JOURNAL for the
STUDY of
ANTISEMITISM
Antisemitism in the UK
JSA London Sunday Symposium
Volume 5 Issue #1 2013
JOURNAL for the
STUDY of
ANTISEMITISM
Volume 5, Issue #1, 2013
Antisemitism in the UK
JSA London Sunday Symposium
Bernard D. Blank
(1927-2011)
This UK-themed issue of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism is dedicated to the memory of my father, Bernard Blank, who, at the age of 19, left
his home in Manchester, England, to fight for the nascent State of Israel
during its struggle for survival and independence. He served as an infantry
soldier in the IDF’s 7th Armoured Brigade (1947-1949) and was involved
in multiple combat missions, including the Battle of Latrun in May 1948.
Speaking of volunteers like my father, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben
Gurion poignantly observed, “The participation of men and women from
other nations in our struggle cannot be measured only in terms of additional manpower, but as an expression of the solidarity of the Jewish
people.”
Zicrona livracha—May his name be for a blessing.
Lesley Klaff, Associate Editor, the JSA, and Senior Lecturer in Law
at Sheffield Hallam University
Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA)
Steven K. Baum and Neal E. Rosenberg, Editors, Marlton, NJ
Florette Cohen, Associate Editor/Research, College of Staten Island
Steven L. Jacobs, Associate Editor/Judaic Studies, University of Alabama
Lesley Klaff, Associate Editor/Law, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Richard Landes, Associate Editor/History, Boston University
Kenneth Lasson, Associate Editor/Politics, University of Baltimore
Kenneth L. Marcus, Associate Editor/Academia, Louis D. Brandeis Center, DC
Shimon T. Samuels, Chair, Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Paris
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, AHA Foundation, AEI, Washington, DC
Paul Bartrop, Historian, Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL
Hadassa Ben-Itto, Author/Judge (Ret.), Tel Aviv
Michael Berenbaum, Sigi Ziering Institute, Los Angeles
Andrew Bostom, Brown University, Providence, RI
Jonathan Boyd, Jewish Policy Research, London
Harold Brackman, Author, San Diego
Israel W. Charny, Encyclopedia of Genocide, Jerusalem
Ben Cohen, Writer, New York
Florette Cohen, Social Psychology, College of Staten Island
Irwin Cotler, Member of Parliament, Mount Royal, Canada
Richard L Cravatts, SPME/Simmons College, Boston
Sammy Eppel, Journalist/Human Rights, B’nai Brith, Caracas
Bernie Farber, Canadian Jewish Congress, Toronto
Ronnie Fraser, Barnet College, London, UK
Manfred Gerstenfeld, JCPA, Jerusalem
Sander Gilman, Humanities, Emory University, Atlanta
Ari Goldberg, AIPAC, Washington, DC
Clemens Heni, Political Science—MEF Funded, Berlin
Jim Heller, Gadfly/Blogger, Victoria, BC
Douglas Hoffman, Grant Writer, New Mexico State University
Paul Iganski, Sociology, Lancaster University, UK
Dennis L. Jackson, Statistics, University of Windsor
Lee Jussim, Chair, Psychology, Rutgers University
Wilhelm Kempf, Editor, Conflict and Communication, Konstanz, Germany
András Kovács, Sociology, Central European University, Budapest
Neil J. Kressel, Psychology, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ
Walter Laqueur, Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Marcia Littell, Holocaust Studies, Richard Stockton College of NJ
Judith Bosker Liwerant, Political Science, UNAM, Mexico City
Hubert G. Locke, University of Washington, Seattle
David Matas, Hon. Counsel, B’nai Brith Canada, Winnipeg
Joanna B. Michlic, HBI, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Fiamma Nirenstein, Italian Chamber of Deputies, Rome
Andre Oboler, Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism, Melbourne
Darren O’Brien, Australian Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney
Andrei Oisteanu, Institute History of Religions, Bucharest
John Pawlikowski, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago
Winston Pickett, Communications, Brighton, UK
Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, Philadelphia
Dina Porat, Stephen Roth Institute, Tel Aviv University
Lars Rensmann, Political Science, University of Michigan
Gregg Rickman, former US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, Washington, DC
Paul Lawrence Rose, European History and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University
Richard L. Rubenstein, President Emeritus, University of Bridgeport
Frederick Schweitzer, Manhattan College, NYC
Milton Shain, History, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Marc I. Sherman, Index/Bibliography, Jerusalem
Marcia Sokolowski, Baycrest Hospital, University of Toronto
Philip J. Spencer, Helen Bamber Center, Kingston University, UK
Pierre-Andre Taguieff, CNRS (Sciences Po), Paris
Diana Siegel Vann, American Jewish Committee, Washington, DC
Sue Vice, English Literature, University of Sheffield, UK
James E. Waller, Cohen Chair, Keene State College, NH
Shalva Weil, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Robert Wistrich, Sassoon Center/SICSA Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Bat Ye’or, Independent Scholar, Switzerland
Andreas Zick, Faculty of Education, University of Bielefeld, Germany
JSA Submission Guidelines
The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA) is the peer-reviewed work
of a select group of independent scholars who examine antisemitism in
traditional and emerging forms. This group is not affiliated with any
institution or financially dependent on a single source of funding. We have
in common an understanding of antisemitism as a social pathology that
must be eradicated. We are an educationally based concern. E-mail
submissions should be original, either on hard copy or an electronic copy in
MS Word format. Citations should be in Chicago Manual of Style format.
Send submissions and questions to the editors of the JSA via mail,
telephone, or e-mail.
Mailing address: Editors, JSA
P.O. Box 726, Marlton, NJ 08053 • 856.983.3247
Electronic journal submissions: [email protected]. Electronic
book reviews: c/o Book Review Editor: [email protected].
The ideas represented in the JSA are those of the contributing authors,
and not reflective of the JSA, its Board members, or the author’s
institution. The JSA welcomes unsolicited manuscripts.
Executive Committee
Jeffrey Diamond • Simon Firer • Philip Kirschner
John Nettleton • Joan Levy Rosenberg • Leon Rosenberg
Neal Howard Rosenberg • Arnold Staloff
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Volume 5
Number 1
From the Editors: Israelis and Jews—Good Hate, Bad Hate
Shimon Samuels and the WSF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manfred Gerstenfeld
Antisemitic Incidents from Around the World: January–June 2013
1
5
Articles
A Personal Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ronnie Fraser
Hostility to Israel and Antisemitism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Hirsh
Political and Legal Judgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lesley Klaff
“You Complacent Middle-Class Asses” . . . . . . . . . . Denis MacShane
21
23
45
59
Original Research
The Dark Side of the Academy . Wassilis Kassis and Charlotte Schallié
63
Proceedings of the 2013 London JSA Sunday Symposium: Selected Papers
Steven K. Baum, Bat Ye’or, Francisco de Almeida Garrett,
Julian Hunt, Clemens Heni, Kenneth Lasson, Winston Pickett . . . .
93
Essays
An Open Letter to My Colleagues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robert Fine
The Oscars 2013 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editors
Antisemitism Exists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elad Nehorai
Antisemitism: Medieval, Modern, Postmodern I . . . Richard Landes
Muslim Antisemitism BI—Before Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alex Rose
Normalizing Antisemitism in Turkey . . . . . . . . . Anne-Christine Hoff
Muslim Antisemitism in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manfred Gerstenfeld
Interview with Gunther Jikeli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manfred Gerstenfeld
Interview with Robert Wistrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manfred Gerstenfeld
From The Tablet to The Prague Cemetery . . . . . . . . . . Simon Mayers
Budapest Hatefest: I and II Eszter Garai-Édler/Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf
Post-Chavez Venezuela . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sammy Eppel
African Americans, Ambivalence, and Antisemitism Harold Brackman
Tackling Antisemitism on Facebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andre Oboler
Coping in Copenhagen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bashy Quraishy
Aliyah 2013 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fiamma Nirenstein
The Land of No Antisemitism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anshel Pfeffer
143
149
151
153
179
185
195
231
235
239
247
253
255
295
299
301
305
Reviews
Heni’s Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon. . . . . Asaf Romirowsky 309
Breitman and Lichtman’s FDR and the Jews . . Michael Berenbaum 313
Jikeli’s Antisemitismus und Diskriminierungswahrnehmungen
junger Muslime in Europa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Doerte Letzmann
Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John T. Pawlikowski
Klausen’s Cartoons That Shook the World . . . . . . . Alexander Traum
Rosenfeld’s (ed.) Resurgent Antisemitism . . . . . . . . . Steven K. Baum
Tilley (ed.)’s Beyond Occupation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colin Meade
Reck’s Diary of a Man in Despair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daniel Leeson
Moreh’s film The Gatekeepers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sheldon Kirshner
Miltenberger’s Jüdisches Leben am Kurfürstendamm
Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose
Berlin Jewish Museum’s “1933”. . . . Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose
Trank’s film Against the Tide . . . . . . Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose
Von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt . . Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose
Birnbaum’s A Tale of Ritual Murder, Israeli’s Blood Libel
and Its Derivatives, Johnson’s Blood Libel, Miloszewski’s
A Grain of Truth, and Pope’s Blood of Lorraine. . Steven L. Jacobs
Antisemitica
Remembering Pogroms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editors
Antisemitic Myths and Shrines (UK) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editors
Jew in a Box . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benjamin Weinthal
Dr. Cohen’s Traveling Antisemitica Show . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editors
“Jews” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Czesl/aw Mil/osz
Sylvia Diamond
Educator, Artist, Mother
(1923-2013)
Jeff and Evy Diamond and Connie Diamond
323
327
331
335
339
345
353
357
361
365
369
373
383
387
389
395
397
There is . . . no other Western society where jihadi radicalism has
proved as violent and dangerous as in the UK.
—Robert S. Wistrich
from Manfred Gerstenfeld’s interview, this issue
Israelis and Jews:
Good Hate, Bad Hate
The accepted definition of racism and genocide incitement applies to
persons of those national, ethnic, racial, or religious origins.1 But on March
22, 2013, a British tribunal decided that continued harassment and disparaging remarks regarding the State of Israel2 was not racist and bore no connection to Judaism.
For those who were not aware, Ronnie Fraser, a graduate student and
lecturer in mathematics, had taken legal action against the powerful University and College Union, arguing that he and others were repeatedly subject
to institutional antisemitism. The problem was extensive and unremitting—
so much so that several prominent professors repeatedly resigned in protest.
Fraser argued that the college union created an intimidating, hostile,
humiliating, and offensive work environment and filed suit in 2011. After a
lengthy investigation, Judge A. M. Snelson and the Employment Tribunal
stated, on March 22, 2013, that such allegations of harassment as “not well
founded.” The unfounded harassment was not suggesting a neutral work
environment—Ronnie and several other Jewish professors had experienced
extensive hostility.
Instead, it was the case that anti-Zionism could not be linked to
antisemitism—even though Ronnie Fraser’s response made the most sense.
He reflected, “For the court to say that Jews do not have an attachment to
Israel is disappointing considering we have been yearning for Israel for
2,000 years and it has been in our prayers.”
If there is no association, then there should have been no discrimination, pogroms, or mass murders of Jews for the past 1,500 years in Israel,
but there is. If there is no association, then research that says statistical
correlations between the two concepts should not exist, but they do (Baum
2009; Cohen et al., 2009; Kaplan and Small 2006). If there is no association, then the Kantor Center findings of Israeli incursions into Arab nations
should not show an increase in violent Jewish hate crimes—but they do. If
there is no association, then the Kantor Center findings of a 30% jump in
antisemitic attacks should not affect Jews worldwide, but it does. If there is
1. A national group consists of those individuals whose identity is defined by a
common country of nationality or national origin. An ethnic group consists of those
whose identity is defined by common cultural traditions, language, or heritage. A
racial group consists of those whose identity is defined by physical characteristics.
A religious group consists of those who are identified by common religious beliefs,
doctrines, practices, or rituals.
2. Commonly referred to in the media as “the Jewish state.”
JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM
no former relationship, why did former Italian MP Fiamma Nirenstein and
thousands like her move to Israel—instead of Ireland or other countries?
(See Nirenstein’s essay, “Aliyah 2013,” in this issue.) If Israel and Jews
cannot not be linked, then one must ask why only Jews are globally
attacked and not Israelis of other religious denominations. Consider these
acts, which occurred in just the first half of the year:
• On January 2, 2013, an Arab gang brutally attacked an American
yeshiva (identifiably Jewish) student visiting with his family in Venice, Italy.
• On June 6, 2013, a 39-year-old Chabad rabbi, Menachem Mendel
Gurewitz, was attacked by a group of young men in a shopping center
in Offenbach, Germany.
• On June 6, 2013, a man was arrested and accused of spraying swastikas and offensive statements, including “f*** Israel,” on Jewish
graves in Auckland, New Zealand.
• On June 6, 2013, talking to an undercover reporter, Conservative
Member of Parliament Patrick Mercer described a meeting with a
young Israeli who said she was a soldier. Mercer told the reporter,
“You don’t look like a soldier to me. You look like a bloody Jew.”
Rather than halting workplace harassment, as of March 2013, a tribunal’s decision allows for such harassment to continue—in effect saying that
prejudice is acceptable for all things Israeli. (See Ronnie Fraser’s “Reflections” in this issue.)
Along similar lines, on April 4, 2013, the Teachers Union of Ireland
voted to boycott all academic collaboration with Israel. Dublin Trinity University sociologist David Landy said, “Undoubtedly, apologists for Israeli
apartheid will complain that such motions stifle academic freedom, but this
is nonsense.”
Maybe not. At the same time Dr. Landy and Irish anti-Zionists were
celebrating the Israeli academia boycott, Canada took an opposite stance.
On April 12, 2013, the University of Manitoba Students Union stripped
Students Against Israel Apartheid of membership status and banned Israel
Apartheid Week. “This is a precedent-setting move that should be emulated
by students on every campus where Israel Apartheid Week events take
place,” observed Canada B’nai Brith’s Frank Dimant. In what may be the
first case of its kind, disdain for Israeli was acknowledged to negatively
affect the university’s students.
For both Israel and the Jewish people, fantasies know no limits. About
the same time that British politician Jenny Tonge exited stage left, politicians David Ward and Anna-Marie Crampton entered stage right and were
quickly ushered off. When signing the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Book
GOOD HATE, BAD HATE
of Commitment in the House of Commons, Ward stated that he was saddened that “within a few years of liberation from the death camps” Jews
could be “inflicting atrocities on Palestinians . . . and continue to do so on a
daily basis . . .” UKIP East Sussex candidate Crampton’s Facebook page
cost her an election. Maintaining that she was hacked into, Crampton
denied that she wrote the following:
The Rothschilds are Zionists . . . there is a difference between Jews and
Zionists. These psychopaths hide behind and use the Jews—it was thanks
to them that 6 million Jews were murdered in the War. . . . Holocaust
means a sacrifice by fire. Only the Zionists could sacrifice their own in
the gas chambers . . . The Second World Wide War was engineered by
the Zionist jews and financed by the banksters to make the general public
all over the world to feel so guilty and outraged by the Holocaust that a
treaty would be signed to create the State of Israel as we know it today.
Fortunately, JSA members fight back in the ever-changing, deadly
atmosphere called antisemitism. Because of the Ronnie Fraser decision, we
have asked Dr. Fraser for his reflections on the experience and created a
British-themed issue, with contributions from several of the UKs’ top scholars; we are also pleased to include original research on the timely subject of
campus antisemitism. The London JSA Sunday Symposium is represented
by those scholars who asked that their papers be reprinted here. And we
have a larger than usual number of original essays and timely reviews.
We at the JSA are pleased to announce a new feature by Board Chairman Shimon T. Samuels that will keep readers aware of current concerns,
as identified by major monitoring groups such as Dr. Samuels’ host affiliation of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (Paris). We look forward to his keen
observations and reporting.
The JSA has entered its fifth year of production and in has grown
extensively. We proudly bring our readers Volume 5, No. 1, and pledge to
continue to offer quality articles and reviews for the next five years. Thank
you to all our associate editors, contributors, and readers for making the
JSA a success.
Steven K. Baum and Neal E. Rosenberg
Editors, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism
World Social Forum Today:
An Interview with Shimon T. Samuels
Manfred Gerstenfeld*
Dr. Shimon T. Samuels takes special note of the World Social Forum
(WSF) and its annual meetings held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Created by
the Brazilian Labor Party (2001) in response to the World Economic
Forum (Davos), the conference focuses on globalization injustice—e.g.,
indigenous trafficking of women. Similar to Durban II, the World Social
Forum was soon coöpted by Palestinian activists. I attended the November 2013 meeting of WSF Free Palestine, and observed with grave concern the tens of thousands attending the 127 workshops—all aligned in
teaching the attendees to undermine anything and everything identified as
Israeli.
Dr. Samuels is the director for international relations of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center and is based in Paris. He is a member of the European
Jewish Parliament, chair of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, and
a recent recipient of its Jabotinsky Award for Outstanding Contribution
in fighting antisemitism.
Samuels began our interview with this description:
From the WSF, regional forums such as the North American, Latin
American, and Asian emerged. The most poisonously anti-Israel is the
European Social Forum (ESF). This forum has a more operational role than
the WSF. Its first gathering took place in Florence, Italy, in 2002; the third
ESF took place in London in 2004, consisting of 500 seminars with 2,500
speakers. Much of its funding was provided by the London Municipality,
whose mayor at the time was leftist Ken Livingstone. This forum largely
1
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[ VOL. 5:1
focused on hate-mongering against Israel. Attacks became even more
aggressive at the next ESF in Athens in 2006. Much attention there was
given to the Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
At the Athens ESF, a handbook describing how to promote the BDS
was distributed, illustrating how those in civil society can stop buying
Israeli products. Its stated goal is to create a critical mass so that governments will follow its lead. The handbook also recommended targeting
“smart boycotts”—i.e., academics. Proponents claimed that even if boycotts are reversed by “Zionist pressure,” their real goal is the publicity
engendered. Instructions were given regarding governmental restrictions on
travel, communications, trade, finance, arms sales, church divestment, and
corporations indirectly doing business with Israelis.
Launched by gay Arab activists in 2010, PinkwashingIsrael.com campaigns
began to boycott all things Israeli, including gay tourism to Israel.
In Athens, Samuels says, pending grassroots provocations were suggested. He continues: One could, for instance, fill supermarket carts with
Israeli products, crash through the registers, and burn the produce in the
street. Other ideas proposed were a European-Palestine caravan to promote
BDS and visits to Palestinian refugee camps. At the Athens ESF, I first met
representatives from Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-Nazi group. It was then
still a small faction appealing for an alliance with the left and Islam against
the common enemy, Zionism. They were handing out their magazine
devoted to the glorious era depicted by the cover photo of Hitler and the
mufti of Jerusalem. Even with the recent government crackdown on Golden
Dawn, this openly neo-Nazi party held 18 of 300 seats in the Greek Parliament and was steadily growing.
Samuels reminds us: In 2008, the ESF took place close to the sixtieth
anniversary of Israel’s independence in Malmø, Sweden. It planned an
international network of demonstrations against the Jewish state throughout the entire year. There was also a call for solidarity with terrorist movements such as the Palestinian PFLP, the Kurdish PKK, the Colombian
2013]
WORLD SOCIAL FORUM TODAY
3
FARC, and the Basque ETA. In subsequent years, the ESF has responded to
the European crisis and austerity issues and their consequences, such as the
rise of the extreme right. The Middle East subsequently became less important. The Official Reference Document of the Palestine National Committee
and the WSF promotes 16 issues on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. These
include the following: dismantling the Israeli “apartheid regime” and its
“apartheid wall,” returning Palestinian refugees from both 1948 and 1967,
(estimated to be in the millions), furthering a military embargo and boycott
divestment campaign, supporting Gaza, advocating the release of Palestinian prisoners, assistance in the Intifada (electronic or real), alerting the
Western media to “Israel’s crimes,” countering Israel’s “distortions of history,” and trying Israel for war crimes in the International Court of Justice.
“Israel Must be Wiped Out” sunhats,
Hamas t-shirts, and other memorabilia available for sale at the WSF
Samuels concludes: I have attended many Social Forum meetings.
There, one learns about activities being planned for the future. At a meeting
in Istanbul in 2010, I first heard about preparing anti-Israel flotillas. WSF
NGOs aggrandize their impact through the UN Committee for the Exercise
of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, a 34-member state
agency of the UN Division of Human Rights, which meets annually on each
continent. This year’s European meeting at the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization included boycott plans against the Jewish National Fund and
the Israeli generic pharmaceutical company Teva.
*Manfred Gerstenfeld is emeritus chair (2000 to 2012) and member of the Board of
Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He has authored fifteen books,
edited five, and is a founding JSA board member, frequent contributor, and recipient of its lifetime achievement award. This interview was first published August
13, 2013, as “The World Social Forum Is an Enabler of Anti-Israelism,” http://
www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13682#.UmsCGxYVjA5. It is
reprinted here by permission.
Antisemitic Incidents from Around the World:
January-June 2013
A Selected List
US Jewish school student being attacked by Arab gang
JANUARY
Venice, January 2: An Arab gang brutally attacked an American yeshiva
student visiting with his family in Venice, Italy, in what local community
leaders said was a rare instance of antisemitism. The student was knocked
unconscious when he strolled late at night in the center of the city. A band
of 15 Arab youth pounced on him, dragged him into a dark corner, and
pummeled him, using sharp weapons. The student lost consciousness, and
the attackers fled when a passerby spotted them and called police and medics. The police are investigating, but have but have not caught the attackers.
Isfahan, Iran, January 2: A woman accused of being involved in the murder
of a Jewish man in Iran reportedly had charges against her dropped after
investigators said that “If you were involved in killing a Jew, you did a
good deed,” Israel’s Channel 2 reported. Daniel Magrufta, 24, the son of a
wealthy Iranian businessman, was murdered last week. The report said that
it was at first believed he was murdered during a robbery at his home, but
no evidence of a break-in could be found. The Jewish community believes
the woman, whom he was dating and who is the daughter of a member of
the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, was involved in his death. The incident
comes just over one month after a Jewish woman was murdered by Muslim
extremists intent on demolishing her house to make room for the expansion
of a mosque.
Toulouse, January 3: Graffiti containing a swastika alongside the words
“SS” and “get the f*** out” appeared on the local chapter of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, the French daily Le Figaro reported.
Den Hague, the Netherlands, January 4: More than 25 percent of complaints
to an online hate speech watchdog in the Netherlands last year concerned
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antisemitism. This figure appeared in a report last month from Meldpunt
Discriminatie Internet (MDI), which monitors racism and racial incitement
on the Internet in the Netherlands. MDI said 26 percent of the 943 complaints it registered in 2012 were about antisemitic content, and that these
were the largest block of complaints. Of the total complaints, 421 could
form the basis for an indictment under Netherlands law, according to MDI.
Jews constitute 0.25 percent of the population of the Netherlands.
Magdeburg, Germany, January 12: Thousands of citizens prevented a neoNazi march through the center of town. Approximately 800 neo-Nazis carrying black flags had to settle for marching through the Salbke quarter on
the town’s southern border. The neo-Nazis changed their route at the last
moment once they realized their original plan to march through the very
center of town didn’t have the slightest chance of success, as they were
outnumbered by their opponents. About 3,000 counter-protesters blocked
the neo-Nazis’ planned route, while another approximately 9,000 people
protested against the march at locations off the planned route.
Toronto, January 14: B’nai Brith Canada has alerted police to a protest
planned tonight in Vaughan, Ontario. The Jewish human rights organization
has warned that the inflammatory rhetoric on the promotional flyer blaming
a “Zionist Plot” for recent sectarian violence in Pakistan has the potential to
incite hatred and spark violence against the Jewish community in Canada.
Budapest, January 19: Hungary’s national soccer team will face sanctions
because of antisemitic chants by its fans in August, the FIFA soccer association has announced. The punishment, handed out by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s disciplinary committee, included a
$43,000 fine to be paid by the Hungarian MLSZ national team. It will also
have to play its next match in an empty stadium. The measures were FIFA’s
response to chants of “stinking Jews” and “Heil Benito Mussolini” during a
match defined as “friendly” against the Israeli national team in Budapest.
The Hungarian fans also turned their backs as “Hatikva,” the Israeli national
anthem, was played, and waved Palestinian and Iranian flags throughout the
game. The Zurich-based FIFA association said it “unanimously condemned
the abhorrent episode of antisemitism” and actions of a “political, provocative and aggressive nature perpetrated by supporters of the Hungarian
national team.”
Brussels, January 28: Immediately after a French court ordered Twitter to
reveal details about users who had posted antisemitic messages, a proud
Sacha Reingewirtz was already spreading the word about a judgment he
helped win via Twitter. Within minutes of the ruling, the vice president of
2013]
ANTISEMITIC INCIDENTS —JANUARY–JUNE 2013
7
the Union of French Jewish Students was firing off tweets with the details
of the decision. The Grand Instance Court in Paris, responding to a complaint filed by the union and several other groups last year, gave Twitter 15
days to hand over personal details of users suspected of posting antisemitic
tweets in violation of France’s restrictive laws on hate speech. The court
also imposed a $1,300 fine for every day that Twitter fails to comply and
ordered the company to set up a system that would flag illegal content for
removal. “It is a major victory for us and a legal breakthrough for others to
use elsewhere in Europe,” Reingewirtz told JTA.
Naples, January 28: About 10 people were arrested in various Italian cities
on suspicion of planning attacks against Jews. According to the Italian
media, surveillance tapes of meetings captured “antisemitic phrases and
speeches full of racist hatred. “They were systematically indoctrinating
young militants to hate foreigners and Jews at meetings in which, among
other things, they discussed Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf,” Naples assistant
prosecutor Rosario Cantelmo said. The extremists were charged with
crimes that included possession of illegal arms and explosives, subversive
association, taking part in political street brawls in Naples in 2011, and
violent attacks on left-wing activists using knives and firebombs.
The London Sunday Times’ cartoon of prime minister Netanyahu
erecting a wall over dead Palestinians
London, January 28: The Sunday Times used International Holocaust
Memorial Day not to honor the six million Jewish dead but instead to honor
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The Times ran a virulently antiIsrael cartoon illustrating a big-nosed Israeli prime minister Binyamin
Netanyahu paving a wall with the blood and limbs of crying Palestinians.
The cartoon included a caption beneath the cartoon entitled “Israeli elections—will cementing peace continue?”
Rayda, Yemen, January 31: Members of Yemen’s small Jewish community
said that one of its members had been attacked and badly hurt in an
antisemitic assault. The victim, Yosef Anati, was hospitalized in serious
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condition. Islamists have targeted Jews in Yemen with increasing frequency
in the past few years, causing many to leave the country. In 2012, a leading
member of the San’a Jewish community, Aharon Zindani, was stabbed to
death. In March 2009, a Yemeni court ruled that a Muslim who murdered a
Jewish father of nine, Moshe Yaish-Nahari from Rayda, would only pay a
fine because he was “an unstable extremist.” Witnesses say Abed el-Aziz
el-Abadi, a former MiG-29 pilot in Yemen’s air force, walked up to YaishNahari on December 10, 2008, and said “Jew, accept Islam’s message.” He
then shot Yaish-Nahari five times with a Kalashnikov rifle.
FEBRUARY
Oslo, February 1: Norway’s justice minister Grete Faremo has rejected
demands by the country’s Jewish community for specific registration of
antisemitic hate crime. While Faremo said she wanted to have more details
of hate crimes committed against the country’s Jews, she told Vårt Land
newspaper she opposed adding antisemitism to Norway’s three existing definitions of hate crime: sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, and religion. Ervin
Kohn, president of Oslo’s Jewish community and EJC affiliate, said the
minister’s statements were unsatisfactory. “It is not good enough to say that
the registration should be more detailed,” he said. “We want antisemitism to
be a separate category.”
Vienna, February 3: Antisemitism in Hungary is causing an influx of Jewish immigrants to Austria, the head of Vienna’s Jewish community said. “I
am pleased people are coming, but the circumstances that force them to
leave Hungary due to the political situation, due to antisemitism, don’t
please me at all,” Oskar Deutsch, president of the Vienna Jewish community, is quoted as telling the Austrian Press Agency. Ariel Muzicant,
Deutsch’s predecessor as leader of Austria’s Jewish community of approximately 8,000, told JTA that his community has begun offering assistance to
Hungarian Jews wishing to leave, including language courses and help in
finding employment, housing, and Jewish education. The community is
now assisting some 20 families that are either in Hungary and preparing to
leave or newly arrived in Vienna.
Marseille, February 6: A 20-year-old Jewish man wearing a Star of David
pendant was mugged and robbed twice outside Marseille’s main train station. Two men on a scooter approached the victim outside Saint-Charles, a
busy train station and shopping mall, and one tore the golden chain from his
neck, the daily La Provence reported. They called him a “dirty Jew” before
fleeing on the scooter, with one of the alleged assailants carrying the pendant. A group of young men nearby then approached and hurled antisemitic
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insults at the victim before stealing an MP3 player and 100 euros, according
to Metro, another daily paper. They also reportedly hit the victim.
Threatened student. Toulouse, February 6, 2013
Toulouse, February 6: A woman wielding a knife reportedly was arrested
after threatening a student at the Toulouse Jewish school where an Islamist
radical murdered a rabbi and three children nearly one year ago. According
to Le Depeche, a French news site, the 51-year-old woman was arrested
outside the Ohr HaTorah school after she brandished the knife in a threatening manner in front of a 16-year-old boy leaving the institution. He returned
to the school and told authorities about the woman, who was arrested
shortly thereafter.
Kaunas, Lithuania, February 16: The Jewish community of Lithuania spoke
out against a march organized by the Lithuanian National Youth Union to
mark the Day of Restoration of the State of Lithuania. “We are voicing our
strong protest against marches of similar character, chants, and slogans, and
are calling on democratic powers to back us,” Faina Kukliansky, acting
chairwoman of the community, said in a statement. “But now we already
know that chants like ‘Lithuania for Lithuanians’ were heard during the
march and banners reading ‘Yesterday Juden Raus, today Lithuania for
Lithuanians’ were being held. It supposes that participants in the march,
with skinheads among them, consider Lithuania the state of ethnic Lithuanians and all others are second-class citizens,” Kukliansky said.
Paris, February 20: According to the Service de protection de la communauté juive (SPCJ), there were 315 verbal or physical attacks against
Jews in France last year, compared to 171 in 2011. The year 2012 was the
most violent since 2004, the SPCJ reports. The increase “degrades the
image of France as the land where minorities are protected,” said Richard
Prasquier, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in
France. Elie Petit, vice president of the Union of Jewish Students, told The
Local the Jewish community was increasingly concerned by these acts.
“This is not just stats; this is about victims who are being hurt and insulted
in the street,” Petit said.
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Youssouf Fofana, killer of Ilan Halimi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvBn8v3kDjc
Moulins, February 20: The leader of the gang that tortured and killed Ilan
Halimi was sentenced to an additional seven years in prison for making
antisemitic videos in jail. A correctional court in Moulins found Youssouf
Fofana, head of the Gang of Barbarians, guilty of propagating terrorism and
inciting racial hatred, Le Monde reported. The ruling came on February 13,
seven years to the day of the death of Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew.
Fofana’s gang kidnapped Halimi and held him for ransom, then tortured
him for three weeks before he was found by police. Halimi died on his way
to the hospital.
Brussels, February 22: Belgium saw a 30-percent increase in the number of
antisemitic complaints filed in 2012, according to a government agency.
Edouard Delruelle, president of the Centre for Equal Opportunities and
Opposition to Racism, a Belgian government agency, said his organization
documented 88 complaints of antisemitism in 2012, compared to 62 the
previous year and 57 the year before that. “The Jewish community is right
to be concerned,” Delruelle told the Belgian daily La Derniere Heure in a
February 21 article. Delruelle said that the figures correspond to the 58
percent rise in antisemitic incidents in France documented in a report by the
SPCJ, the French-Jewish security unit, released this week.
Amsterdam, February 26: A Dutch Jewish group has called on the government of Holland to probe antisemitism in the country’s high schools following the airing of interviews with immigrant pupils who praised the
Holocaust and Jew hatred. “Anti-Semitic biases seem much more widespread than earlier presumed among children of immigrant families, as well
as native Dutch pupils,” the Center for Information and Documentation on
Israel (CIDI) stated in a letter to Jet Bussemaker, the country’s minister of
education, culture, and science. “A national survey is required to study the
figures and numbers,” CIDI, a local watchdog on antisemitism, wrote. The
letter was in reaction to a television program aired last week on the Nederland 2 television channel. In it, Mehmet Sahin, a researcher at Amsterdam’s
Vrije Universiteit, interviews several high school students of Turkish
descent. “The interviewees appear to be partly aware of the Holocaust, but
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approve of the mass murder of Jews,” the Hague-based CIDI wrote. One of
the interviewees said on camera: “I am more than pleased with what Hitler
did to the Jews.” Another said: “I hate Jews, period. Nothing you do will
make me change my mind.”
MARCH
Damascus, March 1: One of the oldest synagogues in the world was
destroyed by Syrian regime forces in the Damascus district of Jobar. A
video posted online by the Syrian opposition military council shows the
synagogue severely damaged after shelling in the area by forces loyal to
president Bashar Al-Assad.
Oberlin, Ohio, March 4: Oberlin College canceled classes to convene a
“day of solidarity” following a series of racial and antisemitic incidents.
Classes at the school, in northern Ohio, were suspended on Monday after
someone wearing a Ku Klux Klan-like hood and robe was seen walking on
campus, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. “This event, in addition to
the series of other hate-related incidents on campus, has precipitated our
decision to suspend formal classes and all non-essential activities for today,
Monday, March 4, 2013, and gather for a series of discussions of the challenging issues that have faced our community in recent weeks,” read a
statement on the college’s website signed by the president of the college,
Marvin Krislov, who is Jewish, as well as the deans of the individual
schools. The statement asked all students, faculty, and staff to participate in
the day’s events.
Mehmet Sahin, forced into hiding
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/
165913#.UT_SraV5n0c
Arnhem, Holland, March 12: The Dutch doctoral student who was seen in a
controversial video trying to reeducate Dutch-Turkish youths has been
forced into hiding after receiving death threats. The Dutch daily NRC writes
that Mehmet Sahin has gone into hiding with his family on the advice of the
mayor of Arnhem, Pauline Krikke. Last week a video surfaced of Sahin
interviewing several Muslim youths in Holland. During the interview the
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youths spewed vitriol at Jews and praised Hitler, with one of the boys saying, “As far as I’m concerned Hitler should have killed all Jews.” The
youths also displayed an alarming lack of knowledge about their subject,
with one boy saying that “millions of Palestinians are being killed.” Dutch
Labor Party parliamentarian Ahmed Marcouch said that he will ask parliamentary questions about the threats. He remarked: “It is horrible that someone has to be afraid because he has done something that we all should do—
teach children not to hate.” The video appeared on Nederland 2 TV, and
went mostly unnoticed until several media outlets brought it to the attention
of leading Jewish organizations, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center;
the center sent a letter to prime minister Mark Rutte about the issue. International antisemitism expert Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld told Arutz Sheva that
the ignorance and hate should come as no surprise and that Dutch authorities have done little to counter it.
Vancouver, March 13: Two brothers are going to court to stop the distribution of antisemitic posters in Winnipeg. Sandy and Robert Shindleman, real
estate developers in central Canada, are bringing the suit against the man
responsible for posters, titled “$hitler’s List,” that began appearing last year
on the streets of Winnipeg. The posters accuse a list of prominent Jews in
the city of being part of a “cabal of cockroaches,” primarily targeting the
mayor, Sam Katz, but also naming the Shindlemans. The brothers’ decision
to file the lawsuit was spurred by the government’s decision not to pursue
hate-speech charges against Gordon Warren, who failed in a bid for Winnipeg City Council seat, the National Post reported.
London, March 14: The British Labor party suspended politician Lord
Nazir Ahmed over allegations that he blamed a road accident that he caused
on a Jewish conspiracy, the United Kingdom’s Press Association reported.
Ahmed, 55, was jailed for causing a deadly road accident while texting
behind the wheel. The Times of London cited Ahmed as saying that his
prison sentence was a result of pressure applied to the court by Jews “who
own newspapers and television channels.” Following publication of these
remarks, a Labour spokesman said: “The Labour party deplores and does
not tolerate any sort of antisemitism. Following reports in the Times today,
we are suspending Lord Ahmed pending an investigation.”
Caracas, March 24: Antisemitic graffiti, including the message “Out with
Jewish Murderers,” was spray-painted on stores owned by Jews in the San
Bernardino section of Caracas. Police have promised to investigate the incidents, saying they won’t permit violence against groups on the basis of
religion. Interim president Nicolas Maduro has accused Israel and the
United States of murdering Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chavez, who
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died of cancer earlier this month. In the wake of these charges and other
antisemitic remarks by Maduro, as well as fear of a wave of antisemitism, a
number of Jewish community events have been canceled.
Antwerp, March 27: A major survey among Belgian teenagers indicated
that antisemitism was seven times more prevalent among Muslim youths
than in non-Muslim teenagers. Conducted in recent months by three universities for the Flemish government, the survey was published last month
based on questionnaires filled out by 3,867 high school students in Antwerp
and Ghent, including 1,068 Muslims. Among Muslims, 50.9 percent of
respondents agreed with the statement “Jews foment war and blame others
for it” compared to only 7.1 percent among non-Muslims. The statement
“Jews seek to control everything” received a 45.1 percent approval rating
among Muslims, compared to 10.8 percent approval among non-Muslims.
Paris, March 28: A group of Arab youths have reportedly attacked Israeli
film director Yariv Horowitz. Horowitz, who directed the film Rock the
Casbah, was participating at a film festival in France when he was attacked
by a group of Arab youths just before the film won the Best Film award,
unconfirmed reports suggest.
APRIL
Jerusalem, April 2: A Palestinian nonprofit organization has removed an
article from its website that accused Jews of using “the blood of Christians
in the Jewish Passover.” The Miftah organization, founded by Palestinian
lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi and funded by European and Western governments, reportedly apologized for publishing the article, after first refusing to
apologize and condemning the Jewish bloggers who publicized the article.
Galway, April 4: The Teachers Union of Ireland has voted to boycott all
academic collaboration with Israel, including research programs and student
exchange. It is thought to be the first full academic boycott enforced by a
European teaching union. Dublin sociology lecturer and anti-Israel activist
David Landy said the move “set an historic precedent. . . . We congratulate
the TUI and call on all Irish, British and European academic unions to
move similar motions. Undoubtedly, apologists for Israeli apartheid will
complain that such motions stifle academic freedom, but this is nonsense,”
he said.
Tel Aviv, April 6: Israeli researchers and Jewish leaders reported a 30 percent jump in antisemitic violence and vandalism last year, topped by a
deadly school shooting in France, and expressed alarm about the rise of farright parties in Hungary, Greece, and other countries.
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New York, April 10: Police have apprehended a man they believe committed a string of hate crimes in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.
According to The New York Times, Rubin Ublies was taken into custody
Wednesday in connection with the burning of 11 mezuzahs inside an ultraOrthodox Jewish apartment complex in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Toronto, April 12: B’nai Brith Canada extends its congratulations to the
students at University of Manitoba who spearheaded last night’s University
of Manitoba Students Union (UMSU) [protest of a] resolution that stripped
Students Against Israel Apartheid (SAIA) of its status as a student group
and banned Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) from UMSU property.
Paris, April 15: A French Jewish group that sued Twitter in March for hosting antisemitic content has lodged a fresh complaint against the company
and accused it of lying. The latest complaint, by the Union of Jewish Students of France (UJEF), was filed April 12 with the Paris Public Prosecutor’s office against Twitter president and director Dick Costolo. UEJF and
another group, J’ACCUSE, said in the complaint that Costolo was “responsible for racial defamation and publicly inciting to discrimination, hate or
violence toward Jews.”
Warsaw, April 16: Antisemitism is high among teenagers in the Polish capital, according to an opinion survey conducted in the runup to Friday’s 70th
anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the AFP news agency reports.
The poll of students, from 20 Warsaw high schools, found that 44 percent
of respondents said they would be unhappy to have a Jewish neighbor. In
the survey of 1,250 students commissioned by the Jewish community of
Warsaw, the Homo Homini polling institute also found that two in five said
they would not like to have a Jewish classmate, and 61 percent said they
would be upset if their partner turned out to be a Jew.
New York, April 19: A brawl broke out on a New York City subway train
after a teenager harassed a Jewish man and told him “They should have
killed all of you.” According to the New York Daily News, Stephan Stowe,
17, and a group of eight friends approached a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke aboard a subway train on Monday. “Assalamu Alaikum,” Stowe said
to the man, using a common greeting among Muslims that means “Peace be
with you,” court documents charge. The man ignored Stowe, and he
became combative.
Toronto, April 23: The latest audit found 1,345 antisemitic acts happened in
Canada last year—a jump of almost 4 percent from 2011. Canada B’nai
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Brith executive vice president Frank Dimant says that includes a significant
increase in antisemitism by people who identify themselves as Muslim.
“Those incidents have dramatically jumped in this country from 16 incidents in 2011 to 87 incidents in 2012,” Dimant said. [Editor’s Note: In
contrast, ADL reported 1,080 American antisemitic acts during 2011; 2012
figures are pending.]
Paris, April 23: A rabbi and his 18-year-old son were injured in an attack by
a knife-wielding man who reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar”—God is
great.” Police arrested the man immediately after the attack, the French
news agency AFP reported. The rabbi was identified by the French news
sites Dreuz.info and JSS News as “Rabbi Baroukh,” 50, of a synagogue on
Saunier Street.
Doha, Qatar, April 24: Yousuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential
Sunni clerics in the world, boycotted an interfaith conference hosted by the
International Union of Muslim Scholars in Dohaon because of the presence
of Jewish participants, according to the country’s Al Arab daily. “I decided
not to participate so I would not sit with Jews on the same platform as long
as they are raping Palestine and destroying mosques, and as long as the
Palestinian issue has not been resolved,” said Qaradawi, who is the chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars.
Cherkasy, Ukraine, April 27: Marching in formation, six young men in dark
jackets approached an anti-government rally in Cherkasy, a city some 125
miles southeast of Kiev. At the appointed moment, they removed their
windbreakers to reveal white T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Beat the
Kikes.” Their jackets had the name Svoboda, the ultranationalist Ukrainian
political party. A small riot quickly ensued. Angry protestors ripped at the
T-shirts; one of the young men beat Victor Smal, a lawyer and human rights
activist, so savagely that could not be recognized.
Budapest, April 28: Following a football match between the Videoton and
Ferencvaros teams in Budapest, Ference Orosz, chairman of the Raoul Wallenberg Association, was attacked by extreme-right football fans. The
attackers shouted “Sieg Heil” and “Jewish communist,” and broke his nose.
Sydney, April 30: Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has
denounced the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement ahead
of anti-Israeli protest action planned at the University of New South Wales.
BDS action at UNSW has turned ugly, with antisemitic and Holocaustdenying material appearing on a Facebook page opposing the opening of a
Max Brenner chocolate shop on campus. Postings on a Facebook page pro-
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moting today’s protest have attacked “Jews and Jew lovers” and said the
figure of six million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany was an exaggeration.
“This [BDS] campaign does not serve the cause of peace and diplomacy for
agreement on a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine,” Gillard
said.
MAY
London, May 8: A woman legal assistant in Britain made an antisemitic
remark in front of the wrong person and paid $3,900 (2,500 pounds) to
learn the lesson of being careful what you say. The solicitor, 34-year-old
Danielle Morris, made the comment in front of a legal bookkeeper, known
in Britain as a “legal cashier,” who happened to be Jewish. The solicitor has
been telling a story in front of the cashier concerning a Jewish man that
Morris said “made a scene” at the office of a doctor she was waiting to see
with her baby. After Morris said, “I can’t stand Jews,” the Jewish cashier
asker her not to repeat the remark, to which Morris responded, I don’t care.
I cannot stand them ever since [the] incident” at the doctor’s office.” The
cashier filed a religious discrimination complaint.
Nazi sympathy aloft in the West Bank
Jerusalem, May 20: A disturbing incident took place when Jewish residents
of the West Bank villages of Gush Etzion and Kiryat Arba spotted a flag
with a swastika flying over the nearby Palestinian Arab town of Beit Omar.
Uri Arnon, who saw the flag, told Tazpit News Agency: “I felt we were
going back 75 years, losing our hold on the land. The Arabs no longer feel
the need to hide their murderous tendencies, announcing out loud that they
wish to destroy us.” The IDF was notified and, according to Israel’s Channel 2, a spokesman said that IDF soldiers were responding to complaints
and attempting to have the flag removed.
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Oslo, May 29: Jewish groups sharply condemned Norway’s third-largest
paper, Dagbladet, for publishing a cartoon that one group said was “so virulently antisemitic it would make Hitler and Himmler weep tears of joy.”
Tea with Adolf?
New York May 30: A JC Penney teakettle designed by Michael Graves,
said to resemble Adolf Hitler, sold out online. JC Penney, which had come
under fire for advertising and selling the space-saving teakettle, sold out the
item on its website, according to reports.
JUNE
Offenbach, Germany, June 1: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Gurewitz was
reportedly attacked in the KOMM shopping center by a group of six to
eight young men, who pushed him as they yelled “shitty Jew.” A criminal
complaint was filed and the police were investigating an antisemitic hate
crime, bodily injury. and harassment. Mark Dainow, a vice president of the
Jewish community in Offenbach, criticized security personnel for failing to
intervene when the youths began attacking the rabbi.
Auckland, June 6: A man accused of spraying swastikas and offensive
statements on Jewish graves told police he was drunk when he and a friend
decided to go out tagging, and that he is not antisemitic, a court has heard.
Christian Landmark, 20, was charged with being a party to intentional damage after it was discovered the gravestones in a central Auckland cemetery
were defaced with antisemitic graffiti and swastikas in October last year.
The graffiti included “F*** Israel” and “Don’t f*** with us.”
London, June 6: A video made by a hidden camera showed a Conservative
MP, Patrick Mercer, making an antisemitic remark regarding a female IDF
soldier he encountered on a visit to Israel. Talking to an undercover
reporter, Mercer described a meeting with a young Israeli who said she was
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a soldier. Mercer told the reporter he thought, “You don’t look like a soldier
to me. You look like a bloody Jew.”
Montreal, June 9: A kosher restaurant in Montreal was the target of an
arsonist only days after a cafe in the area, also Jewish-owned, was on the
receiving end of a similar attack. A Molotov cocktail was tossed into Chops
restaurant during opening hours, sometime before one in the morning.
Nobody was injured, and the restaurant’s sprinkler system was able to control the fire.
Berlin, June 13: The German Bundestag approved a resolution vowing to
combat antisemitism and support Jewish life in Germany, and to deepen the
country’s special relationship with Israel. The resolution, which passed by
an overwhelming margin in a voice vote during a poorly attended session,
signaled the government’s recognition of the continued existence of
antisemitism in the country responsible for the Holocaust.
Paris, June 16: French Jews held a demonstration over a governmentfunded Paris museum exhibit glorifying suicide bombers. The exhibit, entitled Death, is being shown at the Jeu de Paume museum. It features photographs by Palestinian Authority Arab photographer Ahlam Shibli, and
includes portraits of Arab suicide bombers from the military wing of PA
chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction—specifically, they are members
of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a banned terror organization in the United
States and the European Union. Alongside the dozens of photographs are
anti-Israel captions glorifying their deaths.
Toronto, June 18: A rabbi and the father of a young family had discovered
the words “F*** Jews” with swastikas above on the side door of his house.
The perpetrators had also entered the garage and left their threatening mark,
“Watch your children,” inside, again with swastikas above; later, neighbors
of the family found a marker-written swastika written on their car as well.
Tel Aviv, June 25: 70 percent of Israeli Arabs do not accept Israel’s right to
have a Jewish majority, a new poll conducted by Haifa University and the
Israel Democracy Institute has revealed. The poll, which questioned 1,400
Jewish and Arab Israelis over a ten-year period, revealed that, despite the
overwhelming rejection of Israel’s Jewish character, 55 percent of Arab
Israelis would prefer to live there than anywhere else, though a large majority, 6 percent, say they fear being transferred out of the country.
London, June 26: Two prominent US bloggers have been banned from
entering the UK, the Home Office has said. Pamela Geller and Robert
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Spencer co-founded the anti-Muslim group Stop Islamization of America.
They were due to speak at an English Defence League march in Woolwich,
where drummer Lee Rigby was killed. A government spokesman said individuals whose presence “is not conducive to the public good” could be
excluded by the home secretary. He added: “We condemn all those whose
behaviors and views run counter to our shared values and will not stand for
extremism in any form.”
Jerusalem, June 30: A pro-Israel blogger initiated a petition urging human
rights groups to condemn an antisemitic mini-series scheduled to air
throughout the Arab world in July. The Elder of Ziyon blogger delivered
the petition to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, urging
them to condemn the Khaybar mini-series, set to be shown during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. “The show will be on when most Egyptian
families are staying at home for Ramadan, doing nothing but watching TV,”
Mina Rezkalla, a US-based Egyptian activist, told The Wall Street Journal.
“The goal is completely outward antisemitism.”
A Personal Statement1
Ronnie Fraser*
I am naturally disappointed by the decision of the Employment Tribunal to dismiss my claim of harassment against the University and College
Union (UCU). I am, however, very grateful that the hearing provided us
with the opportunity to raise and discuss in great detail the issues of discrimination and antisemitism that are so important to Anglo Jewry. I
believe that the many witnesses we called were able to provide evidence to
the tribunal of an intolerable atmosphere over a number of years and that
the UCU did nothing to stop these institutionally antisemitic acts from taking place.
Having read the judgment, there are two points that greatly concern
me. The first is “a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel
cannot amount to a protected characteristic. It is not intrinsically a part of
Jewishness . . .” (para 150). For the court to say that as Jews we do not have
an attachment to Israel is disappointing, considering that we have been
yearning for Israel for 2,000 years and that it has been in our prayers all that
time. The second point highlighted the need for Anglo-Jewry to urgently
adopt and publicize its own definition of antisemitsm.
As a member of the Board of Deputies, I intend to campaign for us as
a community to accept a definition of Jewishness, which includes a connection with Israel and the adoption of a definition of antisemitism. I would
1. For the prologue, see R. Fraser, “The Academic Boycott of Israel: A Review
of the Five-Year UK Campaign to Defeat It,” JCPA.org, http://jcpa.org/article/theacademic-boycott-of-israel-a-review-of-the-five-year-uk-campaign-to-defeat-it/
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like to thank my wife, my family, my witnesses, and all those who supported my action both from within the Jewish community and elsewhere for
their incredible support and understanding over the last two years. I would
also like to thank my solicitor, Anthony Julius, and all the staff of Mishcon
De Reya for their magnificent work and support.
*Ronnie Fraser is director of the Academic Friends of Israel and currently completing his doctorate. He is a lecturer at Barnet College in London and a member of
the NATFHE lecturers union. The Employment Tribunal judgment can be found
at http://www.judiciary.gov.uk / media / judgments / 2013 / fraser-uni-college-union,
March 28, 2013.
Hostility to Israel and Antisemitism:
Toward a Sociological Approach
David Hirsh*
Sociology is not immune from the ambivalence toward antisemitism that
has haunted anti-hegemonic intellectual and political traditions. Yet in
this paper, I argue that the resources of sociology can be mobilized to
examine the ways in which antisemitism is sometimes manifested in discourses and movements against Israel and Zionism, even those which
think of themselves as antiracist.
Key Words: Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, Israel, Jews, Sociology
THE RESEARCH MATERIALS
The research materials for this paper have been gathered between 2005
and 2011, mainly in the UK, on the basis that they may be relevant to the
relationship between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. These materials
are produced by individuals, groups, and institutions, including political and
social movements, trade unions, and churches. They appear in a diversity of
textual form: books, pamphlets, newspaper articles, journal articles, websites, web pages, blogs, speeches, video, and music. There is a focus on
material that is self-defined as being antiracist and therefore also antiantisemitic because this material has the greatest potential to resonate in
democratic spaces.
There is a tendency in researching this area for the distinction between
primary and secondary research material to become blurred. An academic
text can also constitute, be seen as, be made into, a political intervention. It
may itself be understood as an example of discursive antisemitism or an
example of a spurious charge of antisemitism made to delegitimize criticism of Israel.
Materials produced within official institutional frameworks also constitute part of the terrain on which political struggles are conducted by,
among others, academics. For example, the Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism (2006) was not simply a neutral set of
findings but also an attempt, in which academic scholars were participants,
to institutionalize as official a particular approach to the understanding of
antisemitism. The legitimacy of this official framework was rejected by
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scholars holding opposing views. The European Union Monitoring Commission (now the Fundamental Rights Agency [FRA]) Working Definition
of Antisemitism is similarly contested by some scholars, while others were
actively involved in the work of drafting the definition (Hirsh 2012). The
boundaries of primary materials are porous and include scholarly, political,
institutional, and more popular texts.
The material is qualitative, not quantitative. It never “speaks for itself,”
but always requires analysis and judgment; thus, it is open to different interpretations. Much of the material is gleaned from participant observation and
action research. It is not the fruit of dispassionate and neutral observation
but of public and contested debate and struggle.
Hostility to Israel comes from different sources and takes different
forms. Tropes, elements of rhetoric, and commonsense notions migrate
between antiracist and democratic spaces, nationalist and Islamist spaces,
fringe and mainstream spaces, different kinds of media, and the right, the
left, and the political center. It is within such a complex and dynamic reality
that this paper finds its material and moves toward specific analytical
claims.
ANTI-ZIONISM
AND
ANTISEMITISM
The peace process between Israel and Palestine broke down decisively
in 2000 with the start of the Second Intifada. The coalition of pro-peace
forces in Israel and Palestine largely collapsed into opposing national consensuses, each of which portraying the other as being responsible anew for
the conflict.
In September 2001 there was a UN conference in Durban, South
Africa, to discuss global strategies for dealing with racism. At that gathering, there was a formidable campaign to portray Zionism as the key source
of racism in the world. A number of factors came together that week—on
the city streets and the beachfront, in the NGO conference, a huge event in a
cricket ground bringing together tens of thousands of activists, and in the
intergovernmental forum. The conference was overwhelmed by an organized and hostile anti-Israel fervor. Some of it was expressed in openly
antisemitic forms, some was legitimate criticism of Israel expressed in democratic antiracist forms, and some was antisemitism expressed in ostensibly
democratic and antiracist language. A number of antiracists who were there
experienced Durban as a swirling mass of toxic antisemitic hate. Some of
them were unable to get home in the following days because air traffic was
disrupted after the attacks on the United States on September 11.
The collapse of the peace process, Durban, and 911, as well as the
reverberating symbolic representations of them, can be understood as her-
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alding what some have called “the new antisemitism” (Chesler 2003;
Foxman 2004; Harrison 2006; Herf 2007; Iganski and Kosmin 2003; Julius
2010; Matas 2005; Rosenfeld 2011; Shepherd 2009; Stern 2006; Taguieff
2004; Wistrich 2010). There are a number of theorists who have responded
with skepticism to the idea of a new antisemitism, arguing that this framework is a Jewish nationalist overreaction to mainly justified criticism of
Israel (Beller 2007; Bunzl 2007; Finkelstein 2005; Klug 2004).
This paper does not present an overview of these debates, but instead
focuses on evidence and analysis relevant to three key theoretical aspects of
them:
• Antisemitism should be understood as a social phenomenon that is not
reducible to the intent or the self-consciousness of the social actors
involved. Antisemitism is a social fact that is produced through shared
meanings and exclusions; it is not an individual moral failing.
• Difficulties of understanding are raised by the shift from explicit and
self-conscious racism and antisemitism to discursive and institutional
forms of racism and antisemitism. This paper discusses methodological questions concerning how to recognize racism and antisemitism
when it is not straightforwardly observable in an unmediated way.
• Anti-Zionism tends to understand Israeli nationalism in a spirit that
diverges from standard sociological approaches to nationalism. In this
regard, this paper points toward a critique of conceptualism and a
defense of a more materialist cosmopolitanism. Sociological
approaches to the study of nationalism can help signpost us back
toward understanding Israel as being a worldly material phenomenon
rather than an ethereal and unique signifier. Sociological approaches
can steer us away from ways of thinking about the world that give
extraordinary explanatory power to Jews.
RACISM
AS AN
UNCONSCIOUS, INSTITUTIONAL, OR DISCURSIVE CULTURAL
AND POLITICAL FORM
Openly racist thought and sentiment are increasingly recognized as
falling outside of the boundaries of legitimate public discourse. Racist
exclusions and sentiment are squeezed by legislation, legal precedent, and
institutional policy but they nevertheless stubbornly persist. Whatever persists tends not to be conscious hatred, openly expressed, but rather unconscious institutional or discursive appearances of racism. Racist discourse
has generally shifted away from zoologically based hostilities and toward
prejudicial ways of thinking that are more likely to be articulated in the
language of culture (Barker 1981). There is also increased awareness of the
complexities of racisms and more unease with a simple black/white binary
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framework. In Britain, for example, there is a rise of bigotry and xenophobia, similar to racism in its structure, against people from Eastern Europe
who would be designated as “white” by standard critical race theory or
multiculturalist assumptions (Dawney 2008).
