle. Clearchus of Soli describes in his dialogue “On Sleep” the meeting between his teacher and a Jew. Theophrastrus of Eresos describes the Jews as “philosophers by race,” a characterization that was not uncommon among those writers, for whom the Jews were philosophers dwelling among the Syrians. When Megasthenes went to India as ambassador of Seleucus Nicator, he wrote a work in which he idealized the Indians and included the Jews in his idealized descriptions.
However the mainstream of Alexandrian historians (Egyptians who wrote in Greek) were notorious for their Judeophobia. One reason for this animosity was that many native Egyptians, unhappy with Greek and Roman domination, did not approve of the tolerance under which the Jews flourished. This social envy was the context of the very first Judeophobic writings, all of them by Hellenistic writers in Alexandria and its environs.
The first one mentioned by Flannery is Hecataeus of Abdera (fourth century b.c.e.). He was the first pagan who wrote extensively on the history of the Jews, albeit in a legendary fashion: “When a plague occurred, the Egyptians expelled them... The majority fled to uninhabited Judea... Their leader, Moses, founded Hierosolyma and its Temple, establishing a cult and a constitution which differed completely from any other... groups of men, to whom the Jews adopted a hostile attitude.” On the whole Hecataeus’ account is sympathetic to the Jews (four centuries after him Phylo of Byblos even wondered whether Hecataeus had become a Jewish convert).
Nevertheless he is to be blamed for the first myth related to Jewish history, in what was to become an extensive and murderous mythology. The Jews “had been expelled,” and “in remembrance of the exile of his people, Moses instituted for them a misanthropic and inhospitable way of life.” All the following Alexandrian writers picked up on this humiliating origin. The only exceptions were Timagenes and Appian, about the only Alexandrian Greek historians not to show animosity towards the Jews. And Alexandrian historians were many in number and prolific in their writings.
The first Egyptian to give an account of the history of his country in Greek was the priest Manetho during the third century b.c.e. He tells that “King Amenophis son of Paapis decided to purge the country of lepers and other polluted persons. He collected 80,000 people and sent them to work in the quarries east of the Nile... They appointed as their leader Osarsiph (who) decreed that his people neither worship the gods nor abstain from the flesh of animals reverenced by the Egyptians... he sent representatives to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, who had been expelled from Egypt. The people of Osarsiph (who Manetho identifies with Moses) defeated the Egyptians in a concerted effort.” Although he never explicitly mentions the Jews, Manetho does speak of “a nation of alien conquerors who set fire to Egyptian towns, razed the temples of the gods, and treated the natives with cruelty. After their expulsion from Egypt... they crossed the desert on their way to Syria, and in the country called Judea built a town, which they named Jerusalem.”
Manetho’s contribution was the seriousness he added to what had previously been unsubstantiated tales, in his capacity as the official historian. From this point, the themes of leprous origins and misanthropy were rarely absent from the litanies of pagan Judeophobia. Lysimachus would say that “the Jews, sick of leprosy took refuge in the temples, until king Bocheris drowned many of the lepers and sent another one hundred thousand of them to die in the desert. Moses exhorted them to show kindliness to no one, to follow only the worst advice, and overthrow all the sanctuaries and altars of the gods they might come upon. They arrived in Judea and they built a town called Hierosyla (“town of temple ...”).
Once the story of the Exodus was rewritten, myths were added in order to explain why they were expelled. Poseidonius tells that Jews were “impious people, hated by gods” and refers sardonically to the Jewish abhorrence of pork. During the second century b.c.e. Mnaseas of Pathros raises for the first time the charge that the Jews adore the golden head of an ass. And Philostratus summarizes these pagans’ belief: “For the Jews have long been in revolt against humanity... they have made their life apart and irreconcilable, and cannot share with the rest of mankind the pleasures of the table nor join in their libations or prayers or sacrifices... they are separated from ourselves by a greater gulf than divides us from the most distant Indies.”
To those two main accusations (that Jews were lepers and that their religion was misanthropic) a third one was added by Agatharchides of Cnidus, who mocked “the ridiculous practices of the Jews, the absurdity of their law, in particular what concerned the Sabbath.” The Sabbath was a focus of scorn because it revealed a people of laziness, who needed to rest one seventh of their lives.
During the first century b.c.e. Apollonius Molon (famous rhetorician, teacher of Cicero and Caesar) was the first to compose an entire work against the Jews in which he calls the Jews “the worst among the barbarians, lacking any creative talent, they did nothing for the good of mankind, they do not believe in any god... Moses was an impostor.”
But the worst pagan myth was still to appear in the first century b.c.e. through Damocritus’s pen. In “On the Jews” he claims that “every seven years they capture a stranger, lead him to their Temple, and immolate him cutting his flesh into small pieces.” His slander constitutes a remote source of the blood libel, about which we shall talk in the next two classes.
The peak of Alexandrian Judeophobia was achieved by Apion, whom Flannery calls “the first of the titans in the history of antisemitism.” Apion repeated in his “History of Egypt” every single myth held till then, and filled them with bitter consistency. The Sabbath originated because of a pelvic ailment incurred as Jews fled Egypt, which forced them to rest once a week. The Jews would kidnap a Greek, fatten him, convey him to a wood, slay him, sacrifice his body and swear an oath of hostility against the Greeks. And all this they did once a year (there was inflation in the legends of these “historians.”)
Two great Jews confronted this Judeophobe. The historian Flavius Josephus who called one of his books “Against Apion,” and the philosopher Philo of Alexandria who led a delegation to Rome to plead the Jewish cause before Caligula in the wake of Judeophobic riots in Alexandria under Flaccus in the year 38 c.e. (A.D) (Apion represented the attacking mobs).
ROMAN JUDEOPHOBIA
Greek Judeophobia was inherited by Rome. In the beginning of the common era, the Greek historian and geographer Strabo claimed that “the Jews had already gotten into all cities, and it is hard to find a place in the habitable earth that hath not admitted this tribe of men, and is not possessed by them.”
This overperception of the Jews often accompanies Judeophobia. In any case, whether it created hostility or not, overperception of Jews is the rule. It is well exemplified in a letter sent by Mark Twain (not at all a Judeophobe) to the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica: “I read that the Jewish population of the U.S. was 250,000. I was personally acquainted with more Jews than that in my country. (The) figures were without a doubt a misprint for 25,000,000.”
In every country in which they live, Jews are at most 1% of the population (the only two exceptions are the US, where they are more than 2%, and Israel, where they constitute almost 90%). But in every single country they are usually perceived as five or ten times that proportion. The reasons for this overperception are that Jews are extremely urban (90% of them are concentrated in each country’s two major towns), they are very active in central activities (economy, arts, science) and Jewish history is the sacred history of most of the world (most people learn about the Jews at some stage during their education, so that the Jews are present in people’s minds long before they are personally acquainted).
But besides this overperception, the question remains why these Alexandrians initially attacked the Jews. We mentioned the prosperity of the Jews that created envy. Moreover, there was another reason for the first expressions of Judeophobia, namely that the centrality of the Exodus in the Jewish religion offended Egyptian national feelings. The biblical account challenged the Egyptians to provide a suitable answer, and that is why Judeophobic feelings existed in Egypt even before its conquest by Alexander the Great.
The Romans absorbed the Greek prejudices against the Jews (shameful origin, isolationism, ridiculous practices) and those prejudices were a mainstay of the intelligentsia. The Jewish community in Rome was second only to Alexandria. Already in 59 b.c.e. Cicero in his plea “Pro Flacco” mentions “how numerous they are, their clannishness, their influence in the assemblies.” As in Alexandria, privileges given by the Roman emperors to the Jews earned the hatred of envious neighbors. Those privileges were necessary for practicing their way of life since Romans were generally tolerant of other religions but uncompromising with whatever threatened to undermine their own cult. And their rituals were so woven into daily life that Jewish abhorrence of any type of image worship was a source of tension. However, the policy of the empire was never consistently Judeophobic. Some emperors were hostile to the Jews and some were not . Even the war against Judea did not modify that ambivalence.
But men of letters tended to incline the equilibrium. Horace, Tibullus and Ovid mocked Jewish practices and Seneca brought these jibes to their pitch by calling the Jews “most wicked nation (who) lose one seventh part of life contrary to a useful life.” Quintilian, Martial and Juvenal joined the attack on the “pernicious nation” but the apogee of pagan Judeophobia was reached in Tacitus. For him Jewish institutions are “sinister, shameful, and have survived only because of their perversity. Of all enslaved peoples the Jews are the most contemptible, loathsome... All that we hold sacred is profane to them; all that is licit to them is impure to us.”
Thus we close the chapter on ancient Judeophobia, which was mainly a literary phenomenon, and which justifies the standpoint of those who see in Alexandria the beginnings of Judeophobia.
The question is how could it be otherwise? How could anyone claim that Judeophobia was born with Christianity (as in our 5th thesis of last class) if there is so much evidence that both the Greeks and the Romans produced Jew-haters in abundance?
We will devote the next chapter to this question.
Gustavo Perednik The previous chapter concluded with the question of how can we consider the beginnings of Judeophobia to be in Christianity when we have already seen abundant Judeophobic evidence from pre-Christian times.
The answer is, basically: only with the inception of this new religion based upon Judaism, did hatred against the Jews become the norm, with widely and deeply penetrating roots, facilitating its monstrous growth, sprouting ideological and even theological fruit.
I must state from the outset that pointing out Judeophobia’s Christian roots does not imply the absurd generalization that Christians are necessarily Judeophobes. However, some basic facts remain that deserve attention and constitute the core of this third class.
The essence of the problem is as follows: the nascent church claimed to be the consummation of Judaism. Christianity emerged from Judaism and the first Christian church was Jewish in its leadership, membership, and worship. During the first period of Christianity, until the year 70, while the Jewish state was still in existence, there was no real antagonism between the two religions.
The first Christians conveyed their message to the House of Israel, but it soon became clear that the vast majority of the Jews would not become Christians. They were firm in their loyalty to biblical law and to an uncompromising view both of God’s transcendence and of the coming of the Messiah who will heal the world at the end of times.
Once doctrinal differences were obvious, the original harmony between the two faiths was doomed. The realization that the Jews would reject the new notion of the Messiah as “Son of God” was disconcerting to Christians, whose faith was built on the Jewish Scriptures and beliefs and therefore expected to win over the children of Israel. If they were to be the heirs of those beliefs and their true perpetuators, if Christianity was the fulfillment of Judaism, sooner or later some flaw had to be perceived in the independent continuity of the inherited religion. The ongoing vitality of Judaism questioned the legitimacy of the inheritance.
The break between the two religions was proclaimed by Paul, the Jewish-born true founder of Christianity, who resolved against the observance of law as stipulated in Judaism and established that true salvation comes only from faith in Jesus as the Messiah. The Jewish-Christians were the minority of Jews who accepted this dogma, but even they broke with Paul when they discovered that he was making no distinction between Jew and Gentile. These Jewish-Christians, who continued practicing Judaism, were seen by the new expanding faith as temporarily compromised (see Paul’s epistle to the Galatians 2:11-21 in the New Testament). But Paul had inherited Jesus’ love for his people. Neither he nor his immediate disciples wished to see Jews either degraded or destroyed.
The gradual composition of the New Testament was accompanied by a worsening of the Christian attitude towards Jews and therefore its earlier parts (Paul’s, around the year 50) are devoid of the Judeophobia present in the later parts (John’s gospel, 100). The earliest known canon of the New Testament was compiled in 140 by Marcion, who outrightly rejected the Hebrew Bible.
The discussion of how Judeophobic is the New Testament is beyond the scope of our course. Among Christian theologians, some claim it is as a whole (Rosemary Ruether) and some claim it is not at all (Gregory Baum).
The fact is that some verses in the New Testament describe the Jews in a positive way, attributing to them salvation (John 4:22) or divine love (Romans 11:28) while many others can be -and were- much used by Judeophobes. The two worst verses are those in which the Jews prompt Jesus’ crucifixion and say “His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25) and when Jesus calls the Jews “children of the devil“ (John 8:44). These verses, and the whole gamut of accusations charged against the Jews during the growth and individuation of Christianity, were buttressed by constant repetition by people who had but scant acquaintance with Jews. Jerome, Anthanasius, Ambrose, Amulo, all echo that the Jews have devilish origins, or that they are tempted by the devil, partners with him, and ultimately his willing slaves and instruments.
THE REWRITING OF THE CRUCIFIXION
The main source of later Judeophobia from the New Testament is the story of the crucifixion, full of historical mistakes (this fact does not demean the New Testament either as a sacred book or as the theological basis of Christianity. We speak in historical terms alone).
We are told: during Passover, the Sanhedrin (the supreme Jewish political, religious and judicial body in Judea during the Roman period) tried Jesus and condemned him to death. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate attempted to side-step the death penalty, but eventually gave in to an insistent Sanhedrin. Pilate “washed his hands” and let Jesus be crucified by Roman soldiers.
In Solomon Zeitlin’s Who Crucified Jesus? you can find a complete account of the story which shows, among others, the following inaccuracies: the Sanhedrin never met during festivals, and it seldom applied death penalties (the Talmud has it that “a Sanhedrin which puts a man to death once in seven years is called a murderous one” -Makkot 1:10- and rabbi Eleazar Ben Azaryah added: “...or even once in seventy years”).
And in the case of Jesus, we are surprised by a quick death penalty decreed upon a Jew -whose crime according to Jewish law is no crime at all. (There were crimes that according to biblical law deserved capital punishment, but to claim to be the son of God appears nowhere in the Bible as a crime!). Moreover, the Sanhedrin could carry out capital punishment without any Roman intervention. Why would they request the “help” of their worst enemy in order to carry out their law? (Four methods of judicial execution were stated by Talmudic law: stoning, burning, slaying and strangling, in contrast with crucifixion, which was typically Roman).
Besides that, the role of Pilate is highly unlikely. Why would a man who was in charge of suppressing the Jews, a man who had ordered the crucifixion of thousands of them, unexpectedly strive to defend one of them? The way Pilate chooses to express his lack of involvement is also suspect -it is called ‘Netilat Yadaim,’ the old Jewish custom to wash one’s hands as a sign of purity, which Orthodox Jews still practice. Why would a Roman warrior resort to a Jewish practice?
The answer to these questions is that it is probable that the New Testament tells us a true story -with changed over protagonists. The Roman announced his intention to execute a Jew who seemed to be unusually popular, and warned the Sanhedrin not to react. The Rabbis remained passive (a large group of which opposed rebellion against Rome; the more rebellious party prevailed only four decades later). As was the norm, the Romans wrote the reason for the crucifixion on the cross. In the case of Jesus, INRI (“Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews”) it is clear that they imply a political crime: sedition.
The reason for which the crucifixion was retold by the Gospel writers with these changes is logical. The new religion needed consolidation. Accusing the mighty empire of having murdered God would have been perilous. However, whitewashing Rome and at the same time accusing the weak Jews, who competitively claimed the same sources as their own, the Gospel stood to gain newfound strength and acceptance.
Moreover, the Christians could not evangelize by spreading the word that Jesus was the Messiah, because this argument was meaningless to the pagans. The only convincing claim was that Christianity was the original religion, the universal truth for mankind. For that to be the truth, Christianity had to exclusively possess the history of Israel.
At the end of the first century, the “Letter of Barnabas” attempts to show how Jews misunderstood what Christians call the Old Testament, which, the writer asserts, was never intended to be observed literally, since all therein is but a prefiguring of the Church.
As the start of the second century, Ignatius of Antioch summarizes their view: “Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity.” Thus a fertile theme originated: the Church is, and always was, the true Israel. The problem was that the people the Church claimed to have supplanted, continued to co-exist and, more importantly, laid claim to the same sources of faith, asserting its anteriority and its ownership of the “Old Testament.”
A whole anti-Judaic literature developed, according to which the Church antedates the Old Israel, going back to the faith of Abraham and even to the promise made to Adam. The Church is “Eternal Israel” whose origins coincide with humanity itself. The Mosaic Law was only for the Jews, who were punished for their unworthiness and their cult of the golden calf by the burden of the Law. The Mosaic prescriptions hence were a yoke imposed upon the Old Israel because of its sins. The Jews are an apostate nation, deprived of its providential role of the chosen people. And so on.
The most complete Christian tract against the Jews during early centuries was the “Dialogue with Trypho” by Justin, which puts forward the ominous theme that Jewish misfortunes are the consequence of divine punishment.
But the worst myth arising during that time is “deicide,” the murder of God, which was raised for the first time by Melito, the bishop of Sardis, around the year 150. This sinister accusation, which was repeated for years, decades, centuries, was never the official ideology of the Church. But it became so rooted in Christian sermons that the Church had to officially reject it during the Second Vatican Council in 1965.
THE DEMONIZATION OF THE JEW
The anti-Judaic literature developed while Jewry was weak, humiliated, defeated, when it posed no challenge to Christianity. In the misfortunes of the Jewish people, in the dissolution of the state and in subsequent Jewish defeats, the Christians found definite confirmation of their belief that God was displeased with the Jews and no longer wanted their continuation. The Christians took it for granted that Judaism would ultimately absorbed into their new religion.
However, after the disasters of 70 and 135 (terrible defeats at the hands of the Romans) Jewry gradually recuperated vitality and influence, and the Christian reaction was new literary attacks. We should have in mind that between those two years Christianity became a definitely gentile movement.
According to Origen, the first Christian scholar to study Hebrew, Christians respected the Law more than the Jews did, who interpreted it in a fantastical manner, and whose practices were trivial; their rejection of Jesus had resulted in calamity and exile. “We say with confidence that they will never be restored to their former condition. For they committed a crime of the most unhallowed kind, in conspiring against the Saviour of the human race....”
By the end of the third century the image of the Jew was of an unbeliever and a competitor. At the end of the fourth century, the Jew had been transformed into the deicidal, satanic figure, cursed by God and discriminated against by the State. The very term “Jew” was an insult.
The full flowering of the theology which prescribed Jewish miseries as divine punishment for Jesus’ crucifixion was one of the reasons for the deterioration of the Jewish image and status. By the time Christianity became the dominant religion of the Empire (the year 323), the foundation of its Judeophobia was already laid; it was the natural outcome of theological necessity as well as defensiveness against the danger of a relapse into Judaism. It was an inevitable by-product of Christian propaganda, which had to assume that Judaism was dead, even while Judaism steadfastly refused to die. The Church did not recognized that Judaism was a distinct religion; it saw it as a distortion of the only true religion, a perfidia, a stubborn rebelliousness against God. Thus wrote the Church Fathers.
In the year 338 a Christian mob led by the local bishop burned down the synagogue of Callinicus in Mesopotamia. The emperor Theodosius ordered the synagogue to be rebuilt and the incendiary punished. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, intervened with a letter to the emperor: the synagogue was “home of unbelief, a house of unpiety, a receptacle of folly.” Only out of negligence had he himself not set fire to the synagogue of Milan. Imperial power must be used in the service of the faith. In the cathedral the emperor was threatened with refusal of the sacraments, and he eventually ceded to Ambrose. Other synagogues were destroyed in Italy, North Africa, Spain and even the land of Israel, where a group of monks under Barsauma massacred Jews.
John Chrysostom (d.407) brings Judeophobia to its highest point within all “Adversus Judaeos” literature. In his sermons in Antioch he says: “the Jews most miserable of all men... lustful, rapacious, greedy, perfidious bandits, inveterate murders, destroyers, men possessed by the devil. They know only one thing, to satisfy their gullets, get drunk, to kill and maim one another... They have surpassed the ferocity of wild beasts, for they murder their offspring and immolate them to the devil...”and much more. Chrysostom and all the Judeophobes among the Church Fathers and their successors were over many centuries revered as saints by the Catholic Church.
Augustine wrote at the same time and his original contribution to the Judeophobic arsenal is the theory of the witness-people. The reason for which Jews subsist is to probe the truth of Christianity. Like Cain, he explains, they carry a sign but are not to be killed. Jews were not only wrong but evil.