In the 1970s, it was common for black professional footballers in
England to be subjected to open, sustained, and unchallenged racist abuse
by crowds and opponents. The 2011 disciplinary case against Luis Suarez,
who was found to have racially abused a black opponent, illustrates that
racism is taken more seriously today by the football authorities, and is also
interesting in two specific further respects. The English Premier League is
more globalized, both in terms of those who play in it and those who consume it, and Suarez defended himself by saying that in Uruguay, where he
comes from, the use of the term “Negro,” for example, to address an opponent, is not considered racist. So one interesting aspect of the story is his
own employment of an “anti-racist” or multiculturalist defense. Some of his
defenders have implied that the accusation of racism against a non-white
migrant from South America may itself have had a racist component and
that a white English player would have been less likely to find himself in
this kind of trouble. The other illuminating aspect is that the tribunal that
punished Suarez was careful to make a distinction between the charge that
he “was a racist” on the one hand and that he had “done a racist thing” on
the other. It decoupled the racist act from an association with the quality of
“racist” that may be applied to the person (Reasons of the Regulatory Commission 2011).
The public inquiry into the Metropolitan Police’s mishandling of the
investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence made use of the concept
of “institutional racism” in order to make a similar distinction. This was a
landmark event in the official recognition of racism in British public life.
The concept of “institutional racism” focuses on norms and practices of an
institution that may lead to racist outcomes, while not accusing any individual person of racist attitudes or sentiment of “being a racist” (Macpherson
1999).
A clear, practical benefit flows from making distinctions between
racist acts and racist outcomes on the one hand and the designation of individuals as racist on the other. It is easier in terms of natural justice for the
football authorities to prohibit racist speech than it is to move against individuals who “are” racist; it is easier for the Metropolitan Police to address
its own norms and practices that lead to racist outcomes than to rid itself of
racist officers. The focus on the act rather than the essence of the person
makes sense in terms of policy enforcement. Rules can prohibit certain
kinds of acts but not certain kinds of persons.
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But in both these cases there remains a claim of injustice on the part of
those who are found guilty of racist acts or practices. Suarez says he is sorry
for what he did but he still feels that he has unjustly been branded as a
racist. The Police Federation representing officers felt that an injustice had
been done, one that characterized ordinary police officers as racists.
Aside from the practical issues, the question remains regarding how
scholars should analyze the relationships between the racist act, the racist
institution, the racist discourse, and the social actors who construct, and
who are constructed by, these social phenomena.
The driving of racism underground represents a victory over open
racism, in a struggle that won over large majorities of people to antiracist
points of view. What has been driven underground, however, is not necessarily eradicated—and it may have the potentiality to re-erupt, perhaps in
new and virulent forms.
ANTISEMITISM
UNCONSCIOUS, INSTITUTIONAL,
CULTURAL AND POLITICAL FORM
AS AN
OR
DISCURSIVE
Does antisemitism fit into the pattern? Following the Holocaust and
the rise of the postwar antiracist movements, there was diminishing space
left in public discourse for open antisemitism. Indeed, one of the very foundation blocks of postwar Europe was the narrative of the defeat of Nazism,
the coming to terms with the fact of the Holocaust, and the creation of a
new, peaceful, human rights-based settlement. Europe was shocked out of
its antisemitic ways of thinking by the Holocaust. Just as with other racisms, overt hatred of Jews has come to violate the norms of respectable
public discourse. But then the “new antisemitism” theorists argue that
antisemitism continues to manifest itself in more subtle ways, specifically
in both the quality and the quantity of hostility to Israel.
Their opponents, on the other hand, tend toward the view that, apart
from some manifestations of right-wing or Christian antisemitism, particularly in Eastern Europe, antisemitism is to a large extent a thing of the past.
Some argue that Jews successfully constructed themselves as “white” or as
part of a Judeo-Christian elite, a process that, in Karen Brodkin’s (1998)
narrative, was also occurring in the United States. After the Holocaust,
according to Matti Bunzl’s (2007) version, Jews succeeded in putting themselves outside of the firing line, but only at the expense of other groups now
constructed by racist discourse as threatening to Europe—in particular,
Muslims.
If contemporary antisemitism is difficult to recognize because it is
intertwined with a huge complexity of discourses, ideas, criticisms, activisms, commonsense notions, and unexamined assumptions, it is far from
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unusual among contemporary bigotries. Contemporary bigotry is typically
found among more complex ideational systems (Faludi 2006). Bigoted
ways of thinking have more purchase if they can be held by people who
believe they oppose bigotry. This phenomenon is not as simple as people
dishonestly hiding their bigotry within an ostensibly universalistic rhetoric;
instead, people are unconscious of the racist memes, assumptions, and outcomes that are manifested in their own thought, speech, and action. It is
neither pretense nor camouflage.
Emile Durkheim (1952 [1897]) writes the following on the notion of
intent, in his landmark sociological work, Suicide:
Intent is too intimate a thing to be more than approximately interpreted
by another. It even escapes self-observation. How often we mistake the
true reasons for our acts! We constantly explain acts due to petty feelings
or blind routine by generous passions or lofty considerations.
Besides, in general, an act cannot be defined by the end sought by
the actor, for an identical system of behaviour may be adjustable to too
many different ends without altering its nature.
How is unconscious racism to be recognized, given that understanding
even our own intentions, as well as those of others, is so clearly established
as a sociologically problematic enterprise? Antisemitism, of which we may
be unaware, might be recognized by the inconsistent outcomes it tends to
produce. For example, it may lead to support for an exclusion of Israelis,
and only Israelis, from British universities.1 Unconscious antisemitism may
be recognized by the replication of racist tropes and stereotypes in ostensibly non-racist discourse. For example, opponents of Israeli human rights
abuses may find themselves embracing ideas reminiscent of classic
antisemitic blood libels2 or conspiracy theory.3 Unconscious racism may
manifest itself through slips or mistakes that are otherwise difficult to
1. One leading pro-boycott activist drew attention to a case where the Commission for Racial Equality ruled that redundancies in one department in her university were racist in outcome (although not in intent) because five of the seven
members made redundant in that department were from ethnic minorities. She did
not follow the same logic with her proposed boycott, which would fall disproportionately on Jews and so would be antisemitic in effect even if not in intent (Pike
2007).
2. From the Daily Mirror: “We looked away as Israel bombed the crap out of
Gaza. When the 1,314 dead Palestinians temporarily sated Tel Aviv’s bloodlust
. . .” (Reade 2009).
3. John Mearsheimer: “The Israel lobby was one of the principal driving forces
behind the Iraq War, and in its absence we probably would not have had a war”
(Stoll 2006).
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account for. For example, one activist explained in a petition that the Holocaust was an event in which “thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists
and disabled people were slaughtered,” neglecting to mention Jews (Hirsh
2008). A union official thoughtlessly made a connection between anti-boycott lawyers in Britain and “. . . bank balances from Lehman Brothers that
can’t be tracked down” (Kovler 2009).
It is clear that there is anger in Britain with Israel—with its inability to
make peace with its neighbors, with its continuing occupation of Palestinian
territory, and with its record of human rights abuses. Given the long histories of antisemitism in Europe, it would be unexpected indeed if none of
this anger with Israel was ever manifested in the language, tropes, or
themes of antisemitism. Given the long history of antisemitism within left
and radical politics, it would be equally surprising if antisemitic discourse
did not sometimes infect left-wing and radical criticism of Israel.
Not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic; neither is all criticism of Israel
free from antisemitism. The question of antisemitism, therefore, must necessarily be one of judgment and interpretation rather than of proof or refutation. It is always open to the skeptic either to deny that a particular action or
text is antisemitic or to deny the political significance of antisemitism that
is observed and identified as such. It is open to others to come to the judgment that hostility to Israel can be so disproportionate that all external criticism of Israel is likely to be tainted by antisemitism in one way or another
(Matas 2005). One of the key claims of this paper is that the relationship
between hostility to Israel and antisemitism is complex and difficult to pin
down. It requires sociological and political judgment to recognize significant antisemitism. It is no accident that one of the nodes of particular controversy is around the issue of definitions of antisemitism, and there is
nothing close to an agreed definition among scholars and activists. The proposed definitions, already controversial, are in fact guidelines that are
intended to set the parameters for making difficult judgments (Hirsh 2012).
Seumas Milne (2008c) is a respected and antiracist columnist in the
mainstream Guardian newspaper in London. In March 2008, in response to
a claim that the antisemitism of Hamas is a significant factor in understanding its behavior, he first attempted (Milne 2008a) to deny that Hamas was
antisemitic: “. . . Hamas leaders have in recent years repeatedly disavowed
[the formulations of the charter] and commissioned the draft of a new charter.” Later, Milne developed a position accepting that Hamas was
antisemitic, but judged that this was of little political significance: “[I]t’s
clear to me . . . that Hamas and the support it attracts is only the current
expression of a spirit of Palestinian national resistance to oppression and
dispossession going back decades (Milne 2008b).”
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Indeed, it is unsurprising if some Palestinians respond to the everyday
realities of the Israeli occupation in the language of antisemitism. Milne
himself wants to translate antisemitic language back into the democratic
language of a timeless “spirit of Palestinian national resistance.” By doing
so, he replaces what actually happens with what he wishes was happening.
He tells us what Palestinians, conceived as being without significant internal diversity, really mean if they vote for a party, Hamas, which treats the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authentic document, opposes peace
with Israel, and wants an Islamic state. What they really mean, according to
Milne’s translation, is that they want an inclusive, non-racist, and democratic state.4
John Molyneux (2008), a theorist of the influential Socialist Workers
Party in the UK, relies on a similar view of the world. What actual Palestinians or Israelis say is translated to fit with his own metropolitan
worldview: “. . . from the standpoint of Marxism and international socialism an illiterate, conservative, superstitious Muslim Palestinian peasant
who supports Hamas is more progressive than an educated liberal atheist
Israeli who supports Zionism (even critically).”
What these subjects say and think is no measure of how “progressive”
they are. What matters is their objective position in the balance of forces.
Often, individuals involved in antisemitic discourse and institutions are
unaware of the antisemitism within which they are implicated. The Milne
and the Molyneux examples show how it is also possible for antiracists,
even when they see antisemitism, when they are aware of its presence, to
judge it to be politically insignificant.
METHODOLOGICAL TOOLS FOR SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH
CONTEMPORARY ANTISEMITISM
INTO
Sociology begins as an empirical enterprise, starting with an analysis
of what is. Our ideas about the world as it could be are constrained but also
inspired by their relationship to the world as it is. Sociology’s foundation in
the social world is its materialism. Its cosmopolitanism lies in its assumption that all human beings are in some profound sense of equal worth, irrespective of those factors that divide them, such as ethnicity, gender, class,
and nation. Sociology’s materialism keeps its cosmopolitanism from the
temptation to raise universal principles to an abstract absolute. Its cosmopolitanism keeps its materialism from the temptation to limit itself to
4. The debate is available online at http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/
article.php?id=1726
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descriptive empirical observation of what exists to move to an unambitious
empiricism (Hirsh 2007).
When we turn to the sociological study of antisemitism and its relation
to rhetoric about Israel, the objects of study are movements critical of
Israel, including Palestine solidarity movements and anti-Zionist
movements.
Criticism of Israeli policies and hostility to Israel come from a number
of starkly distinct and different political traditions: liberal, democratic, postcolonial, Stalinist, socialist, nationalist, conservative, fascist, Islamist. They
also come from different parts of the world, and different cultural and language traditions: Europe, America, the Middle East, Arabic, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. These traditions are variegated and distinct, but they are
also intertwined. Elements of rhetoric and commonsense notions circulate
among these living spaces, evolving and moving easily from one to another,
not least through the new media.
An understanding of contemporary antisemitism requires a methodological toolbox that draws upon a number of resources available to sociologists. For example, we need to root our understanding of Israeli and
Palestinian nationalisms within the frameworks developed for the analysis
of nationalism in general (e.g., Anderson 1995; Hobsbawm 1995). This is a
critical tradition, one that has come to understand the mechanisms by which
nationalist movements reproduce themselves through narratives aspiring to
achieve a status that is analogous to a sacred one. Through these processes,
events are represented in music and movies and objects, texts that make us
feel ourselves to be part of the narratives or ones that make us feel
excluded. The sociological understanding of nationalism provides a framework that probes the claims of nationalists but that also understands that
nationalism is fundamentally dialectical. It has the potential to construct
both community and exclusion, responses to oppression but also oppressive
structures. Sociological work on nationalism tends to be comparative and
resistant to the representation of any particular nationalism as if it were
unique, in isolation from all others. It understands nationalism as being produced and reproduced through interactions between economic, political,
and cultural processes. It regards nationalisms critically but looks at what is,
before it moves on to consider what might be.
Sociology is full of contested terms like Zionism and anti-Zionism,
apartheid, human rights, the state, democracy, law, totalitarianism, imperialism, whiteness, genocide, ethnic cleansing. Such concepts, and the
frameworks built around them, are sometimes indispensable for analysis but
are also central to what is being analyzed. They can add to our understanding but are also capable of being mobilized as weapons. Sociology understands concepts in relation to their actualization in the material world. Thus,
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discourse analysis addresses ways in which contested meanings are interpreted and played out, and how they solidify into distinct or opposed discursive formations. Widely different forms of hostility to Israel, embedded in
distinct social movements, may host common elements of rhetoric and
shared understanding, and give rise to unexpected political alliances.
Sometimes thinking on Israel and Palestine fails to go beyond a conceptual discussion of logical principles. Some people are content to demonstrate triumphantly that there is a contradiction between the requirements
for Israel to be a democratic state for all its citizens and for Israel also to be
a Jewish state. They find that contradiction to be sufficient to pronounce
that Zionism is essentially a form of racism and that they understand all
racism in Israel to be a manifestation of the racist essence of Zionism. Other
people equally and triumphantly demonstrate that because anti-Zionism
finds Israel as a Jewish nation to be the only illegitimate nation in the
world, then anti-Zionism is by definition antisemitic. These are conceptual
frameworks that give huge explanatory weight to ideas, partially and simplistically presented.
Sociology should be able to offer a more sophisticated framework of
understanding than that which is content simply to show that the requirements of Israel to be both Jewish and democratic are in some senses contradictory. Sociology can also provide ways of analyzing the dynamics of
contradictions and how they interact with other contradictions. Sociology
offers ways of exploring how contradiction arose, how they have managed
to find material existences in a complex world, how successfully institutions and discourses fulfilled contradictory requirements, and in which
ways things might develop.
Similarly, sociology should not be content to “prove” that anti-Zionism is antisemitic; instead, it can help us study distinct forms of anti-Zionism, their particular traditions and assumptions, to look at ways in which
they actualize themselves in concrete political exclusions, and to explore
the contradictions between the meanings social actors wish to communicate
and the meanings with which their communications are heard, read, and
interpreted in distinct contexts.
Take, for example, the proposal for an academic boycott of Israel.
There are good reasons to argue that this proposal is antisemitic, not necessarily in intent but in effect (Garrard 2008). It may be argued that the boycott singles out Israel for punishment while Israel is far from being the most
serious abuser of human rights in the world; or that it has a disproportionate
effect on Jews, including those who have no responsibility for Israeli
human rights abuses; or that it treats Israeli scholars as though they were
responsible for the policies of their government but does not relate to any
other scholars in the same way.
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A sociological analysis of the relationship between the proposal for an
academic boycott and antisemitism has the potential to offer more depth
than these definitional and ideational claims. It can look at the ways in
which the concept of an academic boycott is actually realized in a campaign. It can look at the ways in which the campaign actualizes itself, say,
in an academic trade union or a university. Jewish communal leaders in the
UK accused the university and College Union, which represents university
and college workers, including academics, of being institutionally
antisemitic (letter to Sally Hunt 2011). A sociological approach to investigating this claim would be able to examine the relationship between the
empirical and the conceptual. It would be able to observe union congresses
and meetings employing methodological rigor from the traditions of
ethnomethodology and discourse analysis. It would be able to analyze the
culture, norms, and practices of the union closely. It would be able to study
the ways in which opponents of the campaign to boycott Israel have been
isolated within the union and to look at the ways that the union leadership
and structures had responded. An empirical approach would have to find
ways to think about the cumulative effects that may arise from criticism of
“Zionist” scholars as pro-apartheid, liars for Israel, pro-Nazi racists, as people who are indifferent to Palestinian suffering, and so on.5 It is necessary
to see how concepts circulate in social situations and how concrete exclusions emerge, whether intentional or not.
ANTISEMITISM
AS A
SOCIAL PHENOMENON
SUBJECTIVE FEELING
AND
NOT JUST
A
Sociology understands antisemitism as an objective social phenomenon that cannot be defined simply by reference to the subjective feelings of
individuals concerned. Sociology attends to discursive and institutional
forms of antisemitism and antisemitic ways of thinking, not only to conscious hostility to Jews. Let me offer three examples.
Judith Butler
The academic and philosopher Judith Butler responded to the claim
made by the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, that:
Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocat5. For links to the testimony of a large number of UCU members who experienced the boycott “debates” as antisemitic, see Hirsh (2010).
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ing and taking actions that are antisemitic in their effect if not their intent
(quoted in Butler 2003).
Butler’s response:
When the president of Harvard University declared that to criticise Israel
. . . and to call on universities to divest from Israel are ‘actions that are
antisemitic in their effect, if not their intent’, he introduced a distinction
between effective and intentional antisemitism that is controversial at
best. The counter-charge has been that in making his statement, Summers
has struck a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not in intent.
Although he insisted that he meant nothing censorious by his remarks,
and that he is in favour of Israeli policy being ‘debated freely and
civilly’, his words have had a chilling effect on political discourse.
Among those actions which he called “effectively antisemitic” were
European boycotts of Israel . . . (Butler 2003).
Butler takes up this same in effect but not intent position in relation to
freedom of speech. Although Summers insisted that he is for freedom of
speech, and makes a distinction between speech and boycott (he thinks boycott is antisemitic), she says that his analysis is objectively anti-freedom in
spite of his lack of intent and in spite of the explicit denial that he means to
be understood in this way.
Butler is known for her pioneering work on the complex ways in
which social and linguistic structures set up gendered and homophobic
exclusions and how conceptual and discursive factors coalesce into systems
of discrimination. According to her own theory, we are all caught up in the
complexity of power relations in which our own self-consciousness is only
a part of the story. But when the issue is one of antisemitism, she puts down
her sophisticated social and discursive tools and argues instead that a person
can only be implicated in antisemitism if they are self-conscious Jew-haters.
She resists the idea that the boycott campaign could have antisemitic effects
even if nobody intends them. Yet when responding to Summers, she reverts
to her more familiar way of thinking, emphasizing that Summers is reinforcing a power structure that chills academic freedom in spite of his declarations that he wants to find the boundary between free speech and racist
discourse.
Caryl Churchill
Let me turn to my second illustration of the complex interplay between
antisemitism conceived as a self-consciousness on the one hand or as a
social structure on the other. Caryl Churchill wrote a short play, Seven Jew-
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ish Children—A Play for Gaza, which offers an account from her imagination of the psychological dynamics within an archetypal Jewish family that
have led to the situation where today’s Jews are able to contemplate the
suffering of the Palestinians without pity or remorse (Churchill 2009b).
British author and journalist Howard Jacobson (2009) argued that Churchill’s play was antisemitic, not least because it made use, in his interpretation, of themes of blood libel, but also, he argued, because it accused Jews
of being pathologically predisposed to genocide.
Churchill (2009a) responded: “Howard Jacobson writes as if there’s
something new about describing critics of Israel as antisemitic. But it’s the
usual tactic.”
Here, Churchill has conflated those aspects of the play Jacobson
judged antisemitic with “criticism of Israel” and insisted he was accusing
her of acting with antisemitic intent. She denied being antisemitic and
accused Jacobson of raising the issue of antisemitism with the intention of
delegitimizing “criticism of Israel.” Her letter goes on: “When people attack
English Jews in the street saying, ‘This is for Gaza’, they are making a
terrible mistake, confusing the people who bombed Gaza with Jews in general. When Howard Jacobson confuses those who criticize Israel with
antisemites, he is making the same mistake.”
Churchill’s position is that the element of intentionality is analogous
between the violent street thug and Jacobson. Jacobson’s critique focuses
on the distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, but she
accuses him simply of conflating one with the other until she arrives at the
punchline of her letter: Jacobson is making the same mistake as the street
thug, “unless he’s doing it on purpose,” she adds. She thus ascribes malicious intent not to the violent antisemite but to the person who opposes and
names antisemitism.
It is now widely accepted among antiracist scholars and activists that
acts, speech, ideas, practices, or institutions may be racist or may lead to
racist outcomes, independently of whether or not the people involved are
judged to be self-consciously racist. One benefit of making this distinction
is that it enables individuals to examine their own ideas, actions, or speech
to see whether, even though they are not racists, they might nevertheless
have done or said something racist. It enables us to remain vigilant and
educated about our own conduct. It enables antiracists to focus on particular
kinds of speech, action, and social structure that may be problematic without getting bogged down in a fruitless discussion about a person’s inner
essence.
The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report (Macpherson 1999) needed the
concept of institutional racism to understand why the investigation of Ste-
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phen Lawrence’s murder by racist street thugs in South East London had
gone so wrong. Macpherson wrote:
6.13 Lord Scarman accepted the existence of what he termed ‘unwitting’
or ‘unconscious’ racism. To those adjectives can be added a third, namely
‘unintentional’. All three words are familiar in the context of any discussion in this field.
The problem was not to be found in the malicious or intentional racism
of police officers but in the institutional culture of the Metropolitan Police.
Antiracists who are accused of antisemitism in connection with their
statements about Israel find themselves in an unusual position. While it is
difficult to look into the heart of a person in order to discover whether they
are racist, it feels more comfortable when the person is yourself. Often
antiracists accused of antisemitism forget the importance of understanding
racism objectively as something that exists outside of the individual racist.
They find it easier to look within themselves and to find they are not intentionally antisemitic—indeed, they are opponents of antisemitism. Intimate
access to the object of inquiry yields an apparently clear result and seems to
make it unnecessary for the antiracist to look any further at how contemporary antisemitism actually functions independently of the will of the particular social agent.
“The Israel Lobby”
My third example concerns “The Israel Lobby.” It has been argued by
some critics that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby
and US Foreign Policy (2007) is antisemitic. In the film Defamation
(2010), Yoav Shamir, the film maker, asks Mearsheimer the following
question:
Shamir: Did you try to think about it like you know, between yourself
and yourself . . . you know, . . . within yourself, did you take a moment to
think maybe some of it was influenced by something which . . . could be
interpreted as . . . antisemitism?
Mearsheimer: No, because I’m not antisemitic and I never had any
doubt that I wasn’t antisemitic and I just didn’t see any need to do
this. . . . Now one can disagree with that but those arguments that we’re
making are not antisemitic and we’re not antisemites. Of course it’s
almost impossible to prove that you’re not an antisemite . . .
It is noteworthy that both the interviewer and the interviewee are
working within the same paradigm. Shamir asks the question using a
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HOSTILITY TO ISRAEL AND ANTISEMITISM
37
strongly intentionalist notion of antisemitism. Mearsheimer’s response indicates that he just knows he is not antisemitic and so it was never an issue.
He also asserts his arguments are not antisemitic, although he does not rebut
the claim that they are in substance. He prefers to look within himself than
at the world outside for a definitive answer to the question of antisemitism.
HOSTILITY
TO
ISRAEL
AND THE
FORMS
OF
ANTISEMITISM
There is no single ahistorical antisemitism; instead, there are distinct
antisemitisms of different kinds and in different times and places. Nevertheless, it is not surprising if sometimes Jews tend to experience every new
hostility as just another manifestation of “the longest hatred” (Wistrich
1994). It is still less surprising given that each new antisemitism tends to
draw upon mythology and imagery created by previous hostilities to Jews.
For example, Nazi antisemitism was radically different from medieval
Christian antisemitism but still made use of some of the same imagery and
stereotypes. Each antisemitism creates something enduring, which remains
in the cultural reservoir ready to be drawn upon and reinvigorated. Within
this cultural reservoir two recurring motifs stand out: blood libel, which
charges Jews with ethnically motivated crimes of cruelty, often against children, often involving the consumption or use of blood or body parts; and
conspiracy theory, which constructs Jews, who are very small in number, as
being hugely, selfishly, and secretly influential on a global scale (Julius
2010).
Criticism of Israel takes many forms. One might say that the occupation of Palestinian territory is oppressive and requires a regime of racist
violence and humiliation to sustain it. One might say that Israel uses
targeted assassinations against its enemies and practices imprisonment of
Palestinians without trial, which are contrary to international human rights
norms. One might say that it is an ethnically based state and not a state for
all its citizens. Or it may be said that Israel was founded through a campaign of ethnic cleansing and only endures due to an ongoing campaign of
ethnic exclusion. There are criticisms that have been made against Israeli
policy or Israel’s existence in an entirely rational way. Some of the criticisms, one may judge, are justified; others, one may judge, are not. On this
level, dialogue, debate, criticism, and campaigning continue.
Naturally enough, campaigning against Israeli human rights abuses
often seeks to engender feelings of compassion for and identification with
Israel’s Palestinian victims and concomitant feelings of anger toward Israel
and Israelis (Fine 2011). Sometimes, antisemitic themes and images are put
to work to help this process. Some anti-Zionist movements, for example
Hamas or the Ahmadinejad regime in Iran, employ antisemitic tropes to
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explain the bad behavior of Israel, to exaggerate it, and to bind people into
an emotional commitment against it.
More surprisingly, however, images and tropes that resemble those of
antisemitism also appear in the anti-Israel agitation of antiracists, of people
who strongly oppose antisemitism. Here there can be no question of
antisemitism being put to work in order to make the case against Israel.
Instead, there must be an unconscious drawing upon the antisemitic motifs
that reside in the collective cultural reservoir. What makes this latter
hypothesis of unconscious antisemitism more puzzling still is the vehemence with which antiracists who employ antisemitic tropes sometimes
deny that they are doing so even when it is pointed out to them, and with
which they downplay the significance of openly antisemitic agitation on the
part of others against Israel.
The rational type of criticism of Israel outlined above is joined in public discourse by a swirling mass of claims that are of a different kind—i.e.,
Israel has a policy of killing children; Israeli lobbying is hugely powerful;
Israel is responsible for the Iraq War; Israel is responsible for President
Mubarak; Israel is responsible for instability throughout the Middle East;
Israel destroys the reputation of anybody in public life who criticizes it;
Israel has huge influence over the media; Israel exaggerates the Holocaust
and manipulates its memory for its own instrumental purposes; Israel steals
the body parts of its enemies; Israel poisons Palestinian water supplies;
Israel is genocidal; Israel is apartheid; Israel is essentially racist; Israel is
colonialist; Israel is the testing ground and the prototype for “Western”
techniques of power and surveillance.
The border between rational criticism and irrational claim is contested
and difficult to define. Sometimes the same claim may be either a rational
criticism or a blunt weapon, depending on how it is mobilized and in what
combination; sometimes rational criticisms and irrational libels combine in
toxic, angry swirls that are difficult to decouple and that have emergent
properties not present before their release and combination.
Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords in the
UK, is an avowed opponent of antisemitism who employs both blood libel
and conspiracy theory against Israel. “The pro-Israeli Lobby has got its
grips on the Western world,” she said in a speech, “its financial grips. I
think they’ve probably got a certain grip on our party” (Hirsh 2006). The
term “pro-Israel Lobby” was popularized by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2007). They argued that the lobby was so powerful that it had
been instrumental in sending the United States to war in Iraq against the
United States’s own fundamental interests. Tonge used the term to refer to a
hugely powerful and secret global force that has the Western world in its
financial grip. The problem with the term is that it facilitates conceptual
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39
HOSTILITY TO ISRAEL AND ANTISEMITISM
slippage. There are certainly pro-Israel lobbying organizations and there are
certainly Jewish communal organizations. But often the ways the terms
“Israel Lobby” and “Jewish Lobby” are used transform the meaning of the
terms into something more sinister. Tonge was not talking about actual
organizations but about a hugely powerful and secret global financial force.
Consciously or not, she was using Mearsheimer and Walt’s terminology in
ways that articulated traditional antisemitic conspiracy theory.
In the summer of 2009, an article appeared in a mainstream Swedish
newspaper alleging that Israeli forces kill Palestinians in order to harvest
their body parts (Berthelson and Barak 2009). In February 2010 Jenny
Tonge called for an inquiry into allegations that Israelis who were in Haiti
to help rescue people from the wreckage of the earthquake there were harvesting body organs to be sold for use in transplant operations.
Nick Clegg, now the deputy prime minster, fired Tonge from her job
as a spokesperson on health issues, saying that her comments were “wholly
unacceptable.” What is interesting, however, is that Clegg denies that
“Jenny Tonge is antisemitic or racist” (Bright 2010). Clegg relies on a personalized and intentionalist definition here, rather than an interpretation of
what she said. When Clegg was challenged for this judgment by journalist
Martin Bright, he said: “The very suggestion that I might explicitly or tacitly give cover to racism, I find politically abhorrent and personally deeply
offensive” (Bright 2009). The question, Bright reports, made Clegg
“beyond angry. Incandescent almost gets it, but that still doesn’t capture the
full fury of the man” (Bright 2009; Murray 2010).
Often, people can see that conspiracy theory such as that of Tonge is
wrong or counterproductive or likely to upset Jews, but the idea that either
the speech or the inividual are antisemitic meets huge emotional resistance.
Raising the issue of antisemitism in relation to discourse that is ostensibly
about Israel is often felt to be unsophisticated, unscholarly, impolite, and an
indicator of vulgarity. It is often portrayed as a bad-faith and dishonest way
that “Zionists” employ in order to try to delegitimize criticism of Israel
(Hirsh 2010). This functions to relieve people of the duty to respond seriously to the issue, allowing them instead to respond ad hominem. It also
makes it difficult to employ “antisemitism” as an analytic term in scholarly
analysis.
CONCLUSION: CHALLENGING
A
SYMBOLIC WORLDVIEW
OF
JEWS
A common feature of diverse antisemitisms has been that they construct “the Jews” as centrally important to everything that is wrong with the
world. As portrayed by antisemites, Jews are deemed to have a universal
importance for mankind. Christian antisemitism said that the Jews had mur-
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dered God, who suffered to save us all, and had refused His message; they
became “a ubiquitous and constant concomitant of Christianity” (Bauman
1993, 37) whose overcoming is necessary for the accomplishment of the
Christian mission. Leftist antisemitism, which the German Social Democrat
August Bebel called “the socialism of fools,” said that Jewish capitalists
were responsible for the exploitation of the masses. Modernist antisemitism
held Jews responsible for preventing modernity from coming to fruition by
clinging on to their religious, social, and linguistic backwardness. Antimodernist antisemitism said that Jews were responsible for the damage that
modernity did to traditional forms and institutions. Nazi antisemitism said
that Jews constituted a racial infection that prevented everybody else from
living happily. Irrespective of their small numbers “the Jews” are afforded
universal significance.
Israel or Zionism as constructed by anti-Zionists is deemed globally
important as well: Israel is the keystone of the whole edifice of imperialism;
Israel prevents peace and democracy across the Middle East; the Israel
Lobby is responsible for war; Israel shows us all our future because “American power” may be undergoing a process of “Israelization”6; Zionism is
deemed responsible for importing Islamophobia into the new Europe.
There is a tendency for the Israel/Palestine conflict to attain a place of
great symbolic importance. Within this imaginary construct, the Palestinians come to occupy a symbolic position as victims of “the West,” of “imperialism,” or of “militarism.” They stand for all of the victims. Of course it
follows that if Palestinians are symbolic representatives of the oppressed
everywhere, then Israelis tend to become symbolic representatives of
oppressors everywhere. In this context, discussion about Israel and Palestine is sometimes less about the small if intractable conflict on the eastern
shores of the Mediterranean and more a symbolic narrative. The vocabulary
and symbolism of the Israel/Palestine conflict are mobilized as a way of
discussing the more universal issues facing humankind or more particularistic issues relating to our own histories and identities. The conflict becomes
an empty vessel into which we can pour our own concerns: British concerns
over the colonial legacy; European concerns about the Holocaust; American
concerns about the frontier; Irish concerns about Unionism and Republicanism; South African concerns about overcoming apartheid. Apart from putting Jews back at the center of the world, this tendency is also wholly
disrespectful to the suffering of the Palestinians. By constructing Palestinians as universally symbolic, their actual needs for solidarity and freedom go
largely unconsidered. Rather than actual people finding a multiplicity of
ways to live and to struggle in difficult circumstances, “the Palestinians”
6. Martin Shaw, quoted in Johnson (2007).
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HOSTILITY TO ISRAEL AND ANTISEMITISM
41
are portrayed as one single heroic victim of the homogenous and evil
“Zionism.” They become romantic and enraged carriers of our own antiWestern fantasies (Fine 2009).
In this way of thinking, the usual sociological approach to nationalism
is reversed when looking at the Israel/Palestine conflict and antisemitism. In
sociology, nationalisms are viewed critically and comparatively, but Israeli
nationalism is often singled out as uniquely racist. Narratives of nationhood
are usually not examined only for their truth or falsity but understood also
as social phenomena with particular trajectories and functions, but Israeli
nationalism is often denounced in simplistic binary terms as an artificial
construct as though all the others were in some sense authentic. Contradictions are usually examined and their consequences traced, but regarding
Israel they are often employed to construct essentialist patterns of thinking—often to denounce the idea and reality of a Jewish state. To be sure,
sociology itself is not immune to forms of antisemitism that claim to speak
for the oppressed and to confront the powerful (Postone 2006). Antisemitism, after all, can be attractive to radical people who view the world and
find a lot wrong with it. Sociology, however, also holds an important key to
understanding antisemitism and the world that produces it.
*David Hirsh is a sociology lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and
author of Law Against Genocide (Routledge Cavendish, 2003). He is founder and
editor of EngageOnline.org.uk, a website that fights against antisemitism and the
Israel boycott.
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Political and Legal Judgment:
Misuses of the Holocaust in the UK
Lesley Klaff*
Political debates in the UK concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict frequently use the Holocaust as a means to criticise Israel and “the Jews”.
They do this by comparing Israel with Nazi Germany or by characterising
the Holocaust as a ‘moral lesson’ for, or a ‘moral indictment’ of, “the
Jews”. Those who raise concerns that such expressions of hostility to
Israel cross the line into antisemitism are frequently told that they are
acting in bad faith to deflect criticism of Israel. This moves the debate
from legitimate questions about contemporary antisemitism to questions
about acting dishonestly to defend Israel. As a result contemporary
antisemitism is not acknowledged and resisted. The unwillingness to
acknowledge contemporary forms of antisemitism is linked to an association of the Holocaust with a genocidal antisemitism that has been consigned to the ‘old’ Europe and an associated failure to accept that
antisemitism exists at the level of discourse and practice (indeed, discourse often informs practice or activity). The aim of this paper is to
understand why and how the Holocaust informs contemporary manifestations of antisemitism in the UK.
Key Words: Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, Critical Theory, Holocaust Inversion, The Livingstone Formulation
Two judgments in England earlier this year influenced my choice of
topic for this paper. The first was made by the Liberal Democrat MP for
Bradford East, David Ward, after signing the Book of Remembrance in the
Houses of Parliament on Holocaust Memorial Day; and the second was
made by the Central London Employment Tribunal in Mr R Fraser v University and College Union at the end of March.
In the first case, politician David Ward made use of the Holocaust both
to criticise Israel and “the Jews” by equating Israel with Nazi Germany, and
by characterising the Holocaust as a ‘moral lesson’ from which “the Jews”
had failed to learn. When accused of antisemitism, mostly by the Jewish
community, David Ward’s response was that his remarks were not
antisemitic, and that the charge of antisemitism was made in bad faith by a
powerful lobby in order to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.
In the second case, the Employment Tribunal dismissed a legal claim
of ‘hostile environment harassment’ brought against the lecturers’ University and College Union (UCU) by Jewish member, Ronnie Fraser, alleging,
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inter alia, that the Union’s repeated discriminatory measures against Israel,
its unwillingness to hear complaints of antisemitism in response to those
measures, and its disavowal of the European Union’s Working Definition of
Anti-Semitism on the grounds that it allegedly prevents Israel from being
criticised, created a culture of antisemitism in the Union which harassed
him as a Jew. In its wholesale dismissal of the case, the Tribunal made
passing reference to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, but refused to rule
on the question of antisemitism in the Union. Characterising the Union’s
repeated discriminatory measures against Israel as the “stuff of political
debate,” the Tribunal accused the claimant, his thirty-four witnesses, and
his Jewish lawyers of conspiring to bring the case in bad faith in order to
prevent the Union from criticising Israel.
The use of the Holocaust as a means to criticise Israel, the characterisation of the Holocaust as a moral lesson for Jews rather than a moral
wrong done to them, and the denial of antisemitism and its associated allegation of bad faith against those who raise it, are now so commonplace in
debates involving the Israel-Palestine conflict in the UK that they are considered to be the ‘new’ tropes of the ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ antisemitism.
Known respectively as ‘Holocaust Inversion’ and the ‘Livingstone Formulation’, these tropes involve the ways in which the Holocaust is
remembered and used. Drawing predominantly on the work of sociologist
Robert Fine and lawyer David Seymour, and using the political judgment of
David Ward and the legal judgment of the Employment Tribunal for illustrative purposes, this paper attempts to understand these tropes.
HOLOCAUST INVERSION: THE STATEMENT
OF
DAVID WARD, MP
David Ward stated:
Having visited Auschwitz twice—once with my family and once with
local schools—I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable
levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of
liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in
the new state of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West
Bank and Gaza.1
Here we see a typical example of ‘Holocaust inversion’, which actually involves two distinct but associated tropes, which may or may not
appear together; the Israelis as the ‘new’ Nazis and the Palestinians as the
1. Ben Quinn, ‘Lib Dem MP David Ward defends remarks about Israel’, The
Guardian, 25 January 2013; http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/Jan/25/libdem-david-ward-Israel [accessed 23/02/13].
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‘new’ Jews on the one hand, which is an ‘inversion of reality’, and the
Holocaust as a ‘moral lesson’ for, or ‘moral indictment’ of, “the Jews” on
the other, which is an ‘inversion of morality’. The following three sections
attempt to shed some light on why they are used and their impact.
Holocaust Inversion: Antisemitic and Anti-Zionist Polemic
German political scientist and Director of the Berlin International
Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA), Clemens Heni believes that
the equation of Israel/the Jews/Zionism with Nazism amounts to an “inversion of truth” which is used as a form of “extremely aggressive anti-Jewish
propaganda.”2 Indeed, lawyer, author, and anti-antisemitism activist,
Anthony Julius, notes that this inversion of the Holocaust has become commonplace in the iconography of the ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ antisemitism.
We see headlines like “The Final Solution to the Palestine Question,” references to the “Holocaust in Gaza”, images of IDF soldiers morphing into
jackbooted storm troopers, or of Israeli politicians morphing into Hitler, or
of the Star of David morphing into the Swastika. The persecuted, the Jews,
have become the persecutors of the Palestinians.3
In terms of its impact on Jews in the UK, Heni’s characterisation of the
‘Nazification of Israel’ as “extremely aggressive anti-Jewish propaganda”
rings true. The 2009 Report of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, Understanding the ‘Nazi’ Card: Intervening
against Anti-Semitic Discourse, which was funded by the UK’s Department
of Communities and Local Government and drafted by Paul Iganski and
Abe Sweiry, reported that equating Israel with Nazis is the greatest component of incitement and racial aggravation against Jews in the UK today. The
Report recommended that the Home Office, the Association of Chief Police
Officers, and the Crown Prosecution Service prepare guidance for the
police on whether the use of Holocaust imagery to refer to contemporary
Israeli policy amounts to incitement of racial hatred against Jews4.
2. Clemens Heni, Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon, Berlin: Edition Critic,
2013, p. 175.
3. Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in
England, Oxford University Press 2010, pp. 506-516. See also Manfred Gerstenfeld, ‘Holocaust Inversion: The Portraying of Israel and Jews as Nazis’, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, no. 55, 1 April 2007.
4. Paul Iganski and Abe Sweiry, Understanding the ‘Nazi Card’: Intervening
Against Antisemitic Discourse, Report of the European Institute for the Study of
Contemporary Antisemitism, July, 2009; http://www.eisca.eu/wp-content/uploads/
2009/07/nazicard.pdf [accessed 01/03/2013].
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So the question is, how to understand the use of the Holocaust, an
event which was the defining moment in the development of antisemitism,
an event so unspeakably horrible that it has been described as a “rupture in
civilisation,”5 a regime that “had no other clear principle except murderous
hatred of the Jews,”6 to precipitate further animosity towards Jews? Or
maybe it is not the intention of those who Nazify Israel to cause anti-Jewish
resentment; maybe they really believe that the Israelis are doing to the
Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe? For instance, when
pressed, David Ward insisted on the validity of his comparison. He said:
Because, don’t forget, long before the death camps were set up, the treatment of the Jews in many of these European countries, and of course
following 1933, in particular in Nazi Germany, was racist, and directed at
the Jewish people. [It was] very low level or what is regarded as low
level cases and nastiness and harassment to begin with, and then escalated. And when you look at it—wherever it may be—the West Bank,
and a declared intent by the Israeli forces to harass, often just annoy
Palestinians—in terms of a check point that will be open on certain days,
and then it will be open but at a later time, and the next day, it will open
slightly earlier, so you get there and it’s been shut again . . . really just to
harass, in many cases to move the Palestinians from land, to just give up
and move on . . .7
Whether or not IDF soldiers deliberately change the opening and closing times of check points in the West Bank in order to harass Palestinians, I
do not know, but even if they do, no matter how wrong it is, there is absolutely no equivalence between that and the ghettos, the labour camps, the
starvation, the disease, the denial of paid work, and the Jew-baiting, that
occurred in Germany and Eastern Europe between 1933 and the Holocaust.
To claim otherwise invokes the blood libel.8 Not only is there no real equivalence between the two, there is no moral equivalence either.
This brings us to the question of David Ward’s possible state of mind
when he made the comparison. Did he really believe it was valid? Or was
5. Dan Diner, Zivilisationbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz, Frankfurt: Fischer
Verlag, 1988, p. 2.
6. Leo Strauss, ‘Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,’ Jewish Philosophy
and the Crisis of Modernity, New York, 1997, p. 139.
7. Ben Quinn, ‘Lib Dem MP David Ward defends remarks about Israel’, op.
cit., fn. 1.
8. For a good discussion of the blood libel and its resurrection in discourses
around the Israel-Palestine conflict, see Raphael Israeli, Blood Libel and its Derivatives: The Scourge of Anti-Semitism, Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick and
London, 2012.
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MISUSES OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE UK
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he knowingly making a false comparison, and if so, what could possibly
have been his reason? Historian Deborah Lipstadt, author of the 1993 book,
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory
(among others) and successful defendant in the libel suit brought by Holocaust denier, David Irving, against her and Penguin Books in 1996, uses the
neologism “soft-core denial” to explain Holocaust inversion, as well as
other forms of Holocaust distortion.9 Noting that the false comparison
between Israel and the Nazis “elevates by a factor of a zillion any wrongdoings Israel might have done, and lessens by a factor of a zillion what the
Germans did”, she considers Holocaust inversion to be “a very convenient
way of engaging in antisemitism” because it involves “accusing Jews of
atrocities.”10 In fact, this is exactly what Ward did. Conflating Jews and
Israelis, he accused “the Jews” of “inflicting atrocities on the Palestinians.”
Holocaust inversion may well be a convenient way to engage in
antisemitism but this does not necessarily help us to understand its specific
purpose. Nevertheless, drawing on Anthony Julius’s observation that it has
become commonplace in the iconography of contemporary antisemitism,
Holocaust inversion appears to serve a very important political function.
For David Ward and his fellow travellers, it is a powerful weapon in the
fight to discredit Israel and to deny her legitimacy in order to justify a ‘onesecular-state-solution’ to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Julius points out that
the Zionist/Nazi trope not only says to the world that the “Zionists are to the
Palestinians what Nazis were to the Jews”, but also compounds two additional tropes: that “the ‘Zionists’ and Nazis share the same Fascist ideology” and that “the ‘Zionists’ are said to have been complicit with the Nazis
in the Holocaust.”11 One can therefore understand why, as a practical matter, the playing of the ‘Nazi card’ is so commonplace in post 1948 antiZionist polemic. It also seems to me that the ‘Israel-equals-Nazi’ trope resonates with the ‘blood libel’, that is, with the mediaeval antisemitic libel that
Jews lust for the blood of gentiles (formerly Christians and now Muslims),
and that this makes its use even more of a concern for Jews generally. This
9. Jonny Paul, ‘Holocaust Scholar Warns of New ‘Soft Core’ Denial’, The
Jerusalem Post, 6th February, 2007; see also Clemens Heni, ‘Secondary anti-semitism: from hard-core to soft-core denial of the Shoah’, Jewish Political Studies
Review, vol. 20, no. 3-4, Autumn 2008.
10. Amy Klein, ‘Denying the deniers: Q & A with Deborah Lipstadt’, JTA
News, 19th April 2009; http://www.jta.org/news/article/2009/04/19/1000426
[accessed 13/03/2013].
11. For an excellent discussion and analysis of the Israel/Jew/Zionist-equalsNazi trope and its distinct defamations, see Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora,
op. cit., fn. 3, pp. 506-516.
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is especially so when the proponent of Holocaust inversion conflates Israelis with Jews, as David Ward did.
The probability that David Ward was deploying Holocaust inversion
for political reasons is buttressed by the fact that the sentiments he
expressed have also been expressed by eminent academics in the ‘new antiZionist’ movement. It was the noted anti-Zionist Edward Said who first
suggested that Israelis and Jews should be more compassionate and sensitive in their treatment of the Palestinians because of their own history of
persecution and suffering, of death camps and the Holocaust.12 Here we see
the idea that the Holocaust was a moral lesson for the Jews, rather than a
moral wrong done to them. We also see a blurring of Jews and Israelis.
Similarly, anti-Zionists Hazem Saghiyah and Saleh Bashir published an
article in 1998, Universalizing the Holocaust, in which they wrote:
The dissociation between the acknowledgment of the Holocaust and what
Israel is doing should be the starting point for the development of a discourse which says that the Holocaust does not free the Jewish state or the
Jews of accountability. On the contrary, the Nazi crime compounds their
moral responsibility and exposes them to greater answerability. They are
the ones who have escaped the ugliest crime in history, and now they are
perpetrating reprehensible deeds against another people.13
Again, we see the Holocaust viewed as a moral lesson for Israel and
“the Jews,” which imposes upon them a greater moral responsibility and
accountability in their treatment of others. There is even an implication here
that Israel and the Jews use the Holocaust to evade responsibility for what
Israel does. We also see the equation between the crimes that Nazi Germany perpetrated on the Jews and “the Jews’,” rather than the Israelis’
treatment of the Palestinians. I still wonder how such claims are possible.
Holocaust Inversion: Ethics as the ‘Other’ of Law
What other possible explanations are there for the practice of Holocaust inversion? How can people like David Ward in all seriousness judge
Israel to be doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews? We
saw from his insistence on the validity of his comparison that his judgment
12. Edward Said, The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward Said by
David Barsamian, Chicago: Haymarket Books 2010, p. 42 (first published in
1987), cited in Heni, Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon, op. cit., fn. 2, p. 195. It
was also Edward Said who first portrayed Arabs and Muslims as the “new Jews”;
see Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1978.
13. See Heni, Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon, op. cit., fn. 2, pp. 201-202.
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MISUSES OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE UK
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is very poor. His statement is wholly inaccurate. Moreover, it trivialises the
Holocaust, whitewashes the crimes committed by the Third Reich, inflates
the ‘crimes’ of the Israelis, and blames Jews for not having learnt a moral
lesson from the Holocaust.
The question of misusing the Holocaust in this way has been
addressed, and I believe answered, by David Seymour. He has developed a
theoretical explanation for Holocaust inversion in his critique of Zygmunt
Bauman’s and Jean-François Lyotard’s theories on the causes of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Seymour shows that these theories permit judgments
about the Holocaust and Jews to be based solely on ethics. The problem is
that there are no checks on the faculty of ethical judgment.14
Seymour argues that by regarding the Holocaust as the latest stage in
modernity and emancipation respectively, Bauman and Lyotard not only
dissolve the specificity of the Holocaust, but they also present it as devoid
of all consciousness, all human agency and all discursive practices of the
law. Instead, both account for antisemitism and the Holocaust in terms of an
ontological ethics, which presents ethics as the ‘Other’ of law. In so doing,
they have overlooked the fact that the ethical sphere is not devoid of judgment. Seymour states that:
[Ethics] is, in fact, a judgement that can only be described as absolutist
and without measure. It is a judgment that is akin to blind fury that,
knowing no limits, knows only ‘obstinacy’ and ‘desperation’ and now
includes within its repressed memories, genocide and death camps.15
Thus it is Bauman’s and Lyotard’s removal of law and legalism from
judgments relating to the Holocaust in the name of ontological ethics
which, Seymour argues, partly explains the use, or rather abuse, of the Holocaust by inverting it and using it as a standard against which the acts of the
Jewish state and Jews can be measured.
Further, Seymour argues that the judgment that the Jews should have
learnt their lesson from the Holocaust may be explained, at least in part, by
Lyotard’s transference of the figure of the Jews as the ‘personification of
the ethical’ onto the ‘sign’ of Auschwitz, which represents the ‘event’ of the
Holocaust. This makes Auschwitz the embodiment of the ethical in the
post-Holocaust world, and as such Auschwitz now replaces the Jews as “the
unidentifiable thorn in the ‘west’s’ flesh.”16 That is, the ‘sign’ of Auschwitz
is met with unconscious frustration because it is a reminder to Europe both
14. David M. Seymour, ‘From Auschwitz to Jerusalem to Gaza: ethics for the
want of law,’ Journal of Global Ethics, Vol. 6. No. 2, August 2010, 205-215.
15. Ibid., p. 210.
16. Ibid., p. 210.
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of the limits of emancipation and of a debt that Europe owes to Auschwitz
but which it can never repay. However, as it is not just Auschwitz that acts
as that reminder but also the Jews for whom Auschwitz was brought into
being:
The potential remains that, once again, Europe will vent that frustration
on the personification of its failure. And so, it is my contention that it is
this ressentiment against the ethical reading of the Holocaust that partly
accounts for the idea that it is the Jews who have betrayed the ethical
imperative (and, by implication, their own ontological essence) that the
Holocaust is said to carry within its ‘sign.’17
Thus, to conclude, it is Seymour’s argument that by presenting the
Jews and the Holocaust solely in terms of the ethical, Bauman and Lyotard
have allowed for both past and present judgments about both Jews and the
Holocaust to be made solely in terms of the ethical. However, as ethical
judgments are made without legal judgment—as ethics is the ‘Other’ of
law—they may be both unreflective and absolute. Moreover, ethical judgments bring with them their own unacknowledged and unrestrained violence, and:
It is a violence that, like the harm with which it is confronted, is in excess
of the measure and dignity of law and finds expression in the presentation
of the Holocaust as a lesson taught to, but not learnt, by Jews.18
Holocaust Inversion: Israel as the ‘Other’ of the ‘New’ Europe
Although not specifically articulated as an explanation for the temptation to accuse Israel of Nazism in its treatment of the Palestinians, Robert
Fine’s work on nationalism, postnationalism, and antisemitism does, in my
view, offer another possible explanation for the practice of Holocaust
inversion.
Fine discusses the classification of modernity into national and postnational periods, with postnational Europe self-regarded as the civilised continent that has transcended its racist past.19 Fine points out that this
nationalist/postnationalist dichotomy is problematic because it tends “to
endorse a moral division of the world between us and them: ‘we’ the
17. Ibid., p. 210.
18. Ibid., p. 214.
19. Robert Fine, ‘Fighting with Phantoms: a contribution to the debate on
antisemitism in Europe’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 43, No. 5, 2009, pp. 459-479.
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civilised and postnationalist European; ‘they’ who believe in the purity of
the nation and act with corresponding barbarity.”20
Fine argues that in this worldview Israel can serve to symbolise the
‘Other’ of the idealised postnational Europe. This is because of the temptation to treat postnationalism not as a critical theory but as an absolute doctrine. Israel can serve this doctrine well, not as a “real country embroiled in
real conflicts”, but as a symbolic vessel into which postnational Europe can
project all that is bad in its own past. In this way, Israel becomes “the
incarnation of all the negative properties postnational Europe has allegedly
thrown off—racism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, violence, even
genocide.”21
By projecting onto Israel all that is bad in ‘old’ Europe’s past, it
becomes possible, and indeed acceptable, for David Ward and those who
subscribe to a similar world view to characterise Israelis or Zionists as
Nazis.
DENIAL
OF
ANTISEMITISM AND THE ACCUSATION OF BAD FAITH:
THE STATEMENT OF DAVID WARD, MP
In response to continued criticism of his statement on the grounds that
it was antisemitic, David Ward denied antisemitism and said:
There is a huge operation out there, a machine almost, which is designed
to protect the state of Israel from criticism. And that comes into play
very, very quickly and focuses intensely on anyone who’s seen to criticise the State of Israel. And so I end up looking at what happened to me,
whether I should use this word, whether I should use that word—and that
is winning for them.22
This is an example of ‘The Livingstone Formulation,’ the term coined
by David Hirsh to refer to the practice of responding to claims of contemporary antisemitism by alleging that those making the claim are doing so dishonestly to prevent Israel from being criticised; that their antisemitism is
not antisemitic at all but ‘only’ ‘criticism of Israel.’ In other words, those
raising concerns about the existence of contemporary antisemitism are
20. Robert Fine, ‘Nationalism, Postnationalism, Antisemitism: Thoughts on the
Politics of Jurgen Habermas’, Osterreichische Zeitschrift fur Politikwissenschaft
(OZP) 39. Jg. (2010) H. 4, 409-420, p. 417.
21. Ibid., p. 417.
22. BBC News Politics: ‘David Ward summoned by Clegg after ‘Jews’ comments’ (13/02/13); http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21446292 [accessed 23/
02/13].
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merely “playing the anti-Semitism card.”23 The Livingstone Formulation is
itself antisemitic because it sees a “secret agenda” behind the charge of
antisemitism, which is to silence Israel’s critics. As Fine notes, “one dodgy
presumption behind this argument is that Israel cannot be defended openly,
so that its defenders have to resort to underhand tactics.”24
Ward’s statement is a perfect illustration of the Livingstone Formulation. His comment seems to imply that there is a powerful Zionist lobby
lurking in the background whose sole purpose is to silence critics of Israel
by accusing them of antisemitism. While Ward strongly suggests that an ad
hominem attack is being made on him by that “huge operation out there, a
machine almost”, it is, in fact, he who is making an ad hominem attack on
those who question contemporary antisemitism. Rather than the “huge operation” deflecting criticism of Israel, he, Ward, is deflecting legitimate concerns about antisemitism. He is moving the debate from legitimate
questions about antisemitism to accusations of being dishonest in order to
protect Israel from criticism. This is a major problem because, as Fine
notes, it prevents the identification of changing forms of antisemitism and
the marshalling of active resistance to it.25
DENIAL OF ANTISEMITISM AND THE ACCUSATION OF BAD FAITH:
MR R. FRASER V THE UNIVERSITY & COLLEGE UNION
The Livingstone Formulation was recently deployed by a court of law.
In Mr R Fraser v University & College Union (22nd March 2013),26 the
Central London Employment Tribunal dismissed a claim against the University and College Union (UCU) alleging institutional antisemitism in the
Union which harassed the Jewish claimant by causing him to be subjected
to a hostile environment. There were ten distinct grounds outlined in the
complaint which, the claimant alleged, constituted antisemitic conduct on
the part of the Union. One of those grounds was the Union’s obsessive and
unlawful pursuit of a boycott policy against Israeli academics and no others
in the world.
In its wholesale dismissal of the case on all ten grounds, the Employment Tribunal decided that it was not required or prepared to rule on the
23. David Hirsh, ‘Accusations of malicious intent in debates about the Palestine-Israel conflict and about antisemitism’, Transversal, January 2010, Graz,
Austria.
24. Robert Fine, ‘On doing the sociology of antisemitism’, European Sociological Association Newsletter, Issue 33, Winter 2012, p. 5.
25. Robert Fine, ‘Fighting with Phantoms’, op. cit. fn. 19, p. 476.
26. Mr R Fraser v University & College Union (22/03/13) http://
www.judiciary.gov.uk/media/judgments/2013/ [accessed 29/03/13].
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MISUSES OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE UK
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meaning or definition of antisemitism, including the EUMC Working Definition27 put forward by the claimant and disavowed by the Union. Noting
that some members of the Union did not like the EUMC Definition of AntiSemitism on the grounds that it brands attacks on Zionism as antisemitic
and precludes criticism of Israel, while others, such as the claimant himself,
did like it, the Tribunal concluded that there were legitimately held differences of view on what constitutes antisemitism and where the line should
be drawn in relation to when criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic, and
that this, moreover, is the “stuff of political debate.”28
The Tribunal’s refusal to even consider the possibility of antisemitism
in the Union constitutes a denial of antisemitism. Denis MacShane, Britain’s former Minister for Europe, Chair of the 2006 All Party Parliamentary
Committee of Inquiry into Anti-Semitism, was a witness for the claimant in
the case. He told Ha’aretz newspaper that:
I was a witness at the tribunal, and it was clear that I was facing three
middle-class English people who . . . just refused to accept that antiSemitism is a contemporary problem. I looked at their implacable, indifferent, bored faces and knew that the case was lost.29
Further, the Tribunal’s denial of antisemitism was accompanied by the
Livingstone Formulation. The Tribunal chose to view the claimant’s allegations of antisemitism, which had been supported by no less than thirty-four
witnesses, as an attempt to silence free political debate in the Union. Noting
that the claimant was the child of refugees from the Holocaust and that “so
long and terrible has been the persecution of the Jewish people through
history”30 the Tribunal stated:
We greatly regret that the case was ever brought. At heart, it represents
an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means. It
would be very unfortunate if an exercise of this sort were ever repeated.31
27. This definition says that criticism of Israel is a manifestation of antisemitism
in certain circumstances, such as where Israel is Nazified or where classic
antisemitic tropes, such as conspiracy theory or the blood libel, are used to refer to
Israel.
28. See Mr R Fraser v University & College Union, op. cit., fn. 26, para. 53.
29. Denis MacShane, ‘Wake Up to the Antisemitism, You Complacent British
Middle Classes’, Ha’aretz, 30th April 2013, http://brandeiscenter.com/blog/wakeup-to-the-antisemitism-you-complacent-british-middle-classes/ [accessed 30/04/
13].
30. See Mr R Fraser v University & College Union, op. cit., fn. 26, para. 51.
31. See Mr R Fraser v University & College Union, op. cit., fn. 26, para. 178.
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ANTISEMITISM AND THE ACCUSATION OF BAD FAITH:
THE RELEVANCE OF THE HOLOCAUST
As this paper is concerned with the misuses of the Holocaust in political and legal judgment in the UK, one might wonder why the denial of
contemporary antisemitism and its associated allegation of bad faith is relevant. At first blush it would appear that there is no connection, but as Seymour and Fine have argued, there is a connection between the way the
Holocaust is remembered and the denial of contemporary antisemitism.
Let’s consider Seymour’s argument first. In his 2007 book, Law,
Antisemitism and the Holocaust, he critiques the explanations of Friedrich
Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-François Lyotard, and Giorgio Agamben
for the causes of antisemitism and the Holocaust. He shows that, despite
their differences, they all lead to a ‘universalist’ perspective on the Holocaust in which all Jewish specificity is lost. Seymour refers to this as ‘Holocaust dissolution,’ which results in the ‘commodification of Holocaust
memory.’32
Then in his conference paper delivered at Harvard Law School in
March this year, ‘Critical Theory: the Holocaust, Human Rights and
Antisemitism’, Seymour critiques the explanations of Zygmunt Bauman,
Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben for antisemitism and the Holocaust
and demonstrates that, despite some differences, a unifying theme in their
work is the equation of the Holocaust with the ‘nation-state’ and
‘modernity’.
Drawing on both his 2007 book and his 2013 conference paper, Seymour argues that the theoretical development in which the Holocaust comes
to be ‘dissolved’ within the broad concept of ‘modernity’ and the ‘abstract
universalism of human rights’ gives rise to two distinct consequences.
These are that genocidal antisemitism is strictly equated with modernity,
which has now been transcended; and the theoretical inability to recognise
antisemitism in its non-genocidal form, both in the ‘old’ Europe and the
‘new.’ Seymour believes that this accounts for the denial of contemporary
antisemitism, as well as the intensity of that denial and the accusations of
‘bad faith’ and Jewish ‘particularism’ that frequently accompany it.33
Fine agrees with Seymour’s view, but bases his analysis on the nationalism/postnationalism dichotomy. Fine argues that Jurgen Habermas’s con32. David M. Seymour, Law, Antisemitism and the Holocaust, London: Glasshouse-Routledge, 2007, Chapter 4.
33. David M. Seymour, ‘Critical Theory: the Holocaust, Human Rights and
Antisemitism’, paper given at Harvard Law School, Critical Legal Theory Conference, March 2013.
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MISUSES OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE UK
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ception of postnationalism represents the ‘new’ postnational Europe as the
civilised continent in which antisemitism is a thing of the past, overcome by
the defeat of fascism and the development of the European Union. This
consignment of antisemitism to the ‘old’ Europe prevents the ‘new’ Europe
from maintaining an on-going critical engagement with it, as advocated by
Habermas. It is for this reason that whenever concerns are expressed about
contemporary antisemitism, it is denied and translated into an attempt to
stifle legitimate criticism of Israel, along with the frequent accusation that
those claiming antisemitism are reverting back to a national and un-European “exclusivity.”34
CONCLUSION
In this paper I have used a recent political judgment and a recent legal
judgment in an attempt to illustrate and explain the correspondence between
the Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism in the UK, by which I mean
the manifestation of irrational forms of hostility to Israel/Zionism/Zionists
in discourses around the Israel-Palestine conflict. On the one hand, the
‘Holocaust’ serves as a means to express such irrational hostility, precipitating further resentment towards, and even hatred of, UK Jews; on the other
hand, the ‘Holocaust’, being associated as it is with a genocidal antisemitism that has long been consigned to history, serves to prevent such manifestations of irrational hostility to Israel/Zionism/Zionists, and the anti-Jewish
animus they foster, from being acknowledged and resisted. It’s as if the use
of the Holocaust to perpetuate antisemitism is juxtaposed against the naı̈ve
assumption that all antisemitism was dissolved in the fires of Auschwitz.
I believe that there is a pressing need for changes in the way we think
about antisemitism in the UK. There needs to be recognition that antisemitism may take many forms, that it is protean, and that it is not always easy to
distinguish hatred of Israel from hatred of Jews. As Fine notes:
Antisemitism may or may not be openly expressed. It may linger in the
discursive nooks and crannies of well-honed anti-Semitic motifs: conspiracy, secret power, blood lust, etc. As is the case in the presentation of self
in everyday life, the forms of appearance of the new anti-Semitism may
not immediately reveal what lies behind the scenes.35
It is precisely because it takes the work of judgment and understanding
to identify contemporary antisemitism that those who raise concerns about
34. Robert Fine, ‘Nationalism, Postnationalism, Antisemitism’, op. cit., fn. 20,
pp. 415-416.
35. Robert Fine, ‘Fighting with Phantoms,’ op. cit., fn. 19, p. 476.
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it need to be taken seriously. It is simply not good enough for a member of
parliament and a court of law to insult those people with an accusation of
acting in bad faith.
*Lesley Klaff is senior lecturer in law at Sheffield Hallam University. She is associate editor for the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism and serves on both the
Academic Advisory Board of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights
under Law and the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism; she is
also a member of UK Lawyers for Israel. This paper was delivered at the II Coloquio International Politicas, Direitos, Eticas at Rio de Janeiro State University on
May 23, 2013.
“You Complacent Middle-Class Asses”
Denis MacShane*
The former UK minister for Europe weighs in on Ronnie Fraser and a
tribunal’s decision to allow anti-Zionism in the workplace.
Just before the 1997 election, a row broke out when the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described British foreign secretary Sir
Malcolm Rifkind as “the Jew Rifkind.” At the time, I wrote in my
diary of a dinner party I attended and an exchange I witnessed
between two old university friends: “We have a big discussion on
antisemitism after the Rifkind row. The main protagonists are
Jonathan, who says it’s everywhere, and Flavia, who says it
doesn’t exist.”
These are the two worlds of England today—a caring, liberal, uppermiddle-class Christian woman who has simply never encountered
antisemitism, and an earnest, engaged, energetic Jewish man who has never
stopped encountering it. I side with Jonathan. Whether we are speaking of
Jews or Muslims, a big problem is the rising intolerance—a phenomenon
not well understood by even the most decent people.
I came across this entry as I sought to make sense of the recent ruling on Ronnie Fraser, the college lecturer who sought to persuade an
English legal tribunal that the ban decreed by his union against contact with
fellow Jews in Israeli colleges and universities was antisemitic in its politics. Trying to persuade the complacent, comfortable, critical-of-Israel middle classes in England that antisemitism is a live problem and one that
constantly manifests itself in new forms is an uphill task. Giles Fraser (no
relation to Ronnie), England’s most prominent Anglican priest, wrote
recently that “Even assimilated Jews are not always protected by their integration with surrounding society.”
Sadly, an English judicial tribunal has just confirmed the Rev. Fraser’s
contention. To read in full the banal, contemptuous dismissal of Ronnie
Fraser’s efforts to show that a one-sided ban on contacts with Jewish academics in Israel, decreed by the UK’s University and College Union (of
lecturers), is to see that the ruling was an assault on his existence as a Jew
and a miserable experience. Of course, trying to use an employment tribunal as a means to take on institutional antisemitism was always a risk. Three
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decades ago, I was president of the National Union of Journalists, and I saw
then how the annual conferences of these small professional unions function as a playground for political activists, cutting their teeth on all sorts of
extremist politics before moving on.
To Ronnie Fraser’s brave legal team, I expressed my concern that
employment law judges were not people who were intellectually equipped
to deal with the UCU’s action against Jews in the UK and in Israel. But
they believed that the law exists to protect the individual against a powerful,
wealthy organization like a trade union. They were wrong. The ugliness of
the tribunal findings defies belief. The European Union’s definition of
antisemitism is dismissed. The work of the House of Commons Committee
of Inquiry into antisemitism that I chaired—which forced a change in government policy to acknowledge antisemitic attack—is trashed. Fraser’s
efforts to use the law are openly insulted. The view of an important public
Commission of Inquiry into the 1993 racist murder of a black youth, Stephen Lawrence, which stated that the police are obliged to investigate
crimes that the victim of discrimination or attacks believes to be motivated
by racial or religious hatred, is thrown away.
For antisemites everywhere, this is a big win. After an English court
destroyed David Irving for his neo-Nazism, another English court has
now—15 years later—upheld the right of a union to target Jews. It is a
defeat, but one that should encourage us all to redouble our efforts precisely
at a time that antisemitism is growing in strength in Europe, and hatred of
Israel increases in England. Of course, there will be some Jewish legal
experts in London who insist the case should not have been fought. Anyone
who has contact with the law knows the arbitrary, highly personalized
nature of judges. In Britain, they come from a narrow, professional, conservative elite. Judges dealing with employment law are experts on workplace grievances, compensation, and unfair dismissal. Asking them to
adjudicate on Israel-Palestine, the meaning of Zionism, and whether institutional antisemitism really exists was likely an impossible request.
I was a witness at the tribunal, and it was clear that I was facing three
middle-class English people who—like my friend whom I noted in my
diary—just refused to accept that antisemitism is a contemporary problem. I
looked at their implacable, indifferent, bored faces and knew the case was
lost—but sometime it is better to fight and lose than wait for a perfect
moment when your case and cause will emerge triumphant. Those engaged
in combating antisemitism in Britain are downhearted. But although I am
not Jewish, I am proud to have been linked with the cause Ronnie Fraser
stood for. The struggle goes on despite the faint hearts and the self-righteous, those who express their wisdom after the event but who wish it had
never been engaged.
2013]
“YOU
COMPLACENT MIDDLE-CLASS ASSES”
61
What is needed now is a major review of the last decade of combating
antisemitism and hate of Israel. The EU’s indifference to the open commemoration of Waffen SS Jew-killers in Lithuania and Latvia, as well as
the entry into mainstream Hungarian politics of Jew-baiting, is worrying. In
Britain, the anti-European populist party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), has just had to suspend a leading candidate after allegations that she tweeted about Zionists organizing the Holocaust; activists
from the anti-Jewish British National Party, now in electoral decline,
are migrating to UKIP, rising in the polls. Expect to see an increase in the
number of racist identity politicians, including antisemites, elected to the
European Parliament in 2014. Leftist and Islamist boycotts, divestment, and
sanctions (BDS) campaigns grow in universities apace. The struggle against
antisemitism is more relevant than ever, but working out the best strategy
and tactics for the next decade of work is now overdue.
*Denis MacShane (@DenisMacShane) is the UK former minister for Europe and
author of Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism (Phoenix, 2010). A version of
this article appeared in Haaretz, April 30, 2013.
The Dark Side of the Academy:
Antisemitism in Canadian and German Students
Wassilis Kassis and Charlotte Schallié*
This paper examines the proliferation of classic and secondary
antisemitic attitudes in Canada and Germany. Data was collected from
self-selected university students (n = 796 Canadian; n = 1,004 Germany)
in one of the largest antisemitism studies to date (N = 1,800). The findings—that nearly four out of 10 students endorse (partially or fully)
antisemitic statements, and that six out of 10 (partially or fully) blame
Jews for Holocaust memory—are disturbing, but in line with other
research on antisemitism. Such findings appear to affirm Hannah
Arendt’s idea of antisemitism as a pervasive and powerful force, one that
cuts through all social and educational strata.
Key Words: Antisemitism, Campus, Canada, Germany
The moon is the only place where one can be free from antisemitism.
—Hannah Arendt (1941)1
Universities are microcosms of society.
—Yvonne Martin-Newcombe2
The present study discusses the persistence of antisemitic attitudes and
opinions at two comparable mid-sized universities—one in western Canada
and one in northern Germany.3 Our data is drawn from the quantitatively
1. Hannah Arendt, “Ceterum Censeo,” in Vor Antisemitismus ist man nur noch
auf dem Mond sicher (Munich: Piper, 2000), 30; originally published in Der
Aufbau, December 26, 1941. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are our
own. Ironically, since the release of the Finnish-German film parody Iron Sky
(2012), even the moon no longer has safeguards in place against antisemitism in the
popular cultural imagination.
2. Yvonne Martin-Newcombe, quoted in“Report Calls for Changes to Support
Minorities on Campus,” The Ring, May 8, 1998, accessed April 26, 2013, http://
ring.uvic.ca/98may08/Voices.html.
3. We gratefully acknowledge the translation and copy-editing assistance provided by Zola Kell, and we would also like to express our sincere appreciation to
Helga Thorson for her perceptive comments. A profound thanks to Gerlinde Weimer-Stuckmann, Myriam Gerber, Jonas Löbbert, Sabrina Strasen, and Elise
Polkinghorne, who assisted us in administering and entering the survey data. We
would especially like to thank Rennie Warburton for his support. Finally, thank you
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based international research project we designed and implemented in 20122013, titled “Public Opinions and Attitudes in Post-Secondary Institutions
in Germany and Canada.”4 In this paper, we report on two student populations of varying demographics within a transnational context.
Antisemitism is a pronounced form of racism based on religion and
ethnicity, yet most public reports and scholarly articles consider structural
racism but fail to include data on anti-Jewish prejudices.5 Antisemitism at
universities is a woefully underdeveloped line of racism research, with minimal survey research to date.6 Our study appears as the first such analysis to
examine both Canadian and German university-based contexts.
There is currently “a revived or intensified antisemitism in the post-9/
11 world,”7 made more pressing by reports that a sizable number (40%) of
American Jewish college students have witnessed antisemitic incidents on
their campuses.8 With antisemitic incidents occurring in response to Israeli
Apartheid Week (IAW) at several Canadian universities,9 we are perennially reminded that antisemitism poses an ongoing concern.
to our colleagues at the University of Victoria and the University of Osnabrück for
allowing us to conduct the surveys in their classes.
4. Wassilis Kassis and Charlotte Schallié, “Survey: Public Opinions and Attitudes in Post-Secondary Institutions in Germany and Canada,” the University of
Victoria and the University of Osnabrück, January 31, 2012.
5. Frances Henry and Carol Tator, Racism in the Canadian University:
Demanding Social Justice, Inclusion, and Equity (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2009); Caitlin Stone, “Crossroads: Race and Gender in the Canadian Academy—Searching for Equity” (paper presented at the Congress of the Humanities
and Social Sciences, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo,
May 31, 2012), accessed August 14, 2013, http://www.congress2012.ca/features/
crossroads-race-and-gender-in-the-canadian-academy-searching-for-equity/.
6. Kenneth Lasson, “In an Academic Voice,” Journal for the Study of
Antisemitism 3, no. 2 (2011): 349-405. See also Linda Beckwith, “Antisemitism at
the University of California,” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism 3, no. 2 (2011):
443-461.
7. Derek J. Penslar, “Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism,” introduction to Contemporary Antisemitism: Canada and the World, ed. Derek J. Penslar, Michael R.
Marrus, and Janice Gross Stein (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 3-12.
8. Aryeh Weinberg, “Alone on the Quad: Understanding Jewish Student Isolation on Campus,” Institute for Jewish & Community Research, San Francisco,
2011; Richard Cravatts, “Antisemitism and the Campus Left,” Journal for the
Study of Antisemitism 3, no. 2 (2011): 407-442.
9. Joanne Hill, “Campus Atmosphere Poisoned by Propaganda,” Jewish Tribune, March 12, 2013, accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.jewishtribune.ca/news/
2013/03/12/campus-atmosphere-poisoned-by-propaganda-students-say; Hillel of
Greater Toronto, “Antisemitism on Campus in Toronto.” Canadians for Justice and
Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), accessed August 14, 2013, http://www.cjpme
2013]
THE DARK SIDE OF THE ACADEMY
65
For McGill sociologist Morton Weinfeld, polarizing debates, such as
those occurring annually during IAW, showcase the various forms of contemporary Jew-hatred and political antisemitism in public spaces. Weinfeld
argues that such discourses represent the new globalized antisemitism—an
ideologically conflated version of modern antisemitic attitudes, anti-Zionism, and “opposition to Israeli policies.”10 Yet, probing the emergence of
globalized antisemitism challenges the limits of political correctness in both
the public sphere and in the classroom. Constance Backhouse, a distinguished university professor and university research chair at the Faculty of
Law of the University of Ottawa, maintains that “we [people in Canada]
have a tradition, a mythology, that we’re race-less and racism-less, that we
don’t have a problem. It’s [therefore] rude to inquire.”11
Racism on Canadian campuses has been only recently examined at
Ryerson University’s “Final Report of the Taskforce on Anti-Racism at
Ryerson (2010).”12 The Ryerson taskforce administered a survey to Caucasian students (n = 156),13 as well as “racialized and Aboriginal students (n =
159).”14 Unfortunately, the small samples affected the quantitative analysis
and the findings remained inconclusive.15 What this study does provide us
with, however, is a snapshot of Jewish students’ attitudes and feelings on
their perception of the spread of antisemitism on campus. Jewish students’
thoughts on campus antisemitism were recorded during a series of focus
group meetings.16 Some students concealed their Jewish identity in public,
as “[t]hey were reluctant to take on the battle against antisemitism in a
.org/DisplayDocument.aspx?DO=853&RecID=454&DocumentID=1841&Save
Mode=0.
10. Morton Weinfeld, “The Changing Dimensions of Contemporary Canadian
Antisemitism,” in Contemporary Antisemitism: Canada and the World, ed. Derek
J. Penslar, Michael R. Marrus, and Janice Gross Stein, 43. A German example for
this new “global antisemitism” is the recent controversy surrounding the wellknown and outspoken publicist Jakob Augustein, who was listed by the Simon
Wiesenthal Center as one of the “top 10” antisemites in the world. Susanne Beyer
and Erich Follath, “Was ist Antisemitismus?,” Der Spiegel, January 14, 2013, 122128.
11. Quoted in Harriet Eisenkraft, “Racism in the Academy,” University Affairs,
October 12, 2010, accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.universityaffairs.ca/racismin-the-academy.academy.aspx.
12. Eileen Antone, Grace-Edward Galabuzi, Cyesha Forde, et al., “Final Report
of the Taskforce on Anti-Racism at Ryerson,” January 2010, http://www.ryerson
.ca/antiracismtaskforce/docs/RU_Taskforce_report.pdf, 1-99.
13. Antone et al., “Final Report,” 63.
14. Antone et al., “Final Report,” 64.
15. Antone et al., “Final Report,” 62.
16. Antone et al., “Final Report,” 103.
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broader arena.”17 Similarly, Jewish faculty were “concerned about hiding
their identity, especially with students who thought well of them and were
on friendly terms until the professor’s Jewishness came into play. Jewish
faculty, therefore, had a tendency to hide their identity, or at least not make
it obvious.”18
The report points to an ambient racist and antisemitic climate on campus and calls into question the role of universities as protectors of a plural
society, as envisioned in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act.19 It concludes:
“The level of fear and apprehension expressed [by Jewish faculty and students] was extremely high and sometimes quite reminiscent of how Jews
felt in Europe before and during WWII.”20
Commissioned by its president with the goal to “reduce the likelihood
that UVic in the future would face some of the serious problems of racism
that have affected other Canadian university campuses,” the resulting study,
“Voices for Change: Racism, Ethnocentrism, and Cultural Insensitivity”
(1998),21 investigated racism on campus as well.
“Voices,” a two-year qualitative study, employed one-on-one interviews with 116 university community participants—67 from focus group
meetings with 49 students and faculty members. One of the study’s coauthors, Yvonne Martin-Newcombe, had argued for a qualitative analysis,
suggesting that “only a few who experience these things [racism, antisemitism] would come forward . . . [permitting focus] on the impact and
processes by which racism and related phenomena are expressed, rather
than the extent of their existence.”22
17. Antone et al., “Final Report,” 104.
18. Antone et al., “Final Report,” 106.
19. Canadian Multiculturalism Act; R.S.C., 1985, c. 24 (4th Supp.), Justice
Laws website, accessed April 22, 2013, http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C18.7/page-1.html#h-3. In 1982, multiculturalism and equality rights were solidified
in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. See Karen Mock, “Redefining
Multiculturalism,” Canadian Diversity 4, no. 3 (October 2005): 88-89.
20. Antone et al., Final Report, 106.
21. “Report Calls for Changes to Support Minorities on Campus,” The Ring,
May 8, 1998, accessed April 26, 2013, http://ring.uvic.ca/98may08/Voices.html.
22. Yvonne Martin-Newcombe, quoted in “Report Calls for Changes.” The
“Voices for Change” findings led to a motion brought before the University Senate
requesting that all units include a statement on inclusivity and diversity on all
course outlines. The motion was proposed by Rennie Warburton and Michael
Miller, and approved by the Senate on December 15, 1998. In a preliminary discussion during the meeting, however, it was decided not to include antisemitism, as
suggested by one Senate member, and to remove a lengthy section from the statement: “The University is committed to . . . providing an education with cultural
diversity and inclusive participation. It is opposed to all kinds of sexism, racism,
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67
We maintain, however, that it is imperative to demonstrate the “extent
of their existence” in order to effect campus-wide changes on inclusivity
and diversity policies. The qualitative data reported on in “Voices for
Change” clearly demonstrated the harmful effects of antisemitic sentiments
experienced by university members. Featuring examples of both covert and
more blatant forms of racism, the University of Victoria report made a convincing case for anti-racism education for both faculty and students. For
example, one interviewee stated: “In a discussion about financial affairs,
she [her colleague] said ‘We’ll Jew it down.’ ”23
Another reported “the swastika was drawn on the notice board not long
ago, on a poster advertising lectures. But it was drawn on another colleague’s face.”24 A third reported that he had “received an anonymous letter
which was a death threat, and it was an anti-Semitic death threat . . . [It]
identified my children and my wife and said that ‘the kids would disappear’
. . . I’d better watch it. And ‘why don’t you go back to Jerusalem, you
Heeb?’ ”25
For a broader understanding of Canadian antisemitism, public-opinion
data is electronically accessible from Juristat, Statistics Canada, and B’nai
Brith Canada. The latter organization reports, in its annual publication
Audits of Antisemitic Incidents:
[I]n 2012, the League for Human Rights [of B’nai Brith Canada] documented 1,345 antisemitic incidents across Canada, representing a 3.7%
increase over the 1,297 cases recorded in 2011 . . . Canada has seen a
steady upward progression in antisemitic incidents in the past decade.
Taking a ten-year perspective, incidents have more than doubled from the
584 cases in 2003. Since 2008 incidents have increased by 19%.”26
ethnocentrism, cultural insensitivity, homophobia, and inappropriate behaviour
toward people with a disability.” The final, and considerably shortened, statement,
which continues to appear in the university’s course calendar, reads as follows:
“The University of Victoria is committed to promoting, providing and protecting a
positive, supportive and safe learning and working environment for all its members.” From “Minutes,” University of Victoria Senate meeting, January 13, 1999.
(Minutes provided by the Office of the University Secretary April 24, 2013.)
23. Yvonne M. Martin-Newcombe and Rennie Warburton, “Voices for Change:
Racism, Ethnocentrism, and Cultural Insensitivity at the University of Victoria,
1998” (report submitted to David Strong, president, University of Victoria), 49.
24. Martin-Newcombe and Warburton, “Voices for Change,” 53.
25. Martin-Newcombe and Warburton, “Voices for Change,” 52.
26. League for Human Rights, 2012 Audits of Antisemitic Incidents, B’nai Brith
Canada, April 23, 2013, accessed July 31, 2013, www.bnaibrith.ca/audit2012/11.
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In the most recent Juristat article, “Police-Reported Hate Crime in
Canada, 2011,” Mary Allen and Jillian Boyce observe that “for religiously
motivated hate crime, there has also been little change over time; hate
crimes targeting Jewish populations continue to be the most common (15%
of all hate crimes).”27
Beginning in 2007, national surveys pertaining to public perceptions of
immigrants and ethnic minorities have been conducted by the Association
for Canadian Studies (ACS/AEC).28 For the purpose of this paper, publicopinion data drawn from two questionnaires administered in 2007 and 2008
are of particular relevance. In “Multiculturalism, Interculturalism and Opinion on Muslims, Jews and Sikhs” from 2007,29 the number of Canadians
who provided a “very favourable” rating is 30% (“somewhat favourable”:
48%; “somewhat unfavourable”: 8%; “very unfavourable”: 4%; “don’t
know”: 10%). In the 2008 questionnaire, “Attitudes Towards Jews and
Muslims: Comparing Canada with the United States and Europe,”30 26% of
Canadians expressed a “very favourable” opinion of Jews (“somewhat
favourable”: 47%; “somewhat unfavourable”: 9%; “very unfavourable”:
4%; “don’t know”: 14%). In both questionnaires, the sample size comprised
1,500 participants, age 18 and higher.
German perceptions and attitudes on antisemitism have been surveyed
numerous times during the last ten years.31 We limit our review to major
German and European surveys—the German General Social Survey
(Allgemeine Bevölkerungsumfrage der Sozialwissenschaften), and the
27. Mary Allen and Jillian Boyce, “Police-Reported Hate Crime in Canada,
2011,” Statistics Canada, released July 11, 2013, accessed July 31, 2013, http://
www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2013001/article/11822-eng.pdf.
28. In a previous national survey, The Bibby Report, it was noted under “Intergroup Attitudes” that in 1995 14% of Canadians felt that “Jews” had “too much
power.” The percentage number dropped significantly from 1975, in which 28% of
Canadians were of the same belief. Reginald W. Bibby, The Bibby Report: Social
Trends Canadian Style (Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 1995), 55.
29. Jack Jedwab, “Multiculturalism, Interculturalism and Opinion on Muslims,
Jews and Sikhs,” Association for Canadian Studies (ACS/AEC), September 11,
2007, accessed March 7, 2013, www.acs-aec.ca/pdf/polls/11897130265510.pdf.
30. Jack Jedwab, “Attitudes Towards Jews and Muslims: Comparing Canada
with the United States and Europe,” Association for Canadian Studies (ACS/AEC),
September 19, 2008, accessed March 7, 2013, www.acs-aec.ca/pdf/polls/1221848
7649334.pdf.
31. For an overview of these studies, see Andreas Zick, Beate Küpper, and Wilhelm Heitmeyer, “Prejudices and Group-Focused Enmity—A Socio-Functional
Perspective,” in Handbook of Prejudice, ed. Anton Pelinka, Karin Bischof, and
Karin Stögner (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2010), 273-302.
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69
ALLBUS Inventory, entitled “Antisemitic Attitudes,”32 with a sample of
3,500 age 18+ years.
Drawing on traditional prejudices against Jews, 23% of the sample
demonstrated a degree of disdain for Jews, agreeing with classic antisemitic
tropes (e.g., “Jews have too much influence in the world”). Slightly less
than 45% of the participants identified with statements that revealed a “secondary” antisemitic bias (e.g., “Many Jews try to take financial advantage
of Germany’s historical guilt”).
The objective of the 2008 study “Group-Focused Enmity in Europe”
was to determine levels of traditional and secondary antisemitism in France,
Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal.33 In this study, phone interviews were conducted using representative
samples of 1,000 participants age 16+ years. The results demonstrated that
antisemitic prejudices were more prevalent in the Eastern European nations
of Poland and Hungary. In Western Europe, antisemitism was more prevalent in Portugal (in most surveys, Spain has Western Europe’s highest
antisemitism rates), followed closely by Germany, then with less antisemitism in Italy and France and even less in Great Britain and the Netherlands.
Overall, approximately 20 percent of the respondents displayed classic
antisemitic attitudes (e.g., “Jews have too much influence in [name of country]”), and 40 percent agreed with public opinions that are strongly indicative of secondary antisemitism (e.g., “Jews try to take advantage of having
been victims during the Nazi era”).
Between 2002 and 2009, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) ran comparative international studies in member states of the European Union,34
32. Datenhandbuch ALLBUS 2006: ZA-Nr. 4500, accessed April 22, 2013,
http://www.uni-due.de/imperia/md/content/bildungswissenschaften/sowi/prust/all
bus_2006_dhb.pdf.
33. Andreas Zick, Carina Wolf, Beate Küpper, Eldad Davidov, Peter Schmidt,
and Wilhelm Heitmeyer, “The Syndrome of Group-Focused Enmity: The Interrelation of Prejudices Tested with Multiple Cross-Sectional and Panel Data,” Journal
of Social Issues 64, no. 2 (2008): 363-83. This study revealed strong interrelations
of six elements of the so-called “group-focused enmity” syndrome (Menschenfeindlichkeits-Syndrom): anti-immigrant attitudes, antisemitism, anti-Muslim attitudes, racism, sexism, and prejudice toward homosexuals. See also Andreas Zick,
Beate Küpper, and Andreas Hövermann, “Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination. A European Report” (Forum Berlin: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Foundation,
2011; and Andreas Zick, Beate Küpper, and Hinna Wolf, “European Conditions:
Findings of a Study on Group-Focused Enmity in Europe,” Bielefeld University,
2009, accessed October 12, 2012, http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/ikg/zick/Pressrelease
13Nov_english.pdf.
34. Representative samples: Anti-Defamation League, “Attitudes Toward Jews
in Twelve European Countries,” May 2005, http://www.adl.org/anti_semitism/
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surveying the persistence of secondary antisemitism. The last findings
(2009) demonstrate that 45 percent of the German respondents subscribed
to opinions that exposed various degrees of antisemitic feelings (e.g., “Jews
still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust”). Arguably, one of the most influential publications in Germany on antisemitic
prejudices and stereotypes in the general population is the Bielefeld report,
Antisemitische Mentalitäten (Antisemitic Attitudes).35 This report is based
on a comprehensive qualitative study, conducted from 2001 to 2011, that
collected representative samples of approximately 2,000 to 3,000 respondents age 16+ years. The participants were interviewed by telephone
regarding social, religious, and ethno-cultural prejudices. The Bielefeld
findings were similar and confirmed a trend: 20 percent held classic
antisemitic attitudes; 45 percent held secondary antisemitism attitudes.
Yet, in all but the ADL survey, those with a higher education reported
lower levels of both (classic and secondary) antisemitic attitudes. Could we
thus hypothesize that education might be the key to lowering antisemitism?
Or would there be similar attitudes in Canadian and German universities?
How would a transnational approach facilitate our understanding of campus
antisemitism? Are there varying levels of antisemitism in Canada and
Germany?
With several of these ideas in mind, we designed our study to incorporate both “classic” antisemitism and “secondary” antisemitism.36
european_attitudes_may_2005.pdf; Anti-Defamation League, “Attitudes Toward
Jews and the Middle East in Six European Countries,” May 2007, http://www.adl
.org/anti_semitism/European_Attitudes_Survey_May_2007.pdf; Anti-Defamation
League, “Attitudes Toward Jews in Seven European Countries,” February 2009,
http://archive.adl.org/PublicADLAnti-SemitismPresentationFebruary2009_3_.pdf.
35. Andreas Zick and Beate Küpper, “Antisemitische Mentalitäten. Bericht über
Ergebnisse des Forschungsprojekts Gruppenbezogene Menschenfeindlichkeit in
Deutschland und Europa. Expertise für den Expertenkreis Antisemitismus, Berlin
Stand 2011,” Bielefeld University, 2011, accessed August 14, 2013, http://www
.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Themen/Politik_Gesellschaft/EXperten
kreis_Antisemmitismus/kuepper.pdf?__blob=publicationFile.
36. The term “classic antisemitism” (Antisemitismus trotz Auschwitz;
“Antisemitism despite Auschwitz”) describes antisemitic attitudes that have not
only derived from ancient and medieval narratives of Jew-hatred but also from the
fin de siècle’s political antisemitism. Expressions of 19th- and early 20th-century
antisemitism “identified the Jew with modern capitalism and the rapid transformation of society and culture that came in its wake,” Penslar, “Antisemitism and AntiZionism,” 81-82. “Secondary antisemitism,” a term coined by Peter Schönbach, is
defined as a unique post-1945 expression of antisemitism, which is also known as
“antisemitism after or because of Auschwitz” and as “Schuldabwehr-Antisemitismus” (the denial of guilt-antisemitism). Although Holocaust denial is the most
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DEMOGRAPHICS
The purpose of our survey is to examine how undergraduate students
respond to the perceived offensiveness of social, cultural, and religious
prejudices such as anti-immigrant attitudes, antisemitism, anti-Muslim attitudes, racism, sexism, and prejudice toward homosexuals. We examined
different forms and expressions of prejudices among post-secondary students within an intercultural cross-disciplinary framework. The data was
collected from self-selected samples and comprised 1,800 undergraduate
students from 37 classes in seven faculties.
Our representative sample groups (see Table 1) comprised post-secondary undergraduate students (age 17 and above) at the two middle-size universities: one in British Columbia, Canada, and the other in Lower Saxony
(Niedersachsen), Germany. Data was collected in Canada in January 2013;
the German survey was conducted in May 2012 and January 2013. The total
number of undergraduate students enrolled in the spring term 2013 at UVic
was 16,395, with 14,593 Canadian residents.37 In contrast, the total number
of German undergraduate students enrolled in the summer semester 2012
was 6,939. During the Winter Semester (Wintersemester) 2012-2013, the
number of undergraduate students at the University of Osnabrück was
7,383,38 and of those, 185 were international students.
extreme form of secondary antisemitism, other, more “semantically subtle”—in
some cases socially sanctioned—forms of expressions are included in this research
category as well. See Penslar, “Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism,” 80-95; Andreas
Zick, Thomas F. Pettigrew, and Ulrich Wagner, “Ethnic Prejudice and Discrimination in Europe,” Journal of Social Issues 64, no. 2 (2008): 233-251; Clemens Heni,
“Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah,”
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, published online November 2, 2008, accessed
July 12, 2012, http://jcpa.org/article/secondary-anti-semitism-from-hard-core-tosoft-core-denial-of-the-shoah/; Doron Rabinovici, Ulrich Speck, and Natan
Sznaider, eds., Neuer Antisemitismus? Eine globale Debatte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2004).
37. “Student Program—Head Count,” Institutional Planning and Analysis, University of Victoria. “[A] student is considered international if his or her immigration status is ‘Awaiting Verification,’ ‘Study Permit,’ or ‘Work Permit.’ ” Data
provided by Robert Lee, analyst/statistician at UVic Institutional Planning and
Analysis, in e-mail message to Charlotte Schallié, University of Victoria, April 4,
2013.
38. “Student Statistics,” University of Osnabrück, accessed April 25, 2013, http:
//uni-osnabruck.de/universitaet/Zahlendatenfakten/studierendenstatistiken.html.
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TABLE 1. Sample descriptors by university
University
Sex
Female
Male
Other
Belong to a religious
community
Yes
No
Citizenship
Citizenship of the specific
country
Citizenship of a different
country
Age
17-19
20
21-22
23 and higher
University of
Osnabrück
in %
n
55.8 1,004
University
of Victoria
in %
n
44.2
796
Overall
Sample
in %
N
100 1,800
77.5
22.5
-
774
225
-
60.7
38.8
0.5
480
307
4
70.1
29.7
0.2
1,254
532
4
81.6
18.4
797
180
20.2
79.8
159
630
54.1
45.9
956
810
97.5
979
91.1
725
94.7
1,704
2.5
11
8.9
71
5.3
96
8.9
16.6
40.5
34.0
88
165
402
337
41.5
16.4
24.6
17.6
326
129
193
138
23.3
37.0
21.5
18.3
414
657
382
325
At the University of Victoria, we surveyed 27 first- to fourth-year
classes in seven faculties—English, geography, Germanic and Slavic
studies, Hispanic and Italian studies, history, philosophy, and sociology in
the humanities and social sciences. At the University of Osnabrück,
questionnaires were handed out in classes with students enrolled in
education and cultural studies, biology, human development, social
sciences, and language and literature. All questionnaires were completed
anonymously and without the instructor being present. The Human
Research Ethics Board at the University of Victoria reviewed and approved
the questionnaire, as well as the introduction and debriefing scripts.39 For
the surveys conducted at the University of Osnabrück, the Code of Ethics of
the German Educational Research Association was followed.40 Neither of
the two universities provided any monetary or token incentives. Consent
39. Ethics approval granted by Protocol Number 12-440.
40. “Code of Ethics of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft
(DGfE)—German Educational Research Association (GERA),” Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft, accessed April 23, 2013, http://
www.dgfe.de/fileadmin/OrdnerRedakteure/Service/Satzung/Ethikkodex_en.pdf.
2013]
THE DARK SIDE OF THE ACADEMY
73
forms, from both the instructor and all students involved, were obtained for
all classes in Canada. At both universities, the participants received a short
oral informational presentation about the survey prior to beginning and a
debriefing after completing the questionnaire. Participation in this study
required a time commitment of about 30 minutes. Students were informed
that their choice to participate was wholly voluntary and that they could
complete the questionnaire in part or request that their partial or fully
completed questionnaire be discounted and destroyed at the time of
collection. All participants were provided with the contact information of
the two co-investigators, the ethics board, and on-campus counseling
services. This information was also available on the consent forms.
The questionnaire was adapted from a number of surveys,
questionnaires, and different measuring devices previously used by one
member of our investigation team.41 The survey consisted of 83 statements
and questions, which were listed on six pages; a final, blank page was
added for personal comments and questions.42
In analyzing the two samples (see Table 1), several differences can be
detected between them. These distinctions prove essential to our research
focus and approach. Our hypothesis, much like Hannah Arendt’s thought
quoted at the beginning of this article, that “the moon is the only place . . .
where one can be free from antisemitism,”43 suggests that similar forms and
expressions of antisemitism exist in communities that vary in their
educational background as well as in their political, social, religious, and
ethnocultural makeup.
Based on the findings in both Canada and Germany, 70.1% of the
participants were female, 29.7% were male, and 0.2% declared their sex as
“Other.” In the German sample, we had significantly more female and
fewer male students than in the Canadian sample (Chi-square = 62.238, df =
2, N = 1,790, p > .001).
At the University of Victoria, there were significantly fewer (Chisquare = 663.281, df = 1, N = 1,766, p > .001) students who belonged to a
faith or religious community than at Osnabrück (UVic = 20.2%; U of
Osnabrück = 81.6%). Despite this variance, the UVic sample had 29
different faiths or religious communities listed. The most frequently
indicated religious communities at the University of Victoria were Roman
41. Wassilis Kassis, Sibylle Artz, Christian Scambor, Elli Scambor, and
Stephie Moldenhauer, “Finding the Way Out: A Non-Dichotomous Understanding
of Violence and Depression Resilience of Adolescents Who Are Exposed to Family
Violence,” Child Abuse & Neglect 37, nos. 2/3 (2013): 181-199.
42. We plan to examine and discuss these comments in a forthcoming article.
43. Arendt, “Ceterum Censeo,” 30.
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Catholics, with 5.2% (n = 41), and “Christian” (without further
specification), with 4.8% (n = 38). No other faith or religious community
reached higher than 1.5% among the total number of participants indicating
a religious affiliation.
The Osnabrück sample, by contrast, features remarkable differences
concerning the respondents’ affiliation with a religious community. Of the
respondents, 36.2% (n = 363) listed their religion as Roman Catholicism,
37.2% (n = 373) as Protestantism or Lutheranism, and 4.1% (n = 41) as
Christian (without further specification). Nine different faith or religious
communities in total were listed by the Osnabrück students. Based on the
specific emphasis of our study, it is relevant to note that only 0.9% (n = 7)
among UVic participants and none of the German students indicated an
affiliation with a Jewish congregation or listed Judaism as their religion.
We found that 2.7% (n = 27) of Osnabrück students and 0.9% (n = 7) of
UVic students provided no answers to the question on faith or religion.
At the University of Osnabrück, significantly more students (Chisquare = 36.353, df = 1, N = 1,800, p > .001) were citizens (German
citizens = 97.5%), compared to the University of Victoria, where 91.1%
reported that they held Canadian citizenship (Canadian citizens = 91.1%).
In the Canadian sample, 54 different native countries were listed, while the
participants in Germany indicated 17 countries of origin. In the German
sample, 3.1% (n = 31) stated that they were citizens of another country
besides Germany. The UVic sample showed a far wider range of additional
citizenships; 17.1% (n = 136) of the participants had a second, and 1.1%
(n = 9) reported that they held a third citizenship.
With regard to the participants’ age, the students in Germany were
significantly older (Chi-square = 278.717, df = 3, N = 1,778, p > .001) than
were the students in Canada. The age span among undergraduate students at
Osnabrück ranged from 17 to 71, and from 17 to 64 at Victoria.
DATA COLLECTION
All measures are based on sum-score scales of the students’ selfreports; such surveys, as a means for generating reliable incidence rates,
have been extensively reviewed in the literature.44 In addition, we collaboratively translated the survey statements from the source text (German)
44. Christine Alder and Anne Worrall, “A Contemporary Crisis?” in Girls’
Violence: Myths and Realities, ed. Christine Alder and Anne Worrall (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2004), 1-20; Anthony Doob and Carla
Cesaroni, Responding to Youth Crime in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2004); Jane B. Sprott and Anthony Doob, “Youth Justice in Canada,” in
2013]
THE DARK SIDE OF THE ACADEMY
75
to the target language (English), negotiating cultural differences and constructs in the process.
Missing values have not been replaced, as we did not want to dilute the
respondents’ answers. For the items used in the two referred scales of this
paper, the missing values were between 2.6% and 4.7%.
The items were measured on a 4-point Likert scale (range = “disagree,” “disagree somewhat,” “agree somewhat,” “agree”). We elected to
have no middle category (e.g., “unsure”), to prevent the development of the
so-called “comfort zone of political correctness.”45 Factor analyses support
the consistency of both scales in the two countries, and in the overall sample. Just one dimension of both scales has been detected (eigenvalue >1).
Single items were combined into patterns and scales, as composite
measures are empirically more reliable and provide higher theoretical validity.46 Empirical research has also demonstrated that multiple-item indices
have the advantage of creating a reliable profile.47 Extremely complex concepts such as “classic” or “secondary” antisemitism are more adequately
and robustly measured by grouping related single attitudes into scales.48
With such a fine-tuned statistical approach, we are able to cover a broader
theoretical and empirical space for the specific constructs in question.
CULTURAL SENSITIVITIES
Additional adaptations of the individual survey items and of the rating
scale were done in order to accommodate the two different languages and
cultural sensitivities in the participating countries. For example, would the
Canadian survey participants be offended by the direct and brusque nature
of the German survey questions?
Crime and Justice: A Review of the Research 31, ed. Michael Tonry and Anthony
Doob (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 185-242.
45. Andreas Zick, Beate Küpper, and Andreas Hövermann, “Intolerance,
Prejudice and Discrimination.”
46. For an overview of the existing empirical research, see Donald G. Gardner,
Larry L. Cummings, Randall B. Dunham, and Jon L. Pierce, “Single-Item versus
Multiple-Item Measurement Scales: An Empirical Comparison,” Educational and
Psychological Measurement 58, no. 6 (1998): 898-915; Lars Bergkvist and John R.
Rossiter, “The Predictive Validity of Multiple-Item versus Single-Item Measures of
the Same Constructs,” Journal of Marketing Research 44, no. 2 (2007): 175-184.
47. Jeff A. Sloan, Neil Aaronson, Joseph C. Cappelleri, Diane L. Fairclough,
and Claudette Varricchio, “Assessing the Clinical Significance of Single Items Relative to Summated Scores,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 77, no. 5 (2002): 479-487.
48. Wilhelm Kempf, “Antisemitism and Criticism of Israel,” Journal for the
Study of Antisemitism 4, no. 2 (2012): 515-532.
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In order to gauge the persistence of negative stereotypes and
prejudices among the student population, negative statements using discriminatory language needed to be included in our survey. For that purpose,
we largely refrained from mitigating or “defusing” the statements—even
those examples that expressed highly inflammatory opinions. In Canada, we
worked closely with the Human Research Ethics Board and designed a
debriefing statement that recognized the inherent offensiveness of the language and the sensitive nature of the subject matter. This was a necessary
step, as the ethics review expressed concern that “some participants may
feel uncomfortable or distressed completing the survey . . . because they are
being confronted with their own prejudices.”49
As part of the translation process, we also extensively discussed the
cultural and historical sensitivities surrounding the question of how Jewish
citizens would identify themselves vis-à-vis their native country—Canada
or Germany. In the wake of the Shoah, many Jews living in Germany would
hesitate to self-identify as German Jews (or Jewish Germans).50 In Canada,
the term “Canadian Jewish” is most commonly used for community-based
organizations as well as professional and educational associations.
CLASSIC ANTISEMITISM SCALE
The scale on classic antisemitism was assessed and adapted using
“old” (pre-Shoah) clichés and stereotypes of Jews.51 This scale was
modeled after the ALLBUS Inventory, “Antisemitic-Attitudes,”52 which
employed four questions (overall sample a = .73; Osnabrück sample a =
49. “Notice of Ethical Review.” University of Victoria, e-mail message to Charlotte Schallié, December 8, 2012.
50. This uneasy sense of possessing an ambivalent hyphenated identity is
poignantly described by Los Angeles-based author and second-generation Holocaust survivor Laura Waco: “Aber ich kann . . . einfach nicht erklären, dass ich
auch eine Jüdin bin, nicht nur eine Deutsche, und dass ich eigentlich nicht weib,
was ich sein soll oder sein kann oder sein darf, deutsch oder jüdisch, dass ich es
nicht in einen Topf werfen kann . . .” (But I can not simply explain . . . that I am
also a Jew, not only a German, and that actually I don’t really know what I should
be or could be or may be, German or Jewish, that I can’t throw it all into one pot
. . . ), Von Zuhause wird nichts erzählt: Eine jüdische Geschichte aus dem Nachkriegsdeutschland (Munich: Goldmann, 1999), 2. See also Susan Stern, ed., Speaking Out: Jewish Voices from United Germany (Carol Stream, IL: Edition Q, 1995).
51. “Nur auf dem Mond ist man vor dem Antisemitismus sicher,” quoted by
Wassilis Kassis in Werte-Bildung interdisziplinär, ed. Elizabeth Naurath, Martina
Blasberg-Kuhnke, Eva Gläser, Reinhold Mokrosch, and Susanne Müller-Using
(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht UNipress, 2013).
52. Datenhandbuch ALLBUS 2006: ZA-Nr. 4500.
2013]
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77
.73; UVic sample a = .74). The four statements on classic antisemitism
were listed in our study as follows (the German questionnaire version is
added in parentheses):
1. Jews tend to provoke antisemitism through their behavior.
2. Canadian (German) women should think twice about marrying
Jewish Canadians (Germans).
3. Jewish Canadians (Germans) tend to show stronger criminal tendencies than other Canadians (Germans).
4. In my opinion, Jews should not be welcomed into Canada
(Germany).
SECONDARY ANTISEMITISM SCALE
Secondary antisemitism is often explained as a set of antisemitic attitudes that occur not in spite of, but because of, the Holocaust. It is also
referred to as post-Shoah antisemitism or post-Auschwitz antisemitism in
Germany’s current political discourse.53 Perhaps the nature of secondary
antisemitism is most pointedly summed up by Israeli psychiatrist Zevi Rex,
who provocatively argued that “[t]he Germans will never forgive the Jews
for Auschwitz.”54 At the heart of this issue is the inherent conflict between
Germany’s historical guilt, the desire “to close the books on the past,”55 and
the perceived and alleged unjustified claims of Jews and the state of Israel.
For this study, we adapted a “secondary antisemitism” scale drawing
from two different sources, Imhoff56 and Bergmann.57 Modeling our survey
items after these two templates, we developed the following five statements
(overall sample a = .86; German sample a = .85; Canadian sample a = .89):
1. Jews continue to exert too much influence on world events.
2. Jews exploit the Holocaust for their own political purposes.
3. Jews continue to talk too much about what happened to them in
the Holocaust.
53. Werner Bergmann, “Antisemitic Attitudes in Europe: A Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Social Issues 64, no. 2 (2008): 343-362. See also Werner
Bergmann and Rainer Erb, Antisemitism in Germany: The Post-Nazi Epoch Since
1945 (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 1997).
54. Quoted in Henryk M. Broder, Der Ewige Antisemit. Über Sinn und Funktion
eines beständigen Gefühls (Frankfurt: Fischer-TB, 1986), 125.
55. Kempf, “Antisemitism and Criticism of Israel.”
56. Roland Imhoff, “Zwei Formen des modernen Antisemitismus? Eine Skala
zur Messung primären und sekundären Antisemitismus,” Conflict & Communication Online 9, no. 11 (2010): 1-13.
57. Werner Bergmann, “Antisemitic Attitudes in Europe.”
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4. Jews greatly overstate their misfortunes, sufferings, and sacrifices.
5. Jews use the events of the Holocaust to make other people feel
guilty.
Prior to our initial computations, an additional confirmatory factor
analysis was run in order to test the empirical verifiable dimensions of all
items in the two scales. A varimax rotation confirmed the intended twodimensional structure for both the German and Canadian samples as well as
for the overall sample. This process demonstrated that the separation of the
data into two different antisemitism scales is not only based on a specific
theory setup but that it can also be empirically and reliably analyzed at both
universities.
RESULTS
The statistical analyses for this study were conducted in two stages: (1)
in order to identify antisemitic attitudes on both scales, a variance analysis
was used to test the university-specific distributions of differences and the
interconnection between the two scales; (2) during the second stage, regression analysis was used to investigate national, religious, and gender patterns
for both classic and secondary antisemitism.
Stage One: Antisemitic Attitude Differences at Two Universities
Of the 1,800 students who participated in our study, only 1,062
(61.1%) disagreed strongly with classic antisemitic attitudes. Approximately 37% of the combined respondents answered within the gray area of
“disagree somewhat” (31.5%) and “agree somewhat” (5.7%). At both universities, 1.7% of the students agreed strongly with the listed statements on
classic antisemitic attitudes. Consequently, we could argue that, in total,
almost four out of 10 participants (38.9%) identified, or partially identified,
with some of the antisemitic opinions listed in the questionnaire. If we take
into consideration that the statements listed in our survey are highly inflammatory (e.g., “Jewish Canadians/Jewish Germans tend to show stronger
criminal tendencies than did other Canadians/Germans”), the relatively
weak resistance expressed against these statements by every fourth respondent can be viewed as alarming.
Our findings on students’ responses to secondary antisemitism are
equally cause for concern. Adding up both samples, 38.2% (n = 670) of the
participating students disagreed strongly with secondary antisemitism.
More than 57% of the responses were within the gray area (“disagree somewhat” 38.1% [n = 668]; “agree somewhat” 19.3% [n = 339]), and 4.3% [(n
= 75]) of students in Canada and Germany agreed strongly with prejudices
2013]
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THE DARK SIDE OF THE ACADEMY
that are manifestations of secondary antisemitism. Adding the Canadian and
German samples together, more than six (57% + 4.3%) out of 10 students
are receptive to the idea of “blaming Jews” for preserving the public and
historical memory of the Shoah.
Our rationale for testing university-specific distributions for the prediction of classic and secondary antisemitism is based on our initial hypothesis that antisemitism is prevalent in all societies, including learning
communities such as post-secondary institutions. By variance analysis (see
Table 2), we confirmed our hypothesis for both antisemitism scales in
Canada and Germany. Regarding the distribution of classic antisemitism, no
significant differences could be demonstrated between the two student samples. For secondary antisemitism, an apparently minor but significant relation was revealed: the German sample had slightly higher prejudices than
the Canadians (see also the low h2 of 0.4% and the almost identical average
scores for both universities: University of Osnabrück = 1.94; University of
Victoria =1.84).
TABLE 2. Variance analysis of the antisemitism scales
Classic antisemitism
Secondary antisemitism
F
Overall
(N = 1,800)
p
Df
h2
.28
6.24
.597 1,1737
.013 1,1751
–
0.4%
German
Canadian
(n = 1,004) (n = 796)
Av.
Av.
1.47
1.94
1.49
1.84
Stage Two: Sociodemographical Patterns Connected
to Antisemitic Attitudes
In the second stage of our research, we used a hierarchical regression
analysis with SPSS 20 to identify possible national, religious, and gender
patterns on the distribution of classic and secondary antisemitism. The
regression analyses were undertaken to explore how extensively antisemitic
attitudes differed in terms of socio-demographical predictors. First, regression analyses were conducted separately for each university; then, they
were run with the overall sample. We used a three-step method for modeling the two scales on antisemitic attitudes for each university and a fourth
step for the overall sample prediction. Model 1 presents the unadjusted
association between sex and antisemitic attitudes; Model 2 adjusts for the
respondents’ belonging to a religious community; Model 3 adds the students’ citizenship; Model 4 represents the overall sample and enhances
Model 3 by adding the specific university as a predictor into the computa-
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tion. In order to identify the specific effects of each model in a more differentiated manner, we looked closely at the changes in R2.
Stage Three—Classic Antisemitism
Table 3 displays the findings for classic antisemitism from the hierarchical linear regression analyses. The first regression step, Sex, reveals a
low, but still significant, predictive variable for classic antisemitism in the
Canadian sample, as well as in the overall sample (change in R2: 3.2% for
UVic, and 1.0% for the overall sample). At the University of Victoria, male
students showed a significantly higher prevalence of classic antisemitic
prejudices than did female students.
The second step of the hierarchical linear regression analysis, Belonging to a religious community, produced no significant results for any given
sample. For all samples in regression step three, the analysis for Citizenship
of the specific country was detected as a low but still significant predictor
for classic antisemitism (change in DR2: 0.9% for the German university;
4.3% for the Canadian university; 2.9% for the overall sample). In all samples, students holding citizenships outside of the testing countries (German
or Canadian) had results that were significantly higher for classic
antisemitic opinions than for students who were either German citizens
tested in Germany or Canadian citizens being surveyed in Canada.
The fourth regression step, University, which took only the overall
sample into account, showed no significant prediction of classic antisemitism being connected to the specific university. Altogether, we identified a
negligible explanation strength of socio-demographical predictors (R2 =
0.9%) for Osnabrück students, and very low predictions for UVic students
(R2 = 7.5%) and the overall sample (R2 = 3.8%).
Stage Four—Secondary Antisemitism
Table 4 displays the findings for secondary antisemitism. Here, we
identified similar prediction patterns for all samples from the hierarchical
regression analyses. Sex, the first regression analysis step, is in all samples a
low but still significant predictive variable for secondary antisemitism
(change in R2: 0.5% for the University of Osnabrück; 4.4% for the University of Victoria; 1.7% for the overall sample). Male students in all three
samples displayed significantly higher rates of secondary antisemitic attitudes than did female students.
The second step of the analysis, Belonging to a religious community,
produced an almost negligible result, but it is still significant for the overall
sample (DR2: 0.5%). Students in Canada and Germany who indicated that
0.56 0.09 .21*** .07*** .04***
Overall sample, N = 1,800
–.02
–0.01 0.04
–.01
.01**
.01*
.01
0.54 0.11 .17*** .07*** .02***
DR2
–0.16 0.05 –.09** .05***
0.49 0.09 .12*** .04*** .02***
–0.11 0.04 –.07** .02***
B SE
b
R2
0.24 0.04 .13*** .02***
Overall sample, N = 1,800
.04***
THE DARK SIDE OF THE ACADEMY
Note: * = p < .05, ** = p < .01, *** = p < .001.
.07*
0.44 0.20
Step 3: Citizenship of the specific
country (1 = Yes; 2 = No)
Step 4: University (1 = German;
2 = Canadian)
.02
0.03 0.07
Step 2: Belonging to a religious
community (1 = Yes; 2 = No)
.05*** .01
B
SE
b
R2
DR2
0.38 0.62 .21*** .04***
–0.09 0.08 –.04
University of Victoria, n = 796
DR2
b
.08*
R2
.01*
University of Osnabrück, n = 1,004
Step and predictor
B SE
Step 1: Sex (1 = Female; 2 = Male) 0.15 0.06
.01***
DR2
0.55 0.08 .17*** .04*** .03***
–0.03 0.03
B SE
b
R2
0.15 0.03 .10*** .01***
TABLE 4. Hierarchical regression analysis summary for socio-demographical variables
predicting secondary antisemitism
Note: ** = p < .01, *** = p < .001.