And the theological gulf grew wider and deeper. As the Anglican theologian James Parkes puts it, the Church did not claim the Hebrew Bible in its entirety, only its heroes and virtuous characters, God’s promises and praise. The rest, the villains and the idolaters, the stubborn and the unbelievers, were left for the Jews. Curses and accusations were for them. And that was the description of the Jews supposedly written by God. Variations of this theme were preached in writings and from pulpits, Sunday after Sunday, century after century, whenever Jews were mentioned.
So, by saying that Judeophobia was born with Christianity, we are not overlooking the hostility of the Greek Egyptians. We are adding proportion. Christian Judeophobia was incomparably stronger. Joseph Eötvösz, a Hungarian nobleman, would say in the 1920’s that “an anti-Semite is one who hates the Jews... more than necessary.” This was not true for the pagan world, generally tolerant to the Jews, even if did have many Judeophobes. But once Christianity took hold, Judeophobia became the norm, God’s will, a theological platform with laws, contempt, calumnies, animosity, segregation, forced baptisms, appropriation of children, unjust trials, pogroms, exiles, systematic persecution, rapine, and social degradation.
On the basis of all the above, Jules Isaac unabashedly calls his 1956 book “The Christian Roots of Antisemitism.” We will study the offshoots of these roots in the next chapter.
Gustavo Perednik
Next - Christian Persecution of the Jews in Europe: Proselytization, Conversions and Ghettos
hristian Medieval European Persecution of Jews: I-Proselytism and Ghettos
At the end of the last chapter we referred to Jules Isaac’s book, The Christian Roots of Antisemitism.” Isaac was a chief inspector of history teaching, at the French Ministry of Education. The deportation and death of his family by the Nazis in 1943, motivated him to devote the rest of his life to the research of Judeophobia. He focused on three principal falsehoods in the Church Fathers’ historiography, namely:
a) that the dispersion of Israel was a divine punishment for the rejection of Jesus as the Messiah;
b) that Jews had committed deicide; and
c) that Judaism was corrupt during Jesus’ time.
Isaac refuted each point through historical data. He also describes the Church’s teaching of degradation, which is manifest even in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the most important Christian medieval philosopher. In 1270 he wrote that Jews “in consequence of their sin, are or were destined to perpetual slavery: so that sovereigns of states may treat their goods as their own property, with the sole provision that they do not deprive them of all that is necessary to sustain life.” These teachings were gradually accepted by secular governments which were influenced by the ecclesiastical establishment. This led to the Jews being subjected to restrictions and exclusions, such as taxes, the obligation of wearing a distinguishing badge, and religious limitations.
Had the Church’s “teaching of contempt” remained within the framework of theology, it might have only caused the Jews humiliation, anger and sorrow. However, Christian Judeophobia transcended mere theory. If a Christian wanted to strike a blow at the devil, he could do so by striking a Jew.
The theology of the Church Fathers was translated into law, which acted as a bridge between theory and practice. The Theodosian Code of 438 (the first official collection of imperial statutes on the subject) sanctioned the civil inferiority of the Jews, defined as “enemies of the Roman laws and of the supreme majesty.” The legislation of Theodosius II became the juridical basis upon which Jewish affairs were regulated.
Numerous medieval bulls (a bull is a Papal edict -”bullum” is Latin for seal) are openly Judeophobic. I’ll give you ten examples:
“Etsi non displiceat “(1205) solicited kings to put an end to “Jewish evils” like usury, arrogance and murder;”
“In generali concilio” (1218) compelled Jews to wear special clothing;
“Si vera sunt” (1239) ordered the seizure and examination of the Talmud and Jewish literature, which were eventually burned;
“Vineam Soreth” (1278) ordered the selection of trained men to preach Christianity to the Jews;
“Etsi doctoribus genium” (1415) was a collection of anti-Jewish laws;
“Numquam dubitavimus” (1482) empowered kings to appoint inquisitors to prevent Jewish practices;
“Cum nimis absurdum” (1555) established the ghetto in Rome and forbade contact between Jews and Christians;
“Hebraeorum gens” (1569) accused Jews of magic and expelled them from papal territories;
“Vices eius nos” (1577) ordered Roman Jews to send delegations to the church;
“Sancta mater ecclesia” (1584) decreed that each Saturday one hundred Jewish men and fifty women must come to listen to conversionist sermons in the church.
This legislation was not always influential on the kings and rulers it addressed. Around 830, the bishop of Lyons, Agobard, called “the most cultured man of his time,” sensed danger in the relations between his flock and the Jews of the city, because the latter were not considered to be of inferior status as deemed by the Church. Indeed, Jews were prosperous and their religion respected. Agobard brought charges against them before King Louis the Pious and called for a return to the Theodosian Code. However, Louis remained well disposed towards the Jews as had his father Charlemagne before him. Years later Louis’s son Charles the Bald also refused to ratify the Judeophobic canons passed by the Church Council on Meaux in 845, as suggested by Bishop Amulo, Agobard’s successor and disciple. These kings were the last representatives of the Carolingian age during which the Jews enjoyed equal rights.
Around 950 the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII promulgated a special oath called Juramentum Judaeorum, which Jews were compelled to take when involved in lawsuits against non-Jews. This remained the rule in Europe until at least the 18th century. Both the text and the ritual of taking the oath, expressed a self-imposed curse, as we can see in the German “Schwabenspiegel “ of 1275:
“About the goods for which this man sues against thee... help thee God, who created heaven and earth... And that so if thou eatest something, thou will become defiled all over... and that the earth swallow thee... thou art true in what thou has sworn... And so that the blood and the curse ever remain upon thee which thy kindred wrought upon themselves when they tortured Jesus Christ and spake thus: ‘His blood be upon us and our children’: it is true... So help thee God and the oath which thou hast sworn. Amen”.
Oaths, badges and restrictions were but a small part of the medieval Judeophobic repertoire. An all-inclusive summary of the martyrdom of the Jews is complex since different geographies and chronologies are involved. But we will discuss seven practices which were common all over Europe, namely: forced baptism, compulsory sermons, disputations, burning of Jewish books, ghettos, expulsions and genocides.
Proselytism: FORCED BAPTISM AND SERMONS
As Christianity became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, large numbers of Jews were forcibly baptized. The earliest detailed account is on the island of Minorca in 418. Other major campaigns of forced conversions spread through Europe, one in 614 when Emperor Heraclius forbade Judaism in the Byzantine Empire, and another in 873, launched by Basil I.
However, Pope Gregory I (d.604) decided that baptism should be accepted willingly and not imposed by force. This became, on the whole, accepted practice, but “willingly” was subject to interpretation. Was conversion under threat of death now acceptable, or should the anticipated violence be more remote? If so, how subtle must the insinuation be? Take the advise given by the bishop of Clermont-Ferrand to the Jews on May 14, year 576, after a mob had destroyed the synagogue in his town: “If ye be ready to believe as I do, be one flock with us, and I shall be your pastor; but if ye be not ready, depart from this place.” About 500 Jews of Clermont converted, and the Christians celebrated -“candles were lit, the lamps shone...” The other Jews left for Marseilles. Was this “willingly”? Well, in 938 the pope told the archbishop of Mainz he should expel local Jews if they refused to convert... willingly (he claimed force should not be applied).
Children were another dilemma. At what age was a baptism “willing,” as opposed to a gesture cheaply bought in return for some trivial compensation? The aforementioned Agobard assembled the Lyons children who had not been sent out of harm’s way by their parents, and baptized all those who, according to his judgment, appeared to be agreeable. One of the clauses in the “Constitutio pro Judaeis” issued by successive popes between the 12th and 15th centuries, declared categorically that no Christian should use violence to force Jews to be baptized. What it did not say was what should happen if the forced conversion actually took place, whether it was valid regardless of the illegal process, or if the victim was free to return to his former faith.
The answer to these questions is that, on the whole, the church condemnation of forced baptism remained unchanged, but its attitude regarding post facto problems became tougher over the centuries.
In a letter of 1201, Pope Innocent III stated that a Jew who submitted to baptism under threat of force, expressed a conditional willingness to accept the sacrament, and so was not allowed to renounce it thereafter. For medieval Christianity the backsliding of faith was heretical, punishable by death according to the code later elaborated by the Inquisition. As late as 1747 Pope Benedict XIV decided that once baptized, albeit illegally, a child was to be considered a Christian and be thus raised.
Later waves of forced baptisms include one which swept through the kingdom of Naples in the last decades of the 13th century, and one in Spain from 1391, which started with the riots led by the archdeacon Ferrant Martinez. Hundreds of Jews were massacred and entire communities forcibly converted, and it left in its wake the phenomenon of the Marranos (a derogatory term for the ”New Christians” and their descendants). These people continued to live an underground Jewish existence until after the 18th century. The most dramatic case was in Portugal, where thousands of Jews settled, having been expelled from neighboring Spain in 1492.
King Manuel of Portugal found that it was unnecessary to expel his Jewish subjects, who were valuable economic assets, in order to purge his realm of heresy. Instead he embarked on a systematic campaign of forced conversion initially directed against the children, who were seized and dragged from their parents’ arms in the hope that the adults would follow suit, and later against the entire population. This explains both why by the end of 1497 not a single professing Jew remained in Portugal, as well as the greater tenacity of Marranism in this country, up to the present day.
A new chapter in the history of forced baptism began in 1543, with the establishment of the House of Catechumens in Rome, which rapidly took hold in other cities. Any person who, by whatever casuistry, could be considered to have shown an inclination towards Christianity, could be immure in the House of Cathecumens “to explore his intention,” all the while being submitted to unremitting pressure. A popular superstition which claimed that any person who secured the baptism of an unbeliever was assured of paradise, lead to a spate of such procedures throughout the Catholic world.
In the mid-18th century the Jesuits were the main enforcers of this practice. Several cases became infamous. In 1762 the son of the rabbi of Carpentras was pounced upon and baptized in ditch water, and thereafter lost to his family. The kidnapping for baptism of Terracina children in 1783 caused a revolt in the Roman ghetto. In 1858, Edgardo Mortara, aged six, was abducted by papal police from his family in Bologna, and taken to the House of Catechumens. The boy had been secretly baptized five years previously by a domestic servant who thought he was about to die. The parents tried in vain to get their child back. Napoleon III, Cavour and Franz Joseph were among those who protested and Moses Montefiore traveled to the Vatican in an unsuccessful attempt to release the child.
The founding of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1860 “to defend the civil rights of the Jews” was partly in reaction to this case. The pope rejected all petitions and by 1870, when his secular power came to an end, the boy had ceased to be Edgardo. He had taken the pope’s name (Pius), and had become a novice in the Augustinian order and an ardent conversionist in six languages. Mortara’s tragic end was his death in Belgium in 1940, weeks before the Nazi invasion, in this way narrowly avoiding an unwilling return to his Jewish roots.
In the Russian Empire during the second quarter of the 19th century, the institution of the Cantonists was introduced. This involved the virtual kidnapping for military service of Jewish male children from the age of 12, or even 8, with the explicit intention of compelling them to abandon Judaism.
ON SERMONS, BURNINGS AND GHETTOS
On the other hand, the same Pius IX of the Mortara case, abolished Sermons to the Jews after more than a millennia of their practice. The first recorded instance of sermons directed at Jews is related to the aforementioned Agobard of Lyons. His “Epistola de baptizandis Hebraeis” (820) states that on his instruction the clergy of Lyons went to preach in synagogues every Saturday. With the foundation of the Dominican order (1216) this system was regularized. King James I of Aragon himself delivered one of these speeches (1263) and later issued an order enjoining the Jews to listen quietly to the addresses of friars who had come to convert them. In 1278 the compulsory conversionist (evangelist or proselytic) sermon received papal approval (in the above bull), and was enjoined in England the following year (ten years after which all English Jews were expelled from the country).
With the Judeophobic reaction that accompanied the Counter-Reformation, the sermon became a regular way of abusing Jewish community life; Rome was the worst case. Jews were compelled to send a regular quota of people to churches to listen to the friars, and hear sermons while beadles armed with rods saw to it that they paid attention, and examined their ears to see that they were not plugged. The philosopher Michele de Montaigne records that while in Rome in 1581 he heard such a violent sermon that Jews appealed for papal protection. In 1630 the emperor Ferdinand II instituted conversionist sermons in the auditorium of Vienna university, and the Jesuits initiated the practice in Prague.
The conversionist (evangelist) sermons continued up to the period of the French Revolution, and by the time they were finally abolished in the mid-19th century, the poet Robert Browning attempted to record the Jews’ state of mind during the sermons: “...when the hangman entered our bounds,/ yelled, pricked us out to this church like hounds./ It got to a pitch, when the hand indeed/ Which gutted my purse, would throttle my creed,/ And it overflows, when, even the odd/ Men I helped to their sins, help me to their God.”
The proscription of Jewish literature was another phenomenon of medieval life, established in the 13th century (it had several precedents, such as the attempt by Emperor Justinian to prevent the teaching of the “second tradition” in 553). In 1199 Pope Innocent III declared that since Scripture contained lessons too profound for the layman to grasp, Christians should rely wholly on the clergy for its interpretation. In 1236 a memorandum was submitted to the pope with 35 charges against the Talmud: it was an allegedly blasphemous book which attacked the Church, mocked Jesus, and was hostile to non-Jews. The pope ordered that the confiscation of Jewish books in France take place on a Saturday, while the Jews were gathered in their synagogues. It happened on March 3, 1240, and similar instructions were conveyed to the kings of England, Spain, and Portugal.
In response to the papal circular, the first public disputation between Jews and Christians was staged in Paris on June 25-27 1240. The Jewish spokesman was Rabbi Yehiel of Paris, then the most eminent French rabbi, whose task was to defend the Talmud against its slanderers. (The Talmud was not completely translated before the mid-19th century and therefore very few had any real knowledge of it. Andrea Masio, a Christian Hebraist who repudiated the papal law on the subject, considered that the condemnation of the Talmud was as valid as the opinion of a blind man about differing colors).
Two years after the Paris disputation, an inquisitorial committee again condemned the Talmud, and 24 wagon loads of books totaling thousands of volumes were handed to the executioner for public burning. Subsequently the burning of the Talmud was repeatedly urged by the popes.
Famous disputations and burnings took place in Barcelona in 1263 (after which the king warned the Jews that their holy books were doomed to the pyre unless they censored them), in Toulouse 1319, in Tortosa 1413. Following the Church Council of Basle in 1431, the pope forbade the Jews to study the Talmud.
Italy became a center of burnings during the Counter-Reformation, after the pope had designated the Talmud blasphemous. On Rosh Hashanah of 1553, thousands of Jewish books were burnt in Campo de Fiori, Rome, in a gigantic pyre, followed by others in about ten Italian towns.
Only in 1564 the prohibition of the Talmud was rescinded, but even after that the confiscation of Jewish literature continued for two centuries. The Talmud was possibly the most attacked booked on earth. In order to write his two-thousand page “Endecktes Judemthum” (Judaism Unmasked) in 1699, Johannes Eisenmenger spent twenty years studying in a yeshiva (a Talmudic academy), so deep was his hatred of the book that kept Judaism alive. “Experts” churned out a vast literature exposing the Talmud’s blasphemies in the past two centuries.
The last public burning of the Talmud before the Nazi era took place in 1757 in Poland, when Bishop Nicholas Dembowski ordered the burning of one thousand copies.
Another practice was to establish quarters for Jews, surrounded by a wall separating it from the rest of the city, the gates of which bolted at night. This compulsory place of residence is called “ghetto,” which in Italian means “foundry” (the quarter of Venice enclosed by walls and gates in 1516 and declared to be the only part of the city open to Jewish settlement, was near a foundry). The institution antedates the word, since the idea was raised as early as the 4th century and was legalized in 1179 when the Third Lateran Council of the Church forbade Christians to reside together with Jews. Famous ghettos were set up in London (1276), Bologna (1417) and Turin (1425), always serving to reinforce the stereotype of the Jew, a demoniac figure who, even when he had contact with Christians during the day, would go back to his night residence beyond the walls to practice his absurd rituals and habits.
The walls of the Italian ghettos were demolished by French troops in 1796. After Napoleon’s fall (1815) there was an attempt to rebuild them, but this did not happen until the Nazis assumed power.
The ghetto was another implementation of the objective to separate the Jews from the rest of society, degrade them and oppress them so that they would ultimately convert to Christianity. When he saw the Jew living miserably in his ghetto, the 18th century Catholic publicist G.Roberti called it “a better proof of the truth of the religion of Jesus Christ than a whole school of theologians.” But the worst is yet to come...
Gustavo Perednik ory of European Judeophobia so far: forced sermons and baptism, book burning, and ghettos. Now the tale takes a harsher turn: expulsions. Jews had been expelled on many occasions during ancient times, but only from the 4th century on was a systematic policy adopted. In the principal expulsions Jews were removed from a whole country for an extended period. By the end of the 13th century Jews had been expelled from England, France and Germany. This is how the story usually unfolded:
The Jew was caught in a no-win situation. On the one hand he was the “royal usurer” from whom kings squeezed their much needed funds. On the other, he was the local lender and pawn-broker who collected from peasants the money he needed to sustain his uncertain existence. The Royalty protected him as long as he was useful, and as long as the anger of the creditors and mobs simmered below the surface. When the resentment boiled over, the king abandoned “his Jews” and joined in the clamor.
In England, during the civil war of 1262, Jews were attacked in many places; in London alone, 1,500 were killed. In 1279 all Jews in the city were arrested on the charge of debasing the coin of the realm. After a London trial 280 were executed. Edward I ordered those remaining out of the realm by All Saints Day, 1290. The Jews’ possessions fell to the crown. In October, a month before the deadline, 16,000 left for France and Belgium, some finding death on the way, even as close as the Thames where a sea captain allowed many to drown. Jews were readmitted to England in 1650.
France expelled the Jews from most of its territory in 1306 and in 1394; they were not readmitted until 1789. Germany expelled them mainly during the Black Death of 1348 (we will refer to it next chapter). Spain and Portugal (in 1492 and 1497) removed the strongest community of that time (about 300,000 Jews) for virtually half a millennium. In 1495 the Jews were expelled from Lithuania, but were allowed to return eight years later.
Expulsions of Jews from specific towns and regions took place regularly (famous among the modern ones were Prague in 1744 and Moscow in 1891). As a rule, the reason for expelling the Jews was usually the exploitation of Judeophobia by rulers, for fiscal considerations. Socio-economic factors contributed to the hostility of Christian merchants and craftsmen felt towards their Jewish rivals, and to the resentment of debtors towards Jewish moneylenders. When Jews were not indispensable moneylenders and they did not fulfill any vital socio-economic function, the outcome was expulsion.
While most countries have their own cruel history of expulsions, Spain is a special case. After the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand, respective heirs to the thrones of Castile and Aragon, the two kingdoms were united (1479). Spanish national homogeneity became the goal, and the Conversos (converted to Christianity) were perceived to threaten that goal. Initially, the Catholic Monarchs, as they were called, continued to employ Jewish and Converso functionaries, but later they requested that the Pope extend the Inquisition’s activities to their kingdom. In 1480 two Dominicans were named inquisitors and in the following six years more than 700 Conversos were burnt at the stake. Tomas de Torquemada, confessor to the queen, was appointed inquisitor-general in 1483, and the institution brought terror to the Jews from town to town. In ten years the Inquisition condemned 13,000 Conversos, men and women alike.
The march towards complete religious unity was reinforced when the last bastion of Muslim power in Spain fell, with the triumphant entry of the Catholic monarchs into Granada, in January 2, 1492. The scandal of Conversos who had remained true to Judaism had shown that the segregation of the Jews and limitations of their rights were not sufficient to suppress their influence, and the “New Christians” had to be isolated from that influence. The expulsion edict was signed in Granada to advance political consolidation; in May the exodus began. Hundreds of thousands left the country where their families had lived for over one thousand years, flourishing as merchants, astronomers, physicians, philosophers and poets.
From then on, concern in the Iberian Peninsula with the New Christians, which had long existed, became an obsession directed against those who had remained. The Marranos and their descendants were excluded from public office, guilds, colleges, orders, and even residence in certain towns. All roles in society were to be performed only by Christians with pure Christian ancestry. As time passed, the establishment redoubled its efforts to unearth the traces of any long-forgotten “impure” forefathers.