Step 4: University (1 = German;
2 = Canadian)
0.49 0.15 .11*** .01** .01***
–0.03 0.06 –.01 0.03*** .01
–.02
Step 2: Belonging to a religious
community (1 = Yes; 2 = No)
–0.04 0.05
B
SE
b
R2
DR2
0.26 0.05 .18*** 0.03***
Step 3: Citizenship of the specific
country (1 = Yes; 2 = No)
University of Victoria, n = 796
DR2
b
.01
R2
University of Osnabrück, n = 1,004
Step and predictor
B SE
Step 1: Sex (1 = Female; 2 = Male) 0.02 0.05
TABLE 3. Hierarchical regression analysis summary for socio-demographical variables
predicting classic antisemitism
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they belong to a religious community showed a higher average of secondary
antisemitic attitudes.
Regression step three for all samples, Citizenship of the specific country, was detected as a very low but still significant predictor for secondary
antisemitism (change in DR2: 0.4% for the German university; 2.9% for the
Canadian university; 1.4% for the overall sample).
Again, for secondary antisemitic attitudes in all samples, those participants who held a citizenship that was neither German (when being surveyed
at the University of Osnabrück) nor Canadian (when surveyed at the University of Victoria) displayed a significantly higher predilection for classic
antisemitic attitudes than did students who were citizens of the testing
country.
Regression step four, University, which was exclusively used for the
overall sample, showed a very low significant prediction of secondary
antisemitism for the specific university (DR2: 0.5% for the overall sample).
At the University of Osnabrück, students showed a slightly higher prevalence of secondary antisemitic prejudices than did students from the University of Victoria.
In total, taking both samples into account, we also identified a negligible prediction strength of socio-demographical predictors for secondary
antisemitism among Osnabrück students (overall R2 = 0.9%), and very low
predictions for UVic students (overall R2 = 7.3%) and for the overall sample (R2 = 4.1%).
Despite the moderate correlation between the two samples’ attitudes
on classic and secondary antisemitism (r = .42** for the University of
Osnabrück, r = .54** for the University of Victoria, r = .48** for the overall
sample), the results were very similar in terms of prediction strength by
socio-demographic variables. On the whole, we detected negligible explanation strength of socio-demographical factors for the Canadian and German samples.
As a consequence of these stated results, we maintain Arendt’s hypothesis that the spread of antisemitism is socially pervasive. It is therefore reasonable to state that the majority of students at the sampled universities in
Canada and Germany appear to be—despite demographic and regional differences—united in their expressions of antisemitic prejudices.
SUMMARY
Our empirical study discussed in this paper examined the proliferation
of antisemitic prejudices and stereotypes among post-secondary students in
Canada and Germany. Our collaborative research project was simultane-
2013]
THE DARK SIDE OF THE ACADEMY
83
ously conducted at two universities, the University of Victoria and the University of Osnabrück, during January 2013; the same survey had been
administered in May 2012 at the University of Osnabrück. At the University of Victoria, the survey was conducted in 27 classes in the faculties of
humanities and social sciences. The sample size consisted of 796 undergraduate respondents enrolled in lower- and upper-level classes. In Osnabrück, the questionnaires were distributed among 1004 undergraduate
participants who were enrolled in ten individual classes in five departments.
Our quantitative findings on antisemitism are part of a larger scale
collaborative research project entitled Public Opinions and Attitudes in
Post-Secondary Institutions in Germany and Canada. In this transnational
study, we explore students’ perceptions of anti-immigrant attitudes,
antisemitism, anti-Muslim attitudes, racism, sexism, and prejudice toward
homosexuals. To our knowledge, our survey is the first transnational study
of this scope conducted at two post-secondary institutions in Canada and
Germany.
The use of factor and reliability analysis supported the consistency and
reliability of both scales—classic and secondary antisemitism—in the
Canadian and German samples. In addition, we detected through variance
analysis and hierarchical regression analysis statistically non-significant or
very low differences between the two campus surveys. Considering how the
two student populations varied in terms of their demographics, this result
was startling, but in terms of the introduced theoretical insights on
antisemitism58 and existing empirical results,59 the statistically non-significant differences were not really unexpected. After all, the already existing
research60 on antisemitism in Germany has revealed very similar results in
the general population since the late 1990s.61
Despite the moderate correlation existing between the individual
scales, we were able to demonstrate the two-dimensional structure of the
two introduced antisemitism scales by a confirmatory factor analysis in the
Canadian and German samples. These analyses verified the empirical distinctive dimensions displayed by the two antisemitism scales. On the
strength of these results, we argue that secondary antisemitism is not simply
58. Kenneth Lasson, “In an Academic Voice,” 349-405. See also Weinberg,
“Alone on the Quad,” 407-442.
59. Zick, Küpper, and Heitmeyer, “Prejudices and Group-Focused Enmity,”
273-302.
60. Anti-Defamation League, “Attitudes Toward Jews in Seven European
Countries,” February 2009.
61. Hermann Kurthen, Werner Bergmann, and Rainer Erb, Antisemitism and
Xenophobia in Germany after Unification (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997).
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a byproduct of classic antisemitism, but should be presented with specific
prevention and intervention strategies.
Out of a total of 1,800 completed surveys, 37 percent of answers on
classic antisemitic attitudes fell within the gray area of “disagree somewhat” and “agree somewhat.” Given the overtly derogatory language
employed in our statements for the German survey—including racial slurs,
epithets, and pejoratives—this number seems relatively high. Our data on
participants’ responses to secondary antisemitism is of even greater concern. Both national samples, taken together, show that over 57 percent of
the students “disagreed somewhat” or “agreed somewhat” with statements
such as “Jews use the events of the Holocaust to make other people feel
guilty,” and “Jews exploit the Holocaust for their own political purposes.”
As a result of these findings, we posit that both classic and secondary
antisemitic sentiments and opinions are noticeably present and continue to
be pervasive at two representative institutions of higher learning in Canada
and Germany. In light of the fact that our findings differ only minimally
from the currently available public-opinion data in Germany, we consider
our results to be supportive of Hannah Arendt’s dictum that no civil society,
regardless of its educational advancement, is untouched by contemporary
manifestations of antisemitism.62
Although it is beyond the scope of this study to explain the persistence
of antisemitic attitudes in post-secondary institutions, we claim that our survey results demonstrate cause for considerable apprehension with regard to
the prevalence of religious and ethnic prejudices in the surveyed student
body at two mid-sized universities in Canada and Germany. Our results are
even more worrisome given the empirical data available on the proliferation
of racism and racist discourses in Western societies. Antisemitism as a cultural code is often linked to other pre-existing cultural images of the other,
which continue to perpetuate stereotypes and prejudices in public and political discourses.63 As the German studies mentioned earlier in this paper
suggest,64 antisemitism is a pronounced form of racism and rarely occurs by
itself. It appears to be closely linked to anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments, gender stereotypes, hatred toward new immigrants, and prejudice
toward homosexuals.65 Berlin sociologist Werner Bergmann argues that
62. Arendt, “Ceterum Censeo,” 30.
63. “[C]ultural as well as social and political views come in packages, in the
form of ideational syndromes,” Shulamit Volkov, “Readjusting Cultural Codes:
Reflections on Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism,” Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture 25, no. 1 (2006): 56.
64. Zick, et al., “The Syndrome of Group-Focused Enmity.”
65. Wolfgang Frindte, Susan Wettig, and Dorit Wammetsberger, “Old and New
Antisemitic Attitudes in the Context of Authoritarianism and Social Dominance
2013]
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85
antisemitism is a barometer for the social persistence of belief systems that
challenge mutual respect, tolerance, and political equality for all members
of society.66
Some Methodological Limitations
First, our study has the limitation of only one information source—the
students who were the respondents to our survey. Additional survey data of
university administrators—and especially of faculty members, adjunct
instructors, and staff—is needed in order to more fully assess and understand the proliferation of ethnic, social, and religious stereotypes and
prejudices among university populations.
Further limitations occur as a result of our sample sizes. Although our
samples covered a sizable portion of the student populations at both campuses, we still would need to survey more undergraduate and graduate students in a preferably larger scale international project. This would allow us
to replicate our model and further test its validity.
The cross-sectional character of this study implies that we cannot
explain causalities or make predictions about an individual’s socialization
process that leads to antisemitism; in addition, our results only confirm the
existence and distribution of classic and secondary antisemitism. As the
introductory citations suggest, a considerable number of our polled students
think that they have little to no rapport with Jewish people. This might not
come as a surprise; after all, only 0.9 percent of the survey participants at
Canadian university were Jewish, and there were no Jewish survey respondents in Germany. We might thus hypothesize that many of the survey
answers reveal students’ opinions of what Alain Finkielkraut called “imaginary Jews.”67 The interconnectedness of the two introduced antisemitism
scales (classic and secondary) to expressions of modern antisemitic attitudes (e.g., antisemitism referring to the defamation of Israel’s Zionist state
ideology and the existence of Israel as a state) should be the scope of future
research on university campuses. Political and empirical difficulties aside,68
appreciating the differences in antisemitism dimensions may yield interrelations and relevance for studies with a broader scope.
Orientation—Two Studies in Germany,” Journal of Peace Psychology 11, no. 3
(2005): 239-266.
66. Werner Bergmann, “Antisemitic Attitudes in Europe.”
67. Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David
Suchoff (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
68. Kempf, “Antisemitism and Criticism of Israel.”
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Some participants appeared to have been confused by our terminology:
“There should be a distinction between Jews and the State of Israel”69; “Der
Unterschied zwischen Juden und Israel ist bei vielen Fragen sehr wichtig”
(The difference between Jews and Israel is, in many questions, quite
important).70
In order to further probe the nature of antisemitic attitudes and their
conflation with Israeli politics, a mixed-methods approach of personal interviews and focus groups may prove fruitful. In addition, qualitative analysis
may be better suited to examine the deeply damaging effects of antisemitic
prejudices on Jewish personal and educational lives. Confronted with such
alarming levels of antisemitic prejudice on campus, we can no longer
assume a “positive, supportive and safe working environment for all . . .
members of the university community.”71 As one student poignantly
pointed out: “[It’s] disturbing that there is a need to perform such a
survey.”72
*Wassilis Kassis is a professor of educational science at the University of Osnabrück/Germany. His main areas of research are international comparisons of particular resilience processes of adolescents, with special attention to the development
of violence and depression under a gender-specific perspective; and the phenomena
of antisemitism and anti-Muslim attitudes. With co-editor Beate Wischer, he
recently founded the Journal of Child and Youth Development.
Charlotte Schallié is assistant professor of Germanic studies at the University of
Victoria, Canada. Her research interests include post-1945 German literature and
film, transcultural studies, and Holocaust education; she has written Heimdurchsuchungen: Deutschschweizer Literatur, Geschichtspolitik und Erinnerungskultur
seit 1965 (Zurich: Chronos, 2008). Schallié serves as co-director of the UVic Iwitness Holocaust Field School and is a 2013-14 faculty fellow at the UVic Centre
for Studies in Religion and Society.
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The JSA 2013 London Sunday Symposium*
Welcoming Remarks
Steven K. Baum, David Hirsh, Winston Pickett, Neal E. Rosenberg
Panel 1—Defining the New Antisemitism
Chair, Kenneth Marcus; Richard Landes, Winston Pickett, Bat Ye’or
Panel 2—Mapping the Rise of Contemporary Antisemitism
Chair, Steven K. Baum; Mark Gardner, Manfred Gerstenfeld,
Robert Wistrich
Panel 3—Antisemitism on Campus
Chair, Kenneth Lasson; Clemens Heni, Dave Rich, Ronnie Fraser
Gloria Z. Greenfield’s film Unmasked Judeophobia
Panel 4—Assessing Current Approaches
Chair, Matthias Küntzel; David Feldman, Gunther Jikeli,
Hagai van der Horst
Panel 5—The Politics of Fighting Antisemitism
Chair, Irwin Cotler; Ben Cohen, Paul Iganski, Denis MacShane
Panel 6—What Can Be Done? Strategic Interventions
Chair, Ruth Klein; Francisco de Almeida Garrett, Julian Hunt,
Philip Spencer
Closing Remarks
Robert S. Wistrich
* Dedicated to the memories of Maggi Eastwood and David G. Littman. We
gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Jeff and Evy Diamond, Mitch
Knisbacher, Daniel Pipes, and Friends of the JSA.
93
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JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM
JSA ANNUAL AWARDS
Lifetime Achievement Award
Manfred Gerstenfeld
Previous recipients include Robert S. Wistrich 2010
Richard L. Rubenstein 2011
Award of Merit—
Righteous Persons Who Fight Antisemitism
RL Hon. Denis MacShane
Previous recipients include Canadian PM Stephen J. Harper
Jabotinsky Award
Shimon T. Samuels
[ VOL. 5:93
Welcome
Steven K. Baum
I look around the room and I see assembled many of the top antisemitism scholars in the world. They have congregated here today for a single
reason when they could be doing something else on a Sunday.
Bat Ye’or could be sightseeing through the mountains of Switzerland,
Ruth Klein could be relaxing by her fireside in Toronto, Irwin Cotler could
be enjoying a takeout from Montreal’s Ruby Foo’s, Judith Liwerant could
be soaking in the sun in Mexico City. There are Matthias Küntzel, Clemens
Heni, and Gunther Jikeli from Germany and Manfred Gerstenfeld, Shimon
Samuels, and Robert Wistrich from Israel—though realistically they are all
unlikely candidates for a relaxing time and instead probably contemplating
ideas for their next book. Yet, all are here today, not unlike many of our
ancestors who came together for the purpose of stemming the tide of hatred
against the Jewish people.
For those of you who don’t know me, I am Steve Baum, editor of the
Journal for the Study of Antisemitism. With co-editor Neil Rosenberg, we
want to take this opportunity to tell you how the JSA began. “Some
nations,” wrote Ernest Gellner, “have navels, some achieve navels and
some have navels thrust upon them.” We are the latter.
Now entering its fifth year and viewed mostly online throughout 56
nations and several thousand hits, the JSA was conceived in response to an
article of mine about to be published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. The University of Warwick-based editors told me that if I wanted to
publish the article on levels of Muslim and Christian antisemitism, I would
have to explain the findings of higher Muslim antisemitism scores in light
of Israeli politics; apparently, my interpretation of 1,500 years of
antisemitic culture was inconsequential. I revised the Discussion section to
include something that made no sense but satisfied the reviewer, and the
paper was accepted and published.
I soon experienced a similar pressure from Cambridge University
Press. I recall having to repeatedly make the case that jihad was not such a
positive force for non-Muslims. Cambridge had the option for my second
book. When they read it, however, they did not like the pro-Israeli stance—
one that did not give equal time to the Palestinians. I argued that Palestinian
politics had no place in a book that investigated the psychology of
antisemitism. They said include equal time for the Palestinian perspective
or your book is rejected. I left before I was fired.
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Eventually, the book was published by a small American press, and it
never sold. But I had decided that I wanted to make a home for scholars to
write in the current climate unfettered by anti-Israeli politics.
I also wanted to make connections. I wanted Jews in the West to know
what Jews in Latin America or Eastern Europe were experiencing, and the
reverse of that as well. To that end, I asked top scholars in antisemitism to
guest edit issues on law, campus antisemitism, Eastern Europe, Australia/
New Zealand, Russia, France, the Middle East, Africa, and South America.
By the time these investigations are complete, I suspect that there will be a
host of new topics, new nations, and new cultures to examine in the neverending saga of Jew hatred.
The JSA has had some milestones that bear announcing. The first and
foremost is that despite all odds, the JSA is entering its fifth year of production. A second milestone that we are proud of is that approximately a quarter of the manuscripts received are from Israeli professors and scholars.
There was another milestone, as well—one that I did not anticipate.
We have received distressed e-mails and concerns from Jews in
Malaysia, Budapest, and elsewhere. [Eszter Garai-Édler, would you please
stand?] At 5′2″ and 110 pounds, Eszter does not look like much of a
prizefighter, but she is. Armed with a Web page, a blog, and a computer,
Eszter fights the Hungarian fascists and is continually threatened and intimidated as she monitors the assaults on the Budapest Jewish community. Her
story appears in the December 2012 issue of the JSA.
The think tank Runnymeade Trust put out a publication a few years
ago called Antisemitism: A Very Light Sleeper. As we will soon learn, in the
UK it has become something of an insomniac. Traditionally the lingua
franca of the far right and Arab Muslim world, antisemitism and anti-Israeli
rhetoric have become fashionable on the left and trendy for labor, and at
pro-Palestinian “peace” rallies. It is very civilized—one can sip a cappuccino of antisemitism lite all day and still leave room for more in what writer
Ben Cohen has identified as a new form of antisemitism, which he has aptly
termed “bistro antisemitism.”
I have been a psychologist for over thirty years, and I still do not
understand antisemitism, let alone its latest incarnations. Christian
antisemitism makes as much sense as Americans hating their British forefathers. The “au courant” brand of Muslim antisemitism makes even less
sense, given its Abrahamic past and semitic ethnic linkings.
We dedicate this symposium to those who are no longer with us. Law
professor and Julius Streicher expert Dr. Maggi Eastwood and tireless
fighter of antisemitism historian David Littman. We open this symposium
in the spirit of Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who wrote: “I
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have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate
them, but to understand them.”
Let Spinoza’s words be the guiding philosophy of this symposium.
There is much to understand, there is much that needs to be explored; let us
get on with the work that scholars do and begin the JSA Sunday Symposium, London, December 2, 2012.
Contemporary Antisemitism
Bat Ye’or*
Antisemitism, as we know, has many facets. Today it is a movement
molded by the hallmark characteristic of our age: it is global. Its source is
no more Europe, although European states—and particularly the European
Union—give it abundant funding, as well as media, cultural, political, and
strategic support. A key source of current European antisemitism may well
be the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation, which influences and creates change. For instance, UNESCO recently declared Hebron’s Patriarchs
Tombs to be of Palestinian patrimony, with support from Muslim holy
books (sura II: 120-136).
The UNESCO decision is problematic in that a global political body
has intervened in a theological dispute and has ratified the Islamization of
the Hebrew patriarchs. Such a decision has tremendous consequences not
only for the Jews but also for the entire Christian world, whose roots have
been Islamized. Moreover, it proclaims to the whole world, Muslim and
non-Muslim, that the word of the Qur’an is the truth, superseding historic
evidences. UNESCO not only has taken a political stance, but also a theological one. More striking is that Western representatives didn’t say a word.
This new antisemitism appears to be triggered by the jihadist ideology,
which intends to destroy Israel and unfolds according to jihadist strategy
and legislation. European support can be seen as willing or extorted contributions from vassal countries, a situation repeated often in history when
vassal Christian states were contributing to jihadist expansion by paying
ransoms or sending soldiers.
One should not forget that the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan in
December 1973 promoted the creation of a second Palestine—the first one
being Jordan and the second occurring in Judea and Samaria—to be led by
Mr. Arafat. The anti-Israeli policy allowed European leaders to set transnational and international bodies whose major aims were to improve the relationships between Islam and the West. This policy was conducted through
the Foreign Offices of each European state and the EU Commission in liaison with Arab diplomats, delegates of the Arab League, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
European leaders know of the dangerous bellicosity of Islamic jihadist
policy. They don’t need our continual and exhausting explanatory exhortations. It is precisely because they know better that they have adopted a
nonconfrontational policy reminiscent of the dhimmi. They are aware that
the lines of the 1948 armistice will cause Israel’s demise and that Islamiz-
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ing Israel’s historical patrimony is part of that process. In addition, Israel’s
demise can occur through the subversion of language and values in order to
integrate Islamic norms and conceptual framework in Europe via multiculturalism and the relativism of values.
The nature of Judeophobia and the means of its propagation have
changed. This new situation requires new definitions, new words, new concepts and explanations because it also integrates Islamic theology, legislation, history, and jihadist Judeophobia, a culture that is not familiar to the
Western public. It means that the traditional thinking and frameworks based
on Christian antisemitism are today inadequate. The language style is new
and much more circumspect. Nazi-style violence and racist antisemitic discourse are carefully avoided and replaced by reminding Israel that it is an
occupier of its own country and that the defense of its citizens’ life and
security is illegal. We saw this attitude recently. America and Europe proclaimed Israel’s right to self-defense against the Hamas rain of rockets but
then prohibited Israel to use it. At the time, Obama forced Israel to accept
Hamas’s Morsi as arbiter over the Jewish state policy. To make it evenhanded, Europe generously gave to Mahmud Abbas a seat at the UN General Assembly.
Not only the nature and the language of Judeophobia have changed but
also their means of propagation. Today, jihadist Judeophobia spreads
through global and transnational networks. It is concealed in innocuous
political language, like the defense of Palestinian historical and territorial
rights that deny those of Israel. Evidences of Israel’s history, whether biblical, archaeological, Greek, or Roman, are rejected because they are not in
the Qur’an or they are Palestinized. And the West accepts not only the presumption of the Qur’an as the source of history; it also produces chronological anachronisms.
Antisemitism today is a gigantic states’ creation, circulating around the
globe within the machinery of diplomacy, policy, culture, NGOs, education,
and media involving billions of Euros and dollars. Think tanks and interfaith dialogues feed the world machinery devoted to the demonization of
Israel. The homogeneous global networks create the impression of an allencompassing antisemitism emanating everywhere, conveyed by a political
language originating in the 1970s that unconsciously impregnates the Western mind and culture with Islamic concepts.
A strong convergence may be noted between EU and OIC policies, as
this strategic union has been strengthened by the instruments of the unofficial Euro-Arab dialogue and its latter developments: the Anna Lindh Foundation; the UN Alliance of Civilizations; and EU political, economic,
media, and cultural support for the creation of Palestine through countless
channels.
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There are striking similarities regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict and in
Muslim immigration issues between the OIC and Europe’s policies. This
may be seen in the Palestinization of EU foreign policy via the transformation of the aggressed into aggressors or in the alleged central role played by
Israel as an instigator of war, terror, and injustice. This construct belongs to
a political doctrine reiterated at every Islamic summit of the OIC, and constantly ranted and imposed by the leaders of the EU and their media, who
fervently reproduce it without understanding its meaning and import.
Europe has been Palestinized as it has been Nazified some decades ago.
Palestinianism is the nexus and the conveyor of global Judeophobia. Such a
situation mirrors the Islamization through the Palestinianism of Western
thinking, policy, culture, legislation, and society.
The Palestinization of Europe progresses by infiltration into the global
governance networks affiliated with the OIC that now dominate all UN networks. They spread a wide web and pass on instructions to sub-networks
and to hundreds of NGOs, particularly Palestinians funded by European
states and the EU Commission, to propagate anti-Israeli hatred. Networks
encompass representatives of so-called “civil societies,” activists promoting
Palestinianism, boycotts of Israel, Muslim immigration, and multiculturalism. Political institutes, think tanks acting as EU-OIC-Palestinian lobbies
(i.e., the Anna Lindh Foundation), often financed by the European Commission, convert directives into public opinion by injecting them into the press,
publications, films, propaganda, art—a bottomless pit for billions. This
opaque, elitist system lacks visibility, doubling and multiplying itself like a
hydra into networks and sub-networks. It uses humanitarian and moral language but it obeys economic interests, submitting to global Islamist terrorism, jihadist threats, and OIC strategy.
The immigrants’ refusal to integrate and their request for sharia has
triggered European movements declaring Israel’s resistance as a model. The
growing forces, hostile to the EU bureaucracy and multiculturalism, are
harshly repressed and demonized by their own governments. I have concluded that: 1) The jihadist global movement encompasses many dynamics
and is spread in part by European inner self-destructive forces; and 2)
global jihad threatens Europe’s security, as well as its cultural and religious
identity.
*I want to express my deep thanks to Steven Baum and the JSA Board for having
included the memory of my late husband, David Littman, in the dedication of this
symposium. Those here who knew David and worked with him will remember how
strongly he fought antisemitism in the most difficult of arenas, such as the Geneva
UN Council on Human Rights.
What to Do? Clarify and Legislate
Francisco de Almeida Garrett*
The fight against antisemitism is a duty and a duty is to be fulfilled,
regardless of the results. Evil must be fought even when results are not
achieved. But we want to reduce antisemitism into small groups, easily
detectible and eliminated. Ultimately, we want to eradicate it.
The fight against antisemitism is a terrible fight: combating those trying to convince people that the Jews control the world and have a plan to
enslave all of humankind. The idea of the Jews as an enslaving people still
exists in the collective subconscious, and there’s always the great danger of
any demagogue using such idea, instigating the masses to punish all Jews,
whoever they may be.
Currently, everybody is aware of the theories slandering the Jewish
people, who are called “the enslaving people.” In our crowded world,
threatened by hunger, these theories could have the effect of an atomic
bomb on the Jewish people, who represent about 0.2 percent of the world
population and can be easily crushed by the mindless masses.
It is necessary to make international laws that have the power to ban
the dissemination of these theories, which can push people insane enough to
discriminate against, hurt, and murder Jews, through the media, particularly
the Internet. “Freedom of expression” has nothing to do with this issue. In a
civilized world, no one can “express freely” harming people. No one can do
that, regardless of one’s good or bad intentions.
Time goes by, however, and the world witnesses the dissemination of
antisemitic theories with indifference. Many years will still go by until the
necessary laws are finally approved and published. This is very worrying.
What to do until that day? I offer a solution, but allow me to preface my
answer.
The Jewish conspiracy theory is highly appealing to the masses, and
can easily fool highly educated people as well. I will go even further. The
majority of the Jewish conspiracy theorists believe what they are saying.
They are not acting on sheer evil, but defensively, to protect something they
believe is under attack.
It is not enough to say that these theories are a fraud. It is not enough
to say that their perpetrators deserve to be punished by legal means,
because, in such cases, they will spend their whole life trying to prove what
they have claimed; they will spend all their energy disseminating that message so dangerous to the Jews.
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The threat of imprisonment is not enough for people to be convinced
of the incorrectness of behavior. People must really be convinced that they
are committing an injustice, that they are wrong and putting innocent people in danger.
It is difficult to refute certain theories completely. If I say there is a
tiny bee frozen somewhere in the universe, on a distant planet, no one can
prove me otherwise. I am absolutely certain, however, that it is possible to
convince the general public that the whole ideological basis of the Jewish
conspiracy theory lies in false propositions.
COMBATING ERRORS
AND
CLARIFYING
THE
CONCEPTS
There are at least three ways of making errors: reasoning wrong with
false data, reasoning wrong with correct data, and reasoning correctly with
false data. In general, conspiracy theorists think wrong with correct data.
They rely on real facts, but draw wrong conclusions from them, because
their entire reasoning is contaminated with logical leaps. This is what Portuguese law calls “violation of the rules of presumptions.”
At other times, conspiracy theorists reason well, but with false data,
meaning that they present reasoning with logic, but based on false propositions. Let’s take a look at the following reasoning: “If Confucius was born
Indian and all Indians are biologists, then Confucius is a biologist.” This
reasoning is valid in its framework, but the proposition is false.
What is also necessary is to begin with correct data and form correct
conclusions. This involves clarifying the issues and persuading the general
public of these concepts. This effort of clarification and persuasion must be
relevant to all social classes, without exception, and should be done in simple and focused presentations, through all lawful means. Organizations and
people with the economic resources should collaborate in financing this
activity, by being aware that they will be acting in the service of justice.
Dinim!
It is important to clarify the concept, and to convince people, that there
are no “Jews” in the sense advocated by the antisemitic promulgators, and
just as crucial to clarify and convince people about the welcoming doctrine
of Jewish law about non-Jews.
Jewish conspiracy theories are very old. The authors of these theories
invented them at a time when they did not know that Jewish law derived
from the Seven Laws of Noah, dictated by God to all humanity: worship the
Creator and not finite idols; respect God’s greatness and kindness; defend
life, in particular human life; promote the sanctity of sexuality; honor third
parties’ property and rights; protect the animals and avoid their suffering;
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foster justice everywhere. But once we are aware of this history, it is possible to eventually destroy the bases of dangerous conspiracy theories.
False Proposition One
The first false proposition of the Jewish conspiracy theory refers to the
expression “the Jews.” This is an expression that makes no sense in the
terms in which it is placed. What is the common denominator between the
religious Jew and the agnostic Jew? Between the Jew begging in Japan and
the Jew who is a lawyer in the United States? Between the Jew who is a
prisoner in Israel and the Jew who is unemployed in London?
There is no common denominator except the moral one. Jews are compelled to comply with a large number of religious obligations or run the risk
of suffering God’s sanction. Tradition tells us that these Jews are moral
heirs of the people who left Egypt and received the Torah in Sinai; they are
thus Jewish souls. Significantly, this single common denominator among all
Jews is not recognized by conspiracy theorists!
False Proposition Two
The second false proposition of the Jewish conspiracy theory places
“the Jews” in the role of despots and of supreme enslavers of the planet.
The Jewish religion represents the most forthright denial of this proposition.
To the Jewish religion, the difference between Jews and non-Jews does not
consist of their importance, but rather of the content and meaning of their
missions in the world.
According to the renowned medieval scholar, teacher, and rabbi Moses
Maimonides, “Those who respect the Seven Laws to serve God belong to
the Righteous among Nations and have their share in the World to Come.”
This is the doctrine of Jewish law toward non-Jews. The enslavement of
peoples is a delirium!
For several reasons, antisemitism is a religious phenomenon and the
fight against it should be done largely in religious assumptions, with religious arguments.
Religious Jews believe that one day the return of all Jews to Israel will
be a religious obligation. No Jew can remain in the exterior to “enslave” the
rest of the peoples. All peoples of the world will be led by Princes of Peace.
In the city of Oporto, Portugal, there is a fantastic synagogue: The
Kadoorie Mekor Haim. Every year, this synagogue receives the visit of five
thousand non-Jewish children, who take home a flyer containing the Seven
Laws. This is how we fight antisemitism. This is how we fight the Jewish
conspiracy theories.
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The Jews do not want to enslave anyone. The Jews do not control the
world. No one controls anything. God controls everything!
To the Jewish religion, God has a special relationship with all human
beings, with whom He has established the Covenant of Noah at a time when
there were not yet Jews and non-Jews, but only men. Moreover, God has a
very special relationship—for good and for evil—with the Jewish people,
with whom He has established a posterior covenant: the Sinai Covenant.
I never heard a conspiracy theorist admitting the possibility of the existence, in fact, of a very special relationship between God and the Jewish
people. On the day conspiracy theorists can admit this possibility, they will
abandon their theories. God’s intervention will explain everything!
In summary, if a sensitive and thorough job is done in clarifying and
persuading to the general public, then it will be really possible to reduce
antisemitism into small, contained groups, readily detectible and then
eliminated.
RECOGNIZING GOD
Clarification and persuasion are certainly victories, but in the fight
against antisemitism, it is not sufficient to reduce it to its minimum expression; we must work to eradicate it altogether. That, however, will not be
possible while the world is governed by agnostic ideologies and international law is not rebuilt on a theistic basis.
Let nobody be fooled! The achievement of universal peace and the
eradication of antisemitism are based on the principle of the belief in God. I
speak here of God; I don’t speak of a team of gods. The forces of the
cosmos, worshipped by aboriginal tribes, as well as the love for the transcendent, through knowledge and meditation—the practical paths of the
religions of the Middle East, China, and India—all converge to a unique
and supreme strength: the unique God: an Eternal God, who was the first
and will be the last.
A few decades ago, supposedly educated men believed that the universe was eternal and that, one day, at a certain time, undifferentiated matter becomes alive, then conscious, then speaking, then proficient in building
concepts and, finally, embedded in each man’s “self.” But in their deep
reasoning and moral conscience they were saying: “No! A stone could
never become a ‘self’; no matter how many millions of years pass, a stone
can never be endowed with personality, thought, feeling, semantics.”
Time has indeed passed. The highly educated are changing; they are
returning to God, because God is a matter of knowledge and reason. He is
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not a matter of faith. Faith does not investigate, does not reason, does not
discover anything.
Human rights have God’s law as a source, as we can read in the US
Declaration of Independence. Heaven is not just oxygen and nitrogen. And
the world needs God. A great sage of the 20th century—Menachem Mendel
Schneerson—never tired of reminding us that man’s righteous behavior can
only result from knowing, through education, that there is “an Eye that sees
and an Ear that hears,” to Whom all, one day, will have to report.
In this confluence, God must be placed in both the spirit and the letter
of the international law, not as shadow, but as affirmation. This is not about
imposing the belief in God by law, just as the belief in parental authority is
not imposed by law. But law imposes respect for parental authority, and
with greater reason must it impose respect for God. This is the point.
Nowadays, there is much talk about “ethics”—that is to say, about
man’s duties to man. But it is necessary to also start talking about man’s
duties to God, which are given in the Seven Laws of Noah and their
ramifications.
These laws form the meeting point of all monotheist religions and, to a
greater extent, of the rest of the beliefs. These are very simple rules, easily
memorized, and have as their essence the religious, cultural, and racial credos of all mankind. These are rules that include an objective definition of
good and evil and that confer a special sanctity to life, to sex, to property,
and to justice.
By following these tenets, it is possible to build a world without
antisemitism; where law is fair, undisputed, and understood by all; where
everyone is aware of their duties; and where everything is justice. It is necessary that the United Nations proclaim a “Universal Declaration of Human
Duties,” clearly marked by the Seven Laws of Noah and their ramifications.
Only the establishment of such a declaration will enable the determination
of the exact scope of each human right.
“Human rights” cannot go on meaning different things to different
people, nor can they continue being considered as anti-rights. “Human
rights” must be a synonym of peace, not of strife, because “human rights”
have God’s law as a source and not man’s law, which is, and will always
remain, the law of the strongest.
*Francisco de Almeida Garrett (David Ariel) is a criminal defense lawyer and a
philosopher of religion. He coordinated the team of British and Portuguese jurists
that in 2012 exonerated the Portuguese Dreyfus—Captain Arthur Barros Basto—
and is a frequent contributor to the JSA.
Strategic Interventions for Anti-Israeli Rhetoric
Julian Hunt*
I want to spend ten minutes discussing whether or not the criminal law
in this country used, in particular, to deal with anti-Israel behavior, to quote
from the title of this panel, is or can ever be a “strategic intervention,” or is
reliance on criminal law—with the aid of third-party agencies and entities
such as the Crown Prosecution Service, the police, and the courts—more of
a leap, very much in the dark, that is likely to lead to little in the way of
tangible results. Perhaps I can start with examples of prosecutions or proceedings that never actually got off the ground. Many of you will remember
the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra scandal. This orchestra came to London
and had its concert disturbed by pro-Palestinian activists. A night of
entertainment by a world-renowned orchestra was severely curtailed. Rude
and offensive chants were sung by these protesters from various seats
spread around the Royal Albert Hall. The disruption was organized,
planned, and dare I say strategic, with the concert broadcasted on BBC
radio actually taken off the air for some time because of the demonstrations
inside the Royal Albert Hall.
How would, or was, this dealt with in a criminal context? Eventually, a
file was submitted to the CPS in London some months after the event. A
potential prosecution for aggravated trespass was not pursued, with no further action taken—in other words, the police had prepared a dossier with
statements and the like and handed it to the CPS, which had, after a review
based on their evidential and public interest tests, decided not to charge. It
did not help that the Royal Albert Hall was unwilling as the “victim” to get
involved or support this prosecution. The main point here, though, is the
reliance on other institutions and organizations that have extremely high
thresholds before they will take someone through the courts. There was
mention of a private prosecution, but these are notoriously difficult to bring,
fraught with danger, expensive, and can be taken over (and dropped) by the
CPS in the form of the director of public prosecutions when he feels like it.
My second example again shows the shear bluntness of criminal law
when balanced against our absolute and rightful respect for freedom of
speech. Perhaps most of all, it shows the trumping of the Article 10 freedom
of speech rights over ostensible hatred of Jews in the form of illegitimate
criticism of Israel. You may remember the case of Ken O’Keefe, a so-called
world citizen according to his website, Palestinian peace activist, and business partner of Lauren Booth. O’Keefe, in February this year at Middlesex
University, participated in a discussion entitled “Is Israel an Apartheid
State?” Aside from telling the audience that Israel was involved in the trag-
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edies of September 11, 2001, he said the following, which was reported to
the police when a few brave and right-minded members of the audience
became deeply upset. I want to publicly thank the brilliant and courageous
blogger Richard Millett, who recorded these comments at the university,
posting them online. Remember too this was an official talk in a hall managed and owned by an English university a few miles from here, heard by
impressionable students and with Baroness Tonge sharing a platform with
Ken O’Keefe at this hate-fest. O’Keefe’s remarks, as recorded by Millet:
So if Israel is inherently a racist state, if it is inherently an apartheid state,
then I want no part of Israel; it has no place in this world. And it does in
its current form, if you want me to use some inflammatory language; in
its current form should be destroyed. Just like the UN in its current form
should be destroyed, just like the American empire in its current form
should be destroyed, just like the British empire in its current form should
be destroyed. [And then this was said to the students in the hall—] I
make no special bones about Jewish people, but the bottom line is this.
The Jewish state—that’s not my expression—the Jewish state of Israel is,
therefore, acting on behalf of the Jewish people. You, like the Nazis,
have now a special obligation. . . . Did they [referring to the Germans] do
enough to stop the Nazis? No, they didn’t. And what are the Jewish people doing right now? Are you doing enough to stop your racist apartheid
genocidal state? I could, as you can imagine, go on.
Along with the personalizing of the comments, with the use of “you”
being clearly directed to certain members of the audience, this is a prime
example of modern antisemitic comment. Now, the matter was reported to
the police in the local area—Hendon, incidentally. No charges were ever
brought against O’Keefe for stirring up racial hatred, or for offenses under
the Public Order Act. Now, let me bear in mind that those deeply unpleasant and hateful words cite a well-known case from the freedom of expression case law developed over the last forty years by the European Court of
Human Rights. In the case of Handyside v the United Kingdom from 1976,
the court stated:
Freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a
democratic society, one of the basic conditions for its progress and for the
development of every man . . . it is applicable not only to “information”
or “ideas” that are favorably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a
matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb [my
emphasis] the State or any sector of the population . . .
The decision not to prosecute O’Keefe was the right one in purely
legal terms. If he had for instance been charged under Section 5 of the
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Public Order Act 1986 for using insulting or abusive words or behavior, he
would or may have argued that his behavior was “reasonable”—a specific
defense to a Section 5 charge. How would it have been reasonable? Because
it was probably reasonable in the context of his Article 10 freedom of
speech rights, with the prosecution having to prove to the very high criminal standard of proof that his behavior or his comments were not reasonable
in an Article 10 context. Perhaps one of my former colleagues at the CPS—
a lifer who’d done 25 years—got it right when he told me that “If you ain’t
gonna win it, bin it.”
We want interventions that work, and that is what occurred in the
O’Keefe case. The recording, as some of you will know, showing Baroness
Jenny Tonge sharing a platform with this nasty piece of work resulted in her
resigning as the Liberal Democrat whip after she refused to apologize for
remarks made at this meeting about “Israel not being there forever,”
remarks Lord Sacks called “dangerous and inflammatory.” Sure, we continue to complain about these hate speakers taking the legal route without
holding out much in the hope of a prosecution, but we also record, blog, and
publicize their speech and for public figures, in a modern democracy, when
they go beyond legitimate criticism of Israel and enter the gutter, see these
mamzers, we hope, toppled.
*Julian Hunt is a London-based attorney who defends pro-Israeli activists and is a
committee member of UK Lawyers for Israel.
Antisemitism in UK Academia
Clemens Heni*
Let1 me2 begin3 with a quote from our chair, Kenneth Lasson. This
year, Kenneth wrote the following from his 80-page working paper
1. Due to the short amount of time allotted for my presentation at the conference, I put some additional information in these notes to provide a complete picture
of my topic. To begin with, antisemitism is a flexible and widespread ideology.
Critics are always one step behind the antisemitic activists. When I started working
on this presentation I thought about starting with the Tottenham Hotspurs. This idea
became particularly timely due to the horrible antisemitic attack last week at supporters of the Spurs in a pub in Rome by some 30 Italian neo-Nazi activists, probably associated with the football teams of Lazio Rome and AS Rome. Several
English football fans were severely beaten and injured; luckily, no one was killed.
The motivation was antisemitism, because the Tottenham Hotspurs are known and
famous worldwide for their pro-Jewish history and stance. During the game in the
Euro League the following day, the same Italian neo-Nazis, or others, displayed
pro-Palestine banners in the stadium and screamed “Jews Tottenham, Jews Tottenham.” Anti-Zionism and antisemitic attacks often go hand in hand. The pro-Palestine banner could have been displayed by Muslims, left-wingers, or even Jewish
post- or anti-Zionists. But why did I want to start my presentation on antisemitism
to the Spurs in the first place? Well, “Jürgen was a German, now he is a Jew” is a
well-known slogan of the Spurs. Ironically and unfortunately, however, Jürgen
Klinsmann, a German football player who once played for the Spurs, was a leading
voice in probably the biggest wave of German nationalism in recent decades, when
he helped initiate a pro-German climate in 2006 during the football World Cup,
which was held in Germany. Bestselling authors like Matthias Matussek from the
leading German weekly journal and news portal on the Internet, Der Spiegel and
Spiegel online, respectively, argued against Holocaust remembrance, and in his
2006 book We Germans, in which he attacked the people of England as being “the
most disliked people on earth,” he embraced German capitalism while aiming at the
“English class society,” which in his view is not on the same high level as Germany’s. I analyzed German nationalism, political culture, scholarship, and
antisemitism during the football Worldcup in summer 2006 (Clemens Heni, “Das
nationale Apriori. Wie aus der BRD endgültig ‘Deutschland’ wurde,” HaGalil, July
7, 2006, accessed November 23, 2012, http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/2006/07/
deutschland.htm.)
2. Hatred of England is widespread in Germany, particularly among those who
also defame Sir Arthur Harris and the Royal Air Force (RAF) of the British army
during the Second World War. For them, Dresden equals Auschwitz, more or less.
This portrayal of Germans as victims, like the Jews, and the projection of guilt onto
the allies (or the Jews) are typical forms of so-called secondary antisemitism, a
term of Peter Schönbach, a co-worker of philosopher Theodor W. Adorno around
1960. Theodor W. Adorno, “Zur Bekämpfung des Antisemitismus heute,” in
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Adorno, Collected Works, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 20, no. 1 (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 360-363.
3. Then, hatred of Israel during the Lebanon war in summer 2006 and German
nationalism went hand in hand. One example of anti-Zionist Jewish activism is
Tamar Amar-Dahl. She returned her Israeli passport in 2006 due to the war and got
a German passport instead. In addition, she wrote a doctoral dissertation about
Israel president Shimon Peres, framing left-wing Zionism as no less “racist” or
nationalistic and as bad as right-wing Zionism. Worse, Amar-Dahl has joined antiIsrael Palestinian events in Germany in recent years, even giving a friendly interview to leading pro-Iranian Islamist homepage Muslim-Markt. This site has been
promoting the boycott of Israel for over ten years now; I was part of a group in
Germany criticizing that kind of anti-Zionist antisemitism as early as 2002. See
Clemens Heni, Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon: Holocaust Trivialization –
Islamism – Post-Colonial and Cosmopolitan Anti-Zionism (Berlin: Edition Critic,
2013 [in print]), 434-436. Tamar Amar-Dahl, Shimon Peres: Friedenspolitiker und
Nationalist (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010); Tamar Amar-Dahl, “MuslimMarkt interviewt Dr. phil. Tamar Amar-Dahl—Historikerin an der Humboldt
Universität zu Berlin,” Muslim-Markt, February 17, 2011, accessed May 13, 2012,
http://www.muslim-markt.de/interview/2011/amar-dahl.htm. The interview of
someone like Amar-Dahl doesn’t shock anyone in Germany because leading
scholar in antisemitism Wolfgang Benz, former long-time head of the Center for
Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at Technical University Berlin from 1990 until
2011, also embraced the Islamism and hatred of Israel by Muslim-Markt and gave
them a friendly interview on November 1, 2010; Wolfgang Benz, “Interview mit
Muslim-Markt,” November 1, 2010a, accessed February 26, 2012, www.muslimmarkt.de/interview/2010/benz.htm. For criticism of Benz and the ZfA, see Clemens
Heni, Schadenfreude. Islamforschung und Antisemitismus in Deutschland nach 9/
11 (Berlin: Edition Critic, 2011), 219-246. This Center for Research on Antisemitism is part of a consortium of scholars on antisemitism and racism, co-headed by
David Feldman from the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism in London.
After having been dismissed by Jewish studies scholar and historian Michael Brenner, Amar-Dahl then wrote her dissertation under the auspices of very right-wing
historian Horst Möller from Munich; her second reader, ironically, was hard-core
left-wing sociologist Moshe Zuckermann from Tel Aviv University. Then, AmarDahl was invited by then head of the Institute for the History of German Jewry in
Hamburg Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, who is now the head of that controversial
center in Berlin and a member of this consortium. If it comes to hatred of Israel,
right-wing Germans and left-wing Israeli have a common cause. Horst Möller is
infamous in Germany for his anticommunist propaganda, framing communism as
“Red Holocaust”; he honored revisionist Ernst Nolte, who was awarded the Konrad
Adenauer Prize in 2000. Nolte is well known in England, thanks to the important
scholarship of British historian Richard Evans, for example. Evans is among the
best experts on National Socialism, Holocaust denial, revisionism, German nationalism, and antisemitism, including the analysis of the Historikerstreit and Ernst
Nolte in 1986 and the following years. For criticism of Möller, German president
Joachim Gauck, the German New Right, and the equation of the Holocaust with
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“Antisemitism in the Academic Voice,” which calls to mind this quote:
“Many words hurt more than swords”:
The romanticized vision of life in the Ivory Tower [ . . . ] has long been
relegated to yesteryear. While universities like to nurture the perception
that they are protectors of reasoned discourse, and indeed often perceive
themselves as sacrosanct places of culture in a chaotic world, the modern
campus, of course, is not quite so wonderful.”4
University of Sheffield Scholar in Law Lesley Klaff addressed contemporary anti-Zionism and hate speech in the UK with this observation:
The last few years have witnessed an explosion of anti-Zionist rhetoric on
university campuses across the United Kingdom. Encouraged by the University and College Union’s annual calls for discriminatory measures
against Israeli institutions and academics, the rhetoric has become even
more strident since Operation Cast Lead. [ . . . ] There has been a
proliferation of anti-Zionist expression on UK university campuses since
2002 when, on 6 April, 125 British academics published an open letter in
The Guardian calling for an EU moratorium on funding for grants and
research contracts for Israeli universities [ . . . ]. This letter marked the
official start of the British “academic boycott of Israel” and acted as a
catalyst for the use of the British university campus as a platform for the
expression of anti-Zionist views.5
As I will argue in this short presentation, antisemitism in the UK is a
widespread phenomenon even among scholars in the field. Robert Wistrich
criticized the weekly London Review of Books, perhaps the “most widely
circulated of European literary magazines,” for its constantly anti-Israel,
anti-Zionist, or post-Zionist approach and its defamation of Israel in recent
years.6
communism, including articles about Lithuania and Holocaust remembrance, see
Clemens Heni and Thomas Weidauer, eds., Ein Super-GAUck. Politische Kultur im
neuen Deutschland (Berlin: Edition Critic, 2012).
4. Kenneth Lasson, Antisemitism in the Academic Voice: Confronting Bigotry
under the First Amendment (University of Baltimore Legal Studies Research Paper
No. 2012-6, 2012), 2, accessed November 22, 2012, http://ssrn.com/abstract=
1923833.
5. Lesley Klaff, “Anti-Zionist Expression on the UK Campus: Free Speech or
Hate Speech?,” Jewish Political Studies Review 22, nos. 3-4 (2010): 87-109,
accessed November 22, 2012, http://jcpa.org/article/anti-zionist-expression-on-theuk-campus-free-speech-or-hate-speech/.
6. Robert Wistrich ,“From Blood Libel to Boycott: Changing Faces of British
Antisemitism,” Posen Papers on Contemporary Antisemitism 13 (The Vidal Sas-
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Analyzing and criticizing scholars is an important field of research;
take, for example, Campus Watch, an organization of the Middle East
Forum (MEF) in Philadelphia, which deals with scholars in Islamic and
Middle East studies in North America.7
In an August 2009 Montreal conference, Robert Wistrich, head of the
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism
(SICSA),8 noted: “George Orwell said, ‘There are some things which only
an intellectual would be stupid enough to believe.’ ” Wistrich went on:
“Intellectuals invented modern antisemitism. They were the pioneers of it
and therefore we need to be particularly attentive and vigilant to the ways in
which contemporary intellectuals are contributing to new and more modern,
or postmodern in some cases, forms of antisemitism.9
soon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 2011), 1-2, accessed
November 22, 2012, http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/robert%20pp13.pdf.
7. “Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, reviews and critiques
Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them. The project
mainly addresses five problems: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with
scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power
over students. Campus Watch fully respects the freedom of speech of those it
debates while insisting on its own freedom to comment on their words and deeds.”
Accessed November 22, 2012, http://www.campus-watch.org/.
8. Let me say a few positive things about the UK and its relation to antisemitism. Perhaps the best-known research center on antisemitism today is the Vidal
Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, established in 1982. It is named after Vidal Sassoon, who
died in 2012; I posted an entry on my homepage to commemorate him. Sassoon
first got in touch with politics in London after the Second World War. In 1947, he
became a member of the famous group 43, a Jewish group fighting antisemitism in
London and England, particularly Oswald Mosley and the Union Movement, and
his pro-Nazi fascists, the Blackshirts. Antisemitism and hatred of Jews did not end
on May 8, 1945, as we all know. Mosley was friends with Arthur Ehrhardt, himself
a Nazi, member of the Waffen-SS, and a SS-Hauptsturmführer, responsible for
fighting “partisans.” Ehrhardt was then supported by Mosley and others after 1945
to reorganize SS activities under another name, and he founded the journal Nation
Europa, following the pan-European SS-ideology. Ehrhardt was the political father
of Henning Eichberg, the leading theorist of German New Right ideology since the
late 1960s. In 2006, I finished my doctoral dissertation about Henning Eichberg
and the New Right and German ideology from 1970-2005, including the analysis
of anti-Americanism, national identity, and antisemitism. Clemens Heni,
Salonfähigkeit der Neuen Rechten. “Nationale Identität, Antisemitismus und
Antiamerikanismus in der politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
1970-2005: Henning Eichberg als Exempel” (Marburg: Tectum), 2007; [doc. diss.,
University of Innsbruck, July 2006]).
9. Robert Wistrich, presentation at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for
the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), Montreal, August 2009, transcript by Clemens
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British historian Arnold Toynbee produced an antisemitic trope when
equating Israel and the Jews to Nazis in the 1950s, as literary critic Anthony
Julius10 and Robert Wistrich have shown.11 The Israel-equals-Nazism-andthe-Holocaust comparison and equation has been part of leftist agitation for
decades, in fact12; just have a look at such an antisemitic cartoon in the
Labour Herald of June 25, 1982.13
Heni, accessed November 22, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIZKoYcP
_vY&lr=1.
10. Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in
England (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 412-414.
11. “The intellectual pioneer in the 1950s of the idea that Zionism is a form of
Nazism was, however, another eminent member of the British establishment, the
renowned philosopher of history Arnold J. Toynbee. His monumental A Study of
History unequivocally and relentlessly indicted the Zionists as ‘disciples of the
Nazis.’ According to Toynbee, they had chosen ‘to imitate some of the evil deeds
that the Nazis had committed against the Jews.’ ” Wistrich, “From Blood Libel to
Boycott,” 7.
12. Even critics of antisemitism, such as Dave Rich from the Community Security Trust (CST), sometimes argue not so convincingly. He said in 2011 at a conference about the EUMC Working Definition on Antisemitism: “For example, the
Working Definition’s list of examples of antisemitism relating to Israel—which
includes describing Israel’s existence as ‘a racist endeavour’ and comparing Israel
to Nazi Germany—is preceded by the crucial sentence: ‘Examples of the ways in
which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel, taking into
account the overall context could include . . .’ [emphasis by Dave Rich]. This
leaves an obvious question not often asked, much less answered: What is the context in which these examples may not be antisemitic? For example, does a statement daubed on a wall differ from the same statement, but made in a lecture theater
or written on an Internet blog? At what point does the manner and context in which
the statement is made demand intervention, either by a website moderator or by the
police?” (Dave Rich, “Reactions, Uses and Abuses of the EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism,” paper presented at Tel Aviv University, July 2011), accessed
November 23 2012, http://kantorcenter.tau.ac.il/sites/default/files/proceeding-all_3
.pdf. Well, if we take the comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany as an example, as
Rich did, one should state that every single comparison of Israel with the worst
regime on earth ever, National Socialism, is antisemitic, regardless if this comparison is made on a wall, in a lecture theater, or in a book, during daylight, at night, on
a Wednesday afternoon, or on a Sunday morning. Such a comparison is obfuscating
the Holocaust and defaming the Jewish state in the worst way possible: It projects
the German guilt onto the Jews. Sigmund Freud, who died in London in 1939,
could have written about this kind of antisemitic projection in some length. I do not
understand why Rich asks if there might be a situation where the comparison of
Israel to Nazi Germany (which is one of the examples of comparisons he refers to)
“may not be antisemitic.”
13. Wistrich, “From Blood Libel to Boycott,” 8.
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Let’s have a look at contemporary scholars and authors and listen to
Jacqeline Rose, a leading voice in the UK when it comes to anti-Zionism
and antisemitism. She is a wonderful example, and maybe George Orwell
had her in mind when he analyzed intellectuals and their relationship to
stupid things many decades ago. Rose wrote in 2005:
It was only when [Richard] Wagner was not playing at the Paris opera
that he [Theodor Herzl] had any doubts as to the truth of his ideas.
(According to one story it was the same Paris performance of Wagner,
when—without knowledge or foreknowledge of each other—they were
both present on the same evening, that inspired Herzl to write Der Judenstaat, and Hitler Mein Kampf.)14
First of all, one must wonder about the scholarly standard of Princeton
University Press. This is not a spelling mistake, because otherwise the editors would have told Rose to correct this. Everyone knows that Hitler was
born in 1889 (a few days after British historian Arnold Toynbee was born).
Rose needs the parallelization of Hitler and Zionism to defame Zionist Jews
in the most shocking way possible, so she invented an extremely ridiculous
and absurd constellation in Paris. Every serious historian and intellectual
must recognize this, regardless if someone likes anti-Zionism or not. This is
simply no longer scholarship, not even controversial scholarship; this is
claptrap.
Theodor Herzl indeed finished the manuscript of Der Judenstaat in
May 1895. We do not know which concert Rose is talking about, but it
could not have been later than May 1895. At that time, young Adolf was 6
years old and in fact only visited Paris in 1940, when he conquered France
during the Second World War, as historian Robert Wistrich recalls in his
critique of Jacqueline Rose. Wistrich wrote in his A Lethal Obsession: AntiSemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (2010) that “no contemporary
platitude about the Jewish state is left unmentioned” in Rose’s The Question
of Zion.15
Rose also compared Israel to Nazi Germany, a hard-core antisemitic
slur, as Anthony Julius, a well-known lawyer and critic of antisemitism,16
14. Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 64-65.
15. Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession. Antisemitism from Antiquity to the
Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010), 536.
16. There are other examples of people in the UK who analyze, criticize, and
fight antisemitism in all its forms, including Muslim, left-wing, and academic
antisemitism. These activists and authors include, among many others, Ronnie Fraser and the Academic Friends of Israel (http://www.academics-for-israel.org/,
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has documented in 2010 in his masterly study, Trials of the Diaspora: A
History of Antisemitism in England.17
The London-based Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism is
rather fascinated by Rose; she was invited to present her new work on June
19, 2012. Not one of the speakers criticized her work, including chair/moderator Anthony Bale from the Department of English and the Humanities at
Birkbeck,18 independent consultant Ingrid Wassenaar,19 University of
Reading’s English literature scholar Bryan Cheyette,20 or Pears Institute
director David Feldman.21
accessed November 23, 2012); Douglas Murray, an outstanding voice against the
Western and British denial of the Iranian threat, who spoke against the affirmation
of Islamism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism at the Cambridge Political Union in
March 2011, accessed July 9, 2012, http://www.cus.org/connect/debates/2011/thishouse-would-rather-a-nuclear-iran-than-war; or see Jonathan Hoffman, vice president of the Zionist Federation, http://www.zionist.org.uk/, accessed November 23,
2012, or young activists and authors like Sam Westrop. It would be interesting, by
the way, to learn why a Muslim member of British Muslims for Israel was disinvited to speak at an event of the Union of Jewish Students (and the possible
involvement of the Community Security Trust in that decision). I think it is important and tremendously timely to support pro-Israel Muslims. Maybe many Muslims
are pro-Israel, but do not dare to speak out. Therefore, it is imperative to give proZionist Muslims a forum and to support their cause; in May 2012 Westrop reported
the following: “Pro-Israel Muslims are especially feared. Kasim Hafeez—my Muslim friend and Israel advocate whom I mentioned earlier—was recently banned
from speaking to Jewish students by the Union of Jewish Students (UJS). The UJS
stated that Kasim’s presence would be dangerously provocative during the annual
‘Israel Apartheid Week,’ because his speaking tour was ‘very controversial and
could potentially backfire on the J-Socs, exacerbating tensions and disrupting interfaith relations. We are concerned that he will stir up unnecessary anti-Israel and
anti-Jewish sentiment among several hostile groups on campus.’ This proscription
was supported by a number of Jewish organisations within Britain.” Sam Westrop,“Fool to the Left of Me, Neo-Nazi to the Right . . .,” May 24, 2012, accessed
November 23, 2012, http://blogs.jpost.com/content/fool-left-me-neo-nazi-right.