In Portugal legal distinctions between Old and New Christians were not officially abolished before 1773. Spain went even further and until 1860 “blood purity” was a requirement for admission to the military academy. The college attended by Spain’s most important leaders, the Saint Bartholomew of Salamanca, took pride in refusing admittance to anyone even rumored to be of Jewish descent. But since no one could be absolutely certain of his “blood purity since time immemorial,” the blemish ultimately became negotiable through bribed witnesses, shuffled genealogies, and falsified documents.
The tragic paradox is that when Jewish suffering was so immense, discrimination, humiliation and expulsion were often considered the lesser evils in an epoch when the menace of death hovered continually over the Jews. Thus the Maharal of Prague, a well known rabbi and philosopher, thought that the era of exile in which he lived was more tolerable precisely because its principal sufferings consisted of expulsions. In many places the Jews got accustomed to expulsion and rapid readmission. A 1692 poem by Elhanan Helin of Frankfurt read: “we went in joy and in sorrow; because of the destruction and the disgrace, we grieved for our community and we rejoiced that we had escaped with so many survivors.” Also Tevye the Dairyman in Shalom Aleichem’s play (1894) takes the expulsions lightly-the reason for which we wear hats, he says, is that we have to be prepared to leave at any moment.
The expulsions resulted in loss of property and damage to body and spirit; they left their impression on the entire Jewish nation and its history; they maintained and intensified the Jews’ feeling of foreignness. Consider that after 1492 there were no Jews living openly on the European coast of the Atlantic Ocean, during a period when this had become the center of the world.
The worst part of Jewish martyrdom was undoubtedly the massacres of Jews, which took place sporadically from ancient times, and systematically since the Crusades. Judeophobia surpassed itself in each successive century; the superlatives were belittled by posterior events. Due to Hitler, for example, Bogdan Chmielnicky was eventually forgotten as the most murderous Jew-hater. This Ukrainian patriot fought Polish domination of his country by killing more than 100,000 Jews during 1648-1649. To this day, Chmielnicky is revered as the national hero of the Ukraine.
Under Christian domain, killing Jews was nothing new. It dates back to shortly after the split from Judaism. In Antioch (the town which assumed Alexandria’s importance in the East) rioting Christian factions, the “Blues” and the “Greens,” massacred Jews and burned down the Daphne synagogue together with the bones of the dead (c.480), about which Emperor Zeno commented that it would have been better to burn live Jews instead. This is an example of a sporadic massacre.
In contrast, the first half of this millennium witnessed genocides of Jews as the norm. And this is precisely when the Church reached the zenith of its power. To summarize, the main genocides were the first three crusades and the four Jew-murdering campaigns that followed them. Let me add the name of one ringleader in each case, as follows: the First Crusade (Godfrey of Bouillon, 1096), the Second Crusade (the monk Radulph, 1144), the Third Crusade (Richard the Lion-hearted, 1190), the “Judenschachters” (Rindfleisch, 1298), the Pastoureaux (friar Peter Olligen, 1320), the Armleder (John Zimberlin, 1337), and the Black Death (Friedrich of Meissen, 1348).
THE TURNING POINT: The Crusades
As Edward Flannery puts it, to find a more fateful year in the history of the Jews than 1096, the First Crusade, would necessitate going back a thousand years to the fall of Jerusalem, or forward to the Holocaust. It all started on November 27, 1095 in the town of Clermont-Ferrand (mentioned last class), when during the closing ceremony of a council, Pope Urban II called for a campaign “to free the Holy Land from the Muslim infidel.” Massive, ill-organized hordes of nobles, knights, monks and peasants set off - and turned on the Jews. The crusaders decided to start their cleansing on the “infidels at home,” and pounced upon the Jews all over Lorraine, massacring those who refused baptism. Soon it was rumored that their leader Godfrey had vowed not to set out for the crusade until he had avenged the crucifixion by spilling the blood of the Jews, and that he could not tolerate the continued existence of any man calling himself a Jew. Indeed, one common denominator of the genocides we are recounting was the attempt to wipe out the entire Jewish population, children included.
The French Jews warned their German brethren, but to no avail. All along the Rhine Valley the troops, urged by preachers like Peter the Hermit, offered the Jewish communities the option of baptism or death. In Speyer, as the crusaders surrounded the panic-stricken community, huddled up in the synagogue, a woman reinaugurated the tradition of freely accepting martyrdom for the glory of God, “Kiddush ha-Shem.” Hundreds of Jews committed suicide and some even sacrificed their children beforehand. In Ratisbon, the crusaders forced the whole Jewish community into the Danube and baptized them. Massacres occurred at Treves and Neuss, in the cities along the Rhine and the Danube, Worms, Mainz, in Bohemia and in Prague. The end of the journey was Jerusalem, where the crusaders found the Jews assembled in the synagogues and set them ablaze (1099). There, the few survivors were sold as slaves, some being later redeemed by Jewish communities in Italy. The Jewish community of Jerusalem came to an end and was not reconstituted for about one century.
In the first half-year of the First Crusade approximately 10,000 Jews were murdered, almost one third of the Jewish population of Germany and Northern France at that time.
In 1144, the crusaders lost Edessa, and the precariousness of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was a matter of concern. A second crusade was called for by Pope Eugene III. He and his successors encouraged the Crusaders, often at the Jews’ expense. For example no interest could be charged by Jews on debts incurred by the crusaders (from the 13th century the term “crusade” applied to any campaign from which the Church stood to gain politically). In 1146 the monk Radulph violently attacked the Jewish communities of the Rhineland and exhorted the crusaders to avenge themselves on “those who had crucified Jesus.” Hundreds of Jews fell before the aroused mobs which rushed upon them crying “Hep, Hep” (this cry was probably shortened Latin for “Jerusalem is lost” and was very popular as a Judeophobic motto in Germany; long afterwards it was the name given to the riots against German Jews in 1819).
Brutalities occurred in Cologne and Wurzburg in Germany, and in Carenton and Sully in France. The famous Jewish scholar Rabbenu Jacob Tam was stabbed in five places in memory of the wounds suffered by Jesus. Peter of Cluny (called “the Venerable”) requested that the king of France punish the Jews because “they defile Christianity and fleece Christians. They should not be killed, but they should made to suffer fearful torments and prepared for greater ignominy, for an existence worse than death.”
After the two first crusades, Jews enjoyed a respite in Europe marred by the Almohade persecutions in North Africa and Spain. But when Saladin put an end to the crusader kingdom in Jerusalem, the Third Crusade was launched. King Philip Augustus of France (who had had a hundred Jews burned in Bray in retaliation for the hanging of one of his subjects who had murdered a Jew) joined enthusiastically as did the German emperor. But the most savage repercussions of this crusade were for the Jews of England, who had been spared during the first and second crusades.
Almost the entire Jewish communities of Lynn, Norwich and Stamford were massacred. In York, the Jews took refuge in the castle, where they were besieged, and killed themselves on the eve of Passover.
For the Jews, the crusades became the symbol of the inveterate hostility of Christianity. 300 rabbis from Western Europe emigrated to the Land of Israel in 1211, portentous that their chances, should they stay, would be slim indeed. And as Flannery says, “those who stayed lived to regret their decision.”
The memory of the martyrs was a source of inspiration for the Jews. The martyrs became an object of admiration for the following generations -God had put them to test and they had proved themselves worthy, a symbol of the whole people, and their martyrdom was perceived as victory. The majority of those converted by force were able to return to Judaism - to be the victims of the massacres that broke out later.
The crusades dramatically revealed the physical danger in which the Jews lived, and encouraged the Jews to move to the fortified cities, where they would be less vulnerable (this could partially explain the urban character of the Jews, which we mentioned in our second lecture).
For the Christians, the Jews were now perceived as the implacable enemy of their faith. A whole mythology developed, which exposed “the true character” of the Jews, and to this we will devote our next lecture.
A consequence of the crusades was the institution of the “serfs of the imperial chamber.” The Jews sought the protection of emperors and kings, and bought it at a heavy price. The new status was conceived as a privilege and protection against the fanaticism of the mobs and the rapacity of the barons, but before long it became a device for royal enrichment. Theology helped. The Pope Innocent III spoke of the “perpetual servitude of the Jews,” and the jurist Henry de Bracton (d.1268) wrote: “The Jew cannot have anything of his own. Whatever he acquires, he acquires not for himself but for the king.” By the 13th century many Jews were well worth owning, before they were eventually killed.
The massacres that followed the crusades proved to be even more gory and murderous than their precedents. In Rottingen in 1298 a nobleman called Rindfleisch stirred up the mob which burned the entire community at the stake. Then his “Judenschachters” (Jew-slaughterers) marched through Austria and Germany pillaging, burning, and murdering Jews as they proceeded . One hundred and forty communities were decimated; 100,000 Jews were murdered. In 1306 the king of France had all Jews arrested on a single day and ordered them to leave the country within a month. 100,000 left and settled in nearby lands; nine years later they were readmitted... to be massacred. A Benedictine monk led 40,000 shepherds (the “Pastoureaux”) in a kind of crusade which destroyed one hundred and twenty communities.
The viscount of Toulouse had been informed of the massacre perpetrated by the Pastoureaux in Castelsarrasin and neighboring localities between June 10 and 12, 1320. He set out at the head of an armed detachment in order to check their advance. He returned with twenty four carloads of Pastoureaux, intending to imprison them in the town castle, but the populace came to their assistance and released them. Indeed, another common characteristic of the genocides is the appalling degree of support from the peasants that the murderous mobs enjoyed.
And as always in the case of Judeophobia, the worst was still to come. In 1336-38 one visionary who “received a call to avenge the death of Christ by murdering the Jews,” John Zimberlin, led 5,000 followers armed with crude weapons, wearing leather arm-bands (the “Armleder”) and slaughtered Jews from Alsace through the Rhineland.
The last genocide on our list was occasioned by the Black Death. A plague killed about one third of the whole population of Europe between 1348 and 1350 (almost one hundred million people). The Jewish communities all over Europe were torn to pieces by a populace crazed by the plague. Who could be blamed for the plague if not the archconspirator and poisoner, the Jew? Emperor Charles IV granted immunity to the attackers and conceded Jewish property to his favorites... even before the massacre took place! For example, he offered the Archbishop of Trier the goods of the Jews “who have already been killed or may still be killed” and to a margrave he gave a choice of Jewish houses in Nuremberg “when the next massacre takes place.”
So much death calls for reflection. Maximo Kahn, a German Jewish intellectual who escaped the Holocaust, wrote in 1944: “The death of the Jews is the most enigmatic of all deaths, the most accusing one indeed. During twenty five hundred years Jews have been killed instead of being allowed to die. Long before racist aspirations existed, long before faith spread around... they started to kill the Jews with so much ecstasy that natural death did not scare them at all. Violent death was thrown at them so implacably, that natural death did not give them the impression of death any more. Unnatural death became so natural, that natural death came to be for the Jews what life was for the rest. In the same way that the rest took hold of life, the Jews took hold of death as if it were life, sunshine, song of birds, flower fragrance, or love. Nothing had for them the appeal present in dying without the footprints of murder in their bodies. As a matter of fact, life was transformed into a waiting for death. For more than twenty five hundred years the Jew is born like a convict awaits the moment of his execution. The Jew who does not die a violent death, lives as if his life was pardoned. It is very strange that the word “Jew” did not become yet a synonym for “moribund”...
Such boundless hatred was sustained by a huge body of myths regarding the Jews that cries out to be studied. This we will do in our next chapter.and Desecration of the Host
Our last two chapters were about suffering. A book by Joseph Ha-kohen published in 1558 gives it the biblical title of “The Valley of Tears” (Emek Ha-Bakha). The author refers to “the hardships which befell us since the day of Judah’s exile from its land.” When we look at these tears and hardships with hindsight, three questions usually come to mind.
The first question is why do the Jews always suffer. If by “why” we’re enquiring about the reasons for Judeophobia, well, this what our study about, and we’ll have some answers when we are done. But the implication may be that it is paranoid to review history and find the Jews consistently cast in the rôle of the victims. Our answer is the conceptualization of Judeophobia as a social disease which consists of hatred of the Jews. We must be aware of the enormity of this boundless hatred, a hatred which, always had the Jews as its main victims. This loathing endured for twenty-five centuries, continued through a genocide of 6,000,000 of its target population (a third of it) after which it remained powerful and game for more.
The second question is whether the unsurpassed magnitude of Judeophobia means that the whole world hates (or hated) the Jews. No, it does not. Not everybody is sick with Judeophobia. But the sick, not the healthy, are the objects of our study, even if the majority are healthy.
The third question is whether the clergy of the medieval Church were unanimous in their murderous stance. Again, the answer is no. Even during periods in which all the Church was Judeophobic in its theoretical outlook, individual churchmen did not always behave violently towards the Jews. There are many examples of bishops and priests trying to protect Jews. When the synagogue of Ravenna was burned down (c.550), Theodoric ordered the Catholic population to rebuild it and to flog the arsonists. During the first crusade Bishop Cosmas saved the Jews of Prague. During the second crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux came actively in the defense of Jews who were being murdered. And there are numerous cases through the centuries.
The problem remains, however, that the most virulent Judeophobes within the Church, were (and are) revered as saints. Judeophobia was a crime committed with virtual impunity. The friar John Capristano (d.1456) instigated the abolishment of Jewish rights in Naples and other towns, and in Bavaria he pushed the authorities to enforce that Jews wear a badge, to expel them from several villages, and to have the debts owed to them by Christians canceled. Due to his activities in Breslau, many Jews were tortured and burned alive; many committed suicide. The abolishment of Jewish rights in Poland by Casimir IV was a further result of Capistrano’s maneuvers, and it set off a train of anti-Jewish violence. Capistrano did not allow the Jews to escape their fate: he was responsible for a papal edict which prohibited the transportation of Jews to the Land of Israel.
During his lifetime he received both the title “scourge of the Jews” and the office of papal Inquisitor. More than two centuries after his death, he was canonized, and every March 28 since then, Catholics worship his memory.
The message of the Church was at best inconsistent. It spread the teaching of contempt, and occasionally tried to stop the contemptuous as they ran to commit unspeakable crimes - but it was usually too late.
This standpoint of the Church never changed radically. That is why one of the first historians of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, was able to draw a chart in which he shows that each of the principal Nuremberg Nazi Laws had their precedent in ecclesiastical legislation. The Conference of Dutch Bishops of 1995 stated it very bluntly, in what was a major breakthrough in Church’s history: there is a direct road that leads from the New Testament theology to Auschwitz.
During WW2 the position of the Vatican reflected its habitual ambivalence. Its reservations about Nazism were limited to whatever affected Catholic non-Aryans. The encyclicals and statements of the Church rejected the racial dogma and questioned some Nazi theses as erroneous, but neither mentioned nor criticized the specific attack against Jews. In 1938, Pius XI is said to have condemned Judeophobic Christians, but this was omitted by all Italian papers from their account of the pope’s address. His successor Pius XII, a Germanophile, had received information about the murder of Jews in the camps as early as 1942. He nevertheless restricted all his public utterances to carefully phrased expressions of sympathy for the victims of injustice.
The pope’s neutrality and silence continued even when the Nazis rounded up 8,000 Roman Jews in 1943. On October 18, over 1,000 Jews, mostly women and children, were transported to Auschwitz. At the same time, more than 4,000 other Jews, with the knowledge and approval of the pope, found refuge in the numerous monasteries in Rome, and a few dozen in the Vatican itself.
The pope could have not halted the Holocaust, but he could have saved thousands of lives had he taken a public stand against the Nazis. Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazi leaders, died as members of the Catholic Church and were never excommunicated (President Perón of Argentina was excommunicated when he attacked the Church’s influence in 1955, and a few months later he was overthrown). A Catholic priest headed the pro-Nazi regime in Slovakia. A quarter of SS members were Catholic (as was almost half of the population of the Greater German Reich).
The resolute reaction of the German episcopate to the Nazi euthanasia program almost stopped it. Jews did not receive the solidarity that the Church gave to the insane and the retarded. Regarding the Jews, the Church was more interested in saving souls than lives. The diocesan chancelleries even helped the Nazi state to detect people of Jewish descent by supplying data from Church records on the religious background of their parishioners. When mass deportations of German Jews began in October 1941, the episcopate limited its intervention to pleading for Christians. When the bishops received reports about the mass murder of Jews in the death camps, their public reaction remained limited to vague pronouncements that did not mention the word Jews.
There were individual and national exceptions. One of the former was the Berlin prelate Bernhard Lichtenberg, who prayed publicly for Jews (and died on his way to Dachau). An exceptional country was Holland, where as early as 1934 the Church prohibited the participation of Catholics in the Nazi movement. Eight years later the bishops publicly protested the first deportations of Dutch Jews, and in May 1943 they forbade the collaboration of Catholic policemen in hunting down Jews, even at the cost of their jobs. Large numbers of Jews owe their lives to the courageous rescue activities of lesser clerics, monks, and Catholic laymen.
Now let’s move on to the three main Christian myths invented in the Middle Ages, through which Judeophobia has been transmitted since the 14th century.
JUDEOPHOBIC MYTHOLOGY
The Blood Libel
The main myth was the Blood Libel, namely the belief that Jews murder non-Jews (especially Christians) in order to use their blood for Passover and other rituals. This libel was one of the utmost expressions of cruelty and mass hysteria in human history. The pattern was generally as follows: a corpse was found (usually of a child, often close to Easter), Jews were accused of having committed the murder to get the blood, the main rabbis or community leaders were detained and tortured till they confessed they had done it, and the outcome was the expulsion of the whole community, the torture of most of its members, or its outright extermination. Generation after generation, Jews were tortured in Europe, and Jewish communities were massacred or dispersed because of this libel.
Although the first cases happened in England, here blood libels were a strictly medieval phenomenon. In 1144, a boy called William was found dead in Norwich, and the local Jews were accused of “having bought the ‘boy-martyr’ before Easter and tortured him with all the tortures wherewith our Lord was tortured, and on Long Friday hanged him on a rood in hatred of our Lord.” The motif of torture and murder of Christian children in imitation of Jesus’ suffering persisted with slight variations throughout the 12th century. In the case of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (1255) the chronicler Matthew Paris relates “that the Child was first fattened for ten days with white bread and milk and then... almost all the Jews of England were invited to the crucifixion.” This echoed the pagan myth (see Damocritus and Apion in our second lesson).
In Spain the myth was included in the law: “We have heard it said that in certain places on Good Friday the Jews do steal children and set them on the cross in a mocking manner” (“Siete Partidas” Code, 1263).
There were altogether around 130 cases of Blood Libel. They spread from England to Italy and Spain, and then Eastwards. In modern times it occurred mainly in Russia and Poland. Overall, Germany was the leader, as in many other aspects of Judeophobia. One third of all the blood libels took place there, most recently under Nazi rule (Memel, 1936, and Bamberg, 1937). A special issue of ‘Der Stürmer’ of May 1, 1934, was entirely devoted to the myth. Outside Germany, there were four other cases during the 20th century.
The first of these four was the Hilsner case. Thomas Masaryk, the founder and first president of modern Czechoslovakia, took a stand “not to defend Hilsner (a 22-year old vagabond of low intelligence) but to defend the Christians against superstition.” He was attacked by the mob and his university lectures were suspended because of student demonstrations against him. This affair stirred a Judeophobic campaign throughout Europe, conducted by Vienna blood libel “specialist” Ernst Schneider.
The libels created a satanic Jewish stereotype. The Jew detests purity, he disdains innocence and good in the Christian child. According to the German monk Caesarius of Heisterbach “the child sings, the Jews cannot endure this pure laudatory song, they cut off his tongue and hack him to pieces.”
The libel was repeated in literature and the arts. About a century after the expulsion of the Jews from England the cultural motif was the plot of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Prioress’ Tale,” where Jews obey their Satanic master and kill the child. In Spain, books supporting the libel were published by top writers in virtually every century, for instance: Rodrigo de Yepes (16th c.), Lope de Vega (17th c.), José de Canizares (18th c.), Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (19th c.), and Romero de Castilla (20th c.).