Westrop is also criticizing right-wing extremist Jewish groups like the Jewish
Defense League (JDL), as well as rather anti-Zionist Jewish groups, both of whom
defamed the British Israel Coalition, where Westrop and Hafeez are members,
http://bicpac.co.uk/, accessed November 23, 2012.
17. Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, 557.
18. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/bale,
accessed November 3, 2012.
19. http://ingridwassenaar.weebly.com/about.html, accessed November 3, 2012.
20. http://www.reading.ac.uk/english-literature/aboutus/Staff/b-h-cheyette.aspx,
accessed November 3, 2012.
21. For an analysis of the Pears Institute, including a critic of Jonathan Judaken,
who is a member of a consortium of nine scholars on antisemitism, co-headed by
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Instead, they praised her, as podcast recordings show.22 Cheyette
referred to Rose as his “teacher,” Wassenaar was “very honored” to speak
at the panel with Rose, and Feldman addressed the Palestinian “Nakba”
without referring to disputed history, as Islamic studies scholar Efraim
Karsh suggested in Palestine Betrayed.23 Feldman has no problem with a
possible “one state” or two-state solution—although the former calls for the
demise of Israel as a Jewish state. Instead, he focuses on the “politics of
citizenship,” pointing out the “vicious attacks on Jacqueline” without mentioning the shocking concerns about Rose’s publications and scholarship.
For Feldman, Zionism has something to learn from the Jewish Diaspora, not
vice versa. In her own contribution at the event, Rose thanked Feldman
“enormously” for organizing the discussion and for inviting her; Feldman
thanked Rose for having convinced him to be part of the panel.
There are other troubling examples of UK antisemitism in scholarship.
For example, there is Zygmunt Bauman, the world-famous sociologist, who
did not just ignore the unprecedented character of the Shoah when framing
antisemitism as part of modernity. Worse, as early as 1989 in his Modernity
and the Holocaust, Bauman accused Israel and the Jews of emphasizing the
uniqueness of the Shoah and the anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust.24
His obsession with downplaying antisemitism and the specificity of
National Socialism and the Shoah and his defamation of Israel culminated
in an interview he gave on August 16, 2011, to the influential Polish weekly
Polityka, where he compared the Warsaw Ghetto with the security fence in
David Feldman from the Pears Institute, see Clemens Heni, “Kosher Stamps for
Post- and Anti-Zionism at Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism in
London,” November 9, 2012, accessed November 23, 2012, http://cifwatch.com/
2012/11/09/kosher-stamps-for-post-anti-zionism-at-pears-institute-for-the-study-ofantisemitism-in-london/; this article was also published on the homepage of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), accessed November 23, 2012, http://spme
.net/articles/8940/4/Kosher-stamps-for-post-anti-Zionism-at-%E2%80%98PearsInstitute-for-the-Study-of-Antisemitism-in-London.html. I was a co-founder of the
German chapter of SPME in 2007.
22. “Proust Among the Nations—From Dreyfus to the Middle East,” in partnership with Birkbeck Institute of Humanities,” accessed October 28, 2012, http://
www.pearsinstitute.bbk.ac.uk/events/events-calendar/proust-among-the-nationsfrom-dreyfus-to-the-middle-east/view/2012-06-19.
23. Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2012).
24. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1989), ix.
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Israel.25 According to the “Working Definition of Antisemitism” of the former European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC),
“antisemitism manifests itself” by “drawing comparisons of contemporary
Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”26
Or take Steven Beller, who wrote in his small book Antisemitism: A
Very Short Introduction, published by a leading publishing house, Oxford
University Press: “Antisemitism, in the form of a political movement aimed
at persecuting, discriminating against, removing, or even exterminating
Jews is no longer a major threat in our globalized world.”27
This is denying reality. Tell the Israeli population in Sderot, Ashkelon,
Beersheba, Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem about this! Beller goes on, claiming that
“the answer to antisemitism is ultimately not a Jewish state, but the establishment of a truly global system of liberal pluralism.”28 Anti-Zionism is
25. For translations from this interview, see Elvira Grözinger, “Zygmunt
Baumanns Verirrungen,” October 3, 2011, accessed May 18, 2012, http://spme.net/
cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=8380.
26. European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC): “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” EUMC, accessed May 17, 2012, http://
fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/material/pub/AS/AS-WorkingDefinition-draft.pdf. The
EUMC existed between 1998 and 2007; the successor of the EUMC in 2007 is the
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), which is still providing
this definition today.
27. Steven Beller, Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (New York/Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 119.
28. Beller, Antisemitism, 119. Beller is also known for challenging critics of
antisemitism, e.g., political scientist and sociologist Andrei S. Markovits from the
University of Michigan. In the UK-based peer-reviewed journal Patterns of
Prejudice, which published several highly controversial articles in recent years (I
analyze a couple of them in my new book—Clemens Heni, Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon), Beller wrote: “Andy Markovits similarly loses perspective
when discussing the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism of his erstwhile friends in
the European left. He states, for example, that the BBC, Guardian and Independent
share a ‘hostility towards Israel, Jews, and the USA’ (222). Israel and the United
States, perhaps, but Jews? As an online reader of the Guardian and BBC, I do not
think their criticism of the United States and of Israel is based on a distorting ‘hostility’ so much as an astute objectivity and a refreshing outsider’s perspective,
although I can see why many Americans I know are, like Markovits, antagonized
by it. But why would Markovits claim that the BBC, Guardian and Independent are
hostile to ‘Jews’, that they are effectively antisemitic? That is a grievous misrepresentation of these institutions, ignoring their decades of combating prejudice and
championing the rights of individuals and minorities, Jews very much included,”
Steven Beller, “In Zion’s Hall of Mirrors: A Comment on Neuer Antisemitismus?,”
Patterns of Prejudice, 41, no. 2 (2007); 215-238, 219-220. Beller equally rejects
the analysis of the “new antisemitism” by Omer Bartov, Michael Walzer, Daniel
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mainstream in the UK, and Oxford University Press is eager to print and
distribute this in a small book supposedly dedicated to analyze antisemitism. German publisher Reclam translated the book into German; the Oxford
University series claims that its books have been translated into many
languages.
Consider British historian Tony Judt (1948-2010), and his infamous
article “Israel: The Alternative” from 2003,29 in which he wrote: “The
depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.”30
Ahmadinejad or the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas are grateful to
Judt for defaming the Jewish state of Israel. Although scholars like sociologist Werner Cohn,31 Judaic studies scholar Alvin H. Rosenfeld,32 literary
Jonah Goldhagen, Alain Finkielkraut, Thomas Haury, Jeffrey Herf, Robert Wistrich, and Matthias Küntzel, ibid., 217.
29. Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003, accessed May 23, 2012, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/
2003/oct/23/israel-the-alternative/.
30. Judt, “Israel: The Alternative.”
31. “Broadly speaking, Jews who hate Israel fall into three categories: a) the
famous, of which Noam Chomsky is about the only one; b) the well-known, like
Norman Finkelstein and Tony Judt, and c) others who are not known beyond their
immediate circles but who do lurk in various crevices of the Internet. Altogether, as
I will explain below, it is not likely that there are more than a few thousand of these
haters active worldwide, say fewer than 10,000 and probably no more than half that
number. Considering that there are more than 13 million Jews in the world at the
moment, the proportion of those who actively hate Israel, about 0.04 of 1 percent,
might well be considered to be modest indeed,” Werner Cohn, “Prolegomena to the
Study of Jews Who Hate Israel. Not to Weep or to Laugh, but to Understand,”
2011, accessed May 23, 2012, http://www.wernercohn.com/Prolegomena%20to%
20the%20Study%20of%20Jews%20Who%20Hate%20Israel.htm.
32. Alvin H. Rosenfeld,“Progressive” Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 2006), 15-16, accessed March
27, 2012, http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85
EAF%PROGRESSIVE_JEWISH_THOUGHT.PDF.
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critic Anthony Julius,33 or Manfred Gerstenfeld,34 formerly from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), analyzed the antisemitism of Tony
Judt, there are a huge number of scholars and students who still take Judt
seriously. British historian Timothy Garton Ash, for instance, gave the first
Tony Judt memorial lecture on September 27, 2011, at New York University.35 For historian David Cesarani, who is familiar with Judt’s anti-Israel
position, Judt was a “superstar” and his “social and political agenda is resolutely moderate.”36 Moderate! Cynically spoken: Maybe Judt was “moderate”—in terms of a UK standard of hatred of Israel.
Then there’s Eric Hobsbawn. Hobsbawn (1917-2012), along with
many other anti-Israel academics, signed a letter in the Guardian during
Operation Cast Lead aiming at questioning the very existence of Israel as a
Jewish state since 1948.37 We can see the close relationship of downplaying
33. “In a speech at the University of Chicago, given in October 2007, Judt said:
‘If you stand up here and say, as I am saying and someone else will probably say as
well, that there is an Israel lobby [. . . ] you are coming very close to saying that
there is a de facto conspiracy or if you like plot [ . . . ] and that sounds an awful lot
like, you know, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the conspiratorial theory of
the Zionist Occupational Governments and so on—well if it sounds like it it’s
unfortunate, but that’s just how it is. We cannot calibrate the truths that we’re
willing to speak, if we think they’re true, according to the idiocies of people who
happen to agree with us for their reasons.’ Judt’s odd, misconceived remarks bring
me to the Jewish anti-Zionist contributions to anti-semitism—in summary, both to
affirm the truth of certain anti-semitic positions (or positions with anti-semitic
implications) and to protect the holders of those positions from charges of antiSemitism,” Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, 557.
34. “Tony Judt, the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University,
delegitimizes Israel in a more sophisticated way than others who are against Zion,”
Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Jews against Israel,” Nativ 8 (October 2005), accessed May
23, 2012, http://www.acpr.org.il/English-Nativ/08-issue/gerstenfeld-8.htm.
35. http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2011/09/15/timothygarton-ash-to-deliver-tony-judt-memorial-lecture-muslims-in-europe-thechallenges-to-liberalism-sept-27-at-nyu.html (accessed May 23, 2012).
36. David Cesarani, “Thinking the Twentieth Century, by Tony Judt, with
Timothy Snyder,” February 10, 2012, accessed June 24, 2012, http://www
.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/thinking-the-twentiethcentury-by-tony-judt-with-timothy-snyder-6699572.html.
37. Paul Gilroy, Ted Honderich, Étienne Balibar, Ilan Pappé, Gilbert Achcar,
and Slavoj Zizek, among many others, were also signatories of that inflammatory
letter. This remarkable letter, published in the Guardian, defamed the very existence of Israel, claiming that: “The massacres in Gaza are the latest phase of a war
that Israel has been waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years.
The goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to
eradicate the Palestinians as a political force, one capable of resisting Israel’s ongoing appropriation of their land and resources. Israel’s war against the Palestinians
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has turned Gaza and the West Bank into a pair of gigantic political prisons,”
“Growing Outrage at the Killings in Gaza,” January 16, 2009, accessed March 29,
2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/16/gaza-israel-petitions. Robert
Fine referred in substance to Paul Gilroy in another article in Patterns of Prejudice
in December 2009 without criticizing the anti-Israel stand of Gilroy; Robert Fine,
“Fighting with Phantoms: A Contribution to the Debate on Antisemitism in
Europe,” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 5 (December 2009): 459-479, 473-474.
Fine, a sociologist from the University of Warwick, follows Gilroy, his colleague,
in the post-colonial trope to equate antisemitism with racism and anti-Black racism
in particular, following Frantz Fanon. Fine hosted Walter Mignolo from Duke University in the United States at his institute. Mignolo, an anti-Zionist, is known as a
supporter of the “one-state solution”—read: the destruction of Israel as a Jewish
state—which would result in the killing of Jews; no doubt about this. Fine (and his
misleading, rather positive analysis of philosopher Jürgen Habermas—Robert Fine,
“Nationalism, Postnationalism, Antisemitism: Thoughts on the Politics of Jürgen
Habermas,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft no. 4 [2010]: 409420), and Mignolo; see Heni, Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon, 23-29. For
Fine collaborated with sociologist Gurminder Bhambra from his department; she
also organized events with Mignolo. Bhambra bases her own work on post-colonial
“superstar” Edward Said; see Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity:
Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (UK, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007). In this work, Bhambra compared the Holocaust to the history of
slavery and the United States Holocaust Memorial to the Museum of Slavery in
Liverpool; this is a distortion of the Shoah. Edward Said was a leading voice of
anti-Israel scholarship since the late 1960s. He portrayed Arabs as the “new Jews”
as early as 1969 (Edward Said, “The Palestinian Experience,” in Moustafa
Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, eds., The Edward Said Reader [London: Granta
Books, 2001], 14-37, 34). Said equated Israel with South-African apartheid in 1979
(Edward Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” in Bayoumi and
Rubin, eds., The Edward Said Reader, 114-168), and denounced Israel as the leading Orientalist, imperialist, and racist power in his bestselling book Orientalism
(Edward Said, Orientalism [New York: Vintage Books, 1978]). The chapter on
Israel is the last and longest chapter in this anti-Western and antisemitic book. In an
interview in 1987, Said said that Israelis had not learned the lessons from their own
suffering under Nazi Germany. In his view, Jews have become perpetrators now in
the same way the Nazis were perpetrators against the Jews. (The interview reads:
“[Question to Said] Given the history of the Jews and the creation of the Israeli
state, because of their historical experience with persecution and suffering and
[H]olocaust and death camps, should one feel that Israelis and Jews in general
should be more sensitive, should be more compassionate? Is that racist? [Said] No,
I don’t think it’s racist. As a Palestinian I keep telling myself that if I were in a
position one day to gain political restitution for all the suffering of my people, I
would, I think, be extraordinarily sensitive to the possibility that I might in the
process be injuring another people,” Edward Said, The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward Said by David Barsamian, introductions by Eqbal Ahmad and
Nubar Hovsepian (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010 [first published in 1987], 42).
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or trivializing the Holocaust and anti-Zionist activism in Hobsbawm’s
work. In his worldwide bestseller Age of Extremes, first published in
1994—supposedly a history of the 20th century—there is no chapter on the
Holocaust. Auschwitz is apparently not worth mentioning in either the book
or index.38 Hobsbawn mentions the Holocaust only in passing. There are 68
photographs in that book, but not one about the Holocaust.39 Historian
David Feldman honored Hobsbawn in 2012,40 while Anthony Julius analyzed the problematic approach of Hobsbawn and anti- or post-Zionist Jews
in the UK like the “Independent Jewish Voice.”41
Or take Edinburgh historian Donald Bloxham, who in 2009 wrote:
Aimé Césaire, mentor of the anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon, was one
of the first to formulate the verdict that Nazi Germany did to Europe what
Europeans had been doing to Africans and others for a long time. The
judgment has since become a commonplace in the scholarship of genocide and colonialism.42
In 1999 Said said that, if he could choose, he would opt for a kind of renewed
Ottoman Empire. Jews could become an accepted minority, but Israel would be
destroyed (Edward Said, “An Interview with Edward Said,” in Bayoumi/Rubin,
eds., The Edward Said Reader, 419-444, 430).
38. Eric Hobsbawn, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991
(London: Michael Joseph, 1994).
39. These pictures have no page numbers, and follow page 212 in Hobsbawn,
Age of Extremes.
40. David Feldman, “Eric Hobsbawm 1917-2012,” The Guardian, October 6,
2012, accessed October 18, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/
oct/06/eric-hobsbawm-tribute-david-feldman.
41. Anthony Julius analyzed the anti-Zionist approach of Eric Hobsbawn and
the “Independent Jewish Voice” (IJV):
The anti-Zionist is not just a Jew like other Jews; his dissent from normative Zionist loyalities makes him a better Jew. He restores Judaism’s
good name; to be a good Jew one has to be an anti-Zionist. Eric Hobsbawn, for example, explained when IJV was launched: “It is important
for non-Jews to know that there are Jews . . . who do not agree with the
apparent consensus within the Jewish community that the only good
Jew is one who supports Israel.” This refusal to “support” Israel leads
to the formulation: “Israel is one thing, Jewry another.” So far from
Zionism being inextricably implicated in Jewish identity, fidelity to
Judaism demands that Israel be criticized and one’s distance from Zionism be affirmed. The public repudiation of the “right of return,” guaranteed to Jews by Israel in one of its earliest pieces of legislation, was
considered to be one important such affirmation.” Julius, Trials of the
Diaspora, 548.
42. Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 20.
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Remember: this is a quote from Bloxham’s Oxford University Press
book, The Final Solution, which is about the Holocaust. There was nothing
like the Holocaust in Africa, as scholarship has shown, but Bloxham
ignores recent academic research on that topic. He mainly refers to one
highly controversial German scholar, Jürgen Zimmerer.43 (I have discussed
Zimmerer and Jakob Zollmann, who is critical about Holocaust distortion,
elsewhere.)44 Suffice it to say that if the Shoah were more or less the same
as colonial crimes, then there would not be a need for Holocaust studies.
Bloxham then accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” without giving the
slightest context and without referring to scholarly literature on the ArabIsraeli war of 1947-48 and the establishment of Israel. Bloxham writes—
again, in Final Solution: “In the ensuing years, in another former Ottoman
province, Palestine, the nascent Israeli state forced the dispersal of large
numbers of Arabs and went on to deny them the right to return.”45
Bloxham next considers the Islamist and secular anti-Zionist position
of “right of return,” which is until today a main obstacle for peace in the
Middle East and a core ideology of the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency for Palestine in the Near East (UNWRA).46 Here, Bloxham distorts
the Holocaust. For him, colonial crimes like those of imperial Germany
were the same as the Holocaust, just on a smaller scale, or “dimension.” In
fact, there was no cui bono in the Shoah, no economic exploitation, for
example. Bloxham is unable or unwilling to face what Steven T. Katz
called the “metaphysical abyss” between massacres or crimes in the colonies and the Shoah. Aimé Césaire also was unable to see the difference
between the Holocaust and colonialism.
These are just a few outstanding examples of scholars from the UK
and their relationship to antisemitism, anti-Zionism, Holocaust distortion,
and post-colonial ideology.47
43. Bloxham, The Final Solution, 324-325.
44. Heni, Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon, 132-150; the chapter is entitled: “From Windhoek to Auschwitz”—“Kaiser’s Holocaust.” I am analyzing and
criticizing these expressions, which in fact are book titles of contemporary
historians!
45. Bloxham, The Final Solution, 108.
46. For a comprehensive analysis and critique of UNWRA and the right of
return of Palestinian “refugees,” see Steven J. Rosen, ed., “UNWRA, Part of the
Problem,” Middle East Quarterly (special issue) 19, no. 4 (2012).
47. I could also ask why David Seymour, a scholar in law from the University
of London, denied the antisemitism in the early work of Karl Marx and did not
even deal in detail with the remarkable scholarship on the antisemitism in “On the
Jewish Question” of Marx from 1844. I would go further and say that Marx actually changed his position and started analyzing the value form of capitalism instead
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Finally, almost all scholars in the social sciences and humanities—I
just focus on a few outstanding examples from the UK here—reject or
ignore research on Islamism and Muslim antisemitism. This is not so much
different from the 1930s, when the Western world ignored if not embraced
Nazi antisemitism. Just look at the Ivy League in the United States and its
pro-Nazi policies since 1933, for example, as historian Stephen Norwood
has convincingly shown in recent years.48
The Jihadist attacks in London on July 7, 2005, did not at all change
the minds of most British academics in the humanities and social sciences.
Instead of analyzing Islamist antisemitism, anti-Western ideology, terrorism, and Jihad, denial of the Iranian threat as well as of Islamist antisemitism and Islamism as a whole is prevailing.
The strange increase in research centers, consortiums, and events
regarding antisemitism are indicating a hijacking of serious scholarship by
newcomers who have no interest in analyzing antisemitism; instead, the
obfuscation or affirmation of antisemitic tropes is prevalent, often based on
post-colonial and post-Orientalist ideology (following Edward Said), Holocaust distortion, and anti-Zionism or post-Zionism.
*Clemens Heni is a political scientist and the director of the Berlin International
Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA).
of defaming Jews and the field of distribution, finance, money lending, and so on.
There is, however, a horrible legacy of the early Marx until today if we look at leftwing and right-wing as well as mainstream anti-capitalist tropes, which defame one
aspect of capitalism, such as Wall Street or the financial sector, while embracing
the labor movement and the production of goods as such. Antisemitism among
groups like Occupy Wall Street has been analyzed in recent years. I was astonished
that Seymour omitted an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s anti-Americanism and his
distortion of the Holocaust when comparing the Shoah to Guantanamo Bay, for
example. Finally, but not surprisingly, Seymour did not deal with perhaps the most
troubling aspect of Hannah Arendt’s scholarship: her anti-Zionism, which predates
most of her political writing on other topics, such as “totalitarianism.” See David
M. Seymour, Law, Antisemitism and the Holocaust (Abingdon, UK: RoutledgeCavendish, 2007).
48. Stephen H. Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and
Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2009); Stephen H. Norwood, Antisemitism in the Contemporary American
University: Parallels with the Nazi Era (Jerusalem: The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism [SICSA]), Acta, no. 34 (2011).
It’s Not Just Name-Calling
Kenneth Lasson*
I’m afraid that universities, which like to perceive themselves as places
of culture in a chaotic world, are not quite that wonderful. Of course, some
are better than others; not all of them are hotbeds of radical turmoil, but a
disturbing number have come to be focal points of loud and strident opposition to the state of Israel.
Although the volume of overt antisemitic acts may have in fact
declined over the past few years, there has been a significant increase in
anti-Zionist rhetoric and activity on campuses around the country and
around the world. The two concepts are not always identical, but in today’s
world they are virtually synonymous.
Antisemitism is not just name-calling, but something much more corrosive. My recent article “In an Academic Voice” (http://www
.jsantisemitism.org/articles/LassonJSA225(6).pdf) examines the relationship between antisemitic and anti-Zionist speech and conduct and how they
both play out on contemporary university campuses, and suggests ways in
which such rhetoric and conduct can be constitutionally confronted.
In any event, my article looks at the historical backdrop, examining the
seeds of Marxism, the use of big lies as opposed to facts, and the so-called
“occupation” in modern Israel.
Then I present statistics and narratives about antisemitism and antiZionism on American campuses, among both students and faculty. Included
in the discussion and analysis are academic boycotts of Israel, divestment
campaigns, the old canards about Israel being an “apartheid state,” and
modern-day Holocaust denial and minimalizaton. I focus on the loud voices
of Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, and others. I try to
counter exaggerations and revisionist history with facts that are difficult to
deny.
Finally, I suggest responses and remedies that are consonant with the
principles embodied and ennobled by the First Amendment. The problem is
that few people read law review articles, and even fewer are persuaded by
them. Thus, the importance of taking a principled stand in other public and
private forums—such as the recent conference at Yale on global antisemitism, where I spoke about this very subject.
I cannot forbear from adding a thought that many share about such
exercises—including my wife and daughter, both of whom played devil’s
advocate about my participation in the Yale conference, as well as about
several other talks I’ve given over the past few months.
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Antisemitism has been around for a long time—as the rabbis pointed
out many centuries ago, it’s a fact that Esau hated Jacob and his descendants always will. Throughout history, we haven’t been able to eliminate
such bigotry, and we never will. The thing to do is to batten down the
hatches—perhaps gather all Jews in one homeland and fight to exist.
Well, I’m not ready to leave just yet. I still truly believe in the American ideals of justice, equality, and tolerance of different cultures. We can be
sure that the rabidly antisemitic radical Islamists are vigilant. The Yale conference was quickly condemned by them as shamefully one sided (e.g., they
called Elie Wiesel a “rabid Zionist.”)
So our task is not just to combat antisemitism, but hopelessness as
well. I think we have largely done that in America, but I tend to be an
optimist, and of course we must always be vigilant.
But if antisemitism in the academic voice is a new and growing phenomenon, is there anything we can do about it? After all, not only is unpopular speech and thought protected by the First Amendment, but those of us
in higher education also (and justifiably) invoke long-established principles
of academic freedom.
Nevertheless, we all understand that words matter: they can cause
damage; they have consequences. And while freedom of speech is broadly
protected, the Constitution does have limits. Defamation is punishable, for
example, as is speech that incites to violence. Moreover, protecting First
Amendment freedoms carries with it a responsibility—to condemn obnoxious utterances—and at least to subject them to a broad and bustling marketplace of ideas.
Likewise, academic freedom. I believe we have an obligation to confront antisemitism in the academy. As with any kind of hate speech or disruptive behavior, the responses should be firm, immediate, and
consequential. To put it in non-academic terms, just as those who spout
antisemitic rhetoric are not bashful in doing so, neither must we be in confronting them.
As always, the problem with regulating any kind of speech is where to
draw the line. While an academic institution should not allow itself to
become a forum for bigotry, neither should freedom of expression be limited. My own feeling is that of a traditional civil libertarian: it is better to err
on the side of liberty; an excess of tolerance is still preferable to censorship.
In the context of antisemitism, the quest for “balance” in the curriculum raises problems of its own: for example, must traditional Holocaust
studies be balanced by Holocaust revisionism or denial? Does the obligation toward balance cover every point taught in a course, or only major
disputes? Who is to enforce the norm? With that in mind, I’d like to give a
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brief synopsis of my current article, in the hope that I might add something
to the discussion. First, the theoretical and historical backdrop.
Antisemitism in the academy is not a new phenomenon. Much of it can
be traced to Karl Marx, whose essay on the Jewish question was an early
reflection of modern leftist thought. “What is the profane basis of Judaism?” asked Marx. His answer: “practical need, self-interest.” And—“What
is the worldly cult of the Jews? Huckstering. What is his worldly god?
Money. Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and money,
and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself
. . . the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from
Judaism.”
Marx was a classic antisemite, not unlike those who fabricated The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion—those who viewed civilization as having
been or about to be destroyed by Jewish conspiracies. Let the world be rid
of the Jews was (and is) the message, and all will be well. But Marxism was
not the only early antecedent to modern Jewish antisemitism. Much academic “scholarship” in Germany during the Third Reich served to legitimize and endorse the Nazis’ worldview. Through it all, ample use was
made of the big lie, in the best tradition of which propaganda is promulgated as fact.
The evolution of such bigotry has continued unabated on American
campuses in the first decade of the 21st century, especially at elite universities in California and the Ivy League. In my article I supply details, but
even they are merely illustrative of many such cases of antisemitism on
campus. So today we have repeated assertions by academics that Israel is
the primary stumbling block to achieving a “two-state solution”; or a
nuclear power that presents the greatest threat to peace and stability in the
Middle East; or is an apartheid state deserving of international boycotts,
divestment campaigns, and sanctions; or plans to “Judaize” Jerusalem by
building thousands of new homes in the eastern part of the holy city; or
adopts policies that, besides endangering US troops in Afghanistan and
Iraq, are the root cause of worldwide antisemitism; or is primarily responsible for a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, against whose citizens it has
committed war crimes.
Trumpeting these claims loudly and often enough has allowed them to
take on the character of unassailable truths. Were they subjected to the same
objective scrutiny that academic historians and political scientists traditionally require of their disciplines, many if not all of them would prove
meritless.
It has become increasingly difficult to separate statement criticizing
Israel from antisemitic ones, the former often thinly veiled versions of the
latter. Just a few of many examples:
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• Earlier this year, Israeli ambassador Michael Oren was hounded off
the stage at the University of California in Irvine by a well-orchestrated group of Palestinian students, who one by one, several minutes apart, shouted racist epithets at him before they were ushered
out.
• Similar groups operate on campuses around the world. At the
Oxford Student Union in the UK, for example, Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon’s speech was interrupted by demonstrators carrying Palestinian flags and chanting “War criminal” and
“Slaughter the Jews!”
• At Toronto’s York University, members of the Palestinian Students
Association shouted down guest speaker Natan Sharansky, yelling
“get off our campus, you genocidal racist.” Earlier, police had to
usher Jewish students to safety after 100 Palestinian students barricaded them inside the campus’ Hillel offices.
All too often, antisemitism in the academy goes beyond the student
body and emanates from faculty. From behind their lecterns or under the
cover of their “scholarship,” statements that in other venues would be considered outright bigotry are viewed as part of honest debate in the ivory
tower—all part of the respectable “marketplace of ideas.” The idea of an
academic boycott against Israel was born in Great Britain, whose largest
faculty association has voted several times in the past five years to
encourage a boycott of Israeli universities and professors over what it views
as Israel’s “apartheid” policies toward Palestinians—advocating that union
members refuse to cooperate with Israeli academics who do not “disassociate themselves from such policies.”
These boycotts likewise have antecedents in Nazi Germany. During
Hitler’s rise to power, some of his staunchest supporters were university
professors—many of whom were drawn into the higher echelons of the
Nazi party and participated in its more gruesome excesses. Mussolini too
had a large following of intellectuals, and not all of them Italian. So did
Stalin, as well as such postwar dictators as Castro, Nasser, and Mao Tsetung.
Over 700 academics signed the original boycott petition, most of them
British, but a considerable number of scholars hailed from a host of other
European countries as well. In 2009, following Israel’s military campaign
into Gaza to stop Hamas rocket fire that had barraged the country for six
years, a group of American professors joined the call for an academic boycott. The group recommended divestment initiatives modeled on those used
against apartheid South Africa. Here again, the big lie comes into play.
Each of the various arguments put forth to justify divestment—that Israel is
responsible for the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, that it is “Judaiz-
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ing” the holy city of Jerusalem, that its policies endanger US troops in
Afghanistan and Iraq—are but preludes to others: that the only hope for
peace in the Middle East is a single, bi-national state, and that Israel itself is
the root cause of worldwide antisemitism.
Again, all of these arguments can be refuted by insistent reference to
history and facts on the ground. More than a few campuses celebrate “Israel
Apartheid Week.” That event has been held every year since 2006, and in
growing numbers on campuses in the United States and Canada. The aim of
such events, according to their organizers, is “to contribute to the chorus of
international opposition to Israeli apartheid . . . [and] an end to the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands,” likening Israel to segregated South
Africa during the latter part of the twentieth century. The truth is that Israel
is a democratic state. Its 20% Arab minority enjoys all the political, economic, and religious rights and freedoms of citizenship—including electing
members of their choice to the Knesset. In stark contradistinction to
apartheid South Africa, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have standing before
Israel’s supreme court. In contrast, Jews may not own property in Jordan,
and neither Christian nor Jews can visit Islam’s holiest sites in Saudi
Arabia.
As Martin Luther King, Jr., observed, “When people criticize Zionists,
they mean Jews. You are talking antisemitism.” What would Rev. King
have said about the comparisons made between modern Israel and the
apartheid South Africa of the late twentieth century?
Holocaust denial, of course, is a form of antisemitism. The deniers say
they are merely seeking to uncover the truth behind what they term as the
largest hoax of the twentieth century. They need not convince students that
the Holocaust is a myth; they score propaganda points merely by convincing them that the Holocaust is debatable.
Particularly troubling are the professors who draw “politically correct”
inferences from the Holocaust and conclude that, whatever happens in
world events, Jews should always conduct themselves as humane, progressive, and peace-loving—in other words, beyond reproach. When viewed
this way, however, Jews become acceptable only as victims. Former Depaul
University professor Norman Finkelstein goes further, arguing that Israel
“inappropriately invokes the Holocaust as a moral defense for mistreating
Palestinians.”
MIT’s Noam Chomsky has strongly criticized the United States’ support of the Israeli government and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Chomsky embraced Hezbollah leader sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who refers to
Jews as the “grandsons of apes and pigs.” Indeed, Chomsky describes the
United States as “one of the leading terrorist states.” It is of course necessary to recognize that Chomsky is entitled to his say. (As he himself has
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pointed out, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we
despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”) It is equally necessary, however, to
challenge him forcefully on the facts
The same process occurs with respected scholars Steven Walt and
John Mearsheimer in their book The Israel Lobby. This is a book that has
been especially damaging to both Israel and the concept of honest intellectual inquiry. It presents a wholly conspiratorial view of history, in which the
so-called “Israel lobby” has a “stranglehold” on American foreign policy,
the American media, think tanks, and academia. Three of the book’s major
weaknesses were identified and analyzed by Alan Dershowitz: quotations
wrenched out of context, important facts misstated or omitted, embarrassingly poor logic. Needless to say, the work has been trumpeted on extremist
websites.
So what legal remedies can we bring to bear in the fight against modern campus antisemitism? Although freedom of speech is guaranteed by the
First Amendment, and should protect both the individual as well as the idea
of academic freedom on university campuses, constitutional remedies are
nevertheless available to address the problems of antisemitism. Principal
among them is the right (if not the obligation) to recognize antisemitism
when it occurs, to present the facts clearly and accurately, and to condemn
it vociferously.
Failure to speak out, on the other hand, sends a message that such
hatred is tolerable and acceptable. Indeed, the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP) specifically endorses the condemnation of
hateful and bigoted speech from, and conduct by, college and university
faculty and administrators.
In recent years, there has been increasing debate over the question of
whether it is permissible for the government to curb “hate speech,” understood to mean whatever demeans or expresses hostility or contempt toward
target groups based on their race, religion, ethnic background, sexual orientation, or other identifying characteristics. The Supreme Court has never
specifically adjudicated the constitutionality of a campus hate speech code.
Several lower courts have struck down such codes as unconstitutional
restrictions on freedom of speech.
Every Western democracy except the United States regulates hate
speech. Many particularly prohibit and punish Holocaust denial. But comparing the American approach to others is inherently problematic. For the
most part, our system has served us well. So how can hecklers seeking to
disrupt speakers at university forums be handled? Here’s one way: When
controversial speakers appear on campus, in advance of the event clearly
announce to and notify students that they will have an opportunity to question or challenge or make comments—but that interruptions will not be tol-
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erated. Moreover, students who engage in disruptive speech or behavior
will be firmly sanctioned, either with suspensions or expulsions. If such a
policy were firmly enforced, I think it would go far to deter both bully
pulpits and hostile audiences. Other remedies that have been proposed
range from simply lodging a complaint with the authorities to imposing
boycotts of alumni funding programs. The problem with the former is that it
is difficult to draw a line between censuring intimidation and restricting free
speech or academic freedom. Boycotts, on the other hand, cut both ways,
and can cause more harm than good. There are some legislative remedies
available as well, such as Title VI of the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964,
which requires recipients of federal funding to ensure that their programs
are free from harassment, intimidation, and discrimination on the basis of
race, color, and national origin. I submit, however, that direct confrontation
remains the best remedy.
I conclude where I started. It is the obligation of all academics either to
recognize or refute claims that have no basis in fact or logic—and not to
ignore them.
Not only can offensive speech and conduct be constitutionally confronted and condemned, but responsible administrators, faculty, and students have a moral imperative to do so.
Not only should scholars shoulder their responsibility to be informed
and aware, but they should also recognize their obligation to respond when
they see logic and common sense gone awry and objective fact and documented history either ignored or denied.
Antisemites and anti-Zionists have a right to their opinion (something I
would fight to protect under principles of academic freedom and the first
amendment). But we are also entitled to ours. Just as it is our obligation to
protect freedom of speech, it is our duty—and responsibility—to expose the
gross intolerance and racism of radical Islam. “Sha – still” just doesn’t
work. Let me mince no words, though: we should forcefully point out
that—from Bali to Fort Hood, from Times Square to London, from Madrid
to Mumbai, from Ground Zero to Gaza—that the barbarians, the murderers,
the inhumanly intolerant are the radical Islamists. When we are challenged
by those who in the name of human rights charge Israel with gross abuse of
the Palestinians, we should ask if they feel the same way about the abuse of
Palestinians by the Arabs themselves. We should ask why the world press
declines to report such abuses, or for that matter the new shopping malls
and bustling food markets in Gaza. We should demand perspective and context—and supply them if they are not forthcoming and apparent. We should
agree that human rights are important for everyone—including why people
like Gilad Shalit, who is denied even the most basic humanitarian right
required by the Geneva Conventions, is entitled to visits by the Interna-
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tional Red Cross. Of course we could go on and would be delighted if anyone reads law-review articles—but happier still if we continue to speak out.
I hope that we will.
*Kenneth Lasson is a professor of law at the University of Baltimore and an associate editor for the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism.
I Can’t Get Away from It
Winston Pickett*
I have a confession: I am obsessed with antisemitism. Try as I might, I
can’t get away from it. It chases me. It pursues me. It invades my thoughts.
Thanks to Google Search, it clutters my e-mail inbox. Over time, I’ve come
to see this as something less than natural. Then again, obsessions seldom
are. That goes for me in particular. You see, I didn’t grow up Jewish. I
wasn’t raised with the flicker of black-and-white newsreels or magazine
pages illustrating the mass extermination of the Six Million embedded in
my consciousness. I didn’t listen to my family recite with grim certitude
that axiomatic declaration from the Haggadah, ve-hi-she-amda: “In every
generation they rise up against us to destroy us.” I was spared feeling
umbilically connected to that baseline truth: “They will always hate us.
They will always come after us. This is our lot in life: Shver zu sein a yid.”
Instead, I had to learn that particular lesson. Sometimes I feel that I am
still learning it. It wasn’t meant to be that way. I had chosen to become a
Jew—for all the right reasons. I certainly didn’t embrace Judaism because I
signed up to what one of Howard Jacobson’s characters mordantly refers to
as “Five Thousand Years of Bitterness.” I did it because I believed in the
transcendent, edifying ideas of Judaism, of Jewish thought, Jewish history,
Jewish custom, and, with time, the most transformative Jewish concept of
all: Jewish peoplehood.
In retrospect, my first encounter with the burden of antisemitism was
actually quite comical. When I told my Catholic mother that I was converting to Judaism, she said: “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself
into. The hatred, the discrimination . . . you’ll find it hard to get a job.” I
could barely conceal a wry smile. You see, at the time I was working on my
PhD in Jewish studies. “Actually, Ma,” I retorted, “I think it’s just the opposite. If anything I think it will help.”
Now while it turns out that my mother was arguably wrong insofar as
becoming Jewish may have contributed beneficially to my career path—she
was right about the hatred and the discrimination. And for years I resisted it.
I refused to be defined by those who hate us. I shunned fellow Jews
who always seemed to play the “victim” card—for whom the “Five Thousand Years of Bitterness” served as the dark sun around which their Jewish
planet revolved. I cringed at what sometimes accosted me as congenital
jingoism, reflexive fatalism, and a sense of the inevitable—the unassailable
conviction that it will all end badly in the bitter by-and-by. Not for me. I
was pulled as if by some irresistible tropism to Judaism’s greatness, its con-
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tribution to ethics and Western philosophy, and by the imperative of tikkun
olam: repairing the world one human being, one act, one mitzvah at a time.
And then 9/11 happened. The world changed. The hatred, the lies, the
venom, and the Five Thousand Years of Bitterness—the ideas and the ideologies that drove those millennia of oppression—were no longer distant
and fixed historical phenomena but broke through to the chaotic present and
erupted into a global consciousness that is still being felt today.
This is also, I would maintain, a key reason we’re here at this symposium: Because we know that it didn’t go away—and that in retrospect we
may have been naive or deluded to think that it would. And the more this
particular recognition sinks in, the more we realize just how very difficult it
is to talk about antisemitism.
If you think I’m kidding, just try having a conversation with the taxi
driver who brought you here or who is returning you to the airport—or with
any casual acquaintance, for that matter—about what you’re doing at this
symposium today.
Chances are, in a nanosecond you’ll find yourself discussing definitions of antisemitism—something my fellow panelist Ken Marcus has
lucidly written about in all its complexity and in a way that should advance
the discussion considerably. Then, after you’ve introduced the topic, I’d be
very surprised if you didn’t find the words “Holocaust” and “Israel” slipping into the same conversation.
As for me, I discovered long ago just how much of a hot potato talking
about antisemitism was—about how even using the word can throw people
into conniptions, make them defensive, and derail their thought processes;
how discussions frequently turn into arguments that sound like one or more
versions of what David Hirsh neatly describes as the Livingstone Formulation—the so-called “use” of the charge of antisemitism as a way of rendering all criticism of Israel as taboo.
So that’s why we’re here: To learn, to study, to analyze, to examine, to
forensically investigate, to diagnose, and hopefully find antidotes for something that has been around for a very, very long time. But studying and
learning about antisemitism doesn’t automatically lead to a cure—whatever
that means. It can, instead, cause a person to become—there’s that word
again—obsessed by it.
Because once you start digging into it, drilling it down, parsing it, dissecting it, only then do you start to see how deftly it has adapted over the
ages—Anthony Julius uses the term “inventive”—and to manifest itself in a
variety of guises and recensions. In turn, this capacity to morph and adapt
creates pitfalls all its own.
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I sometimes think that the study of antisemitism can lead to a kind of
conversionary experience, like wearing infrared glasses. It enables you to
see it where you never thought it existed before. You begin to connect the
dots. An expression of antisemitism in passing, even in the form of “genteel” metaphor—can be seen as causally connected to the deepest, most
invidious motivation—a mentalité so marinated in hatred that it is willing to
exterminate itself—along with innocent men, women, and children—in a
Jerusalem pizza parlor or a hotel in Mumbai. Question: If the antisemitic
meme is toxic, is any strain safe?
Now, what I’ve just done here—the way I’ve introduced the topic of
“Talking about Antisemitism”—serves as a shortcut to a larger thesis I’ve
been working on: an attempt to explain, with some degree of clarity, just
what it is that makes the discussion of antisemitism so difficult. I break it
down into three broad categories of difficulties.
First Difficulty: conceptual. Antisemitism is difficult to talk about
because it is conceptually difficult. Because of its complexity and component parts—so many of which have been around for so very long—it has
emerged from antiquity and historical circumstances hugely different from
our own, but nevertheless identifiable in their essence.
To this aspect of complexity we can add its historical provenances, its
regional and folkloristic accretions, its conspiratorial role in apocalyptic and
millennial thinking, and its ability—as a baseline hatred and fear of the
Jews—to mutate, adapt, and somehow grow in complexity without ever
really going away.
Think about it: How many of us fail to find ourselves gobsmacked—
startled to the point of breathlessness—at the way some of the most ancient
of libels about the Jews have resurfaced in the contemporary public space—
as if the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, scientific revolutions, and other
advancements in technology and thinking had simply never happened?
And then there seems to be the utter irreducibility of these new forms
of hatred—equally resistant to human progress—whereby one manifestation lays down its marker, only to be picked up on a conceptual and
programmatic level years—even centuries—later, with new tools of
implementation.
I remember the first time I read Robert Wistrich’s discussion of
English antisemitism—when he laid out in all its brutal simplicity the fact
that after the Expulsion, the idea of physically removing Jews—a novel
“solution” to the Jewish problem of its day—amounted to a paradigm shift
in hatred, one that would see its logical and mechanized implementation in
the Final Solution as a harbinger to the Thousand Year Reich.
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Second Difficulty: emotion. Antisemitism is emotionally difficult to
talk about. As a form of hatred it’s impossible to encounter it, regardless of
who you are and what faith you were raised in, without being affected on a
very human, kishke (gut) level.
Hate is hate—dress it up, make it elegant, use fancy words—if you are
at all sensitive to it, you feel it. As Jews, for whom the historical narrative is
so paramount to our faith—we feel it more than others. Our history is
imbued with it. Our antennae are attuned to it. Ve-hi-she-amda.
But it is equally emotive for others—and sometimes we forget that.
Like it or not, most people associate antisemitism with genocide, with the
Holocaust. It is this “genocidal shadow” or “holocaust penumbra” that
hovers over the word, making it sometimes difficult to utter in any kind of
company.
And then, of course, there is the pitfall of being accused, when you do
bring up the word “antisemitism,” of wearing your “Five Thousand Years
of Bitterness” on your sleeve—of being pegged as someone suffering from
post-Holocaust trauma syndrome—and someone who always spoils the
party with all this incessant talk about death and annihilation.
But it’s not just because of its genocidal associations that makes talking about antisemitism difficult.
For Jews, I believe it also triggers something deeper, more insidious,
and what I would call genetically hurtful.
If you look hard at the fictions and libels of antisemitism that emerged
with the early Church, the Middle Ages, and deep within the recesses of
Islam—in other words, embedded within every faith that competes for
supremacy and supersession to Judaism, you begin to identify a kind of
theological toxin: If the New Faith is an elixir, the Old Faith must be
poison.
Moreover, this “logic” has its own declension: Antisemitism becomes
an evil mirror of the very axioms and tenets of Judaism that are—davka—
of the most sublime and nuanced nature.
Take the concept of “chosenness”—at the best of times a difficult idea
to understand, but at its base and in rabbinic thinking, a moral mandate for
humility. Warped and twisted, it becomes Jewish supremacy and apartness.
Or the concept of kedushah—and the laws of kashrut that derive from it—
the exalted concept of holiness as seen in Judaism’s attitude toward the
sanctity of blood and life itself.
Warped, twisted, and mutated, these concepts coalesce and become the
Blood Libel. Antisemitism turns Judaism’s sublime precepts into sublimely
hurtful ideas.
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Third Difficulty: politics. When talking about antisemitism the political
component is a dimension that we are all too familiar with and that dominates most of our thinking on a daily basis.
This includes the lack of symmetry when raising the issue of antisemitism as opposed to racism, the impossibility of mentioning the phenomenon
without someone bringing in Israel’s policies, conduct, and foundational
principles. And let’s not even start with the difficulty of explaining how
anti-Zionism acts as a carrier for antisemitism to someone who barely has a
clue about the origins or definitions of either term.
So these three difficulties—conceptual, emotional, political—make
talking about antisemitism a supremely challenging task.
But that, I suppose, is why we are here and why, after all, the Haggadah seeks to remind us of the perennial nature of the enmity Jews face: So
that we may find the tools, the concepts, and the perspectives that enable us
to talk about it in a way that others will understand. In doing so, perhaps
then we’ll be able to change our relationship to the phenomenon from
obsession to a full-on, evidence-based and scientific commitment to keeping it in check.
*Winston Pickett is the former director of the European Institute for the Study of
Contemporary Antisemitism and the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA).
This paper was originally published as “Talking about Antisemitism” in
Algemeiner.com, March 29, 2013.
On Doing the Sociology of Antisemitism:
An Open Letter to My Colleagues
Robert Fine*
Of all my subject matters I have attempted to research in my experience of doing sociology, I have found that the question of antisemitism has
been by far the most troubled, problem-ridden, and anxiety-creating. So I
thought that rather than bottle it up in the corner of my study, I would share
it with my European colleagues and ask those of you who might be interested what you think about this particular concern.
My experience is that, with a certain proviso, it’s basically OK to
speak about antisemitism in the past but it gets trickier to speak about it in
the present. For many years I taught a master’s course on the sociology of
the Holocaust. It always attracted an interested group of students and
despite its heart-breaking and stomach-churning content it excited lively
and even good-humored discussion. No problem.
The proviso I mention was that on the first occasion I presented a
paper on this theme at a conference—it addressed debates around the
Nuremberg Trials—I was greeted with the question of why people keep
going on about the Holocaust. I noted it was the only paper at this large
critical legal conference that had anything to do with the Holocaust. Since
then I have observed that it has become almost a fashion to say that we go
on too much about the Holocaust, that we do so at the expense of other
human disasters, that we focus on the suffering of Jews at the expense of
other victims of Nazism, and—yes—that we have ulterior motives when we
speak of the Holocaust that are connected with turning a blind eye to contemporary forms of domination.
Sometimes I wonder if speaking about antisemitism once is already
too much. The bigger problem I experience arises when we speak about
antisemitism in the present. I have noticed that there is a tendency in sociology to treat antisemitism as always occurring in the past. Modernists treat it
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as a symptom of pre-modernity. Postmodernists treat it as a symptom of
modernity. Postnationalists treat it as a symptom of the age of nationalism.
Theorists of the second modernity treat it as a symptom of the first modernity that is no longer with us. And so it goes on. We are told that antisemitism used to be a blot on the European landscape but that it has become so
discredited after Auschwitz that it now exists only on the margins of society
among ultra-nationalists keen to revive old ways of picking on foreigners.
For liberals it is the growth of a human rights culture in the European Union
that has put an end to antisemitism. For radicals it is Islamophobia and antiRoma racism that have taken off where antisemitism ended. Either way, it
would appear that the long history of European antisemitism was strangely
resolved shortly after the unprecedented killing spree against Jews.
Of course, things have changed since 1945, but the wonder of this
narrative is that antisemitism seems to be dissolved by the very horror of its
deeds. The Europe that brought us the Holocaust in the 1940s can once
again pride itself on being the civilized continent. One effect of this “pastification” of antisemitism—that is, the situating of antisemitism exclusively in the past—is that if people say that there is antisemitism in the air
today or that they themselves are victims of antisemitism, they must either
be mistaken, over-sensitive, delusionary, or worst of all dishonest. Those
who complain about antisemitism, or fight against antisemitism, or even
wish peacefully to study antisemitism can’t be right, since it is already
established that antisemitism no longer exists except on the fringes of rightwing extremism. The secret agenda some people see behind the “charge” of
antisemitism is that of defending Israel against its critics. We are told that
the charge of antisemitism is abused in order to defend the indefensible. In
this discourse antisemitism appears as a ploy designed by Zionists to let
Israel get away with murder. The ad absurdum of this argument is that even
in cases of antisemitism that have nothing to do with Israel, the abuser’s
defense can still be that it is only because he or she is a critic of Israel that
the antisemitic question comes up.
One dodgy presumption behind this argument is that Israel cannot be
defended openly, so that its defenders have to resort to underhand tactics.
Another is that criticism of Israel is not “as such” antisemitic, or more
strongly that no political criticism of Israel can under any circumstance ever
be antisemitic. A moment’s thought should disabuse us of this prejudice.
It’s a bit like saying that no criticism of, say, India or Zimbabwe can ever
be racist. If we criticize governments in India and Zimbabwe for being
authoritarian or for abusing human rights, there might indeed be nothing
racist about such criticism. But if we were to say that Indians and Africans
are incapable of ruling themselves, we would be right back at ingrained
notions of the superiority of the white race or of European civilization.
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When it comes to Israel, of course some kinds of “criticism” are
antisemitic. We may disagree about particular cases, all of which need judgment and deliberation, but the principle is clear enough.
The working definition of antisemitism put forward by the European
Union Monitoring Commission is one attempt to deal with this issue.
According to this definition the following cases of “criticism” of Israel
may, depending on context, be examples of antisemitism: the Nazification
of Israel (e.g., when it is said that Jews treat Palestinians like the Nazis
treated the Jews); the pathologization of Jews (e.g., when it is said that as a
result of the Holocaust Jews have become indifferent to the suffering of
other peoples); the use of old antisemitic tropes (e.g., when it is said that
Zionists engage in a world conspiracy to protect Israel or that Israeli forces
steal the body parts of Arabs); or, more simply, the erasure of any distinction between state and civil society (e.g., when it is said that all Jews in
Israel are responsible for the policies pursued by the government).
We may or may not agree on particular cases, but what is clear is that
some forms of “criticism” lean toward antisemitism more than others. The
systematic treatment of Israel as culpable by standards that are not applied
equally to other states is a case in point. Sociologists should be well
equipped to understand this since we make distinctions all the time
between, say, criticism of a work of sociology and denunciation based on
extraneous ideological considerations. This is the stuff of our laboring lives.
Some forms of “criticism” are not really criticism at all. When some
fellow academics in the UK call for a boycott of Israeli academics, what is
involved is not so much “criticism” as excluding Israeli academics alone
from the world academic community. It is the practice that feeds the
thought. As Pascal said, first kneel and pray and then you believe. The
policy of boycott is based on (a) holding Israeli academics to standards not
applied to academics in other countries, (b) holding academics in Israel
responsible for the actions of their state, and (c) discriminating against academics in Israel on the basis of their nationality. Then the policy of boycott
is conjoined with iterative statements to the effect that criticism of Israel
cannot be considered antisemitic, with disavowal of the European Union
working definition of antisemitism on the grounds it restricts free speech
(an old chestnut that was once roasted by racists objecting to anti-racist
legislation), and with an unwillingness to hear complaints of antisemitism
or to educate oneself in what antisemitism is. We are on dangerous terrain.
None of these actions may be antisemitic in itself but, taken as a whole, it is
difficult not to conclude that there is at least a culture of neglect in this
setting on whether antisemitism is or is not a problem.
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I do not wish to overplay the problem of the academic boycott, for the
issue at stake is much broader. Take for instance the recent discussion of
the Günter Grass affair in the pages of European Societies. Grass, a rightly
celebrated German liberal novelist, was criticized in large parts of the German press for his poem “Was gesagt werden mub” [“What must be said”].
Most of his German critics did not claim that Grass’ poem was antisemitic,
and some explicitly declared this allegation overblown. Grass, however,
was criticized as self-aggrandizing for his claim that he felt driven to break
a silence imposed by the threat of being called an antisemite, while he had
only recently broken his own silence about having been a member of the
Waffen-SS. He was criticized as misrepresenting the political situation for
his claims that Israel was threatening world peace, while Ahmadinejad was
merely a “Maulheld” (“gob hero”—somebody who brags, but does not act)
and an Iranian nuclear bomb was a “mere legend.” Grass claimed that Israel
is threatening not a conventional attack on Iranian nuclear plants, but a
nuclear attack that could “extinguish the Iranian people” (“das iranische
Volk auslöschen”). The key point for many of his critics was that Grass
implicitly presented Israelis as the new Nazis and Germans as victims of
Israel. His evocation of an unspecified “us” as future victims of Israel’s
planned nuclear genocide—“survivors” (“Überlebende”) who will be “at
most footnotes” (“allenfalls Fubnoten”)—and his portrayal of Germans as
cowed into silence by Israel were cases at issue.
Debate around Grass’ poem serves to illustrate some of the difficulties
we encounter in understanding contemporary antisemitism. The view that
Grass’ poem was labeled “antisemitic” because he warned against an Israeli
attack on Iran and in order to immunize Israel against criticism does not do
justice to a social conversation that has as much to do with Germany’s
relation to its past as with Israel. I find that the apparent closeness of the
topic of European antisemitism to debates on the Middle East can introduce
a “friend or foe” way of thinking inimical to differentiated social analysis.
Thus those who raise concerns over contemporary antisemitism are in some
quarters treated as inherently conservative or reactionary; it is as if opposition to antisemitism is necessarily affirmative of the status quo, indifferent
to the plight of the downtrodden, and embedded on the side of power
against resistance. This ignores the fact that a longstanding left-wing tradition of opposition to antisemitism is still alive and kicking in Europe, and
that the issue should indeed be of concern to any critical consciousness
keen to avoid conspiracy theories and essentialist explanations of the ills of
European modernity.
In some circles, however, we hear it said that while European modernity has in principle embraced universal principles via a postnational
regime of human rights, Israel as a state for Jews is in principle an enemy of
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all universal principles. The same is said of theorists of the “new antisemitism”—i.e., that they are obsessed by the fate of Jews and categorize other
peoples (e.g., Muslims, Europeans, the left) as antisemitic. The portrayal of
Israel, its “supporters,” and “purveyors of antisemitism” as the Other of the
Universal, the particularized people par excellence, picks up an old tradition
of anti-Jewish typification. Comparative methodology is notable for its
absence in this kind of designation. Of course, there are Jewish nationalists
who are opportunist in their use of the term “antisemitism,” just as there are
Black nationalists who are opportunist in their use of the term “racism” and
Muslim nationalists who are opportunist in their use of the term
“Islamophobia.” At times they may all enter a competition of victimhood in
which one accuses the other of being respectively antisemitic, racist, or
Islamophobic. This does not mean, however, that any of these categories is
reducible to its misuse.
In the study of antisemitism, we must remain alert to the danger of
categorizing others in ways we do not ourselves wish to be categorized. Just
as we do not wish to be stereotyped as racist—for example, in the seemingly political but actually prejudicial proposition “Zionism is racism”—so
too we must avoid typifying “the Muslims” or “the Arabs” as antisemitic. In
his battles aginst anti-Jewish prejudice in the eighteenth century, Moses
Mendelssohn maintained that the God of the Jews is the God of all humankind. Whether or not we share his faith, we should endorse his universalism
in our own battles against anti-Jewish prejudice. In my earlier work I was
interested in the forms of opposition to racism developed within labor
movements in comparison with the forms of opposition developed within
nationalist movements. Later I wanted to transfer the skills I learned from
the experience of South Africa to the study of antisemitism. I notice, however, that the study of connections between antisemitism, Islamophobia,
and racism, phenomena that in European history have been intimately connected at least since 1492, has been largely dropped. What we find instead
is what we might call a “methodological separatism” between racism and
antisemitism, in which those who take seriously the one tend to neglect the
other, or worse, enter into a competition of victimhood. I am more drawn to
a universalistic consciousness in which the interconnections binding all
forms of racism are kept firmly in view. The idea, for example, that
antisemitism is now a thing of the past and that Islamophobia has taken its
place in the present forgets how coeval they may be and how closely they
may intertwine.