According to the account of the citizens of Trnava in 1494, the Jews believed that “the blood of a Christian was a good remedy for the wound of circumcision... that this blood put into food awakes mutual love... it is a medicine for menstruation which, among them, both men and women suffer... they have an ancient and secret ordinance to daily shed Christian blood in some spot or other...”
Again, the problem was not that the Church spread the libel. On the contrary, it usually opposed it, as did most heads of state. After the Fulda libel in 1235, in which Jews were accused of having taken the blood of five young Christian boys for medical purposes, Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen decided to clear up the matter definitively. If the accusation proved to be true, all the Jews in the empire were to be killed. If not, they were to be publicly exonerated. His inquiry turned into an all-Christian problem. Since the Church authorities with whom he consulted were not able to decide the matter due to their ignorance of Judaism, a synod of converts was convened and its conclusion was published by the emperor: “There is not to be found, wither in the Old or the New Testament, that the Jews are desirous of human blood. On the contrary, they avoid contamination with any type of blood... Those to whom even the blood of permitted animals is forbidden, cannot have a hankering after human blood. Against this accusation stands its cruelty, its unnaturalness.” A few years later Pope Innocent IV wrote that “Christians charge falsely that the Jews hold a communion rite with the heart of a murdered child; and should the cadaver of a dead man happen to be found anywhere they maliciously lay it to their charge.”
Neither the word of the emperor nor that of the pope were heeded. Accusations spread and massacres continued. The Church tried to stop them but with its characteristic ambivalence. The dead boys were considered martyrs and revered as such. Examples are Saint Hugh of Lincoln, the Holy Child of La Guardia, and Simon of Trento. Every year during centuries Christians worshipped the memory of those “martyrs” who had allegedly been murdered by blood-thirsty Jews.
The libel of La Guardia occurred on the eve of the expulsion from Spain. Conversos were tortured till they confessed that with the knowledge of the chief rabbi the Jews had assembled in a cave, crucified a child, abused him and cursed him as was done to Jesus. The crucifixion motif explained why blood libels occurred at the time of Passover.
Out of many cases in Italy, Trento was particularly infamous. In 1475 the friar Bernardino da Feltre announced that “the sins of the Jews were to be soon manifested to all.” A few days later, on Maundy Thursday, a boy named Simon disappeared and his corpse was soon found near the house of the head of the Jewish community. The whole community was arrested, including women and children. Seventeen of them were tortured for a fortnight till they “confessed.” Some Jews died of torture, the few who converted to Christianity were strangled, and the others burnt at the stake. Their property was confiscated. A papal court of inquiry in 1476 justified the libel, Sixtus IV endorsed the “legality” of the trial and the martyr Simon was beatified.
After his success, Friar Bernardino concocted similar scenarios at Reggio, Bassano and Mantua. He instigated the expulsion of the Jews from Peruggia, Gubbio, Ravenna, Campo San Pietro. His last victims were the Jews of Brescia in 1494, the year of Bernardino’s death, shortly after which he was beatified. It was five long centuries before the Church debeatified Simon in 1965.
Desecration of the Host
Another main myth was the Host Desecration. According to the Christian doctrine of Transubstantiation, the wafer consecrated in the ceremony of Eucharist becomes thereby the actual body of Jesus (Protestants dropped the doctrine and consider the wafer only a symbol of the body, not Jesus himself; Catholics still hold it). The myth was the belief that Jews secretly stabbed, tormented and burned the consecrated wafer (this belief brought Judeophobia to a new peak of irrationality, since Jews obviously did not believe in Transubstantiation). This charge brought more persecution and massacre. Most of the forty infamous cases took place in Germany and Austria.
The first recorded case was in Belitz, near Berlin, in 1243 where Jewish men and women were burnt at the stake on this charge on the spot later known as the Judenberg (“Jews hill”). In Brussels it led to the extermination of Belgian Jewry (1370); in Knoblauch to 38 executions and the expulsion of the Jews from Brandenburg (1520); in Lisbon all New Christians were banished from the country (1671). The genocide by Rindfleisch that we discussed earlier started with a desecration of the Host charge. The last accusation of desecration was in Rumania, 1836.
At least two of the post-desecration expulsions are still celebrated every year. One at Deggendorf in Bavaria (since 1337) and one at Segovia in Spain (since 1415), where the alleged desecration is said to have caused an earthquake which resulted in the confiscation of the synagogue and the execution of leading Jews. (As to the reason why blood was supposedly found on the host: stale food kept in a dry place often produces a scarlet fungoid organism blood-colored, called for this reason the Micrococcus Prodigiosus).
The Black Death and Poisoning the Wells
The third myth was referred to at the end of our last class, namely the Black Death. In this case the relation between the myth and its consequential massacres was direct and obvious. Between 1348 and 1350, one hundred million people, a third of Europe’s population, died of an epidemic caused by the bacillus “pasteurella pestis.” In centers with denser populations, such as monasteries, the proportion of dead people was higher. People had extreme reactions, either seeking recourse to religion through repentance and supplication to God, or reverting to licentiousness, lawbreaking and savagery. These two types of reaction often combined to accuse the Jews of having poisoned the wells and therefore being the cause of the death (after so much persecution, Christians could imagine that the Jews might seek revenge).
Pope Clement VI came out to defend the Jews, as did the emperors, but massacres broke out throughout Europe. All appeals to reason were ineffective, and in many places Jews were killed even before the plague had visited the locality.
The first case was in September 1348 in the Castle of Chillon on Lake Geneva. The Jews’ “confessed” that the disease was spread by a Jew of Savoy on the instructions of a rabbi who had prepared the poison.
The defamation, killings and expulsions spread from Spain to Poland, affecting about 300 Jewish communities. Emperor Charles IV, who initially defended the victims, finally granted “forgiveness for every transgression involving the slaying and destruction of the Jews.” A group of “Flagellants” roamed through Germany expiating their sins by stirring up attacks on Jews.
In Mainz the Jews in desperation set fire to their own homes and to the Jewish street; 6,000 Jews perished in the flames. In Strasbourg 2,000 Jews were burnt on a wooden scaffold. But the Black Death not only resulted in the immediate destruction of Jewish lives, but also fed popular imagination with even more horrible characteristics added to the already odious image of the Jew. After the Black Death the legal status of the Jews deteriorated almost everywhere in Europe.
There were other myths in medieval Judeophobia, but none as murderous as the three just explained. For example, the Wandering Jew is based upon a legend heard for the first time in Bologna in 1233. It influenced art and literature, but caused no Jews to be massacred.
In contrast, the aforementioned trilogy were the essence of sheer sadism, and made the term “Jewish” synonymous with “diabolical.” In medieval art, the Jew was portrayed with horns, a tail, an evil visage; his company was that of devils, sows, scorpions: his poses grotesque. The image was further elaborated by men of letters, preachers and apologists, and was seized upon as a motif in mob aggressions.
In the 16th century there was a split within the Church, and Protestantism was born. This could have been the dawning of the breakdown of Judeophobia, but these expectations were dashed as we will see. whether this Medieval “valley of tears” discussed in previous chapters had a parallel in the Islamic world, and whether Christian Judeophobia was equally rampant within the two main branches of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant.
Islam and Protestantism are similar in that both sought the validation of the Jews, and became Judeophobic out of frustration when they were rejected.
But unlike Christianity, Islam did not emerge out of Judaism. Its founder was not Jewish, and it did not claim to be the realization of the promises of the prophets. Therefore its encounter with Jewry was far less tense. Jews in the Islamic world seldom suffered the tortures, expulsions and burning at the stake that typified Jewish life under medieval Christian rule. However, their life under Islam was usually tainted with degradation and insecurity.
In 7th century Medina, at the time of the beginnings of Islam, there lived a Jewish population from whom Mohammed learned many practices of his new religion (to pray in the direction of Jerusalem, which was eventually changed to Mecca; dietary laws; the Day of Atonement which was later replaced by the fast of Ramadan). But when Mohammed failed to convince the Jews to accept him as a new Moses, he turned against them. His angry reaction was recorded in the Koran, giving millions of Muslims throughout history divinely based antipathy to the Jews.
The Pact of Umar of 720 was the Muslim legal code which prescribed the treatment of Dhimmis, or non-Muslim monotheists. The Dhimmis were required to acknowledge their subservient position to Muslims - they must not manifest their religion publicly, they must rise from their seats if Muslims wish to sit, avoid riding horses, wear different clothes. During the 11th century, the Caliph Hakim of Egypt ordered Jews to wear balls weighing five pounds around their necks, to commemorate the calf’s head which their ancestors had worshipped. Yemen was the only Muslim country with a Jewish minority, that was never ruled by a European power. In 1679 nearly all Yemenite Jews were expelled from their cities and villages. The synagogue of San’a, the capital, was converted into a mosque which still exists and is called “the Mosque of the Expulsion”). Until their departure from Yemen in 1948, all Jews were compelled to dress like beggars, and Jewish children were forced to convert to Islam when their fathers died.
When the Turks occupied Yemen (1872) they asked an assembly of Muslim leaders to stop Muslim children throwing stones at Jews. The answer was that the practice was an old religious custom called “Ada,” and could not be forbidden.
In 1840 a blood libel in Damascus introduced the myth into the Arab world. Only after international protest were the Jews who survived their tortures released. But the libel became popular among Muslims, who often attacked the Jews (mostly in Egypt and Syria) for drinking Muslim blood. The present Minister of Defense of Syria, Mustafa Tlas, is the author of “The Matza of Zion,” a book in which he documents the blood libel. The pamphlet was published in 1983 (!) and distributed to all delegates at the United Nations.
Next: Chapter 8: Judeophobia ('anti-Semitism') in the Reformationmation was started by Martin Luther in 1517. One of the principles of the Protestant Church was to bring Christianity back to its Jewish sources rather than the Hellenistic interpretation. Initially many Protestants approached Judaism, expecting Jews to finally accept the new faith when it was lovingly presented and stressing its Jewish components. But again, when this expectation proved false, the reaction was Judeophobic. Luther’s last book was “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543) in which he called the Jews the anti-Christ. “It is harder to convert them than Satan himself.”
Luther called for the violent expulsion of Jews from all Germany. He addressed European noblemen: “Let me give you my honest advice. First, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt... And this ought to be done for the honor of God and of Christianity in order that God may see that we are Christians, and that we have not willingly tolerated or approved of such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of His Son and His Christians... Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed. For they perpetrate the same things that they do in their synagogues. For this reason they ought to be put under one roof or in a stable... Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayerbooks and Talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught. Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more... God’s rage is so great against them that they only become worse and worse... To sum up, dear princes and nobles who have Jews in your domains, if this advice of mine does not suit you, then find a better one so that you and we may all be free of this insufferable devilish burden - the Jews.” This was the theologian and founder of the new trend (one of the most brutal Nazi Judeophobes, Julius Streicher, argued in his defense at the Nuremberg trials that he had merely repeated what Luther had said about the Jews).
So far we have seen the development of Judeophobic mythology pass through three stages: Antiquity (Jews are lepers and ass-worshipers, misogynists and lazy), Early Middle Ages (the Jewish people is deicidal and, through its suffering, a witness of Christian truth) and Late Middle Ages (Jews drink Christian blood, poison wells, and are partners with Satan). The main difference between pagan and Christian myths is that the former were mainly cultural, whereas and the latter were mostly theological: “God hates them” became a common belief.
But what do I see on the horizon? It looks like the salvation of the Jews from the accumulated myths, discrimination and disdain, the lies and legends. It is 18th century Europe: rationalism and Encyclopedism are in the air, free-thinkers scorn superstitions and plan the religion of reason in a world of brotherhood. Surely the Enlightenment will put an end to the discrimination and violence caused by gratuitous hatred!
1897:
“The Jews such as they are today are our work, the work of our 1,800 years of idiotic persecution.” To free the Jews from their oppression meant to free the Christians from their prejudices against them. But, alas, those who held high the banner of the ideological revolution turned to be Judeophobes themselves.
Denis Diderot, the principal writer of the famous Encyclopédie (1765) pointed out some Jewish virtues, for example that the Jews are the oldest nation and never succumbed to polytheism. At the same time he wrote about the Jews as being “ignorant and superstitious,” capable of any villainy. Paul D’Hollbach went further. In “The Spirit of Judaism,” he claimed that Judaism is evil, that its corruption led to the creation of Christianity, that Moses was the most harmful legislator ever, who taught hatred for mankind and parasitism. The Jews’ God is blood-thirsty and causes them to commit genocides, the patriarchs were lascivious liars, the prophets a bunch of fanatics, and so on. The Jews were the vilest people on earth. (It is paradoxical that after two millennia of Jewish suffering under Christian domain, D’Hollbach and others now blamed the Jews for having created Christianity).
On the whole, Montesquieu favored the Jews and empathized with their sufferings (“Judaism is a mother who has given birth to two daughters who have struck her a thousand blows... If you do not want to be Christian, at least be human”) he also warned that “wherever there is money there are Jews.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a noteworthy exception to the rule and adopted a stand consistently favorable to the Jews.
The most ill-mouthed of all Enlightened Judeophobes was none other than the man who incarnated the ideas of the French Revolution based upon “liberty, equality and fraternity.” Voltaire, champion of the Enlightenment, enemy of the Church, wrote a Philosophical Dictionary. In more than a quarter of all the entries in the Dictionary, Voltaire insulted the Jews “the most imbecile people on the face of the earth, enemies of mankind, most obtuse, cruel absurd...” The longest entry of the book is “Jews” and there we read: “The Jews never were natural philosophers, nor geometricians, nor astronomers...” Is it possible that Voltaire had not heard of Maimonides or Spinoza? No, but Judeophobia had the power to twist the reasoning of even this most reasonable man. And he touches the nerve. If there was an area in which Jewish accomplishment was outstanding it was education. Wrote Voltaire: “So far away were they from having public schools for the instruction of youth that they have not a term in their language to express such an institution.”
This great liberator from superstition actually approved of the endless persecutions and massacres of the Jews and supported the blood accusation (“your priests have always sacrificed human victims with their sacred hands.”) And it is not acceptable that “Voltaire struck at the Jews to strike at Christianity,” as some claim, because Voltaire also attacked the Church openly. He did not need to do it via the Jews. He signed his letters with “Écrasez l’infâme” (“destroy the infamous” referring to the Church), except for letters sent to Jews (where he signed “Christian gentleman of the very Christian king’s chamber”). “In short,” ends the Dictionary, “we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched. Still, we ought not to burn them.”
Voltaire’s Judeophobia was commonplace among freethinkers. As with the Church Fathers, they expressed hatred and disdain whenever they referred to the Jews. The English were exceptional in their Judeophobia-free outlook, with the likes of John Locke and John Toland. However, full Emancipation in England did not arrive until 1858 when Baron Lionel de Rothschild took his seat in Parliament, taking an oath specially formulated for the occasion.
Modern Judeophobia was basically a reaction to the Emancipation of the Jews, which took the form of three trends, each one respectively exemplified in three countries, namely: the socioeconomic (France), the racial (Germany) and the conspirational (Russia).
The Emancipation of the Jews and the Reaction
In France the revolutionaries’ National Assembly debated whether the principle of “Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood” should apply to the Jews. After two years, in September 1791, Jews were granted civic freedom, and Napoleon then saw it as his task to make good Frenchmen of the Jews.
Incensed by complaints from Alsace about Jewish usury, Napoleon called for an Assembly of Jewish Notables, holding sessions from July 1806 to April 1807. The Assembly was made up of 111 rabbis and community leaders, who had to respond to twelve questions about Jewish habits namely: polygamy, divorce, marrying out, French patriotism, relationship towards the Gentiles, obedience to French law, rabbis’ appointment and authority, forbidden professions, and usury. During the last months of the sessions, 71 Jews, mostly rabbis, were appointed to translate the answers of the Assembly into religious binding laws. This was called the Napoleon Sanhedrin.
This same year the first modern Judeophobic myth was born. The Jesuit Augustin Barruel claimed that this Sanhedrin had been “brought out to light” after having been underground for almost fifteen centuries, during which it exercised powerful control over Europe. Napoleon’s Sanhedrin was dissolved.
The pre-Emancipatorial Judeophobic atmosphere again reared its ugly head. The term “Sanhedrin” was a misnomer which could be understood to imply that it had the legal power to enforce its decisions. However, this was clearly not the cause but rather an arbitrary detonator (Judeophobia finds excuses everywhere). Pope Pius VII believed Barruel, and in the Papal States and in Germany, the downfall of Napoleon (1815) undid the Emancipation. Those few years had sparked a wave of assimilationism among Jews, many of whom had desperately knocked on the doors of gentile society long before it was open to them. The vanguard of the assimilationists was in Berlin. Hugo Valentin wrote in his book “Anti-Semitism” that “more German Jews were baptized between 1800 and 1818, than in the previous 1800 years put together”.
It was now that the Jews learned to their sorrow that Judeophobia was not neutralized by a mere governmental decree, nor by theories of Enlightenment, nor by assimilation. There was rising agitation against Jews in many German towns and in 1819 it reached a new point of violence with the cry “Hep, hep, death to the Jews!” accompanying the riots. The authorities argued that Emancipation should be withheld from Jews because of the ill-will it caused the masses.
In France several philosophers turned this Judeophobic reaction into their ideology. François Fourier (d. 1837) established a school of social reform, and pursued his aim with passionate dogmatism and intolerance. For Fourier “commerce was the source of all evils and Jews the incarnation of commerce.” It had been a big mistake to emancipate slaves and Jews, “the most despicable nation.” His disciple Alphonse Toussenel wrote in 1845 a two-volume work “The Jews, Kings of the Epoch,” which served as the inspiration for a conservative, rural Judeophobia that eventually developed into a political movement. Toussenel warned the reader that in his book he used “the word Jew in the sense of banker, usurer,” but he openly supported the persecutions that the Jews had previously suffered as a people. This semantic manipulation allowed him to include under the “Jewish” epithet even the Protestant countries.
This type of pun can be misleading. It is true that Toussenel was anti-Protestant too, but the fact that he blames the Jews for everything he disliked illustrates the essence of Judeophobia. He limited himself to reproving Protestant influence, but not want to destroy the Protestants as a group. In the same vein, it is misleading to claim that D’Hollbach was as Judeophobic as he was anti-Christian, or that Stalin was as Judeophobic as he was anti-religious, or that Hitler was Judeophobic as he was anti-Communist. It is one thing to express reservations about an idea (even if that idea is Judaism!) and a very different one to attack a group who incarnate any “evil” idea which the attacker chooses to deride.
The 'Jews Control France' Myth
The hostile atmosphere in France was the backdrop for another book which was a watershed in Judeophobic history: “La France Juive” by Edouard Drumont (1886) described France as subjugated to the Jews in the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. In a short time it had over a hundred editions. In 1889 Drumont founded the Anti-Semitic League (remember Marr’s league in our first lesson?) and a few years later he was elected to the chamber of deputies. This paradigm describing Jews dominating the nation was oft-repeated, regarding any number of nations. The usual way is to mention the names of Jewish bankers, newspaper editors, top industrialists and so on, and then bundle all this power together as claiming it belongs to “the Jews.” (Everyone would see the absurdity in attributing financial power to “the short” because many bankers are 5 ft 2’’, or to claim that the press is in the hands of the “visually challenged” because many journalists wear glasses. And this is the strategy: to note Jews in key positions and to imply that they are secretly coordinated - “the Jews.”) That many Frenchmen are still infected by this, was apparent last March when Jean-Marie Le Pen, a French opposition leader who is supported by 15% of the population, claimed that the President of France is controlled by “the Jews.”
Jews govern everything. This is a modern myth, which was almost absent in previous Judeophobia and which we will consider further in our ninth lesson. In France, the peak of the Judeophobic trend was the Dreyfus affair.
The Dreyfus Affair
Alfred Dreyfus was an officer in the French army who was arrested in 1894 and tried before a court-martial on the charge of treason. A secret military document (the “bordereau”) sent by a French officer to the military attaché of the German embassy in Paris, had fallen into the hands of the French Intelligence Service. Dreyfus’ conviction, his degrading demotion, imprisonment on Devil’s Island, and ultimate acquittal in 1906 was traumatic for France and the entire Jewish world. During the decade of the trial and retrial, accusation and counter-accusation, top French leaders were accused of complicity in this Judeophobic scandal. This divided the French into Dreyfusists (mostly Liberals and Socialists) and anti-Dreyfusists (monarchists, the reactionary and the Catholic Church).
The most striking aspect was not whether Dreyfus was guilty, nor the injustice of putting an innocent Jew in prison, not even if it was merely because of his being a Jew. The appalling aspect was the mass reaction of enmity towards “the Jews” as a whole, slandering a whole population, cries of “Death to the Jews,” caused by the relatively minor indictment of one Jew. And all this in the country of equality of rights.
Jews everywhere were shocked that this could take place in France, the “homeland of liberty and the Great revolution,” and that Judeophobia still prejudiced the behavior of much of the French people, even when the Jewish victim was completely assimilated. This seemed to prove that assimilation was no defense against Judeophobia. At least these were the impressions of one journalist who came to Paris as a correspondent for his Viennese newspaper to cover the Dreyfus affair, and partly in reaction decided to create the World Zionist Organization, Dr. Theodor Herzl.
Echoes of the Dreyfus affair continued to reverberate in France for over a generation. During W.W.II its consequences were still recognizable in the line that divided the Vichy government from the Free French. And it was the leader of the latter, Charles de Gaulle who in 1967 publicly called the Jews “an elitist people, self-confident and proud.” The President of France uttered such an expression only twenty years after he fought the regime which had murdered one third of this “elite.”
In France Judeophobia became mainly economic and political. It was less cultural (as in the pagan world) and not theological (as in the Middle Ages). Also it was not based on racial prejudice, unlike in Germany. The German trend will be the subject of our next lesson.
Gustavo Perednik
Next: Chapter 10: In Germany: Racism and Judeophobia ('Anti-Semitism') acism was first put forward as a system in a French book, but was most fully developed in Germany. Joseph De Gobineau’s “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races” (1853) claimed that the differences between the human races are not only physical but also intellectual and moral. However, racism as a prejudice is old as man. In ancient times Plato and Aristotle stated explicitly that while the Greeks were born to be free, the barbarians were by nature slaves.
The other side of the coin, anti-racist tradition, was a Jewish contribution to Western civilization. The first example of it is provided in the Talmud which states that Adam was the only ancestor of man in order that no one can claim his father to be better than someone else’s father. But altogether, racist prejudice was in European history ubiquitous over time and space. It was formalized with the anthropological studies of the !8th century (the anthropological thesis that human races differ only in physical characteristics, is very recent).
Scientists like Linnéaus coupled skin color with moral and mental characteristics; Buffon considered white man the norm, “king of creation,” while blacks were a degenerate race (for Voltaire they were an intermediate species between white men and apes).
The main racial paradigms of the 18th century saw the Jews as a sui generis (one of a kind) nation, although they pertained to the white race. With the growth of nationalistic struggles in the 19th century the number of theorized races and subraces multiplied. In Europe, great emphasis was placed on racial differentiation, particularly in pre-1870 Germany, where internal political divisions had stimulated nationalistic fervor. Furthermore, the majority of European monarchs were of Germanic descent, and the monarchy divided medieval society into three strata - commoners, clergy and nobility - the latter supposedly with superior “blue blood.”
The philosopher Johann Fichte contended that the original language of Europe (Ursprache) was German, and that the Germans were the original nation (Urvolk). Even in England “Germanism” or “Teutonism” had influential supporters like Carlyle and Thomas Arnold. Fichte’s enlightened vision explicitly excluded the Jews: “Give them civil rights? I see no other way of doing this except to cut off all their heads one night and substitute other heads without a single Jewish thought in them. How shall we defend ourselves against them? I see no alternative but to conquer their promised land for them and to dispatch them all there. If they were granted civil rights they would trample on other citizens.” (Remember the Judeophobic obsessiveness we noted in our first class? Well, both in Voltaire’s France and in Fichte’s Germany, the Jews were less than 1% of the population. But the Judeophobe felt the need to defend himself against them).
The composer Richard Wagner wrote in 1850 : “We have to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews... To explain to us this instinctive and unconquerable repugnance against the Jew’s prime essence, let us first consider how it grew possible for the Jew to become a musician...” Some years before Wagner, Bruno Bauer had attacked “the Jewish national spirit,” and thus prompted young Karl Marx’s answer as we will see in next class. Social Scientists were not the only ones seeking a scientific explanation for Judeophobhia. In his 1803 book Karl Grattenauer offered an avant-garde explanation regarding why Jews smell: there was a “foetor judaicus” produced by a certain “amonium pyro-oleosum.”
During the second half of last century the Jews were considered to be a separate, Oriental race. This idea was stimulated by the linguistic discovery of the Indo-European group of languages. It was believed that the nations who spoke European languages, which were thought to have derived from Sanskrit, belonged to the Indo-European or “Aryan” race. Typically, German scholars used the term “Indo-Germanic” (they claimed that the Germans were the only European nation that was a wholly “pure” Teutonic race). Lassen claimed that “the Semites do not possess that harmonious equilibrium between all the powers of the intellect, which characterizes the Indo-Germans” and his French colleague Ernest Renan wrote against “the appalling simplicity of the Semitic mind”. All creations of the human spirit (with the possible exception of religion) were attributed to “Aryans.” And the Germans, the purest Aryans, were to avoid intermingling with inferior races.
The first proponent of racial Judeophobia was Eugen Duhring who in 1881 claimed that “A Jewish question would exist, even if every Jew were to turn his back on his religion and join one of our major churches... It is precisely the baptized Jews who infiltrate furthest... the Jews are to be defined solely on the basis of race.”
Some fanatics constructed elaborate eschatological systems in which the struggle between the Aryan and Semitic races was the counterpart of the final struggle between Good and Evil. This antithesis was developed by Houston Chamberlain (Wagner’s son-in-law) in “The Foundations of the 19th Century,” a massive volume that became the standard textbook for Judeophobic academics. He explained how, from ancient times “...the Aryans had committed the fatal blunder of protecting the Jews (under Cyrus the Persian king) when the seed of Semitic intolerance spread its poison over the earth for thousands of years, a curse on all that was noble and a shame to Christianity.”
By 1900 the existence of an Aryan race was believed by most to be a scientific truth. A substantial theoretical body was created which singled out “Jewish influence” in art, law, medicine, philosophy, literature, and so on (particularly notorious was the world chess champion Alexander Alekhine’s essay on “Aryan chess against Jewish chess” the latter being hyperdefensive and opportunistic).
One difference between the German-Austrian and the French modern Judeophobias, was that while the former was an immediate reaction to the granting of Emancipation to Jews, the latter was a delayed reaction -eighty years after Jewish Emancipation had been achieved.
The first politician who used Judeophobia to ferment a mass movement was Adolph Stoecker in Berlin of the early 1880’s. The First Anti-Jewish Congress met in Dresden in 1882 with delegates from different countries, who then went on to create the Universal Anti-Jewish Alliance. Three more congresses were held during the 1880’s. In 1886 Otto Boeckel was elected to the Reichstag as a Judeophobe as such. In the 1893 elections, sixteen Judeophobic candidates were elected. The first party anywhere to attain power through a Judeophobic platform was the Christian Social Party in 1895 (its leader, Karl Lueger, held the position of burgomaster of Vienna when he received a visit from a young admirer called Adolf Hitler).
The most paradoxical aspect of this racism was that in all the theoretical writings on “Jewish poison” no racial definition of the Jew was given. Racists could never go further than defining a Jew as someone whose grandparents... professed the Jewish religion. Their method of sustaining the antithesis was simple enough: “Aryan” was anything they liked; “Jewish” was anything they disliked. In this way, Chamberlain believed that both the Italian Dante Alighieri and Jews like King David and Jesus, were of Germanic descent. In contrast, neo-pagans like Alfred Rosenberg or Walter Darre, considered Christianity a typically “Semitic” teaching that undermined “Germanic” spirit through a slave mentality. There was another tragicomic aspect: not all Judeophobes had the same taste. For example: Chamberlain considered Goethe to be a “pure and perfect Aryan,” while Fritz Lentz thought him a “hybrid teutonic-Asian,” and for Otto Hauser he was a “half-caste.”
Now let’s examine some Jewish reaction to the no-way out hostility of racial Judeophobes.
JEWISH SELF-HATRED
Thousands of Jews had discarded their tradition long before the spirit of racist writings. Many Jews who were born into religious families and educated in Talmudic yeshivot, abandoned Judaism as soon as they came into contact with German culture. The child of one such Jew was the poet Heinrich Heine, who declared “Judaism not a religion but a disgrace” and was baptized (“but not converted,” he stated). The writer Moritz Saphir went further: Judaism is a birth deformity, corrected by a baptismal operation.
But when the Emancipation was reverted in Germany, and Jews again faced systematic hatred which did not allow them to rid themselves of Jewishness, a singular phenomenon emerged: Jewish self-hatred. This is the title of Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book, which examines the biographies of six Jews who loathed their descent . Some committed suicide as a result, including the well known Austrian psychiatrist and philosopher Otto Weininger.
There were incidents in ancient times of Jews, like Philo’s nephew Tiberius, who mass-murdered their fellow Jews. And there were many self-hating Jews during the Middle Ages. But they had had the choice of apostasy and more: they could join the most Judeophobic part of the Church and therein persecute Jews. Famous medieval cases include Petrus Alfonsi, Nicholas Donin, Pablo Christiani, Avner de Burgos, Guglielmo Moncada and Alessandro Franceschi. But during the new Judeophobic stage of 20th century Austria and Germany, Jewish self-hatred reached the same nadir as Judeophobia itself. An Organization of National-German Jews was created to support the “German national revival” within which they hoped to be given a Jewish role (they finally received one in Auschwitz).
One of Lessing’s case-studies was of the Viennese journalist Arthur Trebitsch who converted to Christianity, wrote a book justifying Judeophobia, offered his services to the Austrian Nazis, but when he felt all this was inadequate he wrote:
“I force myself not to think about it. But what does it help? It thinks within me... it is there all the time, painful, ugly, deadly: this knowledge about my descent. Just as a leper or a person sick with cancer carries his repulsive disease hidden under his dress and yet knows about it himself every moment, so I carry the shame and the disgrace, the metaphysical guilt of my being a Jew. What are all the sufferings and inhibitions which come from outside in comparison with this hell within? Jewishness lies in existence. You cannot shake it off. Just as little as a dog or a pig can shake off its being, just so little do I tear myself away from the eternal ties of existence, which hold me on that step between man and animal: the Jews. I feel as if I had to carry on my shoulders the entire accumulated guilt of that cursed breed of men whose poisonous elf-blood is becoming my virus. I feel as if I, I alone, had to do penance for every crime those people are committing against German-ness. And to the Germans I should like to shout: Remain hard! Remain hard! Have no mercy! Not even with me! Germans, your walls must remain secure against penetration. They must not have any secret little door in the rear which could be opened for single persons. because, surely, some day through this little door treason would creep in... Close your hearts and your ears to all those who from out there still beg for admission. Everything is at stake! You last little fortress of Aryanism, remain strong and faithful! Away with this pestilential poor! Burn out this nest of wasps! Even though along with the unrighteous a hundred righteous ones are destroyed. What do they matter? What do we matter? What do I matter? No! Have no mercy! I beg of you.”
The Rise of Nazism
By 1923 the Nazi Party had 20,000 members. In 1930 it polled 2,5 million votes raising the number of its delegates in the Reichstag from 12 to 107, which was further raised to 230 in 1932. When they came to power in 1933, the theory of race was a kind of totemistic mythology which served to justify the Holocaust. Centuries of accumulated hatred were poured onto a defenseless population trapped in Europe. The Jew was no longer the scapegoat, not merely a member of an inferior race. He was blamed for every ill: the loss of the W.W.I (called the “stab in the back” theory), inflation and every other problem. He was the destroyer, the poisoner of purity - inherently and ineradicably. Only one “Final Solution” was left, summarized by the Nazi slogan “Juda Verrecke!” (Jewry perish!).
Initially there was pretense of legality, an affectation of national self-defense. Then the program accelerated: ostracism, impoverishment, expulsion, annihilation. Even before the government acted, Nazi storm troops, police and Party members took things into their own hands. Beatings, economic boycotts and killings of Jews became regular occurrences. Jewish lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists, scholars, and artists were ostracized. Jewish children were taunted in class by pupils and teachers, and returned home beaten, pale and shaken. A yellow badge was imposed, Jewish books were burned. Before 1933 was over, German Jews were “despairing men, weeping women and terror-stricken children.” In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws canceled the citizenship of all Jews, who became “guests.” The way out was suicide or emigration. There were limitations on taking possessions out of the country, and by 1938 it was forbidden to take out even one mark. This measure enriched the government with each departure, and also made the Jew a more unwelcome immigrant wherever he applied to go.
Krystallnacht (November 10, 1938) was the night of horror: outrages, murders, rampaging and rapes. Jews ran panic-stricken with Nazi packs in pursuit. Over 100 Jews were killed, 35,000 arrested (and eventually sent to the death camps), 7,500 shops looted, 600 synagogues burned, while the Nazi loud-speakers announced: “Any Jew who intends to hang himself is requested to have the kindness to place a paper with his name thereon in his mouth so that we know who he is.” The Holocaust had begun.
The Holocaust
We do not have the space to include the entire history of the Holocaust in this chapter. It deserves an entire course on its own. A whole nation became brutally Judeophobic in the most extreme way (and alas, the most civilized nation on earth). The Nazi “ideology” was enforced: the removal of the Jews from human society by labeling them as parasites, a dangerous vermin which threatened the world. Judeophobic mythology caused the loss of six million Jewish lives (a third of living Jews) while Adolf Hitler stripped Judeophobia of all its disguises and bared its essence. Unrepressed sadistic instincts were protected by law, by the State, by the silence of the world. Both the Evian (1938) and the Bermuda (1943) international conferences could not find one single place for the Jews to take refuge. And the gates of the Land of Israel remained locked by the British who sent ships of Jewish refugees back to Europe or sank them, leaving the Jews on board to die in the sea.
Millions of Jews had either rejected or held at arm’s length the overtures of Zionism, in the belief that the security of the Jewish people would be best defended by the European liberal ideals, by just laws, by democrats everywhere. Instead, they discovered that even their non-Jewish neighbors and friends were reticent to stand up and fight for them, to protect them, or even to hide them. Yes, there were thousands of “righteous gentiles” who expressed solidarity with the Jewish people, some of them in so doing risking their lives. Yet the overall record was appallingly disappointing for those who believed that Judeophobia would soon be surmounted. At each stage in the progressively worsening oppression of Jews -from legislation to exclusion from employment, from acts of violence against individual Jews in the streets to systematic campaigns against Jewish businesses, deportations, degradation, extermination- Gentile onlookers covered their eyes, shut their doors to people seeking refuge and, all too often, were participants in the murder of Jews, grabbing their property and exposing their hideouts. Even more than in the medieval massacres, the Nazis succeeded in murdering Jews due to the overwhelming cooperation they received from the citizens of Nazi-occupied countries.
All demands from Jews everywhere were virtually unheard, even the request to bomb the crematoria in Auschwitz, where 1,5 million Jews were murdered after unspeakable sufferings. The Allies refused to bomb the death camp, so that their people would not feel that they had been dragged into a “Jewish war.”
To call the Nazi “ideology” racism is another endeavor to de-judaize the Holocaust. Only when it came to the Jews were the Nazis consistently “racist.” Their main allies were Latin and Oriental peoples, Italy and Japan. They were fond of another supposedly “Semitic race” (the Arabs). It is noteworthy that when the Palestinian Arab leader Hajj Amin Al-Husseini visited Alfred Rosenberg in May 1943, he was promised that the press would be instructed to henceforth abandon the word “anti-Semitism,” because it seemed to include the Arab world which was mostly pro-German. Husseini took part in the Iraqi pro-German coup of 1941, and lived in Germany during the rest of the war. He recruited Muslim volunteers for the Nazis, and advocated that the Reich extend “the Final Solution” to Palestine.
The fact is that Nazi hatred focused on the Jews to the virtual exclusion of all other “races” (including the Gypsies, who though murdered en masse were, unlike the Jews, incidental to the Nazi world view). It was not because of racism that Nazis hated the Jews, but because of Judeophobia that they utilized racist arguments. It was not in order to achieve power that the Nazis attacked the Jewish “scapegoat,” but as Hitler wrote in his testament in April 1945 “Above all I enjoin the government and the people to resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.”
Thus Prager and Telushkin summarized Nazi Judeophobia: “Virtually every ideology and nationality in Europe had been saturated with Jew-hatred by the time the Nazis developed the Final Solution. Over the preceding decades and centuries, essential elements of Christianity, socialism, nationalism, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought had ruled the existence of the Jews to be intolerable. In the final analysis they all would have opposed what Hitler had done, but without them Hitler could not have done it.”
Next: Chapter 11: Conspiratorial Theories and Russian Judeophobia ('Anti-Semitism')
Our two previous chapters were devoted almost entirely to the first two types of modern Judeophobia, found in France and Germany respectively. This lesson I will present the third paradigm, “the conspirational.” As we saw in lesson # 6, the country with the highest incidence of modern Blood Libels is Russia. The czars’ attitude towards the slander was far worse than that of the popes and Western monarchs.
The first Russian case took place in Senno in 1799 shortly before Passover, when four people were arrested following the discovery of a dead woman. In the same year the authorities appointed the poet Gabriel Derzhavin to investigate the Jews’ life style, and in his “Opinion submitted to the Czar on the organization of the status of the Jews in Russia,” he denounced their “economic parasitism” and that “in these communities persons are to be found who perpetrate the crime, or at least afford protection to those committing the crime, of shedding Christian blood, of which Jews have been suspected at various times in different countries. If I for my part consider that such crimes, even if sometimes committed in antiquity, were carried out by ignorant fanatics, I thought it right not to overlook them.” Thus a semiofficial seal was given to the libel in Russia at the beginning of last century.
Alexander I gave instructions to revive the libel in Velizh, where the trial lasted for ten years. Although the Jews were ultimately exonerated, the mere accusation was enough for Nicholas I to contend that “there are among the Jews wild fanatics or sects that require Christian blood for their rituals,” and therefore he refused to sign an 1817 circular addressed to local authorities instructing not to indict Jews without evidence. Imagine how Judeophobia was fortified throughout the duration of these trials, regardless of the nature of the eventual verdict.
Several libels shocked Russian Jewish communities (Kovno, Zaslav, Volhynia, Saratov, etc.) until in 1855 an official committee was appointed to investigate the issue. Once again its conclusions were categorical: no evidence could be found to support charges against the Jews. Nevertheless, the libel continued to spread and many “experts” on the subject published books “describing” Jewish procedures for utilizing Christian blood (Lutostansky and Pranatis in Russia; Desportes and Cholewa further afield).
Following the partition of Poland in the late 18th century, Russia became governor of the largest body of Jews. Egged on by successive libels, Russian Judeophobia intensified during the 19th century, at which time approximately half of the world-wide Jewish population (5 out of 10 million) lived within Russian borders. The Jews concentrated in the “Pale of Settlement” (an area beyond which their residence was forbidden) since when Catherine II extended foreigners a generous invitation to enter Central Russia, she specified: “all except the Jews.” In this sense, she was loyal heir to Empress Elizabeth who, when asked to admit Jews for commercial purposes, replied: “From the enemies of Christ I accept no profit.”) Among the worst victims of the czars’ Judeophobia were Jewish children, due to the system of Cantonism, of which an explanation follows.
In 1827 military service was made compulsory for Jews. The age set for draft was 12 years old, in order to exclude adults who had families to support. The statute provided that “Jewish minors (under 18) shall be placed in preparatory training establishments” to serve in the Czar’s army for 25 years, during which they were to be “guided” regarding how to adopt Christianity. The Cantonists were the children thus drafted in barracks (hence “cantonments”) where they were instructed in drill and military training, and disciplined by threat of starvation and corporal punishment.