What makes me most hopeful about the role of sociology in these public debates is that our discipline, for all its faults, was born out of a resistance to racist and antisemitic ways of thinking about the pathologies of
capitalism. I am back at my One Thing: a sociology that embraces the
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universalistic spirit of humanity in which no individual and no group of
people can be labeled enemies of the human race.
*Robert Fine is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, UK.
The author would like to thank Christine Achinger and Glynis Cousin for their
contributions. This essay is a revised version of an article originally published in
the newsletter of the European Sociological Association, Winter 2012, No. 33.
The Oscars 2013
The Academy Awards are seen by 40 million viewers in over one hundred nations.
This year, the 85th, the introductions included a segment with actor Mark
Wahlberg and Ted—the animated bear from host Seth McFarlane’s film of the
same name. An excerpt is provided below, followed by YouTube commentary.1
Referring to Joaquin Phoenix, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Alan Arkin, Ted
the bear says to actor Mark Wahlberg: “You know what’s interesting? All
those actors I just named are part Jewish, What about you . . . You’ve got a
‘berg’ on the end of your name. Are you Jewish?” Wahlberg states that he
is Catholic. Ted cautions him: “Wrong answer. Try again. Do you want to
work in this town or don’t you?” Then Ted announces that he was “born
Theodore Shapiro,” and that “I would like to donate money to Israel and
continue to work in Hollywood forever.” Wahlberg calls Ted an “idiot,”
and Ted the bear responds, “We’ll see who’s an idiot when they give me
my private plane at the next secret synagogue meeting!”
The YouTube comments that followed:
• There is a reason this “joke” about Jews is in the Oscars . . . wake up.
• The really sad thing is when a talking bear is the only one who can tell
it like it is.
• This is hilarious. The only people that don’t think it’s funny is the
fucking Jews that don’t want people to know they control everything.
• Actually, they do want people to know that they control everything. If
they didn’t, they wouldn’t have said what they said in this clip
through an animated character called? Ted. They are basically saying
through this character, “We do own and control everything, we are
glad we do and there’s nothing you can do about it.” The part about
giving money to Israel so you can have a job in Hollywood was blatant, in-your-face arrogance, power-lusting evil.
• “Go cry? somewhere else” (response to a complaint that this segment
was antisemitic).
• Fucking Jews.
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXPnLGBNlAs
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Antisemitism Exists
Elad Nehorai*
We live in a world that is, thank God, very comfortable for Jews. Most
of us are safe and hidden from any hate we may have experienced in past
generations. But that safeness, that hiddenness, has fooled some of us, and
others, into believing that antisemitism no longer exists. That people don’t
hate Jews and wish they were all wiped out.
I’m sick of this lie being floated around. I’m sick of people perpetuating it. I’m sick of other Jews watering down the power of the word because
they accuse everyone of being antisemitic. I’m sick of the fact that if anyone
wants to talk about this now, they are called reactionary. I’m sick of not
being able to call anti-Zionists antisemites because people are too afraid to
admit what is in front of their eyes. I’m sick of being quieted because Jews
have it easier now than they did before.
Just Google the words “Jews are evil” or any other similar antisemitic
trope and see just how deep and far the network of these people is. Did you
know that the results for the word “Jew” led to the only time Google ever
had to explain a word’s results to its users? These people exist. They are out
there. And they want each one of us to die. No other group of people in the
world is demonized so widely and attacked so viciously. I’m sick of hiding
from it and I’m sick of others telling me we should hide from it.
It was recently discovered that Germany had more death and slave
camps than anyone had ever known up until now. Yet, people try and deny
that almost an entire country was put to work at rounding up Jews and
killing as many of them as possible. Still, people pretend it’s not possible
for this hate to spread if we ignore it. Still, people spout out platitudes like,
“Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it,” and then ignore history.
They brush it aside as if it doesn’t exist because they are afraid. Afraid that
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evil exists. Afraid that hate is real. Afraid that their illusions of living in a
safe, perfect world are a sham.
Meanwhile, in France, Jews have been massacred, and continue to be
attacked. In all of Europe, antisemitism is on the rise. No one notices,
because no one wants to notice. The media doesn’t report it, and even when
they do, no one cares. The more we hide, the more it spreads. The more we
ignore it, the more it becomes real. I’m tired of hiding. I’m tired of pretending this doesn’t exist, and that this particular form of hate, of determination
to wipe out an entire race, isn’t unique to Jews. Who’s with me?
*Elad Nehorai is a writer based in Brooklyn; he blogs on Pop Chassid. Reprinted
here with the author’s permission as “Antisemitism Exists.” Originally published
March 7, 2013, on Algemeiner.com
Antisemitism: Medieval, Modern, Postmodern
Part I
Richard Landes*
“Is it possible that the whole world is wrong
and the Jews are right?” (re: blood libel)
Ahad Ha-‘Am/Asher Ginsberg, Russian Zionist, 1893
“The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraw.
I don’t think the whole world can be wrong.”1
—Kofi Anan, UN Secretary-General, 2002
In 1996 I wrote an essay on Jewish-Christian relations entitled “What
Has 2000 to Do with 5760?,” in which I expressed concern over the possible effect that the passage of 2000 might have on the exceptional period of
philo-Judaism that has marked Western society from the end of the Holocaust until the present. Indeed, the last 60 years may well mark the most
exceptional and sustained period of philo-Judaism in the history of JewishGentile relations, and the results—a flourishing and creative civil society
precisely where those relations are best—seem to support the larger argument of this essay about the relationship between Judaism and civil society.
On the other hand, as a historian familiar with the pattern of Christian and
post-Christian history, in which periods of philo-Judaism end up flipping
into their opposite and generating a sometimes furious episode of anti-Judaism, I wondered about a downswing in the aftermath of 2000.
I chose this date as the point of the downturn for two reasons. First, it
was the date of choice for many of the evangelical and fundamentalist
Christians whose support of Israel and whose love of Jews is intimately
1. Joel Brinkley, “Israel Starts Leaving 2 Areas, but Will Continue Drive,”
New York Times, April 9, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/09/world/
mideast-turmoil-mideast-israel-starts-leaving-2-areas-but-will-continue-drive.html?
pagewanted=all&src=pm.
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connected to their desire to convert them, and to see the final apocalyptic
events play out through the fate of the Jews. Given the powerful historical
role of apocalyptic hopes and disappointments in triggering the philo/antiJudaic dynamic,2 I was concerned that the (inevitable) passage of 2000
might provoke a classic case of (post-) apocalyptic scapegoating: Jesus did
not return because of the refusal of the Jews to convert according to the
Christian messianic scenario. Second, Muslims had become acutely aware
of the Jewish-Christian messianic alliance at the approach of 2000, especially the desire to build the “Third Temple” on the site of the Dome of the
Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque. Illustrating the first rule of apocalyptic
rivalry—one person’s messiah is another’s Antichrist—the Muslims
depicted Jews as agents of the Dajjal (Antichrist), who would himself be
Jewish.3
PHILO-JUDAISM
AND
ANTI-JUDAISM
I therefore speculated that we might even see an alliance between bitterly disappointed fundamentalist Christians and their apocalyptic enemy of
2000—Islamism. At any rate, I argued, Jews should prepare themselves for
a rough ride, and, while the philo-Judaic sun shone before 2000, they
should strengthen their alliances among their current friends, liberal and
conservative, secular and religious. In particular, I meant that we should
clarify the nature of our relationships, so that the tacit expectations might
not lead to bitter disappointments. When I spoke to prominent Jews about
this issue, however, I received a condescending, sometimes aggressive,
rebuke: Don’t be silly or alarmist. We’ve never been in such great shape.4
Alan Dershowitz quoted me as a lone voice cautioning against his unre2. See Richard Landes, “The Massacres of 1010: On the Origins of Popular
Anti-Jewish Violence in Western Europe,” in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews
and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wolfenbuettel:
Wolfenbüttler Mittelalterlichen-Studien, 1996), 79-112.
3. David Cook, “Muslim Fears of the Year 2000,” Middle East Quarterly, June
1998, 51-62, http://www.meforum.org/397/muslim-fears-of-the-year-2000. For the
dynamics of apocalyptic hope and disappointment, see Richard Landes, Heaven on
Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (New York, Oxford University
Press, 2011), chap. 2; on global Jihad as an apocalyptic millennial movement, see
chap. 14.
4. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks later recalled our conversation; see Jonathan Sacks,
“Making the Case for My People,” Standpoint, September 2009; http://
standpointmag.co.uk/making-the-case-for-my-people-features-september-09-chiefrabbi-jonathan-sacks.
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strained optimism that the era of state-sponsored antisemitism and its open
displays was over.5
I was right and I was wrong. I was, alas, correct that there would be a
wave of Judeophobia in the West; I was wrong in that it did not come from
disappointed apocalyptic Christian Zionists who blamed Israel; instead, it
came from the “progressive left.” I was right that it was disappointed apocalyptic expectations; I was wrong in that the really bitter disillusionment of
2000 was the failure of Oslo, not the failure of the Rapture. If the push at
Camp David in the summer of 2000 had succeeded and a secular, leftist
government in Israel had given up sovereignty over sacred Jewish space—
including the Temple Mount—to a Palestinian state, then the Christian
camp, which so longed for the building of a new Temple, might have turned
against “the Jews.”
But Oslo failed, and the progressive left turned against Israel with a
vengeance. Which brings me to my last and greatest (and unproclaimed)
error and to the reason I wrote this essay: I had no idea that the resistance to
the new round of Jew-hatred would be so weak, nor how prominent a place
those hatreds would achieve in a post-Holocaust public sphere that was, in
principle, constructed on their exclusion.6 In other words, I had no idea how
powerful the new mutation in Judeophobia that I correctly predicted would
actually become.
I—PRIME-DIVIDER
VS.
CIVIL SOCIETIES
In order to understand the dynamics I am concerned with, and that, I
think, offer the best approach to understanding the distressing situation in
which Israel finds itself, let me lay down some definitions and relate them
to the most important single phenomenon of our time: globalization.
Prime-divider society: Those cultures in which a small elite monopolizes the technology of power (weapons, communications, public voice)
by creating a fundamental gap between them and the vast majority (commoners). The three key components of the prime-divider society are: 1)
legal privilege for the elite, 2) stigmatization of commoner manual labor,
and 3) radically different forms of education/socialization for the two
5. Alan Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew (New York: Touchstone,
1997), 97n.
6. See Richard Landes and Steven Katz, eds., Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ (New York: NYU
Press, 2011).
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groups.7 The monopoly on weapons and communications that the elites
maintain in such cultures permits them to appropriate—with violence if
necessary, and always with the implied threat of violence—the vast majority of the surplus that the largely peasant society produces. The basic interpersonal and international principle behind such structures is the
dominating imperative of “rule or be ruled,” a zero-sum game in which the
elite wins and the commoners lose, producing the wealth distribution typical of such societies—an immensely wealthy and cultured elite and an
uneducated subject population living largely at subsistence levels.
The logic of the elite here is quite simple: if we do not dominate
others, whoever does take power will use it to dominate us—or, as the
Athenians said to the Melians, “the strong do what they can and the weak
suffer what they must.”8 The corollary political ideology, to paraphrase
Plato, is equally simple: to grant freedom and autonomy to commoners,
who have no discipline, no self-control, is a recipe for anarchy.9 The very
stability of society depends on a small elite to run public affairs, and the
immense disparities of wealth and power that mark the prime-divider society are necessary to maintain the social order. Power, in such a society, is
opaque, mysterious, beyond the ken of the population. (These issues will
become crucial in understanding modern antisemitism.)
Civil polities10 try systematically (constitutionally) to substitute a discourse of fairness for violence in dispute settlement. Such cultures attempt
to dismantle the prime divider by legislating equality before the law, by
removing the stigma from, even dignifying, labor by eliminating the elite’s
monopoly on communication (and education), and moving the control of
weaponry from the “private” realm of the warrior elite to publicly funded
and accountable organizations (army and police force). Civil polities
demand of their citizens that they renounce the dominating imperative in
favor of a mutually agreed upon “contract” of “live and let live.”11
7. For a more detailed analysis of these issues, see Landes, Heaven on Earth,
chap. 8.
8. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 5: 105.
9. Plato, Republic, Book 8, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.9.viii.html.
10. There is a huge literature on civil society, much of which has focused on the
institutions that buffer between authoritarian states and their subjects. I use “civil
polities” to designate those kinds of political organizations that in principle guarantee the rights of its citizens. Thus, scholars of the Middle East sometimes even refer
to authoritarian Arab polities as “thriving civil societies” (Richard Norton, ed.,
Civil Society in the Middle East [Leiden: Brill, 1995]), whereas only a radical relativist could call them civil polities.
11. For an excellent depiction of the demands and dangers of what I’m calling
civil polities, see Eli Sagan, The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Para-
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Such cultures systematically encourage the positive-sum relations of
voluntary associations, and argue that if commoners receive a good education, enfranchisement will not lead to anarchy, and that if elites receive a
civic education, their exercise of power will not lead to tyranny. Power in
such societies is in principle transparent and accountable to the people on
whose behalf it is exercised. Civil polities tend to be far more dynamic than
prime-divider ones: because of their positive-sum relations, they tend to
prosper and innovate more; because intelligent people engage in labor,
labor-saving devices proliferate; because their egalitarian rules favor meritocracy, the intellectual discourse shows greater creativity and flexibility;
and because public self-criticism is esteemed, there’s a sharp upward learning curve from mistakes.
Despite the legislative determination to establish civil polity—equality
before the law—no culture has yet accomplished a society in which privilege and prejudice do not play significant roles: the old aristocracy, with its
attitudes and its violence, persists behind the façade of egalitarian principles; great wealth replaces older forms of privilege and coercion; the dominating imperative continues to drive people in their relations with those
weaker than they, whether it be fellow citizens or foreign countries.
Indeed, the temptations of power often destroy experiments in fairness,
since so often the call to fairness, as Nietzsche noted, is based in ressentiment. As the Athenians, about to enslave the Melians, explained to their
designated victims: “The only reason you speak of fairness is because you
are weak. If you were in our position, you’d do what we are doing.”12 The
ability to get power and not abuse it to your own advantage is the hardest
demand of a civil polity; failure means the kind of backsliding that led
democratic Athens to slide into empire and self-destructive warfare with
Sparta. Nor does this involve political issues alone. Honor-shame cultures,
which consider it legitimate to shed another’s blood for the sake of one’s
own honor, promote these values above and below the prime-divider culture, and make the shift from prime-divider to civil society a cultural as
well as political challenge.
Thus, the differences between prime-divider polities and even
attempted civil ones are enormous. Indeed, the very effort to dismantle a
prime-divider culture—to get a critical mass of people, especially of elites,
to set aside the dominating imperative and adopt the constraining (read:
noia in Ancient Athens and Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994).
12. See Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book 5, http://classics.mit.edu/
Thucydides/pelopwar.5.fifth.html; Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Book
2, www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/GeneologyofMorals.pdf.
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humiliating) rules of civil society—poses such enormous difficulty for
dominating elites that it has almost never occurred in history. Thus, these
experiments have repeatedly failed when attempted.
On the other hand, even a simple, minimal shift makes a difference.
For example, once a polity accepts egalitarian law codes as the formal rules
of the culture (no matter how much “cheating” goes on behind the scenes),
new economic and cultural dynamics begin to transform the society. On one
level, the difference between the modern, wealthy nations of the West and
the cycle of poverty that has so far condemned most of the societies of the
Third World lies precisely in the zero-sum dynamics of the prime-divider
society and its replacement with the positive-sum dynamics of civil
society.13
Toward the end of the 18th century, for a variety of reasons we cannot
go into here, certain Western nations (United States, France, England)
decided to formally adopt the rules of civil society: equality before the law
for both elites and laboring commoners; open educational systems; and constitutional governments that, via electoral controls and free press, stood
responsible to their citizens and (relatively) transparent to their scrutiny.
This constitutional revolution accompanied an explosion of economic and
technological transformations that created the wealthiest, most powerful
nations in the history of mankind. The continuous success of these experiments in civil society over the last two centuries has created our current
situation, in which the Western model of technologically endowed democracies offers the principal model of social reform for nations wishing to join
in the material abundance of the modern world.
Globalization, which in the past has only occurred through military
conquest (Hellenistic [third century BCE], Roman [first century BCE],
Islamic [seventh-ninth centuries CE], European [16th-19th centuries CE],
British [19th-20th centuries CE]), now occurs through economic penetration and acculturation. The new, “voluntary” modes, however, are not as
radically different from earlier imperialistic ones as this construct may
make it seem. Plenty of elements of the older, coercive modes lie embedded
in the commercial and political relations that present themselves under the
guise of civil society and its contractual public face. But deep and significant changes have taken place, and at their heart lie many of the issues
surrounding Jewish-Gentile relations.
13. For a good analysis of a culture of impoverization, see the UN Development
Programme’s Arab Human Development Report (2002), http://www.arab-hdr.org/
contents/index.aspx?rid=1.
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Jews and Civil Polities
By the definitions provided above, few societies have even attempted
the experiment of civil polity—some Greek city-states, notably Athens,
possibly Rome during the early stages of the Republic, the urban communes
of medieval Europe, and finally modern constitutional governments. The
most exceptionally fruitful of the ancient experiments was the also first
recorded one, that of the period of the Judges in ancient Israel (ca. 13001000 BCE).14 Here we find a society that is, in principle, governed by an
egalitarian law (all civil and criminal legislation in the Torah applies to
equally to all citizens and to strangers)—a society in which everyone labors
and everyone rests, in which access to the laws and egalitarian principles is
publicized to everyone, and in which the highest authority is a judge who
administers impartial justice to self-regulating communities.
Indeed, the biblical texts suggest, as an alternative to the dominating
imperative, the empathic imperative: love the stranger in your midst and do
not oppress him, for you know the heart of the stranger since you were
strangers in Egypt. Hillel famously expressed this empathic imperative as
the essence of the Torah: “What is hateful to you, do not do onto others,” a
direct response to the dominating Golden Rule: “Do onto others before they
do onto you.” In its opposition to the unbridled power of kings, its egalitarian law code, its denunciation of the arrogance and exploitation of elites,
its defense of the powerless and the poor, and its definition of justice and
the importance of judicial impartiality, the Bible represents the most subversive political document of the ancient world—subversive to the prime
divider and to the discourse of the political philosophers from Plato
onward.15
This essay is not the venue for a lengthy discussion of the wealth and
depth of the values of civil society to be found in the biblical corpus and
subsequent Jewish writings, but one particular one deserves special attention in the context of antisemitism: self-criticism. In order for civil society
to work, all its members—elites as well as commoners—must remain open
14. On the resistance of the Jewish aristocracy to Roman techniques of rule, see
Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New
York: Vintage, 2008). On Jewish culture as unique in the ancient Mediterranean,
see Seth Schwartz, Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society?: Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
15. On the ancient traditions, see Joshua Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible
Broke with Ancient Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011);
on the contribution of this ancient thought to modern democracies, see Eric Nelson,
The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
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to criticism. If judges should not take bribes, and kings should not take
covet the wives and property of their citizens, if the powerful should not
oppress the poor, and every seven or fifty years should set free the slaves
and forgive the debts, then the culture that hopes to work by these principles must have mechanisms for holding the powerful accountable. One of
the most unusual themes in Jewish narratives about power involves the free
and public criticism of those in power (by prophets) and the willingness of
the powerful to admit fault (Judah and Tamar, David and Natan, Raban
Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua). Indeed, no other religious tradition has collected such highly critical texts excoriating the powerful, both lay and clerical, for “grinding the face of the poor.”
This remark does not mean to suggest that other cultures do not have
these elements—the cry for justice and accountability from their elites. On
the contrary, I suspect that such a discourse is nearly universal. What sets
the Jews apart from other religions and cultures is that very late in their
development—approximately half a millennium after the creation of the
religious community—Jewish elites chose to canonize this voice of dissent.
Indeed, as we shall see, antisemites often use Jewish self-criticism against
them, while in the modern predicament of Zionism, sometimes Jewish selfcriticism becomes a pathology.
Of course, such a set of values and such a system of self-regulating
communities without any “top-down” coercive capacities had enormous
difficulties surviving: both external threats and centrifugal tendencies eventually led to judges’ replacement with monarchy (I Samuel 8:11). The first
recorded experiment in a civil polity failed (just as when democracy gave
way to oligarchy and imperial/royal rulers in Hellenistic and Roman societies). But in Israel, even the advent of kings did not marginalize the voices
of civil society, voices critical of abusive kings (Natan and Elijah), voices
critical of elites abusing their privileges (Isaiah and Amos), and voices
envisioning a future in which the nations of the world dismantle their prime
dividers and transform themselves into societies of peace for honest labor:
“They will beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning
hooks; Nation will not lift up sword against nation, nor study war any more.
But each shall sit under his own fig and vine with none to harass them”
(Isaiah 2; Micah 4).
Thus, when kings fell before the power of imperial powers (Assyria,
Babylon, Persia), the descendants of the judges, led by prophets and
reformers, could reformulate civil society in the form of Jewish communities, first in exile, then during the “Second Commonwealth,” and finally in a
second exile. When they conquered a local culture, ancient empires peeled
off the elite along the lines of an already existent prime-divider society and
absorbing them into the lower levels of their own administration, and
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together they dined out on the commoners. Jews alone of these conquered
cultures did not have a clean prime-divider line along which to sever the
elites, and, despite the partial collaboration/assimilation of some (the Hellenizers, the Sadducees), other elites, especially rabbinic, refused to switch
their allegiance from their (chosen) people to the conquering elite. The ability of Jews to survive under circumstances that destroyed all the other cultures of the ancient world derives significantly from their ability to cohere
as a culture without the use of coercion.16 A discourse of fairness and a
mutual solidarity between rabbinic elites and commoners managed to bond
these communities under the enormous pressures of dominating primedivider societies.
I do not mean to suggest that Jewish life was a utopian community
where no coercion, no authoritarianism, no hostility between elites and
commoners existed. Anyone familiar with Rabbi Akiva’s comments about
donkey bites knows better.17 My point here, as later with the state of Israel,
is relative: in comparison with prime-divider societies, the relations
between elites and commoners in Judaism are significantly more harmonious and mutual. Accounts of monarchical legitimacy, aristocratic behavior,
assimilation, coercion, disdain for manual labor, and other elite manifestations in Jewish sources hardly disprove the thesis; they merely illustrate that
Jews, like members of all other advanced cultures, are themselves subject to
the gravitational pull of the prime-divider society. The evidence for exceptions to that tendency, so numerous in the official texts of Judaism and so
limited in those of other cultures, constitutes the real anomaly.
This social aspect of Jewish life as an experiment in civil polity—the
lived experience of ethical monotheism—represents a critical dimension of
Jewish-Gentile relations. Indeed, one might argue that it is embedded in the
very promises God made to Abraham. Rather than offer his Chosen People
the prized goods of prime-divider society, namely dominion, God offers the
classic positive-sum relationship: “Through you, all the nations of the world
will be blessed.”
He then explicates with a classic formula contrasting positive and
zero-/negative-sum interactions: “Those who bless you I will bless, those
16. This interpretation reverses the common formulation that Jews developed
these attitudes because they had no choice: all other cultures faced with this choice
could not make it, and therefore disappeared. The Jews did not disappear not
because they had no choice, but because they had the cultural resources to adopt
successful survival strategies.
17. Rabbi Akiva told his students that before he went to study, when he was an
‘am ha-aretz, if he would have encountered a Torah scholar he would have bit him
“like a donkey.” His students asked, why say like a donkey, and not like a dog? He
answered that a dog doesn’t break bones. Talmud, Pesachim 48b.
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who curse you I will curse [dry up].” Those who have the strength to appreciate Jewish society and what it means for human dignity and freedom will
enjoy the blessings of civil polities, and those who find the Jewish example
threatening to their forceful grip on power, and seek to diminish the Jews,
will live in the destructive and impoverishing zero-sum world of the prime
divider. As we shall see, this promise offers interesting insights into the
course of globalization today. But before we get there, we need to consider
what this approach offers us in understanding the nature and dynamics of
antisemitism.
Philo-Judaism and Anti-Judaism Dynamics
Optimists think that civil polities, especially after the Holocaust,
should be the end of antisemitism, whereas the pessimists think that
antisemitism is a permanent element of human nature (even Jews are susceptible). The perspective offered here suggests that both beliefs are misconceived. Antisemitic sentiment, in this view, derives from those
authoritarians who benefit most from the prime divider, both the elites and
their agents of domination among the commoners. Jews, with their iconoclastic intellects, their developed moral discourse, their educated and assertive (chutzpadik) commoners and responsive and responsible elites, offer a
counter-example to the aristocratic insistence that prime dividers are necessary for social order.
As long as the Jewish communities in a larger Diaspora culture remain
relatively separate and interact to only a limited degree, they do not present
a serious threat. But, especially in cultures that at least nominally prize biblical values of social justice (Islam and Christianity), permitted and positive-sum intercourse between Jews and lay commoners tends to create
conditions favorable to the flourishing of civil society: contracts and credit
(which necessitate mutual trust), economic initiatives, religious and moral
discussions, rule of law and equity. Here, the presence of the Jews as a kind
of social leaven creates a threat to many with a stake in the prime-divider
society.
These two elements of Jewish-Gentile interaction operated in a kind of
dialectic, especially notable in Latin Christian society, that runs roughly as
follows. Every time a positive-sum Jewish-Gentile interaction, based on a
Christian philo-Judaism, was sustained, the forces of civil society flourished, and economic, legal, and cultural transformations favored initiatives
from below. Elites might initially have preferred, even encouraged, such
interactions because they proved so fruitful and hence enriching for them as
well as for the commoners involved. But over time, the kinds of transformations such interactions wrought began to threaten the grip of elites, subtly
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but recognizably altering the socioeconomic landscape and creating new
and potentially aggressive forces to reckon with.18
Thus, the continued influence of Jews on an increasing assertive and
articulate Christian commoner population triggered the emergence of hostility, specifically among those—elites and commoners alike—who stood
most to lose from the new rule-set and the way it undermined the interests
of the prime divider. For these people, the constantly shifting social and
economic landscape created deep anxiety, fear of change, and fear of being
left behind. Denunciations of greed and economic exploitation attacked
those who profited most from new market relations, and the Jews served as
a scapegoat that epitomized the new modern forces at work in the culture.
And at some moment along this productive but unstable dynamic, the gathering forces of this hostility manage to seize upon a widespread social malaise that exploded into violence against the designated scapegoat. Soon
thereafter, coercion and violence attack the other forces of civil society
within the culture—religious dissent and autonomous commoners. As
always, the Jews are only the first target of such war propaganda.
In the history of Jewish-Christian relations, the full cycle of this dialectic remains largely hidden from view—especially the initial period of
cooperation, as it takes place largely at the level of commoners, where little
gets recorded in the surviving documentation. Violence, however, along
with pogroms, expulsions, and inquisitorial attacks, blood libels and their
consequences, leaves a more visible documentary, traced both in the documents of those who developed the ideology (blood libels, theocide, conspiracies of evil), and of those rioters who took the bait. Looking back at this
documentation, historians tend to see an almost unbroken string of antiJewish outbreaks, a lachrymose narrative of hatred and violence. A closer
look at the 11th and 12th centuries and later periods like the Renaissance
and the Reformation suggests that when we see a violent outbreak of antiJewish sentiments, we should look to the previous period for evidence of
more philo-Judaic attitudes and the kinds of socio-economic and intellectual
exchanges that such positive Jewish-Christian interactions encourage.
Thus, in the period just before the explosion of violence in 1096—the
year of the first Crusade—we find a century of extensive Jewish-Christian
interaction, the emergence of autonomous, self-regulating urban communities based on remarkably egalitarian law codes (communes), and the rapid
18. Robert Ian Moore’s groundbreaking Formation of a Persecuting Society
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) analyzes the first time this dynamic becomes pronounced (11th century), and notes the paradox that a period of great growth also
generated an ideology and mechanics of persecution. One finds a similar dynamic
at work in the witchcraft craze of the early modern period.
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spread of agricultural, commercial, and productive capacities within the
European economy. The bishop of Speyer, for example, invited the Jews to
his newly established bishopric in 1084, giving them full legal autonomy
within their community as a way to “increase the honor of the town.”19 At
the dawn of European economic growth, the Jews were prized players. And
when the violence came, it often came not from those who had interacted
with the Jews, but those who had lost ground as a result of the economic
growth such interactions had fostered.20
II—MEDIEVAL LATIN CHRISTENDOM
We are now in a position to understand the basic elements of medieval
hostility to Jews in Western Europe. Medievalists like Gavin Langmuir
have suggested the distinction between anti-Judaism, a dislike of Jews and
Judaism, from antisemitism, a pathological distortion in which Jews and
Judaism become demonized into super- or sub-human forces of evil.21 The
former is built into much of what Christians taught their believers in the
Middle Ages; the latter begins to emerge in the 12th century with the blood
libels—the theological claim that the Jews knew that Jesus was God and
killed him on purpose, the apocalyptic paranoia of those claiming to be
fighting the Antichrist’s minions. The Nazis’ racism should not be the operative element for defining antisemitism, but rather the paranoid fantasies
that rule the genocidal mind through fear and hatred.22
One of the more important elements of both forms of Judeophobia,
however, concerns the manner in which such people use Jewish self-criticism against them. One could take a passage from Jeremiah and one from
John Chrysostom and, by cutting out a few terms (devil, Satan), have virtually indistinguishable tirades against Israel. But Jeremiah chastises to
improve, and Chrysostom accuses to destroy. The distorted use of Jewish
self-criticism in the hands of people who project blame from their own cultures onto the Jews constitutes perhaps the single most corrosive element in
Jewish-Gentile relations, something that pervades the discussion of the
19. Roy C. Cave and Herbert H. Coulson, eds., A Source Book for Medieval
Economic History (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1965), 101-102, http://www
.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1084landjews.asp.
20. Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society.
21. Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 63-99.
22. On the genocidal paranoia of the Nazis and on the Jews as “apocalyptic
enemies,” see David Redles, Hitler’s Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the
Search for Salvation (New York: NYU Press, 2008).
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Israeli-Arab conflict today and a moral failing that lies at the heart of
antisemitism.
At the core of invidious Christian identity formation (We are good
because you are bad; we’re right because you’re wrong) lies both a power
play and a scapegoating discourse based on mimetic rivalry.23 In the period
from the fourth century onward, when Christians served as the ideologues
for prime-divider societies (Rome and its successor kingdoms), Jews had to
be officially humiliated in order to keep the right socio-political order.24
Their disgrace raised the honor of Christianity and the Christian God,
whom, according to Christian authorities, the Jews not only denied, but
killed. Their disgrace served as a witness to the superiority of Christianity
as one more proof of its triumph—we are right because we have supreme
power; you are wrong because we humiliate you.25 Once the empire converted, the strong (Christians) increasingly “did what they willed”—
claimed honor—and the weak (Jews, pagans, and heretics) “suffered what
they must”—lived in humiliation.
And, not unexpectedly, having betrayed their very founding values,
these Christians found it necessary to project their sins onto the Jews: As
they repressed and even killed their own prophets (heretics, dissidents),
Christians accused the Jews (who had canonized their prophets) of killing
Christian prophets. By exculpating the Romans and inculpating the Jews in
the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death, the Christians of that generation, who
translated Jesus’ words from Aramaic to Greek, were able to turn their messiah into the quintessential prophet killed by the Jews. Christians, indulging
this hatred of Jews, created a Mobius strip of self-criticism and projection,
23. On the relationship between power and scapegoating, see Rene Girard’s
work. For all the obvious value of this in shedding light on Christian Judeophobia,
and Girard’s avowed opposition to antisemitism—in his own work he has resisted
such an analysis—see Richard J. Prystowsky, “An I for An I: Projection, Subjection, and Christian Antisemitism in ‘The Service For Representing Adam,’ ” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 1 (1994): 139-157.
24. As Mme. de Sévigné expressed it: “The humbling of inferiors is necessary
to the maintenance of the social order.” See Justin Martyr’s response to the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE—Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, e.g.,
para. 16—as proof of: a) God’s punishing the Jews for deicide, and b) God’s
replacing the Jews with the Christians as the true Chosen People. See Marcel
Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations Between Christians and Jews in the
Roman Empire (AD 135-425) (New York: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization
[1948], 1996); critiqued by Miriam Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus, Studia Post-Biblica, Book 46
(Turnhout, Belgium: Brill Academic Publishers, 1995).
25. Note that the same phenomenon occurs against both Christians and Jews as
a function of Dhimma status.
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constructed around the power of accusation to enforce their projections and
avoid self-awareness.
Thus far, invidious, zero-sum anti-Judaism: something characteristic
not only of Christians but of pagans, Muslims, secular moderns, and postmoderns. The chimerical and paranoid quality of antisemitism, however,
from the time of the first blood libels in the mid 12th century to the Nazi
Holocaust of the mid 20th, marks off European culture as exceptional in the
history of Jewish-Gentile relations. The reason for such a distressing mutation in the history of hatred stems not from some innate viciousness of the
European soul, but from the counter-intuitive phenomenon that Europe in
this period was developing the most extensive commitments to the principles of civil polities in the history of sovereign nations. The hatred accompanied the move toward civil polity like the toxic wake of a transforming
culture. It is the quintessence of the anti-modern and therefore a modern
product.
Initially, most of this hostility expressed itself in religious terms. In the
early 11th century, we have the earliest rumors of an international Jewish
conspiracy to destroy Christendom, in the mid 12th, we have the first blood
libel, and by the late 12th, we have the notion that the Jews knew that Jesus
was God and killed him on purpose.26 Nothing serves to arouse anger more
than the sense that the pain one feels was inflicted by someone else
intentionally.
But behind this cultivated anger lay a social concern. The Jews not
only killed Christ, do not only kill little Christian boys and bake matzah
with their carefully gathered blood (like Christian faithful gathering the
blood of their saints for relics). They also undermined the prime divider that
privileged the Christian clergy and the lay aristocracy; they also empowered
commoners who play by the rules of the market, who think for themselves
(heresy and markets were closely correlated), and who reject the Church for
its idolatry and its claims to monopoly on the media of salvation.
The very existence of the Jews as an autonomous, unsubjected people
undermined the creedal system that empowered ecclesiastical Christianity—the divinity of Christ, the transubstantiation of the Eucharist, clerical
monopoly on text and interpretation of the Bible (especially the subversive
passages of the Hebrew Bible). And beyond that, it undermines the seignorial system of the prime divider, where aristocrats (potentes) have privileges, including owning manual laborers (impotentes), who serve their
masters in poverty and powerlessness. Every time that the Hebrew Bible
was translated, and thus migrated from the control of the clergy to within
26. Landes, “Massacres of 1010”; Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The
Evolution of Modern Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
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reach of commoners, we find a variant of the rebellious egalitarian ditty:
“When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the Gentleman?”27 Medieval antisemitism arises within the framework of prime-divider societies,
where the elites find the very existence of autonomous Jews a threat to their
dominion.
A second, and closely related, issue informed this tragic dialectic,
namely, that of Christian apocalyptic expectations. As we have seen above,
one of the Jewish scenarios for the messianic age represents the spread of
civil polities to all the nations of the world and—therefore—the end of war
(as in democracies don’t go to war with each other). Christian apocalyptic
expectation had given this moral vision of the dismantling of prime-divider
societies a particular creedal twist—at the same time as the nations converted to peaceful societies, they also converted to Christianity (creedal
eschatology), and among these conversions the last and most triumphant
would be that of the Jews.
As a result, in times when Christians waxed apocalyptic—that is, when
they anticipated the imminence of the messianic era—they often grew
increasingly committed to philo-Judaism (those who bless you I will bless),
and correspondingly enthusiastic about both a demotic religiosity that promoted the moral values of civil polity (“love thy neighbor [even thine
enemy] as thyself”; act peacefully toward all men; renounce envy and
Schadenfreude [pleasure in someone else’s failure or pain]).28 When they
found their good will reciprocated, they fully expected that the Jews would
convert to the true faith as a result of their open-hearted affection. Together,
they would build a messianic world of peace and joy.29
In the upswing of enthusiastic hope, this apocalyptic dimension intensified the contribution of these groups to both philo-Judaism and civil polity. But in the (inevitable) downswing after the failure of the Jews to
convert and Jesus to reappear, the Christian disappointment sharpened the
27. See Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford University
Press, 1999), chap. 3.
28. On demotic religiosity, a term developed to designate the egalitarian attitudes embodied in the Hebrew Bible discussed above, see Richard Landes, “Economic Development and Demotic Religiosity: Reflections on the Eleventh-Century
Takeoff,” in History in the Comic Mode: The New Medieval Cultural History, ed.
Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007),
101-16.
29. For a discussion of some of the (rather rare) philo-Judaic apocalyptic tracts
written in the Christian Middle Ages, with a specific focus on this dynamic, see
Richard Landes, review of Robert Lerner, The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval
Millenarians and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000),
in Speculum 79:3 (2004): 789-792.
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sense of rejection by the Jews, leading to a kind of apocalyptic scapegoating
in which the failure of the Jews to convert had prevented Jesus from
returning: Jewish rejection of Christian messianic hopes was a symbolic reenacting of the deicide. And just as the first refusal had led to the Crucifixion, so subsequent ones led to the crucifixion of Christian hopes in Jesusreturn Parousia. This pattern played out most clearly in the career of Martin
Luther, who started by urging a friendly and conciliatory attitude toward
Jews (after all, they had rejected the same flawed Christianity that he had),
and ended with some of the most vicious and virulent denunciations of what
he called their stiff-necked wickedness.30
Whenever we see Jews given the choice between conversion or death
(e.g., the First Crusade, Black Death), an act that every formal piece of
Christian theology since Augustine condemned, we should suspect that we
are dealing with the latter phase of a process in which apocalyptic urgency
had moved from voluntary conversion through Christian love to warfare
with the hated forces of the Antichrist. The Jews at this point had the choice
between turning to Jesus Christ or extermination as agents of the Antichrist.
The dominating imperative (rule or be ruled) had mutated into the paranoid
imperative: “exterminate or be exterminated.” This shift from the transformative apocalypticism of philo-Judaism, with its strong positive-sum
impact on society, to catastrophic and violent apocalypticism, with its tendencies toward totalitarian state actions and mega-death (Crusades, Inquisition, witch hunts, reigns of terror), define the outer extremes of a fruitful if
tragic interaction between Jews and Gentiles in Christian and post-Christian
Europe.
Anti-Jewish polemic in Europe from about 1000 onward (the period
when Europe starts its economic and social dynamics of growth) never
ceases to mutate and to grow more virulent, a pattern we now observe on a
global scale. The exceptional and exceptionally favorable conditions of the
11th century, in which both Jews and Christians of Western Europe developed thriving communities, especially in the nascent islands of civil society
of that time—the urban communes that first appeared in the 1060s—led to
the backlash of Crusade violence (1096), and that violence led to the blood
libel (1140s).
Here, in a classic tale of guilty projection, Christians looked at the
Jewish communities whose members they had slaughtered in an act of vengeance for having killed their Lord, and imagined that the Jewish survivors
30. Neelak S. Tjernagel, Martin Luther and the Jewish People (Milwaukee, WI:
Northwestern Publishing House, 1985), which emphasizes the psychological conditions of bitter disappointment that drove Luther to his tirades against the Jews (and
so many other opponents).
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must be planning the kinds of vengeance that these Christians had already
exacted. If the Jews, because of their weakness, could not do it openly, they
must be doing it secretly, in a bloodthirsty ritual that reverses everything the
Bible teaches both Christians and Jews about not consuming blood.
Thus, the blood libel allows the scapegoater to strip the Jew of his
moral and ethical commitments—to systematically transform all the evidence of the Jews’ civic commitments to discourse rather than violence, to
respect for the rights of the stranger, of the animal, or all living creatures
whose soul is in their blood that the Jews may not drink—and turn it into
evidence of malevolence, hypocritical scheming, and demonic hatred.
Christians began to spread the vicious myth that the Jews secretly consumed Christian blood as a religious rite. The popularity of this myth at
times of anxiety can overwhelm a society’s judgment. As Ahad Ha-‘Am
(Asher Ginsberg) wrote in 1893, describing the prevailing attitude of Gentiles when the Jews denied the blood libel: “Is it possible that everybody
can be wrong and the Jews right?”31 Pogroms predictably ensued.
III—MODERN ANTISEMITISM
AND
CIVIL SOCIETY’S DISCONTENTS
With the advent of constitutional democracies from the American and
French revolutions, we find a fundamental shift in the culture’s public attitude toward Jews. Rather than the built-in hostility of prime-divider societies, we find two new and very positive mutations in the Gentile attitude.
On the one hand, secular post-Christian Westerners felt, reasonably, that if
they predicated freedom of mutuality—if, in order to be free one had to
grant the same freedoms to others32 —that should include the Jews, whom
they accordingly emancipated from the legal and social inferiority to which
Christian Europe had relegated them.33 In the new political dispensation of
egalitarian law, Jews could (in principle) join in the open, meritocratic competition for professional and economic advancement.
31. “Let the world say what it will about our moral inferiority: we know that its
ideas rest on popular logic, and have no real scientific basis. . . . ‘But’—you ask—
‘is it possible that everybody can be wrong, and the Jews right?’ Yes, it is possible:
the blood accusation proves it possible. Here, you see, the Jews are right and perfectly innocent,” Ahad Ha-‘Am, Selected Essays (1962), 204.
32. The Encyclopédie defined the natural law as the product of “in each man an
act of pure understanding that reasons in the silence of passions about what man
may demand of his neighbor (semblable) and what his neighbor has a right to
demand of him.” Diderot, “Droit naturelle,” Encyclopédie 11, no. 116:9, http://
artfl.uchicago.edu/images/encyclopedie/V5/ENC_5-116.jpeg.
33. See the discussion around the status of the Jews in the French Revolution,
both by the secular Robespierre and the religious Abbé Grégoire. Landes, Heaven
on Earth, 265-68.
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On the other hand, specifically in those Christian millennial circles
most closely allied with democratic thinking, we find a peculiar innovation
in the apocalyptic scenario. Whereas medieval Christianity had viewed any
Jewish messianic activity as the “work of the Antichrist,” a strain of Protestantism viewed the return of the Jews to Israel as a necessary and positive
step in the preparation for Jesus’ return. Although this scenario still
involved the ultimate conversion of the Jews to Christianity, it delayed it
significantly, and interjected a (an increasingly) lengthy period of mutual
cooperation and respect between Jews and Christians before that day of
reckoning.34 By the calculations of the secular democrats, the emancipation
of the Jews should have led to their rapid assimilation and ultimate
disappearance.
In a sense, this constituted a secular version of Luther’s attitude—the
Jews had understandably rejected the superstitious nonsense of the (earlier)
Christians, but now, with the triumph of an ecumenical rationale, they
would become citizens and leave their own superstitions behind. When it
didn’t work out according to their Protestant-reasoned millennialism, they
reacted similarly, if less viciously, than their Christian ancestors. Ironically,
those so-called “enlightened thinkers” most disturbed by Jews who had succeeded in modern conditions and stayed identified as Jews ended up
rejecting everything from benighted Christianity except their hostility
toward the Jews (and, one might add, their millennial dreams and attendant
apocalyptic expectations).35
Indeed, when the Gentiles emancipated the Jews, they thought they
were doing a favor to a shriveled population fossilized in their ancient
superstitions. At best, they expected them to gratefully vanish into the powerful currents of the modern age. What they did not realize (and I suspect
many Jews of the time did not realize either) was that these recently
matured Christians (Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment is the autonomy
of maturity) had just adopted rules of a game (equality before the law,
including intellectual meritocracy) that Jews had been playing by for over
three millennia. Despite the democrats’ initial sense that these rules are self34. On Christian “Zionism,” beginning with 17th-century Holland, see Miriam
Bodian, “ ‘Liberty of Conscience’ and the Jews in the Dutch Republic,” Studies in
Christian-Jewish Relations, 6 (2011): 1-9; more broadly, see Crawford Gribbon,
Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). For the impact of this philo-Judaism on Western democratic thought,
see Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of
European Political Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
35. See the most recent analysis from David Nirenberg in his Anti-Judaism: The
Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). On the apocalyptic expectations embedded in the modern venture, see Landes, Heaven on Earth, chaps. 8-12.
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evident, the evidence suggests that they are culture specific, and extremely
difficult to live with and to sustain. The Enlightenment thus set in motion a
constantly evolving society and culture with an ever-changing scene over
the course of centuries. The Jews, long practitioners of these arts under the
worst of conditions (formal degradation), now had an enormous advantage
over the surrounding culture, which was only now adopting these rules.
As a result, one of the greatest unanticipated consequences of modernity was the immense, astonishing success of Jews. Far from being swallowed up in the process, Jews rose to great prominence in all walks of
life—the professions (especially law and medicine), academia, finance,
commerce, journalism, history. Indeed, any profession that called for opening oneself to stiff criticism (academia, science, law, journalism) was a site
of predilection for Jews, trained in a culture of machloket (dispute),
tochachah (rebuke), and public self-criticism.36
Nor was this “mere” stiff competition, as in the case of Moses
Dobrus̆ka, the Moravian disciple of the failed messianic pretender Jacob
Frank, who came to Paris as Junius Frey and became the chief ideologue of
the French Revolution, guillotined with Danton.37 Jews not only played the
game well, they changed the rules. Marx, Freud, and Einstein literally
upended the way that we think about the world and ourselves.38 Nor did this
only happen at the level of the elites. Poor Jews, Eastern Europeans fleeing
the pogroms to Western Europe and the United States, became a particularly active laboring group with a distinct talent for capitalism and an ideological predilection for socialist and communist thought.39 Finally, perhaps
at the conjunction of the elites and the commoners, modern Jews showed a
particular interest and talent in the rapidly emerging world of the public
sphere—the world of newspapers, pamphlets, journals; later, radio, film,
television.
This exceptional success alarmed many. Jewish prominence in all
aspects of this central new dimension of modern life—the public sphere—
created a sense among some Gentiles that the defining elements of their
36. On the astounding success of the Jews in modern conditions, see Yuri
Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
37. Landes, Heaven on Earth, 258.
38. John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss,
and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Frederic
Grunfeld, Prophets without Honor: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and
their World (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979).
39. David Shuldiner, Of Marx and Moses: Folk Ideology and Folk History in
the Jewish Labor Movement (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1999). On the
propensity of Jews, especially Jewish intellectuals, to lean left, see Norman
Podhoretz, Why Are Jews Liberals? (New York: Vintage, 2010).
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culture had been taken over by the Jews. Above all, it deeply disturbed
those members of an older aristocratic elite who found themselves deeply
handicapped by the modern egalitarian rule-set that disqualified privileged
violence; in particular, they were hemmed in by the increasing transparency
they had to endure under the public gaze of journalists. If, at the time of the
first democratic revolutions in the late 18th century, the conspiracy theorists
of the aristocratic world viewed the Masons as the epicenter of the conspiracy to undermine the “true” (Christian) order of the world, by the end of the
19th century, they came to believe that the Masons (and other atheists like
Darwin and Nietzsche) were but the pawns of the real menace, the Jews.40
Jewish successes in a democratic, meritocratic, productive society also
alarmed some below the prime-divider line, people for whom their medieval identities had, in significant part, been formed around their invidious
sense of superiority to the even more lowly Jews. Crabs in the basket of
want and misery, they found the sight of Jews getting out from underneath
them deeply upsetting. To the extent that Christian and Muslim commoners
found comfort in the superiority of their houses of worship, they also
needed a population inferior to them, a bone to gnaw on in their own
wretchedness. For them, the Jews were the helpless scapegoats, ritually
humiliated, occasionally turned over to a howling mob for murderous
thrashings, and they did not appreciate hearing from those who were reassuring these commoners that they were not the bottom of the barrel.
Even those in the new elite who welcomed both the rules of meritocracy and the Jews found themselves in a disturbing and unexpected
competition with these newcomers. Some chose to continue to play by the
meritocratic rules, despite their confusion about Jews and their talents,
intentions, and loyalties. These elites, including the Jews they tolerated/
embraced, have come—very slowly—to dominate most Western academic
circles, constituting one of the most vital and creative elements of modern
culture, drawing in their wake even those in the academy who would rather
not play by modern rules.41 Here again we find the biblical formula illustrated: those who bless you (Western academy) will be blessed; those who
curse you (Nazi, Soviet, and Arab universities) will be cursed.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the reemergence of
the dominant form of antisemitism in the medieval world—now mutated
under the conditions of modernity—in these circles of “semi-modernized”
40. See the multiple discussions of the phenomenon in Landes and Katz, eds.,
Paranoid Apocalypse.
41. Edward S. Shapiro, “The Friendly University: Jews in Academia since
World War II,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 46, no. 3
(1997): 365-74.
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(ultimately anti-modern) intellectuals, who were committed to modern rulesets not only because they were the established game but also were far more
committed to the prime-divider values of incumbency and honor at others’
expense; who resented competition, especially from foreigners whom they
did not understand; and who hated the humiliation of losing control. In
medieval culture, the authoritarians who played by the rules of the dominating imperative controlled political and public voice and legislated against
Jews to assure their humiliation, but in modern culture these people found
themselves increasingly under pressure, either marginalized or under growing scrutiny, while they watched the Jews grow steadily in influence.
And, of course, the press proved one of the most sensitive areas where
this new configuration of conflict played itself out. The older authoritarians
found the greatest threat to them in the arena precisely that had attracted
secularized Jews the most. With their commitment to the civic values of
free speech, to the transparency and criticism of elites and the demystification of power, and to the education and exposure of the larger public to a
wide range of opinions and information, liberal Jews found journalism a
near-irresistible profession. For these authoritarians who watched their
power wane precisely as that of the Jews waxed, only one answer made
sense: conspiracy.
Modernity as Enslavement Conspiracy—The Protocols
Theories about a conspiracy of Illuminati who secretly sought to take
over and rule the world go back to the 18th century, and initially focus on
the secret society of the Masons. And, in fact, to judge from Mozart’s The
Magic Flute (1791), written at the height of enthusiasm about the French
Revolution, the Masons constituted a secret society dedicated to getting rid
the authoritarian elites and their monarchical systems that ruled Europe at
the time. “He is a prince!” gushes one character about Tamino. “He is more
than a prince; he’s a man (mensch),” corrects the Mason. Just as Rip Van
Winkle noticed, when he awakened after the American Revolution, that the
caps (commoners) no longer bowed down before the hats (gentlemen), the
Masons sought a world in which deference was gone, a world where the
prime divider had ceded to world of equality in which no one is “another
man’s man” and all men “can walk upright.”
The key issue, of course, concerned the purpose of this overthrow. For
the elites who felt threatened, the secret work of the Masons could only
signify the work of malevolent men who, like themselves, sought to dominate others. Thus, the purpose of a vision of world “liberation” on the part
of the Masons could only mean the intention to replace the world “domination” of the current prime-divider elites (aristocracy). They therefore heard
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such noble-sounding sentiments as merely the trap, the weapon whereby
these people planned to disarm their opposition. Only a knave or an imbecile would possibly espouse such ideas as “Liberty, equality, fraternity.”
Employing these tactics, the old guard reasoned, the modern elites who
were taking over used these notions to gull the foolish and greedy masses.
The duped mobs who overthrew their aristocracies for promises of freedom
and prosperity had a nasty surprise awaiting them. After losing their only
real, if iron-fisted, protectors, they would soon be at the mercy of forces
over which they had no control, especially those of the technologically
enhanced marketplace. When these new manipulators had achieved their
goal—constitutional democracies everywhere—they would then engineer a
global crisis that would then permit them to enslave the entire world. At its
simplest, these conspiracies represented a political argument first made
explicit by Plato and Thucydides: the painful order of prime-divider society
is better than the chaos of democracy and the inevitable slavery of
tyranny.42
And, of course, the reaction of the French Revolutionaries to the threat
that the united monarchies of Europe posed to this newest outbreak of an
attempt to legislate civil society—the cannibalistic paranoia of the Terror
and the imperialist megalomania of Napoleon—confirmed the fears of these
older elites: this “democratic” conspiracy represented not a genuine drive
for freedom, but a new face to an old foe—the “Others,” and their drive for
dominion.43 Nietzsche was right: behind the slave morality that whines
about fairness and equality lies a deep and corrupt ressentiment that cannot
wait for the opportunity to do onto others as others now do onto them. It
held just as true in the 19th century as it did in the fifth century BCE.
Over the course of the 19th century, as the forces of the prime divider
struggled with the recurring outbreaks of the revolutionary forces of egalitarianism—1830, 1848, 1870—these conspiracy theories became more
elaborate and widespread. The more the older aristocracy found itself
replaced either by these punctuated revolutionary upheavals or the slow
attrition of an increasingly meritocratic intellectual and technologically
adept culture, the more they elaborated this conspiracy theory, in which
their loss represented the last greatest hope for social stability.44
42. On the Protocols’ links to older political philosophy, see Richard Landes,
“The Melian Dialogue, the Protocols, and the Paranoid Imperative,” in Landes and
Katz, eds., Paranoid Apocalypse, 23-33.
43. See Eli Sagan, Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, the Struggle
for Modernity and the Origins of Ideological Terror (Lanham, MD.: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2001), 327-510; Landes, Heaven on Earth, 270-77.
44. Landes, Heaven on Earth, chaps. 10-12.
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At the turn of the century, one of the most powerful forgeries of history identified the Jews as the real power behind the conspiracy to use
democracy in order to enslave mankind. The circumstances of its emergence bear a brief discussion. In 1894, in the France of the Third Republic,
the military condemned an Alsatian Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, for treason. In 1898, Emile Zola published, in a well-known daily newspaper, his
famous “J’Accuse,” a devastating attack on the army for framing Dreyfus
and exonerating the true traitor, Ferdinand Esterhazy; and in 1899 the army
conducted a new trial in which—although the army, with the enthusiastic
support of the Catholic Church, prevailed and found Dreyfus guilty again—
the battle for public opinion was lost. The president of the Republic granted
him a pardon, and the anti-Dreyfusards were left to lick their wounds and
suffer the constant attack of the proponents of modern democracy.45
The trial brought out all of the most virulent contradictions in the
Third Republic—the deep conservatism of both the army and the Church:
their immense hostility to the principles of egalitarianism and the transparency of power, a free press capable of criticizing the government to the
public, and the meddling of intellectuals in affairs of state. The contrast
between prime-divider politics could not appear with greater clarity: justice
for the individual based on an honest and scientific examination of the evidence (handwriting analysis played a key role in Dreyfus’ exoneration) vs.
the necessities of state, the honor of the army (Zola fled to avoid imprisonment for libeling the army) and the government, the importance of appearances, and the danger of admitting to error. Not surprisingly, the supporters
of the army, especially the Catholic Church, argued that a great Jewish conspiracy had created the Dreyfus case precisely to attack the forces of order
in society. In typical fashion for prime-divider elites, they prized image
over reality (Esterhazy remained in office, free to continue his treason), and
they blamed the malevolence of others for errors that they themselves had
made in an extreme effort to avoid admitting error.
Everyone who has learned the history of Zionism knows that Theodore
Herzl’s astonishment at the virulence of the anti-Jewish opinion at the first
Dreyfus trial (1894) shattered his faith in the promises of the Enlightenment
(real equality in exchange for assimilation) and convinced him that the only
way for Jews to become free and escape the virulent hatreds of European
society was to become an independent people. In 1895, he wrote The Jewish State, and in 1897 he presided over the first Zionist conference, in
Basel, Switzerland, setting in motion the first modern Jewish political
movement; Zionism. All of the principles of progressive liberalism were on
45. Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
(New York: Metropolitan, 2010).
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display; the aim of the Jewish state was to guarantee those promises made
so generously in the Declaration of the Rights of Man—liberty and equality—and kept so grudgingly from Jews who applied.
Constitutional government, a free press, freedom of religion, the dignity of manual labor, just courts committed to equality before the law—all
the classic values of progressive modernity—were on display in the Zionist
enterprise. Indeed, some of the enthusiastic participants in the movement,
many of them from an educated proletariat, took these commitments to
equality far beyond the classic liberal notions—equality before the law and
equality of opportunity to the socialist and communist notions of equality of
property and wealth—producing, among other exceptional institutions, the
kibbutz, the most successful communal movement in history.
What the history of Zionism does not often mention is that in 1904 a
pamphlet appeared claiming to publish the secret proceedings of the Zionist
conference of 1897, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here, for the first
time in a form that quickly grew to be the dominant one, the centuries-old
conspiracy of the Illuminati became the millennia-old conspiracy of the
Jews against mankind. The forgers of this document, large parts of which
were taken almost verbatim from an anti-Napoleonic tract from the 1860s,
identify the enemy as this evil cabal of Jews who, in the privacy of their
secret deliberations, openly embrace the principle of the dominating imperative, and present the Jewish support of democracy and other principles of
modernity as a trap to gull the foolish Gentiles to their doom.
The Protocols claims that these power-hungry Jews are classic
demopaths. They use democracy as a trap to seduce the commoners into
overthrowing their natural protectors, the “Gentile aristocracy,” a class too
powerful for the weak and small Jewish people to take on directly. Once
they succeed (revolutions of the late 18th and 19th centuries), the natural
chaos that democracy inevitably engenders will enable the Jews, masters of
the market, to bring about massive crisis and collapse and enslave all of
mankind.
This book, which first “leaked” this intercepted secret protocol of the
Jewish cabal to the world, presented it in apocalyptic terms.46 This was the
conspiracy of the Antichrist, aimed at destroying Christianity, and its progress was now so great that the Jews had almost closed the circle and
enslaved everyone. In the hands of demagogues, the message easily became
an urgent call to drastic action, a “warrant for genocide” against the malevolent Jews.
46. Michael Hagemeister, “ ‘The Antichrist Is an Imminent Possibility’: Sergei
Nilus and the Apocalyptical Reading of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,”
Landes and Katz, eds., Paranoid Apocalypse, 79-91.
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The victory of the communists in Russia in 1917, and the revolution’s
rapid transformation into a merciless totalitarian cult, confirmed the belief
that the atheist forces hostile to the Gentile aristocracy (so many of them
Jews) was determined to subject all of mankind to a devastating slavery.
For many observers, even those not inherently hostile to Jews, it confirmed
all the greatest fears the Protocols had stirred. And when the Nazis took
over these ideas within a more secular, modern framework of the technology of death and the science of racial dominion, the apocalyptic meltdown
of genocidal warfare ensued.47 Under the pressures and anxieties of modernity, the dominating imperative had mutated into the paranoid imperative:
“exterminate or be exterminated.” Co-existence was impossible.
Like the medieval blood libel, the modern conspiracy theory systematically misreads Judaism and the values that have permitted it to survive
from the ancient world and to feel so at home in the modern one. It takes
every honest commitment to values of fairness and equity in Judaism and
reads them as their opposite—malevolent hatred and desire for dominion. It
projects onto the Jews the ressentiment of Nietzsche’s “weak,” who only
call for tolerance and equity because they are weak. The Protocols’ role in
the Nazi genocide proved that the forgery was the cultural equivalent of
germ warfare.
And yet, the success of the Protocols constitutes one of the most
important phenomena of the 20th century, both before and after the Holocaust, and now, unfortunately, into the 21st century. No serious analysis of
Western, and now global, history can be done without an understanding of
why this patent forgery has enjoyed such enormous popularity in so many
different cultural and political climates—right wing, left wing, secular,
religious, European, Muslim, Japanese.
In fact, the Protocols’ immense and enduring appeal lies specifically
with all those who feel threatened by the advance of modernity and of a
meritocratic society based on the principle of equality before the law. This
includes not only the older prime-divider elites, who rule by old-boyincumbency networks and Mafioso intimidation, but also the numerous
people who feel enormous anxiety at the prospects—common in modern
conditions—of not knowing what the future holds, who feel diminished by
the success of others, who prefer to pull down whatever crabs seek to
escape the basket, lest, in escaping, they make those who remain behind
look like lazy failures.
47. David Redles, “The Turning Point: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and
the Eschatological War between Aryans and Jews,” Landes and Katz, eds., Paranoid Apocalypse, 112-131.
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How can one view oneself and one’s fellow commoners as tragic
figures who accept with grace their ineluctable misery when some—the
lowest—show how one can choose success? The visceral appeal of
antisemitism lies in its ability to trigger the worst elements of human selfdestructiveness: Schadenfreude, malevolent envy, scapegoating . . . in brief,
all those who believe in the dominating imperative, both those who dominate, and those who, in deep and abiding ressentiment, hate those who
oppress them even as they identify with these aggressors. Those who curse
you will be cursed.
Conspiracy brings us face to face with a core issue: the refusal to selfcriticize. The prime divider is built on projection of blame. The opacity and
mystery of the elites serve, among other things, to hide their abuse of power
to their own advantage; their monopoly on violence, which permits them to
eliminate anyone who criticizes them publicly; and their monopoly on communications technology and public space, which permits them to dominate
the public voice with their own scapegoating narratives. It projects the most
depraved desires of the believer in conspiracies onto the Other. As the
Nazis screamed about the Jews’ desire to enslave mankind, they themselves
set about to do just that. As Charles Strozier put it: “A conspiracy theory is
a narrative that victimizers tell themselves in order to claim the status of
[future] victims, and justify striking out as a preemptive move.”48 It is a
warrant for genocide.
Thus, where one finds an instinctive recourse to conspiracy theories to
explain the unfolding of events, one finds people who will not accept any
responsibility for their situation, people who project their own worst intentions onto scapegoats and demonize them rather than self-criticize. And, of
course, both the commoners and the Jews then bear the burden of the society’s sins. In every prime-divider society, theodicy must explain why the
commoner suffers, and most often, whether a karmic punishment or the
consequence of the original sin, it is the commoner’s fault. And when, as in
modernizing conditions from the 11th to the 21st century, the Jews leaven
prime-divider society with opportunities for commoners to rise, they must
be held responsible for precisely the oppression to which they offer a compelling solution: if they are not responsible for killing Christ, they are at
least responsible for every problem raised by modernity.
*Richard Landes teaches history at Boston University and blogs at Augean Stables.
His latest work is Heaven on Earth (OUP, 2011). [email protected]
48. Charles Strozier, “The Apocalyptic Other: On Paranoia and Violence,”
Landes and Katz, Paranoid Apocalypse, 39.
Muslim Antisemitism BI—Before Israel
Alex Rose*
In Israel in Medialand, Eliyahu Tal observes:
While repetition is an innocuous educational term, brainwashing has to
do with propaganda. Messages repeated day upon day, month after
month, are bound to register in people’s minds and subconscious. The
globalization of news transmissions simply lends that process more impetus. Once predominantly only reporters of news, the media have assumed
the role of shapers of news, to a degree that arouses concern. One of the
elder statesmen of American journalism, Eric Sevareid, even went so far
as to write: “Our rigid formulae of so-called objectivity—our flat, onedimensional handling of news, have given the lie the same prominence
and impact that truth is given; they have elevated the influence of fools to
that of wise men; the ignorant to the level of the learned; the evil to the
level of the good.”1
Ever since the Israeli Declaration of Statehood, there has been a constant assertion that it was this singular act that resulted in Arab/Muslim
hatred and antisemitism. It is frequently alluded to by Muslim leaders and,
indeed, the media. Critics of Islam argue that the presence of Israel, a Jewish state and democracy, in the heart of the Islamic world is very difficult
for Muslims to accept. It is very hard for Muslims to reconcile Israel’s existence and its regional military supremacy with the prevalent Muslim views
that, as recipients of Allah’s final revelation, no Muslims should be subject
to the political supremacy of a Jewish state. Further, regardless of the small
size of Israel and the vastly larger land mass of the surrounding Arab lands,
1. Eliyahu Tal, ed. Israel in Medialand: A Study of the International Media’s
Coverage of the Uprising (intifada) in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, 1988.
Tal Communications, distributed by The Jerusalem Post.
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from the Muslim perspective, Israel’s presence is a cancer in the heart of the
Islamic world.
What we learn from this is that the establishment of the State of Israel
is a political bone of contention. In other words, the Arab-Israeli Wars,
which are primarily a political confrontation, pitted Jews (who consider the
State of Israel to be part of their ethnic identity) and Arab nationalism
(considered by most Muslims to be a political extension of Arab ethnic
identity) against each other [author emphasis]. The message that is projected on a regular basis is that the State of Israel is responsible for Islamic
antisemitism, i.e., the root of the conflict. English standup comedian Pat
Condell has recognized this, stating that “Arabs don’t hate Jews because of
Israel; they hate Israel because of the Jews.”2
To understand what this means for peace efforts with the Arabs, one
need read no further than the Shmuel Katz’s 1982 pamphlet, No Solution to
the Arab-Palestinian Problem. Katz understood full well the religious
nature of the Arab-Israel conflict when he wrote:
Of all the statements about Israel made under Islamic religious inspiration, perhaps the most significant is the one uttered by Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat in a sermon he delivered in Cairo’s Al-Hussein mosque on
April 25, 1972 on the occasion of the birthday anniversary of the Prophet
Muhammad”: “The Jews were the neighbors of the Prophet in Medina
. . . and he negotiated with them. But in the end they proved that they
were men of deceit. The most splendid thing that the Prophet Muhammad
did was to drive them out of the whole of the Arabian Peninsula . . . They
are a nation of liars and traitors, contrivers of plots, a people born for
deeds of treachery. . . . promise you . . . the defeat of Israeli arrogance
and rampaging so that they shall return and be as the Quran said of them
‘condemned to humiliation and misery’ . . . We shall send them back to
their former status.”3
Katz concludes: “The eradication of the State of Israel means the restoration of Islam to its potency, to its rightful dimensions: in Israel’s end lies
the confirmation.”
Katz never shied away from the truth. He noted in The Existential
Fact:
2. “The Great Palestinian Lie,” October 6, 2011, accessed January 1, 2013,
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2011/10/arabs-don’t-hate-jews-because=of=
israel.htm
3. Shmuel Katz, “No Solution to the Arab Palestinian Problem.” Jerusalem:
Van Leer Foundation, 1982, accessed January 1, 2013, www.shmuelkatz.com/Articles/NoSolutionToArabPal.pdf
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Indeed, one of the most critical tasks of the Jewish people is to ensure
that at least its friends should absorb the fact—bleak, uncomfortable but
existential—that the Islamic world, if it were prepared to accept Israel’s
collective existence at all, would only tolerate it as a subject community
under Muslim sovereignty.4
Hebrew University’s Robert Wistrich has more recently focused on
Islamic antisemitism. His 2002 booklet Muslim Antisemitism: A Clear and
Present Danger, while exhaustive, has a common theme. In his introduction, he makes the point that the warning signs of a terrorist attack on the
centers and symbols of American security were evident long before 9/11,
both in the rhetoric of the Al-Qaeda movement and in smaller scale attacks.
He states further that “a virulent strain of antisemitism has taken root in the
body politic of Islam to an unprecedented degree.”
Wistrich recognizes the centrality of the Koran in the dissemination of
“some notably harsh passages” that are “far from harmless” in their description of Jews as “corrupters of Scripture,” “falsehood,” and “distortion,”
stubbornly and willfully rejecting Allah’s truth and their rejection of
Muhammad, who branded them as enemies of Islam, depicting them as possessing a malevolent, rebellious spirit. According to Wistrich, the jihad
against Israel is seen by the Islamists in particular as not only a militarypolitical battle for the inalienable “sacred Muslim soil” [Waaf] of Palestine,
but also as a struggle against a much larger force—“whether it be America
or the occult power of the Jews. Professor Wistrich:
Shortly after the disaster of June 1967, the more conservative fundamentalists exacerbated and sharpened the traditional image of Zionism and
the Jews into something so utterly vile and perverse that it could only
merit total eradication. In point, of fact, Muslim Arab antisemitism of the
late 1960s was already genocidal in its implications. Virtually all the
Arab theologians assembled in Cairo in 1968 denoted Jews as “enemies
of God” and “enemies of humanity” and as a criminal riffraff rather than
as a people; their state was seen as the illegitimate culmination of allegedly immutable and permanently depraved characteristics. President
Sadat of Egypt on April 25, 1972, referred to the Jews as “a nation of
liars and traitors, contrivers of plots, a people born for deeds of treachery,” who would soon be “condemned to humiliation and misery,” as
prophesied in the Koran.5
4. Shmuel Katz, “The Existential Fact.” The Jerusalem Post, January 23, 1981.
5. Quoted in Robert S. Wistrich, “Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present
Danger.” New York: American Jewish Committee, 2002, accessed January 1, 2013,
http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42d75369-d582-4380-8395-d25925b85eaf%7D/wistrichantisemitism.pdf
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Perhaps the most revealing observation provided by Wistrich in his
excellent opinion piece is expressed in the following statement: “The Western media, as is its custom, has been extremely reluctant to relate the current terrorist war against Israel and the West to its ideological roots in Islam
or to the sources and meaning of Jihad.”
Brown University’s Andrew Bostom published “Misunderstanding
Islamic Antisemitism” in the American Thinker (2008). He framed his work
around two questions based upon his research and distributed to a cadre of
academics, independent scholars, theologians, journalists, and activists who
have addressed antisemitism within the Muslim world. His questions were
whether this quote exemplifies racial or at least ethnic antisemitism, and
where or when it was written. Here is a response:
Our people [the Muslims] observing thus occupations of the Jews and the
Christians concluded that the religion of the Jews must compare unfavorably as do their professions, and that their unbelief must be foulest of all,
since they are the filthiest of all nations. Why the Christians, ugly as they
are, are physically less repulsive than the Jews may be explained by the
fact that the Jews, by not intermarrying, have intensified the offensiveness of their features. Exotic elements have not mingled with them,
neither have males of alien races had intercourse with their women, nor
have their men cohabited with females of foreign stock. The Jewish race
therefore has been denied high mental qualities, sound physique, and
superior lactation. The same results obtain when horses, camels, donkeys,
and pigeons are inbred.6
The responses to Bostom were unsurprising, representing conventional academic and journalistic generally accepted beliefs—in other words, the
assertion that Muslim Jew hatred is of recent origin, commencing in the late
19th or early 20th centuries, a byproduct of the advent of Zionism and the
consequent Arab-Israel conflict over the land area defined in the mandate
for historical Palestine. Yet the quote, which dates back to an essay by an
Arab writer named al-Jahiz (d. 869), clearly illustrates the anti-Jewish attitudes prevalent within an important early Islamic society. At this point,
Bostom provides numerous examples of antisemitic statements from Muslim authors throughout the ages, using demeaning quotes from the Koran
and other religious texts. He brings to mind a specific quote from Bat
Ye’or’s 1974 foresighted analysis of the Islamic antisemitism and resurgent
jihadism in her native Egypt:
6. Quoted in Andrew G. Bostom, “Misunderstanding Islamic Anti-Semitism.”
American Thinker, May 11, 2008.
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The pejorative characteristics of Jews as they are described in Muslim
religious texts are applied to modern Jews. Anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism are equivalent—due to the inferior status of Jews in Islam, and
because divine will dooms Jews to wondering and misery, the Jewish
state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah.
Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad.7
In his classic La Trahison de Clercs (1928), Julien Benda decried with
prophetic accuracy how the abandonment of objective truth abetted totalitarian ideologies, which led to the cataclysmic destruction of World War II.
This classic remains the nearly complete failure of Western intellectuals to
study, understand, and acknowledge the heinous consequences of the living
institution of jihad war and Jew hatred. The intimately related doctrine of
Islamic antisemitism, Professor Bostom concludes this article with this
observation: “And the jihad against the Jews is but one aspect, albeit primal, of the jihad to establish global Islamic hegemony.”
From the days of Mohammed, non-Muslims under Muslim rule were
subject to taxation, humiliation, oppression, exile, and murder. Bostom
proves this through historical analysis. The Koran is believed to be the perfect, unchanging, eternal word of God. This leaves Islam no room for
reform, especially when it comes to hostility to non-Muslims, especially
Jews.
*Alex Rose was born in South Africa in 1935. He came to the United States in
1977, where he worked as in engineer at Westinghouse. Rose is a founding member
of Committee for Accuracy in the Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA),
www.camera.org. He and his wife have lived in Ashkelon, Israel, since 2003. This
essay is a shortened version of an article, “Antisemitism and Islam,” originally
published in Think Israel, http://think-israel.org
7. Quoted in Bostom, “Misunderstanding.”
Normalizing Antisemitism in Turkey
Anne-Christine Hoff*
In February 2009, Middle East Technical University professor Ihsan
Dagi published an article in Today’s Zaman with the title “The Roots of a
New Antisemitism in Turkey.” That article discussed the effects of three
writers on the intellectual climate of Turkey: Soner Yalcin,1 a leftist journalist working at Hurriyet Daily, Ergun Poyraz, a freelance journalist, and
Yalcin Kucuk, an academic with a Marxist background. Their books, says
Dagi, promote the view that a Jewish network controls Turkey and that the
country must engage in a new struggle for national independence if it
wishes to break free from Jewish control. Thousands and thousands of copies of Yalcin, Poyraz and Kucuk’s conspiracy theory books have sold in
Turkey in the last decade. Yalcin’s book Efendi: The White Turks’ Big
Secret, for example, has been reprinted 82 times since April 2008, and
Poyraz’s books The Children of Moses and The Rose of Moses sold over
150,000 copies in 2007 alone. Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was also a bestseller in 2005.2 Dagi writes:
1. According to Cem Özdemir, Valley of the Wolves’ director Serder Akar
used Soner Yalcin as an adviser for the film and to gain publicity. Cem Özdemir,
“Beyond Valley of the Wolves,” Spiegel Online, February 27, 2006, accessed April
1, 2013, <http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,401565,00.html<http://www.
spiegel.de/international/0,1518,401565,00.html>
2. Sebnem Arsu, “If You Want a Film to Fly, Make Americans the Heavies,”
The New York Times, February 14, 2006, accessed April 1, 2013, <http://www.ny
times.com/2006/02/14/international/europe/14turk.html>
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These publications have created a mental climate in which being a Jew or
having a Jewish background is something to be ashamed of and enough
to be anti-Turkish. The picture that has emerged out of these publications
was that Turkey was and has always been under the influence of Jews.
These books popularized the view that almost all important public
figures, past and present, were Sabbatean, of Jewish origin; that the Turkish Republic was a “Jewish project”; and that the Turkish economy and
political and cultural life were under the control of people of Jewish origin. These were not unknown ideas. But the important thing was that
through these books, antisemitic sentiment was introduced to new segments of society; people who were urban, educated, professional, and
secular. An idea that was hitherto popular among a very small number of
radical Islamists has spread into new social and political environs [ . . . ]
This kind of writing was part and parcel of creating a siege mentality,
provoking antisemitism and justifying a neo-nationalist popular uprising.
This normalization of antisemitism was on display after the Mavi Marmara crisis in May 2010, and appears to extend to the highest levels of
state. Where once anti-Israeli sentiments might appeal to a minority segment of Turkish society, anti-Israeli statements can now under the right
circumstances be overtly expressed and can help a politician to gain popular
support and win elections. In June 2010 Semih Idiz of Hurriyet Daily News
wrote a column entitled “Erdogan Fans Anti-Israeli, Anti-American Sentiments for Political Gain,” in which he accused Prime Minister Erdogan of
demagoguery and of using the Mavi Marmara crisis to further his own
ambitions for dominance in the region. If the climate that a Pew research
poll highlighted—with Turkey having doubled its antisemitic sentiments
from the period between 2004 and 20093—then perhaps Erdogan’s methods
are simply shrewd politicking, and antisemitic films like Valley of the
Wolves: Iraq (2006), which present caricatured Jewish antagonists, will not
only continue to be popular but will also continue to be sanctioned by both
state and media.
3. According to The Jerusalem Post, the numbers of people in Turkey who
said they had a “very unfavorable” attitude toward Jews jumped from 32% in 2004
to 73% in the spring of 2009. Amir Mizroch, “Poll: 90% of ME Views Jews Unfavorably,” The Jerusalem Post Online, September 2, 2010, accessed April 1, 2013,
http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Poll-90-percent-of-ME-views-Jews-unfavorably
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Valley of the Wolves: Iraq (2006)
Valley of the Wolves: Iraq’s racist, supremacist message made it a hit
in Turkey but controversial in Germany, the United States, and Israel. The
film depicts Americans, Jews, and Christians as inhuman and brutal killing
machines, holy warriors trying to expand their religious empire by the
sword. American soldiers shoot the groom and his guests at an Iraqi wedding, and a Jewish-American doctor removes organs from injured civilian
prisoners in order to sell them to rich clients in New York, London, and Tel
Aviv. In another scene a man dressed like a Hasidic Jew, wearing sidelocks,
a long black coat, and a black fedora, eats dinner in an expensive American
hotel in northern Iraq. This man leaves the building minutes before a bomb
destroys the hotel, a reference to the conspiracy theory that Jews were
warned ahead of time about the collapse of the World Trade Center and
therefore no Jew died in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11,
2001.
Valley of the Wolves: Iraq grossed $27.9 million at the box office—
25.1 million in Turkey and $2.8 million in Europe—enjoying one of the
highest box office returns in Turkish film history.4 Within three days of the
film’s release, Valley of the Wolves: Iraq had already been seen by 1.2
million people.5 Three days after the opening of the film, in February 2006,
BBC News reported that “At one of Istanbul’s biggest multiplex cinemas the
blockbuster is showing on five separate screens and nearly all the seats are
4. Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, Wikipedia.org, accessed April 1, 2013, <http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Wolves:_Iraq>
5. Nicholas Birch, “Audiences Cheer Film’s Anti-US Message,” The Washington Times, February 14, 2006, accessed April 1, 2013, <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/feb/14/20060214-104958-5445r/?page=1>
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sold out.”6 This same article reported that the film received an “all round
vote of approval from the audience for the movie and general disapproval
for the U.S.”
STATE-SANCTIONED ANTISEMITIC PROPAGANDA
The Wall Street Journal reported that many of the highest levels of
Turkish society, including many of the country’s most powerful politicians,
attended the film’s premiere in Ankara. Ermine Erdogan, the wife of prime
minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Istanbul major Kadir Topbas, president of
the Turkish Parliament Bulent Arinc, and businessman Sabahattin Can
offered unqualified praise for the film. Ermine Erdogan, seated next to the
film’s star Necati Şaşmaz, is reported to have said, “I feel so proud of them
all.”7 Former parliamentary speaker and present deputy prime minister
Bulent Arinc apparently described the film as “absolutely magnificent.”8
Arinc, when asked about the factual nature of the film, reportedly replied by
saying, “Yes, this is exactly as it happened.”9 Former foreign minister and
current president Abdullah Gul stated that “this film is no worse than some
of the productions of Hollywood studios.”10 Istanbul mayor Kadir Topbas
told the Associated Press that the movie “was very successful—a soldier’s
honor must never be damaged.”11
Robert L. Pollock of The Wall Street Journal, in an article he wrote in
2010 about Turkey’s relationship with the United States, recalls an interview he gave with PM Erdogan in 2006. According to Pollock, in that interview he could not convince Erdogan to distance himself from Valley of the
6. Sarah Rainsford, “Turkish Rush to Embrace Anti-US Film, BBC News, February 10, 2005, accessed April 1, 2013, < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4700154.stm?
ls>
7. Davids Medienkritik: “US Hollywood ‘Stars’ Zane and Busey Spreading
America-Hate Worldwide,” The Washington Times, February 19, 2006, accessed
April 1, 2013, <http://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/2006/02/hollywood_stars
.html>
8. Janine Zacharia,“Rice Wants Turkey to Challenge Anti-US Views, Support
Iraq,” Bloomberg, April 25, 2006, accessed April 1, 2013, <http://www.bloomberg
.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ax2wceRBeY3Y&refer=US>
9. Constanze Letsch,”Ein extraordinaerer Film, der Geschichte machen wird,”
Jungle World 8, February 22, 2006, accessed April 1, 2013. http://jungle-world
.com/artikel/2006/08/16968.html
10. Medienkritik, “US Hollywood ‘Stars.’ ”
11. “New Turkish Film Vilifies Americans,” Nbcnews.com, February 2, 2006,
accessed April 1, 2013, <http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11150082/site/todayshow/ns/
today-entertainment>
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Wolves: Iraq’s fictional blood libel. The article includes a segment from
their interview transcript:
Erdogan: “I believe the people who made this movie took media reports
as their basis . . . for example, Abu Ghraib prison—we have seen this on
TV, and now we are watching Guantanamo Bay in the world media, and
of course it could be that this movie was prepared under these
influences.”
Pollock: “But do you believe that many Turks have such a view of
America, that we’re the kind of people who’d go to Iraq and kill people
to take their organs?”
Erdogan: “These kind of things happen in the world. If it’s not happening
in Iraq, then it’s happening in other countries.”
Pollock: “Which kind of things? Killing people to take their organs?”
Erdogan: “I’m not saying they are being killed. . . . There are people in
poverty who use this as a means to get money.”
OVERTHROWING
THE
“WHITE TURKS”: A THEME
IN THE
LITERATURE
Where films like Valley of the Wolves: Iraq present crude depictions of
insatiable, unscrupulous Jews, the antisemitic publications of the last decade focus on uncovering the Jewish origins of revered Turkish public
figures in order to discredit them. This obsession with the “pure” racial
lines of public figures resembles popular propaganda in Nazi Germany,
which equated the mixing of racial lines with Jews to “blood treason.” For
example, the book Monopoly by Yalcin Kucuk even goes so far as to list
Turkified Jewish names in order to show the Jewish roots of well-known
Turkish figures in history. The Islamists are not the only ones using these
tactics. Secular Kemalists like Ergun Poyraz also try to smear perceived
Islamist public figures by accusing them of having Jewish roots. For example, Poyraz’s The Children of Moses posits that Erdogan and his wife are
“crypto-Jews” who are conspiring with Israeli intelligence to destroy secularism in Turkey. The cover of the book, displayed in bookshop windows
across the country, depicts a photomontage of prime minister Erdogan and
his covered wife Ermine framed by the Jewish star. Two other books by
Poyraz, The Rose of Moses and The Mujahid of Moses, argue that president
Abdullah Gul and parliamentary speaker Bulent Arinc are secret Jews who
serve the “Elders of Zion” and threaten Turkey’s secular republic.12
The most popular of these antisemitic books, Yalcin’s Efendi, does not
limit itself to uncovering the Jewish roots of present-day public figures.
Instead, the book questions the legitimacy of the foundations of Ataturk’s
12. Angel Rabasa and F. Stephen Larrabee, The Rise of Political Islam in Turkey (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2008), 66.
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Turkish Republic by associating the principal founders of the republic with
Judaism. Yalcin’s highly saleable book claims to uncover the Jewish roots
of the secular elites who have led the nation for the last century. In this
highly imaginative scenario, the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk himself, was part of the Jewish conspiracy to infiltrate and destroy
Turkey.
MEDIA-SANCTIONED ANTISEMITIC PROPAGANDA
Just as the reception of Valley of the Wolves: Iraq by key political
figures like Ermine Erdogan, the wife of prime minister Erdogan, was both
warm and exuberant, highly influential members of the Turkish media gave
Soner Yalcin’s Efendi uncritically glowing reviews. Rifat N. Bali, in his
article “What Is Efendi telling us?,” explores how the Turkish media bolstered the reception of Efendi by continually plugging the book on television, radio, and in print. Cuneyt Ozdemir, the host of a popular talk show
called 5N1K on CNN Turk, said Efendi was written with “the conscientiousness of the investigative reporter.”13 Influential columnists Dogan
Hizlan and Ihsan Yilmaz claimed that Yalcin “had put his signature on a
great piece of research indeed.”14 Aksam writer Serdar Turgut wrote that he
read the book “with great attention and as a great intellectual pleasure,”15
and that the work shines a light on “the true history of Turkey.”16 Milliyet
writer Yilmaz Cetiner claimed that Efendi taught the reader the most important information of the “who’s who in the last century, and what did they
do” kind.17
Rafat Bali further notes that because Soner Yalcin worked as conceptual advisor to the television series Valley of the Wolves and as concept
creator for the film Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, he was able to use the popular show as yet another forum to promote his book. According to Bali,
Yalcin used his influence as conceptual advisor to the television series to
add a scene to an episode of Valley of the Wolves in which one of the
show’s heroes, Aslan Bey, picks up a copy of Efendi and hands it to another
person, saying, “Look what’s written in Efendi.” The camera then pans in
for a five-second close-up of the book’s cover.18
13. Cuneyt Ozemir, “Efendi’nin Macerasi,” Radikal Kitap, May 7, 2004.
14. “Dogan Hizlan’in Sectikleri,” Hurriyet Cumartesi, April 24, 2004; Ihsan
Yilmaz, “Murekkebi Kurumadan,” Hurriyet, April 30, 2004.
15. Serdar Turgut, “Kaybetmeyi onuruna yediremeyen kusak,” Aksam, May 3,
2004.
16. Serdar Turgut, “Sabeytayizim ve Tarih,” Aksam, May 4, 2004.
17. Yilmaz Cetiner, “Nurbanu Sultan Yahudi degildi,” Milliyet, May 13, 2004.
18. Rifat N. Bali, “What Is Efendi Telling Us?,” Kaballah 13 (2005): 109-139.
2013]
NORMALIZING ANTISEMITISM IN TURKEY
191
A SIEGE MENTALITY
What Professor Dagi describes as a “siege mentality” has already
affected the dynamism of Turkish Jewry. According to the World Population Prospects of the United Nations, as many as 6,000 of the 23,000 Jews
known to reside in Turkey at the end of 2009 had already emigrated to
Israel by September 2010.19 Judging by those numbers, more than 25% of
the Turkish-Jewish community left the country within a nine-month period
(and just three months after the Mavi Marmara incident on May 31, 2010).
For those who remain in Turkey, the present antisemitic, anti-Western climate dictates that Turkish Jews must keep a low profile.
According to Rifat Bali, Jewish parents counsel their children not to
wear the Star of David necklace in public. They also advise their children to
remain silent and, if possible, ignore all criticism of Israel in public. Turkish
Jews report often being suspected of disloyalty to the Turkish state or of
greater loyalty to Israel than to Turkey. Following the Mavi Marmara incident, Turkish media, for example, demanded a statement from the only
Jewish newspaper in Turkey, Salom, on how Turkish Jews felt about the
Mavi Marmara incident. The Chief Rabbinate issued a brief, mild response,
saying that the Turkish Jews felt the same sorrow for the loss of Turkish
lives that the general Turkish community felt.20
The signs read: “Dogs allowed”; “For Jews and Armenians the entrance is closed.”
19. Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division (2009).
World Population Prospects, Table A.1 (PDF). 2008 revision. United Nations,
accessed April 1, 2013, <http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2008/
wpp2008_text_tables.pdf>
20. Rifat N. Bali, “The Slow Disappearance of Turkey’s Jewish Community,”
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, January 6, 2011, accessed April 1, 2013,
<http://jcpa.org/article/the-slow-disappearance-of-turkeys-jewish-community/>
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Since that incident, there have also been several boycotts of Jewish
businesses and even public displays of signs on storefronts refusing entry to
Jews. For example, the newspaper Radikal published an image of a banner
at a press conference for the Anti-Israeli Federation Association of Culture
Osman Gazi in Eskisehir that read: “Dogs allowed”; “For Jews and Armenians the entrance is closed.”21 Lior Zagury of Aish.com reported that in June
2010 several Turkish shops put up signs that read “We do not accept dogs
and Israelis.”22
CONCLUSION
The antisemitic propaganda of writers like Soner Yalcin, Ergun
Poyraz, and Yalcin Kucuk has been a highly effective tool to spread and
normalize antisemitism in Turkey. Their conspiracy-theory books would
not have been successful, however, were the general climate in the country
not already receptive to such literature. What Yalcin’s, Poyraz’s, and
Kucuk’s books show is not that Turkey is united politically or socially but
that Turkey can only unite on one issue: the anti-human nature of Israel and
its solidarity with the Palestinian minority. Furthermore, the reaction of
elite members of the Turkish government to Valley of the Wolves: Iraq
gives the impression that the elites of Turkey embrace the film’s racist and
incendiary message. Moreover, the public’s widespread approval of the film
suggests that Turkish society itself approves of the film’s neo-nationalist,
anti-Western, and antisemitic message. The film’s unprecedented box office
success and the enthusiasm with which both the Turkish public and the
Turkish elite received the film indicates that both segments of society either
cannot bring themselves to publicly criticize the film or that they endorse
the myth of Turkish supremacy the film promotes. Based on the crude
depictions of Americans and American Jews in the film, the neo-nationalist
values of the film are being shaped by a racist ideology that demonizes
Christians, Jews, and Americans. This climate of Islamic ultra-nationalism
reverberates within the Jewish Turkish community because suspicions
regarding that community’s loyalty to Turkey make the community eager to
present itself as “good Jews.” Turkish Jews remaining in Turkey must then
learn to navigate through the new ultra-nationalistic, anti-minority political
21. “Kopekler girermis, yahudiler ve ermeniler giremezmis!” Radikal, July 1,
2009, accessed April 1, 2013, <http://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=
RadikalDetayV3&ArticleID=915950>
22. Lior Zagury, “No Dogs and Israelis: Anti-Semitism Is Moving into the
Mainstream,” Aish.com, June 19, 2010, accessed April 1, 2013, <http://www.aish
.com/jw/id/96549499.html>
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NORMALIZING ANTISEMITISM IN TURKEY
193
and social system that surrounds them for the sake of their own selfpreservation.
*Anne-Christine Hoff teaches writing and literature at Jarvis Christian College,
Hawkins, TX. She was a lecturer at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University until 2009 and
has edited a collection, Facing the Past, Facing the Future: History, Memory,
Literature (2012).
REFERENCES
Arsu, Sebnem. 2006. “If You Want a Film to Fly, Make Americans the Heavies.”
The New York Times, February 14.
Bali, Rifat N. 2005. “What Is Efendi Telling Us?” Kaballah 13, 109-139.
_______. “The Slow Disappearance of Turkey’s Jewish Community.” 2011.
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, January 6, http://jcpa.org/article/theslow-disappearance-of-turkeys-jewish-community/
Birch, Nicholas. 2006. “Audiences Cheer Film’s Anti-US Message.” The
Washington Times, February 14, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/
2006/feb/14/20060214-104958-5445r/
Cetiner, Yilmaz. 2004. “Nurbanu Sultan Yahudi degildi.” Milliyet, May 1.
Dagi, Ihsan. 2009. “The Roots of a New Antisemitism in Turkey.” Today’s Zaman.
February 9, http://www.todayszaman.com/columnistDetail_getNewsById.
action?newsId=166383
Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division. 2009. World
Population Prospects, Table A.1 (PDF), 2008 revision. United Nations, http://
www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2008/wpp2008_text_tables.pdf
“Dogan Hizlan’in Sectikleri” (2004). Hurriyet Cumartesi, April 24.
Idiz, Semih. 2010. “Erdogan Fans Anti-Israeli, Anti-American Sentiments for
Political Gain.” Hurriyet Daily News, June 14, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.
com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=erdogan-fans-anti-israeli-anti-americansentiments-for-political-gain-2010-06-14
“Kopekler girermis, yahudiler ve ermeniler giremezmis!” 2009. Radikal, July 1,
http://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalDetayV3&ArticleID=
915950
Letsch, Constanze. 2006. Ein extraordinaerer Film, der Geschichte machen wird.”
Jungle World 8, http://jungle-world.com/artikel/2006/08/16968.html
Mizroch, Amir. 2010. “Poll: 90% of ME Views Jews Unfavorably.” The Jerusalem
Post Online, September 2, http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Poll-90-percentof-ME-views-Jews-unfavorably
“New Turkish Film Vilifies Americans.” 2006. NBCnews.com, February 2, http://
www.nbcnews.com/id/11150082/site/todayshow/ns/today-entertainment
Ozdemir, Cem. 2006. “Beyond Valley of the Wolves.” Spiegel Online, February 22,
http://www.spiegel.de/international/controversy-over-turkish-movie-beyondthe-valley-of-the-wolves-a-401565.html
Ozemir, Cumeyt. 2004. “Efendi’nin Macerasi.” Radikal Kitap, May 7.
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Pollock, Robert L. 2010.“Erdogan and the Decline of the Turks.” The Wall Street
Journal, June 3.
Rabasa, Angel, and F. Stephen Larrabee. 2008. The Rise of Political Islam in
Turkey. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 66-68.
Rainsford, Sarah. 2006. “Turkish Rush to Embrace Anti-US Film.” BBC News,
February 10, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4700154.stm?ls
Turgut, Serdar. 2004. “Kaybetmeyi onuruna yediremeyen kusak.” Aksam, May 3.
_______. 2004. “Sabeytayizim ve Tarih.” Aksam, May 4.
“Turkish Delight.” 2006. The Wall Street Journal, February 10.
“US Hollywood “Stars” Zane and Busey Spreading America-Hate Worldwide.”
2006. Davids Medienkritik, February 22, http://medienkritik.typepad.com/
blog/2006/02/hollywood_stars.html “Valley of the Wolves: Iraq.”
Wikipedia.org. Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_
the_Wolves:_Iraq
Yanik, Lerna K. 2008. “ ‘Those Crazy Turks’ that Got Caught in the ‘Metal
Storm’: Nationalism in Turkey’s Best Seller Lists.” Cadmus, April, http://
cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/8002
Yilmaz, Ihsan. “Murekkebi Kurumadan,” 2004. Hurriyet, April 30.
Zacharia, Janine. 2006. “Rice Wants Turkey to Challenge Anti-US Views, Support
Iraq.” Bloomberg.com, April 25, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=
newsarchive&sid=aX2wceRBeY3Y&refer=us
Zagury, Lior. 2010. “No Dogs and Israelis: Antisemitism Is Moving into the
Mainstream,” Aish.com, June 19, http://www.aish.com/jw/id/96549499.html
Muslim Antisemitism in Europe
Manfred Gerstenfeld*
The massive, non-selective immigration of Muslims into Western
Europe has had a profound impact on European Jewry that is more than any
other development in the last 50 years.1 For Jews, the consequences of this
influx are almost entirely adverse. Much responsibility for this rests with
sizable parts of the Muslim immigrants and their organizations.
At the same time, major responsibility for the negative developments
also lies with the authorities in the countries of arrival. They permitted large
numbers of immigrants into their countries without investigating their cultural and religious backgrounds and assessing how this would affect their
integration.2 These authorities should have predicted that Muslim immigrants, coming from places where antisemitism is widely promoted, would
lead to increased attacks on Jews—particularly as hate-mongering against
Jews originates in parts of the religious and political segments of the immigrants’ societies of origin.
After the arrival of large numbers of non-Western immigrants, many
authorities in European countries continued to ignore the numerous
problems resulting from their own misconceived policies. This has often
been the case; there were already problems with non-selective immigration
before 2000, as mentioned for instance by several French authors.3 One
1. The term “Muslims” is used throughout this essay, and includes people who
consider themselves Muslims by religion or culture.
2. “Immigrants” throughout this essay also includes their descendants.
3. Emmanuel Brenner, ed., Les territoires perdus de la République, 2nd ed.
(Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2004). See also Shmuel Trigano, interview by Manfred
Gerstenfeld, “French Antisemitism: A Barometer for Gauging Society’s Perverseness,” Post-Holocaust and Antisemitism 26 (November 1, 2004).
195
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example was the attacks on synagogues during the first Gulf War in 1991.4
Anti-Jewish aggression has greatly increased further in this century.
As far as Jews are concerned, the main consequence of this non-selective mass immigration from Muslim countries is its role in the marked
increase of antisemitism in Europe. This manifests itself in both the disproportionately large number of antisemitic incidents caused by immigrants
from these countries and in the more extreme nature of some of them.
Active antisemitic attitudes of immigrants also come to the fore in several
other ways, for instance in relation to Holocaust commemoration and
education.
In addition, the often biased way European societies react to Muslim
immigration has also had a mainly negative impact on the Jewish community. Assessing this problematic issue requires far more than studying the
limited statistical data currently available on Muslim antisemitism; it also
goes beyond the ample anecdotal information on physical and verbal Muslim antisemitism and about antisemitic attitudes among immigrants and
their progeny.
THE SPREAD
OF
ANTISEMITISM
Antisemitism is spread much wider among Muslim immigrants than
among autochthonous populations. This disproportion, cited for instance in
a detailed study edited by Nicole Vettenburg, Mark Elchardus, and Johan
Put, is already apparent among many youngsters.5 Furthermore, the most
extreme incidents of Muslim antisemitism have gone beyond those of
autochthonous antisemitism.
Such phenomena cannot be analyzed without focusing on the many
negative characteristics and attitudes that have permeated large parts of the
Islamic world. One of these phenomena is extreme anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement, which often goes hand in hand. This agitation has influenced
the prejudiced attitudes against Jews that many Muslim immigrants have
brought with them to Europe. These attitudes have sometimes been
strengthened further in their countries of arrival by local inciters.
The current and often vicious anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incitement in
parts of the Muslim world also has a continuing influence on part of the
immigrants and their descendants—more so as this ongoing incitement is
broadcast from the Middle East to Western Muslims via satellite TV and
4. Sammy Ghozlan, “Les relations judéo-arabes en France,” Observatoire du
Monde Juif 1 (November 2001).
5. Nicole Vettenburg, Mark Elchardus, and Johan Put, eds., Jong in Brussel
(Leuven, The Hague: Acco, 2011).
2013]
MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM IN EUROPE
197
the Internet. Some mosques in Western Europe also promote antisemitic
hate themes. For example, in 2001, the radical El Tawheed mosque in
Amsterdam was forced by the authorities to remove several statements from
its website, including the following: “The Jews possess the weapons industry and, on the other hand, they are the ones who make the wars.”6
Besides Muslim antisemitism, there are many additional aspects and
consequences of this non-selective immigration for both Jews and the status
of Israel in Europe. The major issue to be addressed here is: What is the
direct and indirect impact of non-selective Muslim immigration on
Europe’s Jews? The impact of this immigration on Israel is yet another
specific issue. It can only be briefly touched upon below.
Such an analysis requires an assessment of the failure of many Western governments to deal responsibly with the negative consequences of this
mass immigration. Furthermore, one has to discuss what the attitude of Jewish organizations toward Muslims in Europe should be. There are several
additional important issues outside of these categories as well. The overall
subject is so complex that an article can only address its major points; a
book could do more justice to its many interrelated aspects.
MUSLIM IMMIGRATION
AND INCREASED
ANTISEMITISM
Reports on antisemitic attitudes among European Muslims are limited.
One is thus largely dependent on news items and other anecdotal data. All
of these, however, point in the same direction.
Mark Elchardus, in the book he edited with Vettenburg and Put,7
devotes a chapter to antisemitism in Dutch-language schools in Brussels,
based on the attitudes of students from 14 years old.8 Elchardus found that
about 50% of the Muslim students could be considered antisemites, as
opposed to about 10% of the non-Muslims; he also concluded that practicing and believing Christians are more antisemitic than non-believers.9 The
disproportion in attitudes between Muslim students and others is thus
major.
Among non-Muslims, the main stereotype of the Jew was as an arrogant, clever, and not very honest businessman. Among Muslims, the main
stereotype was that of the warmongering, dominating Jew. Elchardus
observed, however, that the importance of this conclusion was secondary
6. “De ongrijpbare islamitische school,” NRC Handelsblad, October 20, 2001.
7. Vettenburg, Elchardus, and Put.
8. Mark Elchardus, interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Belgian Antisemitism,” Israel National News, May 21, 2013.
9. Vettenburg, Elchardus, and Put, 278.
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compared to the large difference in the degree of antisemitism between
Muslims and non-Muslims.10
In view of the children’s age, one can assume that they’ve adopted
antisemitic feelings from their parents’ homes. This means that antisemitic
hate-mongering is being transmitted to the younger generation in many
Muslim families.
INTERVIEWS: YOUTH
IN
BERLIN, PARIS,
AND
LONDON
Another study offers insights into the attitudes of Muslim teenagers.
Günther Jikeli conducted 117 interviews with Muslim males with an average age of 19 in Berlin, Paris, and London. He concluded that the differences between the youths in the three cities were minor. Most interviewees
voiced some or strong antisemitic feelings. They openly expressed their
negative attitudes about Jews, often aggressively.
Many Muslim youths whom Jikeli interviewed articulated “classic”
antisemitic stereotypes. The most frequently repeated ones were conspiracy
theories and beliefs that associate Jews with money. Jews were often considered rich, stingy, and double-faced by these youngsters, who also often
perceive Jews as one collective group with a common and “evil Jewish
interest.” These archetypal stereotypes strengthen a negative and potentially
threatening picture of “The Jews” in the minds of the interviewees.
Jikeli mentions that, while antisemitism is never rational, some Muslim youngsters do not even try to justify their antisemitic feelings. For these
youths, if someone is Jewish, that is sufficient reason to loathe him or her.
Some interviewees stated that they intended to carry out antisemitic
acts, for instance, attacking Jews whenever they encounter them in their
neighborhoods. The authorities—and Jewish communities in particular—
can ignore these threats only at their own peril.11 Numerical data from
research by both Elchardus and Jikeli for different age groups confirm that
antisemitism is widespread among young Muslims.
These findings also lead to another conclusion. As antisemitism among
Muslims at a young age is already so widespread, this major problem will
not disappear by itself in the coming decades.
10. Ibid.
11. Günther Jikeli, interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Myths and Truths About
Muslim Antisemitism in Europe,” in Demonizing Israel and the Jews (New York:
RVP Press, 2013), 150-153. Jikeli’s detailed research can be found in Günther
Jikeli, Antisemitismus und Diskriminierungswahrnehmungen junger Muslime in
Europa (Essen: Klartext, 2012).
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MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM IN EUROPE
199
ONE DUTCH STUDY
Further information can be obtained from studies done in the Netherlands. In April 2004, a pilot project of the program Second World War in
Perspective was instituted in which students of Moroccan descent taught
students in thirteen Amsterdam trade school classes about the Second
World War and the Middle East conflict.12 Its purpose was to fight discrimination and, in particular, antisemitic manifestations. An important aim of
this project was to promote a common historical consciousness between
descendants of immigrants and the native Dutch population.13
A final report on these findings included a measurement of prejudicial
attitudes toward Jews.14 Before the project began, only 32% of the Moroccans thought Jews were “as nice as other people”; after the project, however, this increased to 50%.15 For other ethnic groups, data were only
available after the project—43% for Turkish students, 83% for Dutch students, and 77% for Suriname students.16 Yet, after the project was over,
only 31% of Moroccan students considered it a problem that Jews are discriminated against. Forty-three percent of the students of Turkish origin
held that opinion; for Dutch students, the figure was 58%, and for Suriname
students 72%.17
This study posed the question of prejudice against Jews in a different
and more concealed way than did the other studies cited above. The Second
World War in Perspective program showed that through education,
antisemitism can be reduced, though far from eliminated. After this education initiative was completed, anti-Jewish prejudice found among Muslims—Moroccans and Turks in this case—remained far larger than among
other ethnic groups.
The CJO, the umbrella organization of Dutch Jewry, criticized a new
Holocaust distortion in this program, however: the organizers’ interconnecting of Holocaust education with the Middle-East conflict. The organization
wrote: “A government document of 13 September 2010 titled ‘The Propagation of Key Values of the Democratic State of Law’ says that a newly
planned project of the government is support of the teaching program ‘The
Second World War in Perspective.’ In it, Jewish and Muslim youngsters
12. “Eindrapport project Tweede Wereldoorlog in Perspectief,” Gemeente
Amsterdam, September 23, 2004.
13. Ibid., 5.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 35.
16. Ibid., 31.
17. Ibid.
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teach together about the Second World War, the Holocaust and developments in the Middle East. As we have already explained, this is the wrong
approach. We object to these associations.”18
A study in France found anti-Jewish prejudice to be particularly prevalent among religious Muslims. Forty-six percent held such sentiments compared to 30% of non-practicing Muslims. Only 28% of religious Muslims in
France don’t hold anti-Jewish prejudices.19
VIOLENT ANTISEMITIC INCIDENTS
Few detailed figures on the background of perpetrators of antisemitic
violence exist. Whatever data there are confirm that the number of Muslim
perpetrators of violent antisemitic incidents in most Western European
countries is far larger than their proportion in the national population. In the
Netherlands over the years 2002-2006, the percentage of North Africans
among those who committed violent antisemitic incidents was reported by
the CIDI (Center for Information and Documentation on Israel) to vary
between 33% and over 40%. North Africans, mainly Moroccans, represent
approximately 2% of the population.20
In its annual report for 2012, The Community Security Trust, the
defense organization of British Jewry, wrote that it had received a physical
description of the perpetrators of 169 antisemitic incidents. In about half of
these cases, they were white, 8% were black, 31% were South or East
Asian, and 11% were Arab or North Africans. Most likely is that almost all,
or all in the latter two categories, are Muslims.21 Muslims make up about
5% of the UK population. Their presence among the perpetrators of
antisemitic incidents is thus several times that percentage.
Anecdotal information on Muslim antisemitism in Europe is numerous. The most worrying category concerns extreme violence. France occupies a special place here. Several murders of Jews out of antisemitic
motivations by Muslims have taken place there.
Before the turn of the century, such attacks in Europe were mainly
caused by Muslim terrorists who came from Arab countries. In Paris in
18. CJO aan Tweede Kamer, “Pak antisemitisme aan,” January 27, 2011,
www.cidi.nl/Nieuwsberichten/CJO19. Cécilia Gabison, “Les musulmans pratiquants ont plus de préjugés,” Le
Figaro, December 7, 2005.
20. Meı̈r Villegas Henrı́quez, “Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland:
Overzicht 2006 en 1 januari–5 mei 2007,” Centrum Informatie en Documentatie
Israel, 51.
21. Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2012.
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MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM IN EUROPE
201
1982, the Jewish restaurant Goldenberg was attacked. Six people were
killed, most probably by the Arab Abu Nidal group.22
Sebastien Selam
In this century, there were several murders of Jews by Muslims living
in France. Sebastien Selam, a Jewish disc jockey, was killed by his Muslim
childhood friend and neighbor Adel Amastaibou in 2003. Medical experts
found the murderer mentally insane. When the judges accepted this conclusion, the findings prevented a trial in which antisemitism in substantial parts
of the French Muslim community might have been discussed. In the
absence of a trial, some in the Jewish community saw yet another sign of
how delicate a subject Muslim antisemitism is in French public debate.23
In 2006, a young Jewish man named Ilan Halimi was kidnapped and
tortured for 24 days before being killed. His kidnappers, led by Youssouf
Fofana, called themselves the “Gang of Barbarians.” When his court trial
began in 2009, Fofana shouted “Allahu Akbar” and gave his identity as
“Arabs African revolt barbarian salafist army.”24
On March 19, 2012, Mohammed Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, killed a teacher and three children in front of the Toulouse Jewish
school Otzar Hatorah. Earlier that month, he had murdered three French
soldiers. A few days after the murders at the school, Merah was killed in a
shootout with French police.25 Later, Merah’s brother Abdelghani published a book in which he recounted that their parents had educated them to
22. “Terrorist Abu Nidal Reportedly Found Dead,” Baltimore Sun, August 20,
2012, New York Times service.
23. Brett Kline, “Two Sons of France,” Jerusalem Post, January 21, 2010.
24. “Trial Begins of French ‘Gang of Barbarians’ Accused of Killing Young
Jew after 24-Day Torture,” Daily Mail, April 30, 2009.
25. Murray Wardrop, Chris Irvine, Raf Sanchez, and Amy Willis, “Toulouse
Siege as It Happened,” Telegraph, March 22, 2012.
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be fanatic antisemites. His sister Souad and brother Abdelkader are also
extreme antisemites, according to Abdelghani.26
In the aftermath of the Toulouse murders, antisemitic incidents in
France increased rapidly. In this century, major spikes in antisemitic occurrences in Western Europe have usually been linked to developments in the
Middle East, such as the second Intifada, the second Lebanon war in 2006,
and Israel’s Cast Lead operation in Gaza in 2008-2009. This time, there was
another development: Merah’s murders created a “bandwagon” effect of
attacks on French Jews unrelated to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In 2012,
France saw an increase of 58% in antisemitic incidents compared to the
previous year, according to a report of the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (SPCJ). The report stated: “2012 has been a year of unprecedented violence against Jews in France.”27
There are also reports on attempted—and prevented—attacks in other
European countries. In February 2013, for example, three Muslims from
Birmingham were found guilty of planning a major terrorist attack. They
had discussed the possibility of charging into a synagogue with guns if they
could not build a bomb.28
There are also examples of European Muslims succeeding in or trying
to carry out murders of Jews in Israel. In April 2003, two British Muslims
perpetrated a suicide attack in Tel Aviv near the Mike’s Place café. Three
civilians died and more than fifty were wounded.29
SCANDINAVIA
The Scandinavian countries are gradually acquiring a particularly bad
reputation concerning antisemitism, as well as for anti-Israelism. An important aspect of this is physical attacks on Jews and occasionally their supporters by Muslims in these countries. There are also many other examples
of Muslim antisemitism.
Norway
Some incidents in Norway illustrate this well:
26. John Lichfield, “How My Hate-Filled Family Spawned Merah the Monster,” The Independent, November 12, 2012.
27. “Report: France Saw 58% Rise in Antisemitic Attacks in 2012,” The Jerusalem Post (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), February 20, 2013.
28. Anna Sheinman, “Birmingham Terrorists Found Guilty,” The Jewish
Chronicle online, February 21, 2013.
29. www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Communiques/2003/Details+of+April+
30-+2003+Tel+Aviv+suicide+bombing.htm
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• In 2009, during the Cast Lead campaign in Gaza, the largest
antisemitic riots in Norwegian history took place in Oslo. A Christian
who had walked to a pro-Israel demonstration with an Israeli flag was
beaten and severely wounded. Life-threatening projectiles were
thrown at pro-Israel demonstrators. All, or almost all, of the perpetrators were Muslims. Eirik Eiglad described this in detail in a book, The
Anti-Jewish Riots in Oslo.30
• In 2010, in Dagsreveyen, a program on Norwegian state television
NRK, journalist Tormod Strand reported on widespread harassment of
Jewish schoolchildren by Muslim youngsters.31 It was mentioned that
Jew hatred had become legitimate among large groups of Muslim students and few of them objected to it. Some Muslims argued that “Jews
control everything.” The expression “Fucking Jew” was a common
insult. Several Jewish students faced threats that they would be killed
if they came to school. One Jewish father said that his son was
threatened with being hanged.32
• In October 2012, Ubaydullah Hussain, spokesperson for the Norwegian Islamist group The Prophet’s Ummah, threatened to kill Jews.
Hussain posted his threat on Facebook as a reply to an article wherein
the Jewish community told the press how unsafe they feel. Hussain
wrote: “I will give them protection, Inshallah. As soon as I take the
hunter’s license and get my hands on an AK4.” The police arrested
him.33 He was released a few weeks later, but it was announced that
he will be charged.34
The number of Muslims in Norway is probably around 3% of the
country’s population of 5 million. Yet, analyzing Muslim antisemitism
there offers many insights. That converts to Islam are sometimes extreme
antisemites was highlighted in 2012, when King Harald V decided to award
Trond Ali Lindstad the Royal Medal of Honor. Lindstad is a Norwegian exMarxist who converted to Islam and has made many antisemitic statements.
Even though in Norway there is much anti-Israelism—including at the
highest government levels—and to a lesser extent antisemitism, this award
30. Eirik Eiglad, The Anti-Jewish Riots in Oslo (Oslo: Communalism, 2010).
31. Tormod Strand, Lørdagsrevyen, NRK, March 13, 2010, www.nrk.no/netttv/indeks/205057/
32. “Representantforslag fra stortingsrepresentantene Hans Olav Syversen,
Dagrun Eriksen og Geir Jørgen Bekkevold om å iverksette en handlingsplan mot
jødehat, Stortinget,” June 15, 2012, www.stortinget.no/no/Saker-og-publikasjoner/
Publikasjoner/Representantforslag/2011-2012/dok8-201112-145/
33. “Politiet aksjonerer mot Ubaydullah Hussain,” Dagbladet, October 25,
2010, www.dagbladet.no/2012/10/25/nyheter/drapstrusler/pst/innenriks/ubaydullah
_hussain/24035989/
34. Vemund Sveen Finstad/ABC Nyheter, “Ubaydullah Hussain løslates,”
November 27, 2012.
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was considered going too far. After national and international protests, the
king took the medal back and later apologized.35
Lindstad, a supporter of Hamas and Palestinian terrorism,36 had made
statements such as “Beware of the Jews” and “their special, Jewish interests”;37 “Be critical of Jews in the world, when it comes to the influence
they have within newspapers and other media, in many political organs and
related to contacts and networks where decisions are being made”; and
“The Jewish American lobby misuses historical facts, like for example the
Holocaust, to promote the case of Israel,” as well as “All American presidents must follow the Jewish American lobby.”38
Another news item that should provide food for thought was cited in
the Norwegian daily Aftenposten. Many taxi drivers in Oslo are Muslims,
and some of them refuse to drive Jews to synagogues.39 Though a seemingly small issue, this reflects a much wider threat of the prospect that Muslims in various professions will begin to refuse to serve Jews.
Sweden
Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, is now often mentioned as “the
capital of European antisemitism.” The executors of many physical and verbal antisemitic acts are mostly, or perhaps even all, Muslims. Hannah
Rosenthal, then the US government special envoy for combating antisemitism, visited the town in 2012. She spoke out against antisemitic statements
made by Social Democrat mayor Ilmar Reepalu. Rosenthal remarked that
Malmö under this mayor is a “prime example” of “new antisemitism,” as
anti-Israel sentiment serves as a guise for Jew-hatred.40 A record number of
complaints about hate crimes in the city in 2010 and 2011 did not lead to
any convictions, however.41 Nowadays, it is often remarked that Muslims
do not only cause problems for Jews and homosexuals, but also for many
35. Cato Husabø Fossen and Nils Gunnar Lie, “Kongen beklager Linstadbråket,” TV2, November 20, 2012.
36. Klassekampen, June 20, 2007.
37. “Vær kritisk til jøder,” Koranen, March 28, 2010, http://koranen.no/artikkel
.php?id=379
38. “Fokus på Jødisk lobby,” Koranen, March 25, 2012, http://koranen.no/
artikkel.php?id=935
39. Finn Otto Arenberg, “Nektet å kjøre jøder,” Aftenposten, April 12, 2011,
www.aftenposten.no/meninger/debatt/article4091501.ece
40. Cnaan Liphshiz, “In Scandinavia, Kipah Becomes a Symbol of Defiance for
Malmo’s Jews,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 24, 2012.