Community leaders were held personally responsible for attaining the high quota of adolescents, who usually came from the poorest homes, from which they were cut off forever. Every community was forced to resort to the help of thugs who snatched the children to the accompaniment of the screams of parents and neighbors. These officers, the “khapers” (Yiddish for kidnappers) incarcerated children from 8 years old in the communal building and handed them over to the army. The system was imposed more rigorously during the Crimean War (1854) when a Jewish quota of 30 conscripts per thousand males was required, and gangs of khapers prowled with intent to hunt down victims.
The children were transferred from the Pale of settlement to Siberia, the journey taking several weeks. The Russian thinker Alexander Herzen recalled that when he met a convoy of cantonists in 1835, the official explained to him that “a Jew boy is such a frail, weakly creature... he is not used to tramping in the mud for ten hours a day and eating biscuit among strangers, no father nor mother petting; well, they cough and cough till they cough themselves into the graves... Not half of them will reach their destination, they just die off like flies... A third were left on the way” he said, pointing the earth.
Once in the barracks, the surviving children were handed to sergeants who had been instructed to “influence” the children towards baptism. These “educators”’ tools included starvation, sleep-deprivation, lashing and all kinds of physical torture till baptism (or death) was achieved. Czar Nicholas I regarded it as a means for “correcting” the Jews of the realm. After the ceremony, the youngsters changed their names, were registered as the children of their sponsors, and started training. Their new comrades frequently reminded them of their Jewish origins by ongoing maltreatment.
A side-effect of Cantonism was that many parents reluctantly sent their children to state schools or agricultural colonies, since in this way they were exempted from the draft. These schools were financed by candle-tax, which was levied on candles used by Jews for ritual purposes, including memorial and wedding candles.
During three decades of Cantonism, up to 40,000 Jewish children were “recruited.” The Hebrew name “Be-emek Ha-Bakha,” In the Valley of Tears, which we mentioned three weeks ago, was also the title of a novel by the Yiddish writer Mendele Mokher Seforim (d. 1917), in which the horror of Cantonism is told.
The fearful state of the Jews in Russia was the reason for which when it came to happen that a new czar with new ideas ascended to the throne, the Jews felt a new dawn of hope was imminent. Alexander II is still called “the Czar liberator” in Russian historiography for his liberal policy, the Age of the Great Reforms. As far as the Jews were concerned, Cantonism was abolished, and the Pale of Settlement was eased. As Chaim Potock states in his book “Wanderings,” the Russian Enlighteners thought emancipation would follow, and “the dance started.” But they did not reckon with the subsequent backlashes.
What happened next is deja vu to us, veteran students of Judeophobia in the middle of the ninth lesson. Just as in France and Germany, Jews entered the arts, became journalists, lawyers, dramatists, novelists, poets, critics, composers, painters, sculptors. They seemed suddenly ubiquitous in the economic, political and cultural life of the motherland. But the Gentile reaction to this Jewish participation in Russian life was far less enthusiastic. Russian writers (like Lermontov, Gogol and Pushkin) included in their works repulsive stereotypical Jews. Dostoevsky went further in “The Jewish Question” (1873) justifying this attitude by blaming the Jews for being wily exploiters, ruthlessly leeching on the surrounding populace, especially the defenseless and ignorant peasants. For him, the Jews, enthroned on sacks of gold, inspired all manner of politics against Russia from Western Europe. According to him, Russians, citizens of the only land in which Christianity still represented a life-determining power, were regarded by the Jews as beasts of burden.
But the party went on. Jewish literature and press throve, mainly in Hebrew and in Yiddish, and also in Russian. Zevi Dainow published a Hebrew sermon in honor of the Czar and Lev Levanda called the Jews to “wake up under the scepter of Alexander II” - until the party was abruptly disrupted.
March 13, 1881, one of the most fateful dates in Jewish history. This was to catalyze the biggest exodus of Jews ever, millions of them establishing communities in the Americas and the Land of Israel. The assassination of Alexander II was the springboard for the most ferocious Judeophobia backlash in Russia. This new era brought the beginning of pogroms (Russian for “assault,” a new entry in our Judeophobia lexicon, which describes an attack on a defenseless population by mobs, accompanied by destruction, looting, murder and rape.) Since a Jewess was in the revolutionary cell that murdered the Czar, the new, precarious regime rallied the people by blaming “the Jews” for the assassination. The blood-bath of government-inspired pogroms took place in three waves of increasing furor, leaving tens of thousands dead and innumerable maimed and wounded. The first pogrom took place in April in Yelizavetgrad. Count Nicholas Ignatiev, the new minister of interior affairs, called the pogroms “acts of spontaneous justice launched by the exploited Russian people.”
Revolutionary gangs increased their activity and ultra-Conservative organizations rose to combat them, and to reverse the liberal measures of Alexander II. Among these organizations: the Sacred League, the Union of the Russian People, the Black Hundreds, the United Nobility. Their motto was “Strike the Jew and save Russia.” Many revolutionaries accepted the pogroms as a means to wake up the masses, who would eventually turn against the regime. The revolutionary motto was “Strike the bourgeoisie and the Jews!”
Ignatiev wrote to Czar Alexander III that “over the last 20 years the Jews have gradually gained control of commerce and industry... made every effort to exploit the general population... They have thus fomented a wave of protest, which has taken the unfortunate form of violence... Justice demands severe regulations which will alter the unfair relations between the general inhabitants and the Jews and protect the former from the harmful activity of the latter.” These “severe regulations” were known as the May Laws, “temporary” decrees that applied to the Jews until the 1917 revolution, and which forbade Jews to settle outside the towns and townlets and canceled deeds of sale and lease in the name of Jews in the forbidden areas. Thus Russian merchants got rid of their Jewish rivals, and the police were given a source of constant extortion and harassment of Jews still living in villages.
Another restriction in the “new Russia” was Numerus Clausus (“closed numbers,” quotas) for Jews who wanted to study (a practice that prevailed in many countries, even in the US). In July 1887 the Ministry of Education decided that the proportion of Jews in all secondary schools and higher institutions was not to surpass 10% in the towns within the Pale of Settlement, 5% in the towns outside it, and 3% in Petersburg and Moscow. In some cases it even applied to converted Jews.
One of the main supporters of the Numerus Clausus was Count Konstantin Pobedonostev “Supreme Prosecutor of the Holy Synod” (1880-1905) a type of minister for religious affairs, who believed that because Jews were more talented than Russians, in time they would dominate the latter. Pobedonostev strove for Russification and defined the fate of the Jews in Russia: “One-third will die, one-third will leave the country, one-third will be assimilated within the Russians.”
A feature of Russian Judeophobia which had far-reaching influence was its manner of self-justification. The Czarist secret police looked for a means to ideologically justify its actions. They finally found it in a book, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” written by Sergei Nilus around 1902, which is a modern adaptation of the old demoniac tradition.
The book supposedly included the “true” Protocols of the Jewish conference held in Basle, Switzerland in 1897 (the First World Zionist Congress) which while presenting its aims as the establishment of a national home for the Jews, really conveyed a plan to dominate the world. In it, rabbis and leaders speak about their blood-thirsty inclinations, machinations and power.
There were some precedents to the Protocols, but only Nilus’s book was a resounding success, as we will see. Three previous similar manuscripts were written in 1869: one German (“The Rabbi’s Speech” by Hermann Goedsche), one French (“The Jew, Judaism and the Judaization of the Christian Peoples” by Gougenot de Mousseaux), and one Russian (“The Book of the Kahal”, by Jacob Branfman). Many of the conspiracy-believers quoted other sources. The idea had first appeared after Barruel and the Sanhedrin (see lesson # 7). But the English source appeared not in Judeophobic propaganda but rather in the spirit of a naughty joke. Benjamin Disraeli included in his novel “Coningsby” (1844) a passage in which the rich Jew Sidonia describes how he traveled from country to country to raise a loan, and in each capital found that the minister concerned was a Jew. He ends his tale with the comment: “So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes” (bk. 3, ch. 15). And this paragraph came from a Jew who was later to become Prime Minister! (Needless to say, Judeophobes who quoted this “proof of the power of the Jews,” overlooked the fact that the various ministers named were in reality non-Jews).
A further German ground breaking publication was “World Conquest by the Jews” by Millinger (alias Osman-Bey), which by 1875 had reached its seventh edition and foresaw a world without Jews where “wars will be less frequent, because nobody will stir one nation up against another; class-hatred and revolutions will cease, because the only capitalists will be national, who never exploit anyone. “The Golden Age would lie before us all, it would be the ideal of progress itself. Drive out the Jews with an enthusiastic shout... The Alliance Israelite Universelle can be destroyed only through the complete extermination of the Jewish race.”
The story of the Protocols was fully told in 1967 by Norman Cohn in “Warrant for Genocide.” For some years The Protocols had little influence. But after an article published in the London “Morning Post” suggested a Jewish world government (August 7, 1917) the Russians substantiated this thesis by sending the Protocols to numerous newspapers. The Protocols sold millions of copies in more than twenty languages, was diffused and believed as no Judeophobic book had been before. In America the main mentor of this myth was Henry Ford who spread the word in The Dearborn Independent in 1920. In that year The Spectator of London requested that a Royal Commission be appointed to investigate the existence of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy whose goal was the destruction of Christianity. Were the answer to be affirmative, “we shall be justified in moving with great caution in our admission of Jews to the fullest rank of citizenship ... We must drag the conspirators into the open, and show the world how evil are such pests of society.”
It smacks of the Synod of Converts of 1235 (see lesson # 6). Do Jews eat Christian blood? Do they secretly dominate us? The Royal Commission was never appointed, since The Times correspondent in Constantinople, Philip Graves, discovered that the Protocols had been copied from a pamphlet directed against Napoleon III and dated 1865. The source was the satirical novel “Dialogues in Hell” by Maurice Joly, in which the French -and not the Jews- were the dominating power. Out of 2,560 lines, 1,040 had been literally copied by Nilus, failing even to change word order. On August 18, 1921, “The Times” devoted a resounding editorial to admitting its error. The Protocols were false, the conspiracy another Judeophobic myth.
But as with the Blood Libel, manifest falsehood did not change much. The Protocols continued to be sold by the millions in many languages. In October 1992 the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan of Petersburg, Yoann, published a series of articles on the first page of the “Sovetskaia Rossiia,” claiming the Protocols were proof of the Jewish conspiracy, of which Russia was enemy number one.
NEW HOPES, NEW DISAPPOINTMENTS
Deja vu all over again (remember the Enlightenment after centuries of Church Judeophobia?). What do I see on the horizon? It looks like the salvation of the Jews from the accumulated myths, discrimination and disdain, the lies and legends. It is 20th century Russia: rationalism and socialism are in the air, egalitarian revolutionaries scorn superstition and plan the religion of reason in a world of brotherhood. Surely the Bolshevik revolution will put an end to the discrimination and violence caused by gratuitous hatred.
But, alas, many of those who held high the banner of ideological revolution turned out to be Judeophobes themselves. This includes even the theoreticians of Anarchism, who advocated the total reversal of the previous establishment’s ideology. Thus, in 1847 the French Pierre Proudhon wrote about the Jews: “This race poisons everything by meddling everywhere without ever joining itself to another people. Demand their expulsion from France, with the exception of individuals married to Frenchwomen. Abolish the synagogues; do not admit them to any kind of employment, pursue finally the abolition of this cult... The Jew is the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or exterminate it... By fire or fusion or by expulsion, the Jew must disappear... What the peoples of the middle ages hated by instinct I hate upon reflection and irrevocably.” The fact that many ideologues of the Left shared this view is most striking.
To conclude this chapter we will quote their chief theorist. Karl Marx was baptized when he was 6 by his father, Hirschel, the son, son-in-law and brother of rabbis, and descendant of Talmudic scholars. Hirschel became Heinrich and a Protestant, when a Prussian edict in 1817 forbade Jews to be advocates [lawyers] (he was one of the thousands referred to in Chapter 8, who converted to Christianity in response to the reversion of Emancipation after Napoleon’s defeat).
Karl Marx’s first essay was “On the Jewish Question” (1844), a response to Bruno Bauer’s position that the Jews could be emancipated if and only if they gave up their faith. Wrote Marx: “The chimerical nationality of the Jews is the nationality of the merchant... The secular basis of Judaism is practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money. Out of its entrails bourgeois society continually creates Jews... Emancipation from huckstering and from money, and consequently from real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our era.” The emancipation of humanity is in Marx’s book a synonym of the abolition of Judaism. As for Marx’s followers and Communist Russia, we will examine their Judeophobia in the next chapter.
Next: Marxism and Judeophobia ('Anti-Semitism')The Jew in Marxist Philosophy and Marx's life
The previous chapter drew a parallel between the Enlightenment with its contrasting medieval background on the one hand, and Socialism with its czarist backdrop on the other. These two movements beg the question: what caused these new orders based upon rationalism and brotherhood to be so infested with the Judeophobia that characterized the old world. The fact is that no cure emerged; from neither the decline of Christianity as the dominant force shaping the political realm, nor from the emancipation of the Jews from legal restrictions. Apparently, European societies were so saturated by centuries of Jew-hating, that they were unable to produce Enlightenment or socialism that was Judeophobia-free. In his comprehensive study, historian Zosa Szajkowski could not find a single word in favor of the Jews in French socialist literature between 1820 and 1920, even when half of this period was replete with 600 pogroms. We mentioned Tousenel, Fourier and Proudhon as examples of Judeophobia from the Left. Saint-Simon is the striking exception.
Within Marx’s writings and biography, four aspects of Judeophobia can be discerned, namely:
1) For Judeophobes, the importance of Jews they dislike is overblown, and their Jewishness is emphasized even when it is non-existent. Thus for Nazism, Communism was a Jewish ideology. And within the left itself, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin considered Marx “a modern Moses” and the Jews as “a nation of exploiters.” In contrast, Judeophobes studiously blur the Jewishness of Jews who are central in their cause. Thus, Marx’s Jewish origins were usually skipped by the Communist regimes. In the Soviet Encyclopedia edition of 1952, the Jewish origin of Marx was totally withdrawn.
2) Jews were accused from both sides of the political spectrum with contradictory arguments, and therefore had no chance to be proven innocent. Despite their suffering under the domain of Christian states, the Jews were ultimately seen as the germ of Christianity by many free-thinkers. In the same way, the Judeophobia of Marx and many Marxists did not deter anti-Communist Judeophobes from accusing “the Jews” of having created Marxism. For this reason, during the 1918-20 civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, the anti-Communist Ukrainian fighters murdered 50,000 innocent Ukrainian Jews.
3) Marx also exhibits a typical Judeophobic trait, to ignore both the Jews’ sufferings and the existence of Jew-hatred in his own time. His antagonism to Jews was expressed both in his essays and private correspondence; he never had a word of sympathy for the pogrom victims, whose influx into London began while he was living there. This “selective humanism” is a characteristic of leftist Judeophobes, Jews and non-Jews alike. In 1891 the Second Socialist International in Brussels (which included many Jewish delegates) rejected a motion condemning increasing Judeophobia. If you want to unmask someone’s Judeophobic leaning, ask him whether Judeophobia exists anywhere in the world. A negative answer is indicative.
4) Marx also exemplifies a phenomenon which exacerbates Judeophobia: the non-Jewish Jew (as in the title of Isaac Deutscher’s book, published in 1968, one year after his death). The non-Jewish Jew is a radical who, although he has no connection with Judaism whatsoever, he is perceived as “the Jew” by the society he strives to overthrow. The non-Jewish Jew sympathizes with every underdog, as long as he is not Jewish. Thus wrote Rosa Luxemburg in a 1916 letter: “Why do you come with your particular Jewish sorrows? I feel equally close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putumayo, or to the Negroes in Africa with whose bodies the Europeans are playing catch-ball... I have not a separate corner in my heart for the ghetto: I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are cloud and birds and human tears.” With hindsight, those Jews of the 1916 ghetto would have been happy to exchange their fate with the Putumayo workmen and Black Africans in Africa. As Irving Howe put it “even in the warmest of hearts, there is a cold spot for the Jews.”
COMMUNIST JUDEOPHOBIA
Unlike Marx, Vladimir Lenin, the architect of the Russian revolution, was not a Judeophobe. In 1914 he publicly fought czarist persecution and stated that “no nationality in Russia is so oppressed and persecuted as the Jewish.” Thus he passed a twofold test: public admission of ongoing Jewish suffering, and the will to combat it. Lenin also the third test: he never used Judeophobia even when it would have been politically expedient (for example when he argued with the Bund, the Jewish Socialist Party, he did not mention that their Jewishness was problematic; nor did he stress the Jewishness of one of the assailants in an attempted assassination on him).
But Lenin’s personal attitudes were overcome by Communist ideology, which explicitly denied the Jews the definition of peoplehood, and therefore distinguished the Jews as the only group deprived of any legitimate national expression (not only religious). Hebrew language was labeled subversive, and hundreds were sent to prison for either teaching or learning it. From the outset, the Communist government systematically destroyed Jewish community life in Russia. The motto of the Russian anti-Communists (“Strike the Jew and save Russia”) was replaced by “Strike the Jew and the Bourgeoisie.” Judeophobia became, in August Bebel’s words, “the Socialism of fools.”
This was the first time that a Judeophobic movement insisted it was no such thing (the campaign was implemented under the title of “anti-Zionism”). In 1919 Zionism was designated a counter-revolutionary movement and duly prohibited, together with all Jewish schools. The destruction of cultural life was implemented mainly by the Yevsektzia, the loyal “Jewish Sections” of the Communist Party.
When Lenin died in 1924, and eventually Stalin became the head of Russia, Soviet policy became more blatantly and brutally Judeophobic. Broad evidence of Stalin’s personal hatred for Jews can be found in his daughter’s memoirs.
The “Jewish problem” -a group ideologically defined not as a people, but which behaved as a people- called for a solution. One proposal was called Birobidzhan. This was an area in far East Russia, by the border with Manchuria, about 35,000 sq. km. in size. It was in the government’s interest to send Jews there; it would create a stronghold against Japanese expansion and elicit financial support from Jews abroad. For the Yevsektsiya, it was the alternative to Zionism. On March 28, 1928, it was decided to settle the territory with Jews and a few days later migration began. That year the publication of all Hebrew literature was forbidden and many Jewish writers were imprisoned.
Yiddish schools, a theater and a newspaper were established in Birobidzhan and even when Communist Jews from abroad were invited, about 1,500 came. Nevertheless, with the exception of 1941, the peak year of the Jewish Region, it never reached even 10% of Jews among the general population.
By 1930 the Yevsektsiya had achieved the destruction of most Jewish cultural life in the URSS, so they were deemed unnecessary, and were eliminated. Their leaders were either executed (like its head Simon Dimanstein) or died in prison (like their newspaper editor, Moishe Lirvakov). And as we saw in the German case, not even self-hating responses saved Jewish intellectuals. Osip Mandelshtam, one of the most accomplished and refined poets in all Russian literature, although “allergic to Jewish smells and the sounds of the Jewish jargon” was arrested in 1934 and died in a prison camp in the Far East.
In that year Birobidzhan was granted the status of “Jewish Autonomous Region” and Mikhail Kalinin, the mentor of the project, predicted that “within a decade Birobidzhan will probably be the only bulwark of national Jewish socialist culture.” Two years later, however, Stalin’s purges marked a turning point in Soviet policy. There was a cessation of denouncing and punishing expressions of popular Judeophobia, and the beginning of systematic liquidation of remaining Jewish institutions and leading figures by the government. A first blow was struck to the development of Birobidzhan.
All in all, animosity towards the Jews weakened after Nazism took power and it attacked the Soviets as a Jewish lackey. Then a new peak of Russian Judeophobia was reached in 1939 with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact which led to WW2 two weeks later. Stalin promised Hitler to replace Jews from leading positions (he had just replaced his main foreign spokesman, Litvinov, a Jew, with Molotov, who eventually signed the Pact). The Third Reich was now congratulated for its struggle “against the Jewish religion” and the Soviet press and radio systematically concealed reports about the Judeophobic character of the Nazi regime. German Communists who had escaped the Reich were extradited to Germany, Jews included.
Although some defended the move as Stalin’s shrewd attempt to buy time to build his forces for the inevitable battle against the Nazis, it became obvious that Communist parties around the world quickly abandoned any focus on the evils of Fascist and on Nazi Judeophobia.
When Russia was invaded by the Germans, the Soviets needed to recruit world public opinion for their war effort. Two months after the invasion they organized the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), a group of public figures and intellectuals. On August 24, 1941, the “representatives of the Jewish people” met in Moscow to “call our Jewish brethren throughout the world” to aid the Soviets. But even then, Soviet condemnation of the Nazis against the murder of “peaceful, innocent people” consistently refused to present Jews as victims. Even though at least 200,000 Jews died fighting in the Red Army and many were distinguished for their heroism, the authorities continued the execution of Jewish soldiers and rehabilitated them post-mortem only after the Stalin era.
The JAFC, headed by Solomon Mikhoels, published a Yiddish journal, transmitted radio broadcasts, and in 1943 went on a fund-raising campaign to the US, the UK and other countries. They were enthusiastically received by the Jewish communities everywhere, since their visit renewed the contact between Soviet Jews and world Jewry that had been severed since 1917.
After the war, the concealment of Jewish suffering continued with a vengeance. Any attempt to emphasize that the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union was particularly bad for Jews, was strongly criticized by official spokespersons. Soviet books and films on WW2 systematically ignored the Holocaust, virtually to the point of denying. In a forty-minute Russian-language film shown to Soviet visitors at Auschwitz, where 1.5 million Jews were murdered, the word Jews was not mentioned once. A “Black Book” on Nazi crimes against Jews in the USSR by the Yiddish writer Vasili Grossman, was banned after it was already set in type. Not only did the Soviets deny (by omission) the Holocaust, but outrageously used Nazi atrocities to increase Judeophobia by connecting Nazism with Zionism.
JAFC publications were banned, and in January 1948 Mikhoels was murdered by the Soviet secret police. That year new purges took place, aimed at destroying any Jewish activity. Even in Birobidzhan the Yiddish theater and schools were closed. The Jewish population, which had reached then 30.000, shrank and the “Jewish Autonomous Region” was history.
The JAFC was liquidated together with all remaining institutions, the attacks on Zionism increased, and a witch-hunt of “Cosmopolitans” was launched. By the end of 1948 the most prominent Jewish writers and public figures had been arrested. During a secret trial in 1952, they were accused of conspiring to separate the Crimea from the Soviet Union, in order to convert it into a Jewish bourgeois republic that would serve as a military base for enemies of the USSR. Twenty-six Jewish writers (many of them lifelong staunch supporters of Stalin) were executed on August 12, 1952. (Since then and until recently, August 12 was the Day of Solidarity with Soviet Jewry).
“Cosmopolitans” was a derogatory term applied to Jewish intellectuals in the Soviet Union from November 1948, at the peak of Russian chauvinism and its struggle against Western influence. It was initiated with articles in Pravda and other central organs, which denounced those “who have no homeland” (in the country of internationalism!). The anti-cosmopolitans “unmasked” Jewish names in arts and literature, inflated their real importance in their respective fields out of all proportion, and revealed the real names of Jews using pen names, showing how Jews hid their identity behind Russian names and spread hatred of Russia (this “hatred” was exemplified by the fact that some of them dared contend that great Russian writers were influenced by such “cosmopolitans” as Heine or Bialik). The campaign subsided in May 1949, but it comprised the first public attack on Soviet Jews as Jews, and is considered to have initiated the so-called “Black Years,” which lasted until Stalin’s death. The main rabbis were arrested (Lubanov, Epstein, Lev) and many died in labor camps.
Soviet Judeophobia, a central tool of Stalin’s regime and policy during the Cold War, reverberating far beyond the USSR. In 1952, fourteen leading party members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party were prosecuted in Prague for conspiracy against the state. Eleven of them were Jews, including the Party secretary-general, Rudolf Slansky. The Slansky Trials were conducted under the supervision of Moscow agents. For the first time an authoritative Communist forum openly proclaimed the accusation of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy. The Jewish origin of the accused was repeatedly stressed, and their alleged crimes were traced to this prime cause. The prosecution stigmatized them as Zionists, although the accused had opposed Zionism all their lives. The worsening economic situation was blamed on “the Jews.”
The Israel embassy in Prague was depicted as a center of espionage and anti-Czechoslovak subversion. Eight of the accused were executed and the other three condemned to life imprisonment. Hundreds of Czechoslovak Jews were thrown into prison or sent, often without trial, to forced labor camps. (In the late 1950’s the victims of Slansky Trials were rehabilitated, but the accusations against Zionism and the State of Israel were never revoked).
But the climax of Stalinist Judeophobic policy was yet to come. On January 13, 1953, twelve doctors were arrested in Moscow and charged with plotting to poison the Soviet leadership. Nine of them were Jews. When Stalin died on March 2, it was revealed that he was preparing to use the “Doctors’ Plot” to expel over two million Jews to Siberia. Stalin’s heir Nikita Khruschev, though himself a Judeophobe, attenuated the outright folly of the Stalin era. He canceled the Doctors trial, and in 1958 admitted that the Birobidzhan project had failed (he attributed the failure to Jewish dislike for collective work and group discipline).
Although the new policy denounced Stalinist methods and purges, Judeophobia was never considered one of its vices. In 1961, seven of the eight recorded speeches by Lenin were rerecorded and marketed - the only one excluded was Lenin’s speech against Judeophobia. The attacks against Zionism became more overtly anti-Jewish. Trofim Kychko’s vicious book “Judaism without Embellishment” was published in 1963 by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Jews became frequent victims in show trials for “economic crimes” such as “speculation,” carried out by the security police until Khruschev was removed in 1964. Out of 110 convicted, 70 were Jews, condemned to execution. In a 1963 trial in Ukrainie, twelve people were found guilty of the same “economic crime.” Half of them (the non-Jews) were sent to prison. The six Jews were shot.
Soviet propaganda started a campaign grotesquely depicting the image of Zionism as a sinister international conspiracy spread to dominate the whole world, very similar to that propounded in the Protocols. From the Six-Day War in 1967, all Soviet media constantly referred to the Jewish State as a Nazi state.
Regarding post-Communist Russia, we see a by now familiar pattern. Judeophobes started attacking the Jews for having promoted Communism and Red terror, claiming Jews controlled Russia during the seventy communist years. The Jews killed the Czar, they spurred the purges, they destroyed Russian traditional architecture.
Prominent contemporary Russian writers such as Valentin Rasputin, Vasily Belov and Victor Astafiev, claim that “Jews instill a corrupted atmosphere, since they pollute the purity of the honest and good Russian soul.” The mathematician Ygor Shafarevich sees in the Jewish mentality the evil of technological society as opposed to the virtue of traditional Russia. The Jew incarnates urban civilization and what he calls, amazingly, “Russophobia.”
A word about the New Left, left-wing radicalism which attracted many students and youth in the US and Europe during the late 1960’s. The Jewish aspect of the movement is paradoxically twofold: a disproportionate participation of Jews in the leadership, and rabid anti-Zionism. And again, Germany at the vanguard. The SDS (Student Socialist Organization of Germany) during 1969 repeatedly disrupted public meetings in which the Israel ambassador was due to appear. Later that year New Left terrorists tried to blow up West Berlin’s Jewish community hall during a service commemorating Nazi atrocities. The perpetrators deplored German guilt feelings towards the Jews as “neurotic and backward-looking.” German New Left leaders, such as Ulrike Meinhof and Dieter Kunzelmann joined Palestinian guerrillas and inveighed against “bourgeois German Judenkomplex.” One notorious result of this German-Arab partnership was the 1976-kidnapping of an Air France plane. Only the Jewish passengers were retained as hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, until they were rescued by the Israeli army.
Anti-Zionism and Holocaust-Denial, the two most persistent expressions of contemporary Judeophobia, were present in the Leftist stage, as we saw in this chapter. In later chapters, we will refer to both phenomena from a more general perspective.
Gustavo Perednik
Next: Chapter 13: Judeophobia ('Anti-Semitism') in The United States e last chapter concluded by considering the New Left, which had a strong impact in American youth, and now we will include a special consideration about the American scene. To some extent, since there was no need for Emancipation in the US (Jews took an active part in the very inception of the States) Judeophobia in America can be seen as an imported phenomenon. Before the independence, in no colony were the Jews physically harmed as such (an attempted expulsion took place in 1654 by Peter Stuyvesant, Dutch governor of New Amsterdam). Other minorities were more group-targets than the Jews.
Native Judeophobia appeared during the Civil War when voices in both fighting sides accused “the Jews” of helping the enemy. On December 17, 1862, Ulysses Grant (victorious Union Army general and 18th US President) issued his infamous expulsion of all Jews from Tennessee, and President Abraham Lincoln reversed this “General Order Number 11” only after it was enforced in several towns.
Although in the US there was no “response to Emancipation,” a good test for Judeophobia, the 1890’s witnessed Jew-hatred as a response to the increasing cultural gap. Between 1881 and 1890 over 1,500,000 Jews arrived fleeing the pogroms (two lessons ago we described it as the biggest exodus ever. If we take the period between 1881 and 1920, 3 million Jews entered the US). Much of the older population distrusted the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Thus, Henry Adams (a great-grandson of the second US President) voiced fears that the Jews were going to control the country: “The Jew atmosphere isolates me.” In Ignatius Donnelly’s 1890-novel “Caesar’s Columns,” the Jews seized power to take revenge against the Christians for how they had made them suffer. The aftermath of this cultural gap was “Restrictionism,” a movement to limit immigration, whose intellectual fathers did not avoid Judeophobia (Madison Grant’s 1916-“The Passing of the Great Race” condemned the Jews for mongrelizing the nation) and eventually achieved the Immigration Act of 1924 which heavily discriminated against South and East European immigration.
However, American presidents and leaders altogether expressed their esteem for the Jewish people. The founding fathers of the US had the same origin as the Puritans in England, who through their love for the Bible they rediscovered the Bible’s language, land and nation.
Responding to czarist Russia’s refusal to issue visas to American Jews and mistreatment of those few who got them, in 1911 the American government abrogated unilaterally the Russo-American Treaty of 1832.
A few patterns were similar to the European scene, although always in a much lesser degree. Thus, the “American Dreyfus affair” took place in 1913 against engineer Leo Frank, a factory manager in Atlanta. After his employee Mary Phagan was found murdered in the factory basement, Frank was immediately arrested and charged. The flimsy evidence was the testimony of a black employee who was suspected of being himself the true culprit. Mobs in and out of the courtroom called for Frank’s blood, the Jeffersonian Magazine demanded the execution of “the filthy, perverted Jew of New York,” and its editor led an order of “Knights of Mary Phagan” to organize a boycott of Jewish stores throughout Georgia. The Judeophobic atmosphere helped the guilty verdict and two years after the indictment, a mob dragged Frank from jail and lynched him. It was the first and last case until the episodes in Crown Heights a few years ago, when African American assaulted random Jews and murdered one as an act of “retaliation” against the accidental slaying of two children by a Chasidic driver who lost control of his car.
In Latin America, the similarities to European characteristics were blunter, especially Argentina, where a pogrom took place, perpetrated by the “Liga Patriotica” during the “Tragic Week” of 1919, and many Judeophobic gangs acted thereafter. But the scope we set for this course excludes a whole chapter of South American Judeophobia, each country having its own history.
The Leo Frank case was a harbinger of an upsurge of overt Judeophobia after WW1. The artificial national unity was over, and postwar disillusionment brought during the 1920’s fear that the old way of life was under the onslaught of the foreign born, the city, and religious liberalism. The racist, ultraconservative and Judeophobic Ku Klux Klan reached a membership of 4 million in 1924. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were spread by Henry Ford (as was mentioned in last lesson) in a campaign from 1920 until 1927, when he finally issued a public apology.
In 1922, educational discrimination became a national issue when Harvard announced it was considering a quota system for Jewish students. Albeit eventually dropped, the quota was enforced in many colleges through underhanded techniques (as late as 1945 Dartmouth College openly admitted and defended a quota system against Jewish students). Jews encountered resistance when they tried to move into white-collar and professional positions. Banking, insurance, public utilities, medical schools, hospitals, large law firms and faculty positions, restricted the entrance of Jews. This era of “polite” Judeophobia through social discrimination, underwent in the 1930’s an ideological escalate.
A new ideology appeared which accused “the Jews” of dominating Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, of causing the Great Depression, and of dragging the US into WW2 against a new Germany which deserved but admiration. The main spokesman for these tenets was the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin, whose weekly radio program drew millions of listeners. When in 1942 the truth of the Holocaust began to be known, the Church ordered Coughlin to cease all non-religious activities.
The avant-garde of the new isolationism was the America First Committee, which included the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. In 1941 he termed the Jews the most dangerous force pushing the US into the war. In 1944 a public opinion poll showed that a quarter of Americans still regarded Jews as a “menace.” But after WW2 American Judeophobia declined, except for the African American community.
In spite of the strong Jewish participation in the African American civil rights movement of the 1950’s, the Black power movement generated considerable friction in the African American-Jewish relations, especially when a native form of Islam attracted African Americans in search of an identity, while the Muslim world was at war with the Jewish sate.
On April 14, 1970, the radical Black power leader Stokely Carmichael declared: “I have never admired a White man, but the greatest of them was Hitler.” Similar expressions are heard today by Louis Farrakhan and other leaders of his “Nation of Islam.” Judaism is openly called “a gutter religion” and in 1994 labeled Hitler “a genius.” His aide Khalid Abdul Muhammad declared that “Jews are “bloodsuckers... You’re called Goldstein, Silverstein and Rubenstein because you’ve been stealing all the gold and silver and rubies all over the world.”
Gustavo Perednik
Next: Chapter 14: Contemporary Anti-Zionism
Anti-Zionism and Holocaust Denial are the two main new expressions of contemporary Judeophobia. We study them together because they both represent an attempt to twist history through hate. We saw in last chapter a focus of anti-Zionism, namely the USSR and the New Left, which went as far as to brand Zionism as an ideological offshoot of Nazism. One of the branders was Yury Ivanov whose 1969-“Beware Zionism” was hailed by Soviet press as “the first scientific and fundamental work on this subject.” In 1983 the Soviets created the Anti-Zionist Committee, which in five years published 48,000 leaflets “denouncing Zionist crimes.”
We are aware of what has been written on whether you can be anti-Zionistic with no Judeophobic leanings. Anti-Zionism singles out the national feelings and movement of the Jews -and only of the Jews- and considers Israel -and only Israel- an illegitimate state. It proposes actions which would bring death to millions of Jews. Although from a strictly theoretical point of view you could be anti-Zionistic and not Judeophobic, in the real world the two come together.
This identity is often explicitly worded by its spokespersons. Thus, Yakov Malik, the Soviet ambassador to the UN, declared in 1973: “The Zionists have come forward with the theory of the Chosen People, an absurd ideology.” (As it is well known, the biblical concept of “Chosen People” is part of Judaism; Zionism has nothing to do with it). In his book “America - A Zionist Colony,” Saluk Dasuki wrote that “Jews, whether they have preserved their religion, or whether they have adopted other religions, are known in the United States under the collective name Zionists.” In a propaganda film of the late 1970’s, the radical Vanessa Redgrave performed a sensuous dance with a PLO machine gun. Whenever the film attacks Jews and Judaism, although the Arabic word Yahud (Jew) is used, the English subtitles read “Zionists”. In the same tone, wrote Rachid Boujedra: “The State of Israel has been permitted gradually to encroach on its neighbors, in accordance with the Old Testament precept... Herzl’s theories have emptied Palestine of its inhabitants an brought in Jews from all over the world, thus giving effect to the prophecies of Joshua.”
Martin Luther King understood the question very clearly when he declared: “They criticize Zionists but they mean Jews. You’re talking antisemitism.” Anti-Zionism shares with Judeophobia its main characteristics (remember first lesson?). Its obsessiveness was evident in a 1979-conference on “Human Rights in the Third World” at Harvard. There were massacres in Africa, there was Libya and Idi Amin... But only one item was placed on the agenda: “the So-Called Nation of Israel’s Terrorism and Genocide.”
Indeed, during the 1970’s the Arab world became the center of Judeophobia, through the Arab Boycott, vicious caricatures in the Arab press, and avoiding (till this very day) to mention Israel in their maps. “My Homeland, Palestine - Zionism, the People’s Enemy” was published in Germany in 1975. Author Ahmed Hussein presented Zionism as the promoter of Judeophobia in order to draw the Jews away from their countries to Palestine. “The dead Jew is the best propaganda for the State of Israel.” For the Jew, it was again a no-win situation, because even when resorted to self-defense and rejected Judeophobia, he would be considered “serving Zionist interests“ and turned into a target. “Having studied the subject thoroughly, and relying on materials by writers and scholars -says Hussein- I have come to the conclusion that during WW2 not a single Jew was killed for being Jewish... Only the lie of the six million enabled the Zionists to push the establishment of the State of Israel and the financing of its development by German capital.”
The overall attack on Zionism is appalling if we consider that even progressives such as feminists and ecologists were partners of the assault, even when in their areas of interest Israel can show a much better record than the Arab world, which can not exhibit one single democracy throughout its twenty-one states. Jean Paul Sartre reacted to the hypocrisy of considering the Arab world, with its slavery and feudal states as Socialist, and Israel, with its kibbutzim and welfare state as “a lackey of imperialism.” But the Arabs were consistently presented as the oppressed Third World fighting Israel, or Western technology.
The banner of “the non-justifiability of the state of Israel” is very surprising. In fact, Israel is one of the few states whose birth was indispensable to save thousands of lives. Or as Lord George Byron summarized it his 1815-poem: “The wild dove hath her nest/ the fox his cave/ Mankind their Country/ Israel but the grave!”
Another anti-Zionist focus was the UN, where Israel was turned into “the Jew of the countries.” One-third of all UN condemnations were against Israel. Only the national movement of the Jews was labeled racist (10/11/75) and hegemonist (14/12/79). Only Israel was declared “not a peace-loving State” (5/2/82) and was on the verge of being expelled from the family of nations (it is appalling to see how the same dangers that haunted the Jews as a group during centuries, threatened Israel as a state). Only Israel was (and is) repeatedly compared to the Nazis. And sometimes the condemnations were so absurd that they remind medieval fanaticism, such as charging Israel of poisoning Arab schoolchildren (23/8/83).
International news agencies and the main media networks were central in the rewriting of the history of Zionism, presenting it as an imperialistic movement born to exploit a pacific a millenarian nation. It is seldom mentioned in the media that there never was an independent state in the Land of Israel besides the Jewish state, that Jerusalem was never a capital but for the Jews, and that until the 1940’s the very word “Palestine” and “Palestinians” was dear only to the Jews, while the Arabs stuck to the notion that they were part of Southern Syria. Even in 1977 Zoher Mossein, head of the PLO Bureau of Military Operations declared: “There is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians and Lebanese; we are all members of a single nation. Solely for political reasons are we careful to stress our identity as Palestinians, since a separate State of Palestine would be an extra weapon in Arab hands to fight Zionism with. Yes, we do call for a Palestinian State for tactical reasons. Such a State would be a new means to continuing the battle against Zionism.” But out of the dozens of stateless peoples in the world, curiously enough the Palestinians are the one which arises most solidarity, no matter the methods they use to achieve their strategy.
The media is a persevering partner in the process of rewriting history in a way that the goal of Zionism -the recovery of the Land of Israel as a haven for the Jews- is delegitimized as a colonial movement, a tool in the hands of empires to uproot a pacific nation from its land. Not only the main news networks and news agencies, such as Reuters, the London BBC, but even well respected publications like “National Geographic” in its 1992 issue on “The Palestinians” traced their ancestry 5,000 years to a pre-Israelite “Palestine” (a word coined by the Romans in the 2nd century). Wide documentation of this subtle phenomenon of “stealing Jewish history” can be found in the 1993-book “Eye on the Media” by David Bar-Illan.
Gustavo Perednik
Next: Chapter 15: Holocaust Denial
During the Holocaust itself, the aim of Holocaust Denial was to stress the Jews’ unawareness in order to murder them without resistance. Al least two Nazi ringleaders, Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler, forbade public talk about the “Final Solution.” After the war, Holocaust Denial was first proposed in 1948 by French Trotskyites and anarchists led by Paul Rassinier, whose 1964-book “Debunking the Holocaust Myth” claimed evidence of the genocide was “Stalinist propaganda.”
In 1979 Holocaust Denial became an organized propaganda movement when the “Revisionist Convention” founded the prolific “Institute for Historic Review” in Torrance, California. Since 1980 it publishes a tri-monthly “Journal of Historic Review,” which was sent for free to the 12,000 members of the Organization of American Historians, and holds annual conventions.
Willis Carto, founder of the “Liberty Lobby” (the largest Judeophobic propaganda organization in the US) incorporated the IHR and made out of it a pseudo-academic enterprise convening professors with no credentials in history (Rassinier had them in geography, Butz in electrical engineer, Faurisson in literature, etc.). Thus they developed new outlets for their Judeophobia. The IHR publishes its Journal of Historic Review. From 1991 Bradley Smith places advertisements in college newspapers for the CODOH (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust). They even recruited a David Cole who claims Jewish parentage, and the British military commentator David Irving whose best-selling book “Hitler’s War” (1977) claims that Hitler never knew of Jews being murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Holocaust Denial poses a quandary: you lose if you answer their arguments (since their “view” can be thus presented as an opinion to “open the debate on the Holocaust”) and you also lose if you do not answer (“Jews do not have any arguments to reply”). How to confront the phenomenon merits a special lecture which, again, is beyond the scope of our course. But I must mention the four levels in which they usually express themselves, in order of sophistication:
1) the Holocaust never took place;
2) the figures are exaggerated;
3) there was no systematic plan whatsoever;
4) in every war there is a Holocaust, and the Jews make a fuss of their own, always presenting themselves as champions of suffering and persecution.
Holocaust Denial is not only a fraud. It is a dangerous one, because it whitewashes Nazism, it plants hatred wherever it is allowed, and under the excuse of “freedom of expression” it transgresses law in two ways: apology of crime and incitement to violence.
Judeophobic mythology was widened by Holocaust Denial. As if lepers, ass-worshipers, deicides, people-witness, barbarians, racial virus, exploiters and world conspirators were not enough, Jews are branded as Holocaust-fabricators. A general view of the mythology and its reasons is the subject of the next Chapter.
Gustavo Perednik
Next: Chapter 16: Summary - Theories of the Etiology of Judeophobia ('Anti-Semitism'
We have traveled through an unparalleled malignity. We gave it its appropriate name and exposed the different stages of its mythology. As one main book of our bibliography concludes, Judeophobia “is the longest and deepest hatred of human history. Other hatreds may have surpassed it in intensity for a historical moment, but all in their turn have assumed -or presently commence to assume- their proper place in the dustbin of history.”
This a central purpose of our course - awareness of the uniqueness. You cannot reduce this colossus to simple group-prejudice, as many well-meant liberals and open-minded do, Jews and Gentiles alike. Take the example of Anne Frank, the famous girl who died during the Holocaust. Anne wrote on April 11, 1944: “Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allow us to suffer so terribly up till now?... We will always remain Jews, and we want to, too.” But, alas, in the Broadway version of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Anne’s was metamorphosed into a mouthpiece for the universalistic view of the authors and said: “We are not the only people that have had to suffer... sometimes one race sometimes another.” Judeophobia should not be dejudaized.
THEORIES
From the outset we disregard the scapegoat as a theory, since it is only a description of how Judeophobia is used and not an explanation of why it exists: Judeophobia is orchestrated by leaders in order to direct popular discontent away from themselves.
Albert Einstein went one step further with the scapegoat explanation: “The shepherd boy said to the horse: You are the noble beast that treads the earth. You deserve to live in untroubled bliss; an indeed your happiness would be complete were it not for the treacherous stag. But he practiced from youth to excel you in fleetness of foot. His faster pace allows him to reach the water holes before you do. Stay with me! My wisdom and guidance shall deliver you and your kind from a dismal and ignonimious state.” Blinded by envy and hatred of the stag, the horse agreed. He yielded to the shepherd lad’s bridle. He lost his freedom and became the shepherd’s slave.
The horse represents a people; the lad, a class or clique aspiring to absolute rule over the people; the stag, the Jews. The horse has been suffering the pangs of thirst, and his vanity was often pricked when he saw the nimble stag outrunning him. This is basically the scapegoat theory of Judeophobia. Judeophobia is orchestrated by leaders who wish to deflect popular discontent away from themselves. When rulers have confronted their inability to satisfy those whom they have subordinated, they have frequently resorted to this technique: they seek "the Other," some group unlike the majority, and blame it for the ongoing discomfort. In European history, the group most consistently chosen to be this Other has been the Jews. The scapegoat theory is inadequate, because it is merely a description of how Judeophobia is sometimes utilized; not an explanation of why it exists. For this theory to be operational, Judeophobes had to exist in the first place. Moreover, not every Judeophobic outburst was the direct result of some attempt by leaders or kings to divert angry sentiments. Once Judeophobia became deeply ingrained within European culture, it assumed a life of its own, and was passed on from parents to children generation after generation.
The "life of its own" of Judeophobia is the focus of this final chapter. Judeophobia was an intrinsic part of "common sense" in most European societies which had undergone Christianization. In Chapter 1 we quoted a Hungarian nobleman who defined it thus: a Judeophobe is one who hates Jews more than necessary. This "common sense" lived on long after its origins and initial rationale had been forgotten. The myths we studied were nothing more than attempts of the Gentile society to justify this culturally sanctioned and inherited hatred. Gentiles did not attack Jews "because” they believed they had killed God, rather, deicide provided them with a good excuse to vent their frustrations and anger against a defenseless population. As to why the Jews were cast as the stag, Einstein takes one step beyond the scapegoat explanation: "Because there are Jews among almost all nations and because they are everywhere too thinly scattered to defend themselves against violent attack." Jews are attacked because of their defenselessness.
This theory was propounded in the 1860's by Peretz Smolenskin, a philosopher of Jewish nationalism who founded the Hebrew monthly Ha'shahar. For Smolenskin, the roots of Judeophobia lay in the contempt felt for the inferior national status of the Jews. This situation could only be reversed only by a practical affirmation of Jewish nationhood. And he warned that Judeophobic attacks in Russia and in Germany were not temporary aberrations, rather the first manifestations of worse horrors to come. Many other Zionist ideologists had the vision to grasp the dynamic and aggressive character of Judeophobia. Some of them foresaw the threat of the total physical destruction of the Jews, like Moses Lilienblum. When he witnessed the pogroms of 1881, he discerned Judeophobia's roots in the Aryan society's instinctive enmity towards the Jews. No legal equality would guarantee social equality. By "instinctive," Lilienblum meant that the age and depth of Judeophobia facilitated easy and repeated orchestration. His contemporary Leon Pinsker agreed with him and went even further (maybe too far): since Judeophobia is a hereditary disease reaching back more than two thousand years, it is incurable. Even the most sophisticated and convincing refutation of its beliefs would be unsuccessful in dislodging Judeophobic origins and practice, or the malign instinct which serves as its source.
As we learned in Chapter 1, Pinsker coined the word Judeophobia. For him, the Jews were a "ghost people.” The world saw in them the horrendous image of a walking corpse. The Jews lacked unity, structure, land and flag, they were a people who had ceased to exist, but continued with a semblance of life. They are always guests and never hosts. Since fear of ghosts is innate, said Pinsker, it is not surprising that this fear is even stronger towards an apparently dead nation which lives on. This abstract, almost Platonic hatred, caused the world to see the whole Jewish nation as responsible for the alleged or real crimes of each of its members. Terror of the Jewish ghost was inherited and fortified over countless generations. Judeophobia is a bastard child of demonology. With deep roots in all the human races, the Jewish-ghost fear is a hereditary psychosis. In the 1940s, another Zionistic visionary, Zev Jabotinsky, called it "anti-Semitism of things" as opposed to “anti-Semitism of things." Not longer did it need the acquiescence of "men:" Judeophobia was part of society even when no effort was made to provoke it. These explanations were formulated by Zionist thinkers, who saw Judeophobia as an almost instinctual response of the nations towards the powerless Jews. This powerlessness of the Jews, in spite of the Judeophobic myth to the contrary, is utterly self-evident. Jews were unable to save themselves from the Holocaust, nor to persuade Western governments to bomb the concentration camps and their railroads, nor to get the US to fight against Hitler before it was directly attacked at Pearl Harbor. Had Jews held real power as a group, and not just the power that comes from being, on an individual basis, accessories, advisors, and intermediaries to those in real power, they would have been in a position to interfere with the systematic destruction of the Jewish people during WW2; the nature of the Holocaust was known throughout the world by 1943. These theories are "Zionistic approaches" because they strive to cure Judeophobia (or at least to minimize its effects) by giving the Jews power, and the potential to defend themselves by giving them a state of their own. Besides the powerlessness theories, many other theories exist. To this day no paper has systematically presented all theories. A select few follow, facilitating a better understanding of some aspects of Judeophobia. These theories are categorized within four disciplines.
SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY
Sociological theories focus on certain roles in society that Jews occupied, which exposed them to special hatred. For instance, during the Middle Ages they were moneylenders. Under kings and barons they served as “serfs of the imperial chamber" (see lesson # 5) and as such they collected taxes from poor peasants on behalf of landowners. That is why Judeophobia was often seen as a hatred equivalent to the grudges towards the wealthy attributed to proletarians.
From a similar perspective, Bernard Lazare contended in his 1894-book Anti-Semitism, its History and Causes, that Judeophobia would be useful in the advent of socialism (he recanted after the Dreyfus affair.)
Economic explanations go as far as attributing to the Jews the whole economic system, such as Henri Pirenne's theory of the advent of modernity, and Werner Sombart's, who in 1911 considered the Jews the cause of capitalism.
Exaggerations aside, we have to bear in mind that economic factors do not create Judeophobia, they only exacerbate it. Jews have been hated in extremely varied economic situations. More Judeophobia has been suffered by 19th century-poor Russian Jews than by 20th century-affluent Canadian Jews.
To some extent, the socioeconomic position of the Jews was a consequence of Judeophobia and not its cause. Jews went into banking when the probability of imminent expulsions compelled them to invest in currency rather than in property. They lent money because they were forbidden to possess land. They had few other professions because the guilds were rigidly closed and accepted only Christian members, and so on. As Prager and Telushkin summarized: "Jews were not hated because they lent money. They lent money because they were hated.”
Jews often held positions in which they provided the public face of the ruling elites, exerting apparent power. They were also lawyers, doctors, teachers, psychologists and social workers, and therefore Jews often seemed to have power, which was, in truth, non-existent.
The sociological explanation contends that since Jews appear to have power, they are a convenient focus of anger when the pain caused by the social system becomes acute for the lower class. According to Michael Lerner this is the uniqueness of the oppression of Jews: a hidden vulnerability "because Jews are placed in positions where they can serve as the focus for anger that might otherwise be directed at ruling elites, no matter how much economic security or political influence individual Jews may achieve, they can never be sure that they will not once again become the targets of popular attack should the society in which they live enter periods of severe economic strain or political conflict.” But to understand why Jews "appear" to have power, we must leave economics and dive into psychology. The psychological theories on Judeophobia solve a fault of the economic theories, which see the cause in the victim and not in the victimizer. The champion of psychological theories was Jean-Paul Sartre who in Anti-Semite and Jew (1966) described the Judeophobe as "the man who is afraid. Not of the Jews but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty... " For Sartre, Judeophobia is "fear of being alive." The psychological theory is better in that it analyzes the victimizer, but it is inadequate because it considers Judeophobia to imply psychopathology. Judeophobia is evil, but evil is not pathological.
PHILOSOPHY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Michael Lerner attributes Judeophobia partially to "the revolutionary antiauthoritarian thrust of Judaism, with its implicit challenge to every ruling class... Elites in the ancient world tended to rule through a combination of brute force and ideologies of existing class divisions as sanctified by an unchanging natural order. Whether in the form of ancient myths about the gods who ruled nature, or in the far more sophisticated form proposed by Plato in The Republic, elite ideology destined society to remain divided by class... Jewish existence was living testimony that these myths and ideologies were invented to perpetuate the needs and interests of the rulers. Jews had managed to break out of the most degraded position on the class ladder, slavery, and had gone on to run their own society successfully. As long as the Jews existed, the ruling elites were wrong and their rule was in question.”
This fact about Jewish history might have been less threatening had Jews contained the story of their origins in a few rarely told mythic tales. Instead, the entire Jewish religion was built upon telling and retelling this story. The cornerstone of Jewish observance, Shabbat, was to be kept "in commemoration of the Exodus of Egypt," by setting aside one day a week when no one could make the Jews work. The very idea that the oppressed could set a limit to their oppression, and that the oppressors would have to kill them before they would pass that limit, was itself a revolutionary reform - the first real victory against slave-drivers and an enduring reminder that oppression could be overcome.
No matter how intently and desperately individual Jews tried to de-emphasize these confrontational aspects of their religion, and sought to identify themselves with the imperial powers and their values, the spirit of independence and freedom made the Jews the most rebellious People of the ancient world. The Jews were the group that rebelled against Hellenistic and then Roman rule with greater ferocity and tenacity than any other.
Jews differed from other people precisely because they followed norms that seemed subversive to the established order. Jews seemed unwilling to accept "reality" and subordinate themselves to imperial powers. This made them seem threatening to the ruling elites, who sought to make their subjects distrust Jews before they got too friendly with them and heard the Jews' ideals of egalitarian society.
Maurice Samuel wrote a series of books between 1924 and 1950 in which Judeophobia is not a Jewish problem, but an affliction of the Gentiles to which Jews had to accustom themselves. Western man hates the Jew because he is the jailer who had bound the world with fetters of moral law. This is "the great hatred" in the amoral pagan soul. A not very different position was taken by Prager and Telushkin in their 1983-Why the Jews? where the higher quality of Jewish life arouses continuous and uncompromising envy of the non-Jewish world.
Eliane Amado Levy-Valensi offered her interpretation during the 1960s: Judeophobia is the result of the Gentiles' failure in stealing Jewish history for themselves. "Judaism was already an ancient religion, possessed of a great literature, with great heroes and wise men in its past, and a divine promise of an even more glorious future. Christianity possessed none of these. From the very outset, therefore, the Christians laid claim to the Bible, at first merely as predicting Jesus and later as being exclusively their own." Also the plight of the Palestinians could be explained from the same perspective. Even Jesus is presented by them as "a Palestinian." The lack of a long history of their own, brings other peoples to hate Jewish ownership of a past. Although no theory alone can fully explain Judeophobia, the combination of several can be useful in dealing with this social disease.
Conclusions
Our overview of Judeophobia can lead to several conclusions:
1.
Judeophobia enables people to vent their sadistic instincts. You can harass, humiliate and kill, and you have an entire ideological body, which is very established and dating back many centuries, to defend your brutality.
2.
When fighting the Jews, a much written about people, the Judeophobe feels more important than he would fighting a less famous group.
3.
As a group, Jews often arouse guilt feelings among Gentiles. This may be due to the fact that morality virtually began with the Jews' Bible, and as such Jews incarnate ethical prohibitions, or because of how they were persecuted (this fact can provoke not only feelings of guilt but also of fear, since revenge could eventually be taken.)
4.
Judeophobia is an intrinsically anti-rational attitude of a generally rational society. A Jew is attacked as such, and if other Jews react to this attack they are deemed "egocentric." The Communists (and also the BBC) claimed that they did not want to stress the “Jewish" aspect of the victims lest the defense would become too partisan. Regarding the last two attacks against the Jewish community in Argentina (the Israeli Embassy was blown up in 1992, the AMIA communal building in 1994, leaving almost one hundred dead), in both cases the Jews were accused of being the perpetrators in order to present themselves as victims. (No one was punished for either attack). Constantin Brunner's theory emphasized the irrationality of Judeophobia by claiming it is group-egoism in contradistinction to rational thought. But he disregarded that this irrational attitude is often expressed by very rational people, a fact which gives it further credibility. In the case of Voltaire, we said in lesson # 7 that Judeophobia could twist the reason of the most reasonable men. And in the case of Germany as a whole, Judeophobia flourished and reached its climax precisely in the land of philosophy, with the active support of leading thinkers, from Fichte and Wagner to Heidegger. Many Nazi ringleaders were intellectuals and artists.
5.
To add to the irrational aspect, the sources of Judeophobia are particularly hypocritical. Jews were burned at stake by the religion of love, slandered by the forerunners of enlightenment and fraternity, and discriminated against by the ideology of equality.
6.
Judeophobia is practiced on (at least) two levels. One is direct and aggressive, the other is subtle,, consisting of condoning the first level. In other words, you can measure a Judeophobic stance not only by how it relates to Jews but by how it relates to Judeophobes. If we take the case of the Church and its central role in the history of Judeophobia, we realize that its role was paradoxical. In his "The Prophets of Israel" (1892) James Darmesteter pointed out how "The hatred of the people against the Jew is the work of the Church (which) protects them against the furies which she has unleashed." Something similar can be said about Israel-bashing. The UN is not responsible for terrorism against Israeli citizens, but by repeatedly condoning it (and systematically condemning Israel) encourages the Judeophobe murderer to feel a partner with the international community in his struggle against Zionism.
Many agree with Archbishop Theodor Kohn (d.1915), himself a victim of racial Judeophobia, in that it is "a sickly condition that only time can heal." But apparently the passing of time is not enough and special action is required. The Church is one of the main players capable of taking that action. In post-Holocaust revulsion at what Christian Europe did to the Jews, the Catholic Church has eliminated its most vicious Judeophobic teachings and prayers. But it has not engaged in any substantial consideration about how it engendered Judeophobia. Little effort has been made to instruct Christians on the role Christianity played in generating Judeophobic culture, and most remain virtually unaware of it.
The French Catholic poet Paul Claudel wrote several plays on the confrontation between Jewry and Christendom. He gradually freed himself from traditional prejudice and developed an original vision of the Jewish people. His awareness of the Christian world's responsibility for the Holocaust, prompted his suggestion in a letter in 1945 to the French ambassador to the Vatican, the thinker Jacques Maritain, that the Pope institute a ceremony of expiation for crimes committed against the Jews. At the time of the Eichmann Trial, German bishops asked all German Catholics to recite a prayer asking forgiveness. And when in 1994 the Vatican finally recognized the state of Israel, William Rees-Mogg published in the London Times a call for a general act of Christian contrition: "The Christian churches ought to make some formal act of contrition for what has happened over these 2,000 years... we do need to apologize for the massacres, for the Inquisition, for the ghettoes, for the badges, for the expulsions, for the accusations of blood guilt, and above all for Christian failure to perceive in time, or protest about in time, the full evil of the Holocaust.”
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Start - Judeophobia - A History and Analysis of Jew Hate or so-called Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism
Start - Judeophobia - A History and Analysis of Jew Hate or so-called Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism
Gustavo Perednik
Acknowledgement
These pages are adapted by the kind permission of Dr. Gustavo Perednik.They are based on a twelve-lecture Internet course prepared for "The Jewish University in Cyberspace." During 2000 and 2001, the book by Gustavo Perednik "Judeophobia" was published in Spanish. This course summarizes the core ideas of the book. It presents a comprehensive and unique analysis of the development of Jew hate (Judeophobia or anti-Semitism) throughout history. It tries to answer the question "why the Jews?" - why have Jews been particularly singled out for ethnic, racial and religious persecution, and it traces the relationship between anti-Zionism and racist Judeophobia or so-called anti-Semitism.
Zionism and Israel Information Center is grateful to Dr. Perednik for his permission to popularize his works.
History of anti-Zionism External link: Antisemitism