41. “In Malmo, Record Number of Hate Crimes Complaints but No Convictions,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 9, 2013.
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other Swedes. Holocaust researcher Mikael Tossavainen wrote that in Sweden, “Ahmed Rami, the man behind Radio Islam, was convicted of hate
crimes because of the antisemitic content of his broadcasts, in 1989 and
again in a court of appeals. Nevertheless, influential journalists and politicians supported him and even denied or exculpated his antisemitism. Jan
Bergman, professor of theology at Uppsala University, testified in Rami’s
defense and claimed, among other things, that for Jews it was indeed a
religious duty to kill Gentiles.”42 This draws attention to yet another subject
for analysis: the non-Muslim antisemitic allies of Muslim antisemites.
Nowadays, Rami promotes his antisemitism on the Internet.
Denmark
At the end of 2012, Arthur Avnon, Israeli ambassador to Denmark,
was quoted as saying to the French Press Agency (AFP), “We advise Israelis who come to Denmark and want to go to the synagogue, to wait to don
their skullcaps until they enter the building and not to wear them in the
street, irrespective of whether the areas they are visiting are seen as being
safe or not.” He also advised visitors not to speak Hebrew loudly or wear
visible Star of David jewelry.43 The main assaults against Jews are caused
by Arabs. The Jewish community complains in vain about the inaction of
the Danish authorities.44
FRANCE
At the beginning of this century, the outburst of violent antisemitic
acts—to a disproportionately large extent perpetrated by Muslims—was
particularly significant in France. There had been a somewhat similar situation during the first Gulf War.45 In 2000 and following years, much attention was therefore focused on France.
French sociologist Shmuel Trigano said a few years later that the press
and public authorities had not reported the antisemitic violence for several
months. He remarked:
42. Mikael Tossavainen, “Arab and Muslim Antisemitism in Sweden,” Jewish
Political Studies Review 17 (Fall 2005): 3-4.
43. “Israeli Envoy Warns Against Wearing Skullcaps in Copenhagen,” The
Times of Israel, December 13, 2012.
44. Hannes Gamillscheg, “Dänemark: Juden fühlen sich unter Druck,” Die
Presse, January 1, 2013.
45. Shmuel Trigano, interview, “French Antisemitism.”
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Even the Jewish organizations remained silent, probably at the request of
the socialist-led left-wing government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
This silence was yet another example of how the Jewish community felt
abandoned by both the French authorities and complacent French society.
The situation of the Jews in France was aggravated as various media
expressed opinions claiming that the violence and hate was quite understandable in view of events in the Middle East and Israel’s policies. This
implied that the destiny of French Jews was determined by Israeli policies and French critique on it.
During the first months of attacks, French Jewry called for help, but
no one listened. This led many French Jews to realize that their place and
citizenship in this country was questionable. They understood that the
authorities were willing to sacrifice the Jewish community in order to
maintain social peace. This attitude was reinforced by France’s pro-Arab
policy during the Iraq War.46
Then-Socialist foreign minister Hubert Védrine suggested that one
should understand the Arab violence in France, saying: “One does not necessarily have to be shocked that young Frenchmen of immigrant origin have
compassion for the Palestinians and are very agitated because of what is
happening.47
It was not pointed out that if one legitimizes this attitude, its logical
consequence would be that all Muslims in France could be attacked as a
reaction to the many crimes in Muslim countries against non-Muslims.”
Trigano was the first to publicly recognize the massive upsurge of
antisemitism in the new century in a series of publications titled
Observatoire du Monde juif (Observatory of the Jewish World). These publications, which started in 2001, placed much attention on the respective
roles of both Muslims and French authorities.48
As France was the hotbed in the new wave of antisemitic incidents in
Europe, other French authors were also among the first to address the massive revival of Jew-hatred. In 2002, the French philosopher and political
scientist Pierre-André Taguieff wrote a book on the new antisemitism in
Europe.49 Many aspects of Muslim antisemitism in France were discussed
in a book edited by Emmanuel Brenner (pseudonym for Georges Bensous46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. The first volume of the Observatoire du Monde juif was published in
November 2001. The last one, number 12, carries no date but probably came out in
the second half of 2004.
49. Pierre-André Taguieff, Rising from the Muck (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004).
The original French version was titled La nouvelle judéophobie (Paris: Mille et une
nuits, 2002).
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MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM IN EUROPE
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san).50 Brenner and his colleagues mainly describe and analyze this breakdown in one segment of French society—those parts of the school system
where antisemitism, racism, and sexual discrimination have appeared and
have often not been appropriately dealt with by teachers and authorities.
Brenner’s book also refers to the breakdown of law and order in various
other spheres of French society. This dissolution manifested itself, for
instance, by police fearing to enter certain areas in and around major cities
throughout the country. These no-go areas are largely populated by North
African immigrants and their descendants. Many are Arabs, others Berbers.
THE NETHERLANDS
At the Kristallnacht Memorial commemoration in Amsterdam in 2003,
former EU commissioner Frits Bolkestein said, “Who had ever thought that
about a year ago a man on the Dam Square here, in the heart of our country
where a monument stands for our liberation from the Nazi occupation, a
man was attacked by a group of Moroccan youngsters only because he was
wearing a skullcap? Who had ever dared to think that teachers in the
Netherlands would hesitate to teach about the Shoah because of the hostile
reactions of their Muslim students?”51
This author’s book Het Verval: Joden in een stuurloos Nederland (The
Decay: Jews in a Rudderless Netherlands), had its origins in such an incident. In 2004, the author traveled in an Amsterdam electric tramway car.
There, a Mediterranean-looking youth sang loudly without any apparent
reason: “Jews one has to kill, but it is prohibited.” No one among the many
passengers in the tramway reacted.52
Chief rabbi Binyomin Jacobs of the Dutch provincial rabbinate
recounts that he once visited a nursery school where a three-year-old
Somalian girl called him “dirty Jew.”53 Charles Dahan, a Jewish wine trader
of Moroccan origin in Amsterdam, relates: “One Yom Kippur, I walked out
of the beautiful Amsterdam Portuguese synagogue together with a law professor. In front of the nearby Jewish Historical Museum, some Moroccan
boys were singing a melodically pleasing song in Arabic. The professor
said, ‘Look at those kids.’ He remarked about how pleasant their singing
50. Emmanuel Brenner, ed., Les territoires perdus de la République, 2nd ed.
(Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2004).
51. “Herdenking Kristallnacht,” CJO, November 9, 2003.
52. Manfred Gerstenfeld, Het Verval: Joden in een stuurloos Nederland
(Amsterdam: Van Praag, 2010), 21.
53. Binyomin Jacobs, interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Rabbijn in een
polariserende samenleving,” Het Verval 176.
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was. I said, ‘You don’t know what they’re singing! The words are “Here
come the Jews, Death to the Jews! We will get them.’ ”54
During a Dutch television program in early 2013, a number of Turkish
youngsters in the Netherlands said that they approved of the murder of millions of Jews in the Second World War. One of them remarked: “What
Hitler has done to the Jews is fine with me.”55 Journalist Elma Drayer criticized the fact that there was so little reaction to the statements on the program. She observed that if Dutch youngsters would have said on television
that they would have approved if all Muslims had been slaughtered, there
would have been huge reactions.56
As far as Muslim antisemitism is concerned in other countries, several
Jewish leaders concur that the situation has deteriorated. Antisemitic incidents by young Muslim children, youngsters, and adults have been reported.
Germany provides an example: in 2012, Stephan J. Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden), told
the weekly Die Zeit that there is “an increasing willingness among many
Muslim youngsters to be violent toward Jews.” He added: “This willingness
to be violent in the Muslim camp is comparable with that in the extreme
right wing camp.”57
ANTISEMITISM
IN
ACADEMIA—SAMAR
Anecdotal information about Muslim antisemitism in European universities is overwhelming. The story of Samar, conducted as an interview, adds
perspective and insight into the situation. Samar (a pseudonym) is a young
ex-Muslim woman in the Netherlands. During her adolescence, she began
to realize how deep the hatred of Jews was among almost all other young
Muslims she met. Later, she started to monitor this hatred among Muslim
students she was in contact with.
Samar says: “During my years at university, I spoke with an estimated
150-200 Muslims. It struck me that almost all held the same opinions, irrespective of whether they were Moroccans, Turks, Kurds, or Muslims from
Suriname. In all those years, I only met two Muslims who did not hate Jews
or Israel.
54. Charles Dahan, interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Kleine Amsterdamse
verhalen,” Het Verval 237.
55. “CIDI: Onderzoek antisemitisme, ” Nederlands Dagblad, February 25,
2013.
56. Elma Drayer, “Het taboe op jodenhaat is verdwenen,” Trouw, February 26,
2013.
57. Joachim Wagner, “Hitler gefällt mir,” Zeit online, June 10, 2007.
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“Almost all Muslim youths I met at university denied the Holocaust.
They did not believe in the so-called ‘two-state solution’ for Israelis and
Palestinians. They wanted Israel wiped off the map. They believed Jews
had to be driven out of Israel so that it could again become a Muslim
state.”58
Samar also found that there was no difference in viewpoints between
male and female students. This contradicts frequently heard opinions that
such attitudes are held mainly among male Muslim youngsters. In addition,
she noted that their antisemitic remarks are mainly limited to discussions
where only other Muslims are present. They often hide their opinions in the
company of non-Muslims.
Samar’s testimony is particularly important because her experiences
are with Muslims studying at universities. She mentions that she had no
contact with youths from the streets. Whitewashers of Muslim antisemitism
often falsely claim that antisemitism problems among Muslims are limited
to poorly educated hooligans.
DISTORTING
THE
HOLOCAUST
Some Muslim organizations and individual Muslims have aimed at
distorting or disturbing Holocaust commemorations. There are also reports
from various countries about the disruption of Holocaust teachings by some
students. Denial of the Holocaust is frequent in many of the Muslim countries where immigrants in Europe come from.59
In various places, World War II or Holocaust commemorations have
been disrupted. On May 4, 2003—the Netherlands’ National Memorial Day
for the victims of World War II—several ceremonies in Amsterdam were
interrupted. In one area of the city, during two minutes of silence in honor
of those who were murdered, youths shouted, “Jews have to be killed!”
about twenty times. The perpetrators were young Dutchmen of Moroccan
descent. In another part of town, Moroccan youngsters played soccer with
wreaths that had been laid on the memorial.60
On November 9, 2003, a commemoration meeting for Kristallnacht in
Vienna was disrupted by the Sedunia group, who shouted through loud58. “Samar,” interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Dans les Coulisses de
l’Antisémitisme Musulman aux Pays-Bas,” Lessakele, October 23, 2012.
59. Goetz Nordbruch, “The Socio-Historical Background of Holocaust Denial
in Arab Countries: Reactions to Roger Garaudy’s The Founding Myths of Israeli
Politics,” ACTA 17 (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2001).
60. “Allochtonen verstoren herdenking vierde mei,” Parool, May 8, 2003.
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speakers. Sedunia is an organization of Muslim immigrants and their progeny, as well as Austrian converts to Islam.61
There have also been attempts by Muslims to distort the meaning of
Holocaust commemorations. In January 2005, Iqbal Sacranie, secretary
general of the Muslim Council of Britain, wrote to British minister Charles
Clarke, informing Clarke that his organization would not attend the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz unless it included the “holocaust” of the Palestinian intifada.62
In September of that year, a committee of Muslim advisers to prime
minister Tony Blair suggested that Holocaust Memorial Day be abolished
and replaced by a “Genocide Day” that would also commemorate the mass
murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya, and Bosnia.63
For six years, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the largest Muslim organization in the country, continued to boycott Holocaust Memorial
Day. British minister Ruth Kelly condemned the MCB for this when she
held the position of communities’ secretary. Finally, at the end of 2007, the
MCB changed its position on attending the ceremony. Even then, however,
the organization said they would have preferred to have the day replaced by
a “genocide memorial day.”64
After pressure from Muslim organizations, the Bolton (UK) local
council replaced Holocaust Memorial Day in 2007 with a Genocide Memorial Day. There was much opposition. The following year, they marked
both.65 In later years, Holocaust Memorial Day was fully reinstated.66
Kristallnacht memorial meetings in some European cities are being
abused as political instruments rather than to memorialize Jewish victims.
This is mainly—but not only—done by left-wing organizations. In
Helsingborg, Sweden, the Jewish community refused to participate in the
2012 Kristallnacht memorial meeting. The local paper, Helsingborgs Dagblad, noted that the community’s leader, Jussi Tyger, said that the memorial
61. http://no-racism.net/article/1008/, viewed January 6, 2009.
62. David Leppard, “Muslims Boycott Holocaust Remembrance,” Sunday
Times (London), January 23, 2005.
63. Vikram Dodd, “Muslim Council Ends Holocaust Memorial Day Boycott,”
The Guardian, December 3, 2007.
64. Ibid.
65. Michael Whine, interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Muslim-Jewish Interactions in Great Britain,” Changing Jewish Communities 32 (May 15, 2008).
66. “Mayor Opens Holocaust Memorial Day,” The Bolton News, January 25,
2010.
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211
meeting was organized by left-wing parties and Muslims, who are known to
be the most racist against Jews.67
DISRUPTION
OF
HOLOCAUST TEACHING
Reports on disruption of Holocaust lectures come from various countries. Mikael Tossavainen wrote about Sweden, “One Holocaust survivor,
who gives talks at schools all over the country about his experiences during
the Shoah, tells of Arab and Muslim pupils who stay away from his lectures, sometimes at their parents’ request. He notes, “Students who attend
rarely express hostility, but those who do are exclusively ‘of Middle Eastern origin.’ ” In some cases, he explains, Muslim youngsters also say that
they view the Holocaust and the genocide of the Jews as a positive act.68
On the Norwegian state television program Dagsreveyen mentioned
earlier, the journalist Tormod Strand also reported on interruptions during
Holocaust education. Muslim students in Norway, he said, are laughing
about the Holocaust and praising Hitler for killing Jews.69
Yet another issue is how the Holocaust is taught at Muslim schools in
Europe. Little is known about this beyond anecdotal information. In 2005,
Fenny Brinkman, who for some time was a teacher at an Amsterdam Muslim school, published a book, Haram (Impure), on her experiences there.
She tells how a colleague taught about the Holocaust in one of the classes.
The next day, several fathers complained. The head of the school then
decided that in the future, focus would only be on the persecution of Gypsies because Jews were evil people.70
In Norway in 2013, Kristoffer Gaarder Dannevig, a journalist from the
daily Dagsavisen, interviewed Ghulam Sarwar, chairman of the Central
Jamaat-e Ahl-e Sunnat mosque, the largest in Oslo. Dannevig asked him
why the Germans killed the Jews during the Holocaust. Sarwar answered,
“One reason is that they are a troublesome people in the world.”71
67. “Inget judiskt deltagande när Kristallnatten ska uppmärksammas,”
Helsingborgs Dagblad, November 7, 2012.
68. Quoted in Manfred Gerstenfeld, The Abuse of Holocaust Memory: Distortions and Responses (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and ADL,
2009), 132.
69. Conrad Myrland, “Lyspunkt og lavmål fra NRK,” MIFF (March 16, 2010),
http://www.miff.no/Antisemittisme/2010/03/16LyspunktOgLavmaalFraNRK.htm
70. Fenny Brinkman, Haram (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2005), 45-46.
71. Miranda McGonagall, “A Real Slip of the Tongue,” Norway, Israel and the
Jews (blog), January 20, 2013. This article translates into English the original Norwegian text by Kristoffer Gaarder Dannevig in Dagsavisen of January 17, 2013.
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LEADERS
The problems with Muslim antisemitism are exacerbated because
Muslim leaders and organizations often remain silent about such attacks,
which contributes to the impression that “whoever remains silent agrees.” It
also means that there is little public Muslim counterweight to the many
antisemites in that community.
Richard Prasquier, chairman of CRIF, the umbrella body of French
Jewish organizations, says: “We told the leaders from representative Muslim bodies that they should condemn the Merah murders. They did condemn them, but mainly in order to try to prove that Muslims were also
victims of Mohamed Merah, because his deeds had fueled Islamophobia.”72
The Netherlands is one of the countries where Muslim organizations
have helped organize anti-Israel demonstrations. When participants rioted
afterward and were involved in antisemitic incidents, these organizations
rarely condemned them. This avoidance shed additional light on their functioning. They are capable of co-organizing hate manifestations, yet do not
take responsibility for their consequences.
Problems concerning Muslim antisemitism in Europe thus have an
additional component—the silence of many of its leaders and representative
organizations in condemning antisemitism and hate crimes committed by
Muslims in the name of their religion or culture. This is the more severe
behavior, as incitement and defamation are so easy to promote while fighting against them is far more difficult.
A Few Exceptions
Yet, there are exceptions to this silence in Muslim circles, even if they
are few and far between compared to the many Muslim antisemites and
those who remain silent about hate crimes. Richard Prasquier relates that in
2012, eighteen French imams traveled to Israel. “Their willingness to visit
was a courageous act, since many of them were subjected to major criticism
from other Muslims,” Prasquier said.73 As mentioned before, Abdelghani
Merah, in spite of his antisemitic education, discarded the antisemitic attitudes he had been taught by his parents, and even exposed them in a book.
Günther Jikeli states that during his interviews of young Muslim
males, he found “some Muslim youngsters who distance themselves from
antisemitism. This happens even if they were initially influenced by
72. Richard Prasquier, interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Muslim Antisemitism in France,” in Demonizing Israel and the Jews, 164-166.
73. Ibid.
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antisemitic views from their friends, family and the media.”74 Such a finding is even more remarkable, because from statements made by some interviewees, it emerges that negative beliefs about Jews are the norm in their
societal environment.
Selami Yuksel, the spokesman of the Contact Organization of Muslims
and Government (CMO), spoke at the 2003 Kristallnacht commemoration
in Amsterdam. In his remarks, he stated that it was the Muslim community’s responsibility to “regain a grip on our youngsters, whom we lost from
a social point of view.”75
In Oslo in 2011, the former general secretary of the Islamic Council,
Shoaib Sultan, said: “Antisemitism is a problem in the Muslim community
in Norway. There is also a lack of understanding when it comes to the
Holocaust. We need more people [among the Muslims] that dare to stand up
and say that antisemitism is wrong.” He added that some of it can be
changed with education, noting that “People that have visited the concentration camps do not make jokes when they get back home.”76
There are similar exceptions in many other places. Much publicity is
often given to Muslims who oppose antisemitism and even fight it. They
merit the praise, yet one has to point out that their number is small compared with that of Muslim antisemites and community leaders who are
passive.
THE INDIRECT IMPACT
OF
MUSLIM IMMIGRATION
There is also a substantial indirect influence on Jews from the Muslim
immigration. Sizable anti-Muslim feelings have developed in Western
European countries. A poll taken in 2008 found that 56% of the Dutch people see Islam as a threat to the Netherlands.77 Such feelings have led to the
establishment of anti-Islam parties in a number of countries. They are different in character, depending on the country. Some, such as the Freedom
Party (PVV) in the Netherlands, are careful not to have any neo-Nazis
within their ranks. Others could not care less. Greece now has the
antisemitic and anti-Muslim neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn in its
parliament.78
74. Günther Jikeli, interview, “Myths and Truths.”
75. “Herdenking Kristallnacht.”
76. Kenneth O. Bakken, “Antisemittisme er et problem blant norske muslimer,”
MIFF, June 15, 2011, www.miff.no/Antisemittisme/2011/06/15-AntisemittismeEr-Et-Problem-Blant-Norske-Muslimer.htm
77. Maartje Willems, “Immigranten toelaten grootste vergissing ooit,” Elsevier,
March 26, 2008.
78. “Greek Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party Blasts Holocaust Remembrance as
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Anti-Muslim feelings are partly responsible for increased public opposition to unstunned (unparalyzed) ritual slaughter and male circumcision. A
combination of factors plays a role here. In secularized societies, pseudoreligious ideologies enter the vacuum created by the disappearance of religious values and norms. Among these is the “humanization” of certain animals. The populist Dutch Party for the Animals only has a few
parliamentarians, yet it has been the main promoter in the campaign against
unstunned ritual slaughter. One of its main supporters was the Freedom
Party.
The misconduct of certain Muslims, which is emphasized by the
media, is a further aspect of an anti-Muslim view. If newspapers report that
a sheep has been ritually slaughtered outside of regular slaughterhouses,
this draws negative attention upon ritual slaughter. It gets worse if a newspaper titles an article “Stolen Sheep Ritually Slaughtered.” Even if it is not
explicitly stated that the dead sheep found in a garden was slaughtered by a
Muslim, the readers understand it as such.79 Jews suffer collateral damage
from the anti-Muslim campaigns because their ritual slaughter and circumcision also come under attack. Much-discussed female circumcision among
segments of the Muslim population has been a major catalyst in this issue.
Many Westerners now consider all forms of circumcision as “mutilation.”
The tendency in secularizing societies to become more opposed to
religion is strengthened further by hostility toward other Muslims. This also
affects Christians and Jews. It would have been advisable to carry out studies and polls on these subjects, yet it is somewhat taboo, like so many other
Muslim-related issues in Western Europe.
Due to rising nationalist and anti-Islam forces in many Western societies, there is also more hostility toward minorities. This has an impact not
only upon immigrant communities, but also often on the well-established
and well-integrated Jewish minority. This perception goes beyond the
antisemites in autochthonous populations. The viewpoint of the Jew as a
foreigner is ingrained in large sections of European societies.
Yet another factor is that authorities become less agreeable to specific
demands from Jews due to the fear that Muslims will make similar ones.
For instance, various educational institutions in France are not willing to
give Jews vacation time to observe Jewish holidays because they don’t want
this to become a precedent for Muslims and their holidays.
Partly due to threats made by Muslims, security measures have been
greatly enhanced at Jewish institutions in many European countries. After
the Merah murders, Jewish communities all over Europe implemented fur‘Unacceptable,’ ” The Forward (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), February 18, 2013.
79. “Gestolen schaap ritueel geslacht,” Algemeen Dagblad, November 20, 2010.
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ther increased security measures.80 Authorities are reluctant to provide
funding for this. One reason is that it may encourage Muslims to ask for
protection for the much larger number of their mosques and institutions.
One of the few positive aspects of the mass immigration is that authorities have to pay more attention to minority cultures. In some countries, this
has also has made things easier for Jewish cultural activities.
ISRAEL
The analysis of the impact on Israel of non-selective Muslim integration into Europe is a major subject largely outside of the scope of this essay.
For many Muslims, however, there is no difference between Jews and
Israel. Since anti-Israel sentiments and acts of hatred against Israelis often
have an impact on European Jews as well, the topic needs to be discussed
here to some extent.
A major aspect of the impact on Israel of the Muslim integration into
Europe is that the anti-Israel demonstrations that have taken place in many
cities have led to hatred or violence against Jews and Jewish or pro-Israeli
targets. Shouts of “Death to the Jews” have returned to European streets.
They are sometimes complemented or substituted by shouts of “Hamas,
Hamas, Jews to the gas,” mainly by Muslims. It should be mentioned that in
the Netherlands, for instance, the origin of this slogan is not in the Muslim
community but among autochthonous Dutchmen on the tribunes of soccer
stadiums. From there it has moved into society at large.81
The summer 2006 war in Lebanon brought further proof that
antisemitism and anti-Israelism go hand in hand among Muslims. At an
anti-Israeli demonstration in Amsterdam that was attended by many Moroccan youngsters, one could see texts like: “Jews, the army of the Prophet
Mohammed is marching.”82 This is a reference to the prophet Mohammed
being involved in the killing of Jews.
Many Muslim organizations and individuals in Western countries
incite against Israel. Muslims are involved in boycott campaigns against
Israel; some Muslim parliamentarians in European countries also incite
against Israel. Several non-Muslims do this as well, yet without the involvement of Muslims, there would be far less incitement.
80. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “The Toulouse Murders,” Journal for the Study of
Antisemitism 4(1): 168-169.
81. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Antisemitism and the Dutch Soccer Fields,” Journal
for the Study of Antisemitism 3(2): 629.
82. Margalith Kleywegt and Max van Weezel, Het Land van Haat en Nijd
(Amsterdam: Balans, 2006), 214.
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There is also an indirect impact on Israel. This comes clearly to the
fore during elections. In tight elections, a sizable one-sided Muslim vote
can make a difference. Parties market their anti-Israel policies to Muslims
in order to get their votes by rewarding them with something that costs
them nothing. A few years ago in Rotterdam, there was a large minority on
the left in the municipal council to “twin” Rotterdam with the city of Gaza.
It was a cheap gesture toward the Muslims at Israel’s expense.83
According to Israeli antisemitism scholar Simon Epstein, “These
developments occur against the background of the discovery by the political
parties of the electoral strength of the Arab and Muslim population. For
instance, Pascal Boniface, a Socialist strategist, wrote a study for his party
stressing that there are ten times more Muslims in France than Jews. He
suggested that they should consequently shift to a more pro-Palestinian
position.84 He also published an article in Le Monde on this subject, which
created much controversy.”85
In Norway during parliamentary elections in 2009, the Christian Democrats obtained the lowest number of votes since World War II. The liberal
wing of the party and then-second deputy leader Inger Lise Hansen proposed a change in strategy in order to attract new voters: the unilateral support for Israel should be changed, the Norwegian embassy should not be
moved to “the occupied Jerusalem,” and the party should be against the
“Israeli Wall.” This proposal attracted much criticism, and Hansen was not
re-elected to parliament in 2011.86
FAILURE
OF THE
AUTHORITIES
It would be a mistake to blame the deterioration of the situation of the
Jews and Jewish communities in Europe exclusively on large parts of Muslim immigrant communities. Several other factors, such as incitement from
the extreme left and the extreme right of the political spectrum, also play a
role.
83. Joost de Haas, “Links Rotterdam wil Gaza als zusterstad,” Telegraaf, September 23, 2008.
84. Simon Epstein, interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Fifty Years of French
Intellectual Bias against Israel,” Post-Holocaust and Antisemitism 4 (January 1,
2003).
85. Pascal Boniface, “Lettre a un ami israelien,” Le Monde, August 4, 2001. See
also Pascal Boniface, “Est il interdit de critiquer Israel?” Le Monde, August 31,
2001.
86. Robert Gjerde, “Nestleder vil skrote KrFs Israel-politikk,” Aftenposten, January 31, 2010.
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The origins of this deterioration lie largely with European governments. They began with a major flawed policy when they allowed a large
non-selective mass immigration from Muslim countries into their own. In
the Netherlands, 57% of the population considers the large waves of immigration—not specifically of Muslims—the greatest mistake in the country’s
history.87
European governments were unaware about whether and how these
immigrants could be entirely integrated into Western democratic societies.
The problem resulted from the fact that authorities in European countries
had no understanding of the religion and related culture of the countries
these immigrants came from. They often even lacked much understanding
of key elements of their own culture. That made it even more difficult to
assess whether that culture would be adopted by the immigrants or meshed
with it. In practice, the question was not even asked.
Yet Western democracy and Islam, as interpreted by many in the countries of origin of the immigrants, may collide on crucial societal issues. The
result of this Western ignorance was that what is generally referred to as
“the Muslim problem” became a multifaceted issue Europe will have to live
with for many years to come.
Out of this lack of insight, the authorities created a far bigger problem
for the Jewish communities. This resulted from the fact that the Muslim
immigrants came from countries where antisemitism is widespread and
often related to religion. In these cultures, Jews and Christians are considered by many as dhimmis, protected citizens inferior to Muslims. In several
of these countries, there is major incitement against Jews and Israel. The
problem in the European countries of arrival was exacerbated because the
number of Muslims usually grew to be many times as numerous as that of
Jews. This only added to the vulnerability of the latter.
INDIRECT STATE ANTISEMITISM
Governments must assure the well-being of all of their citizens, including taking measures to prevent discrimination against their citizens and
minority groups. In this new century, many European governments have
often failed in this duty with respect to individual Jews and the Jewish
community.
The classic definition of state antisemitism is that a state discriminates
against Jews via its laws. In post-modern societies, there are several other
modes of behavior that can be defined as state antisemitism. A major one is
letting in immigrants who are disproportionately antisemitic and whose
87. Maartje Willems, “Immigranten toelaten grootste vergissing ooit.”
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antisemitism is more extremely violent compared to that of the resident
population. European non-selective immigration policies might thus be
called “indirect” or “involuntary” state antisemitism.
The resultant poor integration of many immigrants has further aggravated the problem. Numerous European authorities and citizens are convinced that sizable percentages of the Muslim immigrants and their progeny
cannot be integrated. They would probably be satisfied if there were
“peaceful coexistence,” with segments of immigrant society that cannot be
integrated adequately.
European governments often avoid exposing Muslim antisemitism. In
colonial times, Western racism far exceeded any other form of discrimination. This has engendered guilt feelings in parts of Western populations.
While true, it is still politically incorrect to accuse an immigrant minority
group of having a high percentage of people who hate another minority, i.e.,
Muslims about Jews. This becomes even more difficult as there is also substantial discrimination against Muslims in European societies.
Furthermore, accusing large parts of the Muslim community of
antisemitism could “upset” the social peace. Fear over this was an important factor in the negligent attitude of the French Socialist government
toward antisemitic incidents in the first years of this century.88
In 2003, the EU-sponsored European Union Monitoring Centre on
Racism and Xenophobia was accused by the authors that it had shelved a
report on antisemitism for political reasons. The report had been assigned to
the Center for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University in Berlin.
One author, Werner Bergman, said that EUMC officials had expressed concern about accusing Muslim perpetrators.89 This turned out to be a futile
effort to withhold knowledge from the public. There was and is so much
Muslim antisemitism that information about it had to come out in the open
in many places. So it did.
INTIMIDATION
OF
JOURNALISTS
The problem of obfuscation of facts goes beyond the authorities. On
several occasions, British journalists have told this author that their papers
conceal problems with domestic Muslims. Intimidation plays a major role
here.
88. Shmuel Trigano, interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “French Antisemitism:
A Barometer for Gauging Society’s Perverseness,” Post-Holocaust and Antisemitism 26 (November 1, 2004).
89. Marc Perelman, “E.U. Accused of Burying Report on Antisemitism Pointing to Muslim Role,” The Forward, November 28, 2003.
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The absurdity of this situation was evident when in 2012, Israeli TV
Channel 10 broadcast a four-part documentary titled Allah-Islam, the
Spread of Islam in Europe. An undercover Israeli journalist, Zvi Yehezkeli,
posed as a Palestinian in order to make this material accessible. The documentary filmed no-go areas in Muslim ghettos in various European countries. It gave attention to the violence, drug peddling, weapons possession,
and other crimes among Muslim immigrants, expressions of justification of
Muslim terror, intimidation of dissenters, discrimination against and sometimes honor killings of Muslim women, as well as religious fanaticism and
the widespread antisemitism. It would have been normal practice had Israeli
TV bought such a documentary from a European broadcaster, instead of
producing it itself, with substantial risks to the journalist. Yet such a widespread program does not seem to exist.
Some European stations have broadcast programs with a much narrower scope. For instance, in 2007 British Channel 4 broadcast a program
titled Undercover Mosque. The producers summarized it as “An extensive
investigation into a number of British mosques to reveal how a message of
hatred and segregation is being spread throughout the UK.”90
The West Midlands police thereupon accused the filmmakers of distorting the truth in their documentary and that it “had selectively edited
quotes from preachers in mosques around the country to make them appear
more extreme.” After these police claims were found to be false, Channel 4
and the program makers were paid about 100,000 pound sterling
compensation.91
IDEOLOGICAL FACTORS
The huge problems of integrating many non-Western immigrants,
mainly Muslims, also involved ideological challenges for European societies. One of the results was the promotion of a vague concept of a “multicultural society.” This often entailed looking away from society’s own
leading culture. In this context, some would even promote the nonsensical
claim that there is no hierarchy of cultures or civilizations.
To accept this fallacy would mean, for instance, that Nazi Germany’s
civilization was equivalent to that of the democratic civilizations of the
Allies. One result of accepting this viewpoint is indirect support of genocide. Murdering six million Jews in the Holocaust fit well into German
culture of the time.
90. Undercover Mosque, documentary, BBC Channel 4, first broadcast January
15, 2007.
91. Duncan Gardham, “Channel 4’s ‘Undercover Mosque’ returns,” The Telegraph, August 22, 2008.
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By 2011, senior European politicians such as German chancellor
Angela Merkel, British prime minister David Cameron, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy declared—far too late—that multiculturalism was
deeply flawed or dead. Sarkozy said: “We have been too concerned about
the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him.”92
HUMANITARIAN RACISM
Another de facto ideological concept that developed was what one can
call “humanitarian racism.” These undeclared racists believe or act according to the conviction that people of color are only victims and thus are not
responsible for their own fate. Humanitarian racists thus also often ignore
minority racism. “They are a weak community. We should not publicly
mention the antisemitism among them,” is one of the ways this racism
might be phrased. This expression is also a typical example of a sentimental
fallacy. Those who employ it seek to persuade the public to ignore certain
crimes because the criminal is poor, or belongs to a non-Western community. Sometimes this is even done by Jews in cases of antisemitic incidents,
which gives it a masochistic twist.
Former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali exposed the ignoring of
minority racism when she said, “I studied social work for a year in the
Netherlands. Our teachers taught us to look with different eyes at the immigrant and the foreigner. They thought racism was a phenomenon that only
appears among whites. My family in Somalia, however, educated me as a
racist and told me that we Muslims were very superior to the Christian
Kenyans. My mother thinks they are half-monkeys.”93
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that: “All human
beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with
reason and conscience.” This statement implies that antisemitic or racist
Muslims are responsible for their acts, like any other antisemite or racist.
The humanitarian racist’s approach, which effectively states that nonwhites can only be victims, leads to many other distorted concepts. The
false impression was created that society fails if it doesn’t make major
efforts to integrate immigrants. However, the responsibility of a person who
92. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Europe’s Grave Failure,” Ynetnews, February 21,
2011.
93. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Confronting Israeli
Realities with Dutch Ones,” in European-Israeli Relations: Between Confusion and
Change (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, The Adenauer Foundation, 2006), 160.
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comes to a new country to find his way and integrate into society should be
entirely his or hers. This is largely the case in the United States, for instance.
When Jews came in large numbers from Eastern Europe to Western
Europe before the First and Second World Wars, they did not expect governments to assist them; they knew that it was their own responsibility to
succeed and integrate in the society into which they immigrated. Their
immigration was largely successful without government assistance. Before
the Second World War, for instance, the Dutch Jewish community had to
pay for Westerbork—the barracks camp for German Jewish refugees who
fled to the Netherlands.
Humanitarian racism also leads to a distortion of the Islamophobia
issue. “Phobia” means an irrational fear. The term Islamophobia can be
rightfully used when Muslims are discriminated against in Western societies; it is often more difficult to obtain employment if one is named
Mohammed or Ahmed than if one has a European name. Skin color is
another discriminatory factor. There are many further examples of discrimination of Muslims in Western societies. There have also been attacks on
mosques. These come under the heading of Islamophobia.
Yet, Islamophobia is not comparable to antisemitism, which has deep
religious, ideological, and cultural roots in European societies and goes
back more than a thousand years. In addition, there is nothing irrational
about the Western fear of the many Muslims who promote jihad and want
to convert the Western world to Islam through violent means or otherwise.
From a Pew study in 2009, it was found that there are far more than 100
million jihadists in the world.94 In these cases, the term “Islamophobia” is
falsely used to silence critics.
Furthermore, Westerners who fight against Islamophobia very often
ignore the massive antisemitism among Muslims in Europe. This disregard
of a rather common attitude fits their humanitarian racist approach. Many of
these racists wrongly claim that they belong to the anti-racist camp.
MULTICULTURALISM
AND
HUMANITARIAN RACISM
One can illustrate with many examples to what distortions multiculturalism and humanitarian racism lead concerning attitudes toward Muslims. Pierre-Andre Taguieff has exposed the process by which crimes by
the disadvantaged are condoned, including the media’s role in justifying
violence and turning criminals into victims. The next step is to declare the
latter not responsible because their acts are fueled by their socioeconomic
94. Juliana Menasce Horowitz, “Declining Support for bin Laden and Suicide
Bombing,” Pew Research Center Publications, September 10, 2009.
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conditions. This is nothing but an updated version of Marxist determinism.
A further step, then, is that the Islamist version of Islam becomes the religion of the poor and the victims. This thinking also involves claiming that
Muslims or Arabs are being humiliated or attacked.95
Dutch journalists Margalith Kleijwegt and Max van Weezel recount
that in a public Amsterdam school with many Muslim students, these students prepared a home-made book for their teachers as a present for Christmas. It contained some pictures of Osama bin Laden. A number of teachers,
one of them Jewish, did not accept the present.
The school’s director considered this refusal excessive and said: “I
think: just walk through our school building and look at what the pupils
stick up in the canteen: pictures of Bin Laden and swastikas. We have many
youngsters in the school who are fascinated by Osama bin Laden. I can
imagine that our Jewish teachers are shocked. But the fact is that many of
our pupils think this way. We have to learn to live with it.”96
Journalist Elma Drayer recalls, “September 11, 2001, was a turning
point in the Netherlands. In the weeks following, there was unrest in
Amsterdam West, where many Muslims live. A few weeks later, Moroccan
youngsters threw stones at Jews who came out of the synagogue. I called
the police to check what was happening. The police spokesman said, ‘I
would prefer if you don’t place too much attention on this. These people are
already in a disadvantaged position.’ He wasn’t speaking about the Jews at
whom the stones were thrown, but about the Muslims who threw the stones!
Perpetrators thus became victims and victims became perpetrators.”97
Tariq Ramadan, Geneva-born professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford, falsely transformed Mohammed Merah, educated as a rabid
antisemite at home, into a non-racist, non-antisemitic “victim of society.”
He claimed that Merah’s ideas had nothing to do with the beliefs of any
contemporary currents in Islam.98 As has been noted above, Merah’s
brother has exposed how antisemitic their parents’ home was.
Many in Europe do not wish to be confronted with problems concerning the integration of so many Muslim immigrants. In this framework, additional distortions are promoted. It is convenient for many Westerners to
differentiate between Islamism and Islam—thus, they can be against Islam95. Pierre-André Taguieff, Rising from the Muck (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004).
96. Kleijwegt and van Weezel, Het land.
97. Elma Drayer, interviewed by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Distorted Dutch Views
of the Jews,” in Gerstenfeld, Demonizing Israel and the Jews, 176-178.
98. Tariq Ramadan, “Les enseignements de Toulouse,” Communiqué de Presse,
March 22, 2012; see also Gerstenfeld, “The Toulouse Murders,” 172.
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ism or radical Islam, and even expose it. At the same time, they can turn
away from the many problems among non-Islamist Muslims.
Problematic elements related to Islam are much wider spread than only
among so-called Islamists. The Muslim perpetrators of violent antisemitic
acts in Europe are far from being all radical Muslims.
EUROPEAN JEWISH COMMUNITIES
This problematic situation raises major questions for Jewish communities in Western Europe. Its leaders rarely have answers to these challenges,
and, in fact, often fail to even try to find them. The most far-reaching question is: “What is the future for Jews in Europe?” At times it is phrased
differently: “Is there a future for Jews in Europe?”
In 2003, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon said that European governments were not doing enough to fight antisemitism because of “an ever
stronger Muslim presence in Europe.” He added that this “is certainly
endangering the life of Jewish people.”99
In 2010, Dutch politician Frits Bolkestein was even clearer. He stated,
“Jews have to realize that there is no future for them in the Netherlands and
that they should advise their children to leave for the United States or
Israel.” Bolkestein arrived at this conclusion due to problems he foresaw for
the Netherlands, specifically resulting from the unsuccessful integration of
many Muslim immigrants, and the problems this would create for many
declared Jews.100
Jewish leaders tend to be more circumspect, yet at the annual conference of the CRIF in January 2013, Richard Prasquier said: “Not long ago,
the notion that resurgent antisemitism could endanger the presence of Jews
in France would have been considered absurd.” He added that this had
changed due to “parties and groups which are racist at times and at other
times ultra-secular [and in opposition to] ritual slaughter and circumcision
. . . There is a new antisemitism and it complements the old.”
In this context, Prasquier did not specifically mention Muslim
antisemitism. Yet he did say that the murders by Mohammed Merah and the
subsequent outbreak of antisemitism made the emphasis of CRIF’s 2013
annual general meeting be on the growing threat of antisemitism.101
99. Reuters, “Sharon: Muslim Presence in Europe Is Endangering the Life of
Jewish People,” Haaretz, November 24, 2003.
100. Gerstenfeld, Het Verval, 21.
101. “French Jewish Leader: Antisemitism Threatens Jewish Presence in
France,” January 15, 2013, http://antisemitism.org.il/article/76877/french-jewishleader-antisemitism-threatens-jewish-presence-france
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There are other more operational issues. Attacks on rituals raise the
question for Jewish communities to determine to what extent they should
collaborate with Muslim organizations on these questions. There is common ground as far as the fight for freedom of religion is concerned, but
little common ground as far as practice is concerned. Kosher slaughter is
carried out by certified slaughterers who have undergone lengthy training.
This is not the case with halal slaughter.
A difference in practice also exists as far as male circumcision is concerned. This Jewish ritual takes place eight days after birth. It is hardly
traumatic at that age. Circumcision of Muslim boys is often done at later
ages. In Western Europe, there are also cases of female circumcision by
Muslims, which is illegal.
Another important question concerns whether Jews should enter into
dialogue with Muslims, and why? If the answer is yes, then the next question is, with which Muslims? One must also ask: How representative are the
Muslims we dialogue with? Do some Muslim groups use the dialogue with
Jews to make them acceptable to the authorities? The underlying motive
thus becomes, “If our Muslim group is acceptable even for the Jews to
speak with, it should certainly be acceptable for the authorities.” For these
Muslims, the dialogue serves as self-promotion targeted toward the authorities and the press.
Experience shows that Jewish-Muslim dialogue often leads to the
emergence of Jewish whitewashers. They ignore the incitement against
Israel from their Muslim dialogue partners.
In a meeting of the Dutch Jewish-Moroccan network in Amsterdam at
the end of 2012, Mostafa Hilali, a major in the Dutch army, accused Israel
of war crimes. He said thereafter that the Middle East conflict should not
influence co-existence in Amsterdam. During that meeting, a Moroccan
woman shouted that Israel should not exist. Her outburst was applauded.
Apparently none of the few Jews present retorted that the hate mongering,
violence, and criminality coming out of segments of the Islamic world far
exceeds that emerging from any other world religion. This is a good example of the highly problematic nature of some of these dialogues.102
A necessary and detailed analysis of the Jewish-Moroccan network in
the Netherlands would give insights into whether its overall impact is negative or positive. One of its Jewish supporters, Rabbi Lody van de Kamp, in
an interview compared Muslim antisemitism to the Islamophobia in the
Jewish community. He left out that while there are a significant number of
cases of Muslim physical and verbal attacks on Jews in the Netherlands,
102. Salomon Bouman, “Moeizame dialoog in Amsterdam,” Nieuw Israelietisch
Weekblad, December 7, 2012.
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Jews do not attack Muslims. Nor did he mention that recognizable Jews
have to hide their identity because of harassment that is mainly from
Moroccans.103 There is at least one more article, by a Jewish and a Muslim
member of this network, that distorts the facts on this issue.104
ISLAMISM
AND
NAZISM
When discussing Muslim antisemitism in Europe, one cannot ignore
the extreme hate mongering and incitement coming out of the Muslim
world. In Muslim countries, hardly anyone holds a favorable opinion of
Jews. In Turkey, for instance, the figure is 4%; in Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan it is 2%.105 This is only one aspect of what antisemitic hate mongering
has led to. When people from these and similar countries immigrate to
Europe, they bring these views with them.
The incitement also influences certain European Muslims. We do not
know their numbers, but, due to the demonic character of the hate mongering, it may lead to physical attacks.
Some of those comparing attitudes of movements in the Islamic world
to those of the Nazis present compelling arguments. Holocaust expert
Yehuda Bauer points out: “Today for the first time since 1945, Jews are
once again threatened openly by a radical Islamic genocidal ideology whose
murderous rantings must be taken more seriously than the Nazi ones were
two and more generations ago. The direct connection between World War
II, the Shoah, and present-day genocidal events and threats is more than
obvious. The Shoah was unprecedented; but it was a precedent, and that
precedent is being followed.”106
Historian Robert Wistrich writes that hard-core antisemitism in the
Arab and Muslim world is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany. Wistrich explains that Muslim hatred for Israel and Jews is “an eliminatory
antisemitism with a genocidal dimension.” Regarding common elements
between Muslim and Nazi antisemitism, Wistrich lists fanaticism, the cult
103. René Zeeman, “Rabbijn Van de Kamp stoort zich aan antisemitisme en
islamhaat,” Reformatorisch Dagblad, January 22, 2011.
104. Erwin Brugmans and Mohamed Rabbae, “Wat Marokkaan en Jood bindt,”
Volkskrant, December 22, 2010.
105. Pew Research Global Attitudes Project, “Muslim-Western Tensions Persist,” July 21, 2011.
106. Yehuda Bauer, “Reviewing the Holocaust Anew in Multiple Contexts,”
Post-Holocaust and Antisemitism 80 (May 1, 2009), http://jcpa.org/article/
reviewing-the-holocaust-anew-in-multiple-contexts, accessed December 27, 2012.
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of death, the nihilistic wish for destruction, and the mad lust for world
hegemony.107
In an article, Richard Prasquier compared radical Islam to Nazism. He
notes two important common features. The first is that Jews are the prime
enemy for both movements and antisemitism is an essential component of
their ideology. The other is that both Nazism and radical Islam dehumanize
Jews.108 Historian Richard Landes posited that “future historians will probably find that present antisemitism in Arab and Muslim societies reached an
even higher fever pitch than that of the Nazis.”109
JEWS
AS
SENSORS
FOR THE
WEST
In October 2005, major riots broke out in France that lasted three
weeks. They started when two youths in Clichy sous Bois were electrocuted
when they accidentally entered a transformer shack of the national electricity company there; their friends claimed they were fleeing the police. These
riots affected hundreds of towns. About 10,000 cars were burned as well as
many institutions.
Since late 2000, and for five years afterward, parts of the Jewish community who lived close to Muslim communities had already gone through
what France experienced in 2005. Numerous Jewish institutions and hundreds of Jews had been attacked physically; many of the perpetrators were
Muslims. One could remark that the rioters had taken note of the weak
reaction by French authorities in response to the antisemitic attacks. Thus,
they could now focus on their desired target: French society.110 The antiWestern Muslim attitude alongside the antisemitic attitude had already been
detailed in the book edited by Emmanuel Brenner, cited earlier.111
Religion was not mentioned by the rioters. Yet, they all came from
North and West African Muslim communities. These riots were presented
as “social unrest,” falsely linked entirely to the “difficult economic conditions of the rioters.” French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut invalidated this
107. Robert S. Wistrich, Muslimischer Antisemitismus, Eine aktuelle Gefahr
(Berlin: Edition Critic, 2011), 101.
108. Richard Prasquier, “Oui, l’islamisme radical et le nazisme sont deux idéologies comparables,” Le Monde, October 17, 2012.
109. Richard Landes, interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld, “How Muslim Conspiracy Theories Affect Jews,” Israel National News, March 7, 2013.
110. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “The Autumn 2005 Riots in France: Their Possible
Impact on Israel and the Jews,” The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2005.
111. Brenner, ed., Les territoires perdus.
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MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM IN EUROPE
227
narrative by observing that: “In France there are other immigrants whose
situation is also difficult—Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese—and they are
not taking part in the riots.”112
The physical impact of the riots on the Jewish community was not
much greater than on others living in the nearby areas.113 Two synagogues,
however, were attacked with Molotov cocktails—one in Pierefitte and the
other in Garges les Gonesse.114 Jewish shops were not specifically singled
out, but in areas where shops were burned down, theirs were also burnt.
This violence should not be confused with the many targeted anti-Jewish
attacks of previous years.
CONCLUSION
Even though statistical data are limited, a number of conclusions can
be drawn. As stated above, Muslim antisemitism is a major problem in
Western European countries. In a number of cases, it expresses itself in
antisemitic acts that are sometimes far more extreme than those committed
by members of the autochthonous population.
It also expresses itself in a disproportionately large number of
antisemites among the Muslim community when compared to the autochthonous community. This seems true from early childhood onward. There
are indications that it exists both at an academic level and among the poorly
educated; there also seem to be few differences, except for the violence
involved, between males and females. At the same time, however, one
should avoid generalizations by accusing all European Muslims of being
antisemites. This is evident from all statistical data, which show that this is
far from being the case.115
In view of the large number of young Muslim antisemites, the problem
of Muslim antisemitism will not disappear in the coming decades; it may
well become even stronger. The Muslim presence in Europe and the failure
of the authorities to solve the many problematic aspects of it have affected
many other matters of importance to the Jewish community. Some concern
Holocaust education and commemoration; others involve the need for
112. Dror Mishani and Aurelia Smotriez, “What Sort of Frenchmen Are They?”
Haaretz, November 17, 2005.
113. Hilary Leila Kriegler, “French Jews Remain Largely Untargeted,” Jerusalem Post, November 8, 2005.
114. “Un cocktail Molotov lancé vendredi sur la synagogue de Garges-lesGonesse,” Agence France-Presse, November 6, 2005.
115. See, for instance, Vettenburg, Elchardus, and Put.
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security measures for Jews and Jewish organizations. Another relevant
issue is that many Jews must hide their identity in the public domain while
many Muslims flaunt theirs.
Concerning matters of religion specifically, the Muslim presence also
has an impact on the Jews. Anti-Muslim opposition, which is now major in
many European countries, will encourage further attacks on rituals such as
religious slaughter and male circumcision.
Jewish communities should evaluate whether it is worthwhile for them
to give more publicity to the many antisemitic incidents caused by Muslims. They should insist that statistical data on Muslim antisemitism be
recorded and published by all Western European countries. Avoiding collecting these data is a tool for the authorities to dodge proper handling of
the hate-mongering. The problem of Muslim antisemitism is sufficiently
severe to justify this request.
Percentages of antisemitic viewpoints should be collected from all age
groups among the Muslims, and compared to those of the native population.
The roots of this antisemitism and those who promote it should be studied
as well. Additional detailed studies should be undertaken to obtain a better
insight into this widespread hate-mongering. Attention should also be
placed on to what extent Muslim leaders and Muslim organizations condemn antisemitic and other crimes coming from their own communities.
After these data haven been obtained, programs should be developed to
alleviate the problem. This should include how certain Muslims play a
major role in trying to reduce a Jewish presence in the public square, while
many Muslims accentuate the Muslim presence.
Antisemitism is a worrisome societal issue, going beyond the major
hostility toward a vulnerable minority group by a large number of members
of another minority group. A further component is that what happens to the
Jews is also a gauge of the attitude of large parts of the Muslim minority
toward Western society in general. Beyond their inherent responsibility
toward a minority experiencing maltreatment, this makes it an important
issue as well for authorities to investigate the problem and find ways to
mitigate it. It is clear, though, that major problems coming out of segments
of Muslim communities will not be eliminated for many years to come. As
historian Raphael Israeli put it: “Muslim hatred groups within Western societies, though they are not totally out of place in view of the many extreme
right and left parties that infest those countries, add nevertheless a novel
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MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM IN EUROPE
229
dimension of social disturbance in the heart of the West.”116 This means
that ethnic and cultural tensions will continue to be a regular phenomenon
in many Western societies.
*Manfred Gerstenfeld is an Israeli expert on antisemitism, emeritus chairman of the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and a recipient of the JSA Lifetime Achievement award. This essay is an extended version of the presentation that Gerstenfeld
gave at the JSA conference this year in London.
116. Raphael Israeli, Muslim Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe (Piscataway, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2009), 192.
Interview with Gunther Jikeli
Manfred Gerstenfeld*
Antisemitism among Muslim youngsters in Europe has specific characteristics which distinguish it from the hatred of Jews by people in surrounding societies. Yet it also has common elements. Many standard
statements about the origins of Muslim antisemitism in Europe are without foundation. There is no proof that this hateful attitude is greatly influenced by the discrimination of Muslim youngsters in Western societies. I
have conducted 117 interviews with Muslim youngsters of an average
age of 19 in Berlin, Paris and London. The majority voiced some or
strong antisemitic feelings. They openly express their negative viewpoints toward Jews. This is often done with aggression and sometimes
includes intentions to carry out antisemitic acts.
The speaker I quote above, Günther Jikeli, is a Christian antisemitism
researcher at the Kantor Center at Tel Aviv University and was awarded the
Raul Wallenberg Prize. He earned his PhD at the Center for Research on
Antisemitism in Berlin in 2011. From 2011 to 2012, he served as the
OSCE/ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights)
adviser on combating antisemitism. His new book (available in German)
describes his research findings. Its title translates as Antisemitism and
Observations on Discrimination among Young Muslims in Europe.
In our interview, Jikeli discusses his work with antisemitism in Muslim youth:
Many youngsters I interviewed expressed “classic” antisemitic stereotypes. Conspiracy theories and stereotypes which associate Jews with
money are the most prominent. Jews are often deemed as rich and stingy.
They are also frequently seen as being one entity with a common and evil
Jewish interest. These archetypal stereotypes strengthen a negative and
potentially threatening picture of “The Jews” in the minds of these
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youngsters. They usually do not differentiate at all between Jews and
Israelis. Their view of the Middle East conflict can be used by them as a
justification of a general, hostile attitude toward Jews including German,
French and English Jews. They often claim that Jews have stolen Palestinian-Arab or alternatively, Muslim land. This is a major contention for
them to delegitimize the State of Israel. The expression “Jews kill children” is also heard frequently. It is a supportive argument for their opinion that Israel is fundamentally evil. As they do not make any distinction
between Israelis and Jews in general, this becomes further proof for the
“vicious character” of Jews. It also makes them very emotive.
He continues:
The assumption of a general or even eternal enmity between Muslims (or
Arabs) and Jews is widespread. This is often expressed in statements
such as, “Muslims and Jews are enemies,” or accordingly, “Arabs dislike
Jews.” This makes it difficult for youngsters who identify strongly as
Muslims or Arabs to distance themselves from such views. We know that
antisemitism is never rational. Yet some Muslim youngsters do not even
try justifying their attitudes. For them, if someone is Jewish, that is sufficient reason for their loathing. From statements made by some interviewees, it emerges that negative attitudes toward Jews are the norm in their
social environment. It is frightening that a number of them express a
desire to attack Jews when they encounter them in their neighborhoods.
Some discuss antisemitic acts carried out in their environment where the
attackers have never been caught. Several interviewees approved of these
aggressions. Aware of the fact that others from their social, religious and
ethnic backgrounds attack Jews and remain uncaught and have not been
clearly condemned enhances the normalization of violence against Jews
in their circles.”
Jikeli notes that:
Differences between the interviewees of the three countries regarding
their antisemitic viewpoints are surprisingly minor. One sees some divergence in their argumentation. German Muslims mention that Jews control
the media and manipulate them in order to conceal Israel’s “atrocities.”
In France, interviewees often say that Jews play a dominant role in the
national TV media. In the U.K., they mainly mention Jewish influence in
American broadcasting as well as in the film industry there.
The word “Jew” is used pejoratively in Germany and France, by
non-Muslims also. In the U.K., this phenomenon is less known in general
and among Muslim interviewees. Only in France are Jews often seen as
“exploiters.” Some Muslim youngsters mention that it is wrong that Jews
allegedly have a better life in France than Muslims. It may well be that
this stems from the fact that French Jews are often more visible than
those in Germany and the U.K. and furthermore, that many French Jews
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233
are also immigrants from North Africa and that there is a certain feeling
of competition.
He continues:
In Germany, some interviewees often use specific arguments they have
picked up from society at large, such as the allegedly high Holocaust
restitution payments made to Israel. Another argument frequently offered
and believed is that Jews, in light of the Holocaust, “should be better
people than others, whereas Israel embodies the opposite.” Yet, there are
also some Muslim youngsters who distance themselves from antisemitism. This happens even if they have been initially influenced by
antisemitic views from their friends, family and the media. This proves
once again that people should not generalize.
Jikeli concludes:
Antisemitism may be strengthened further by referring to a general negative attitude by the Muslim community toward Jews. References to the
Koran or the Hadith may also be used with the implication that Allah
agrees with this viewpoint. Yet one should not falsely arrive at the common assumption that Muslim antisemitism is exclusively a product of
hatred of Israel, or from Western “classic” antisemitism, the teachings of
Islam, or their Muslim identity. The reality is far more complex.
*Manfred Gerstenfeld is emeritus chair (2000 to 2012) and member of the Board of
Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He has authored fifteen books,
edited five, and is a frequent JSA contributor and founding JSA board member. This
interview was originally published February 14, 2013, www.IsraelNationalNews
.com
Interview with Robert Wistrich:
A Millennium of British Antisemitism
Manfred Gerstenfeld*
“The anti-Zionist discourse in the UK probably exceeds that of most
other Western societies. It has achieved a degree of resonance, particularly
in elite opinion, that makes the country a leader in encouraging discriminatory attitudes. The United Kingdom holds a pioneering position in promoting academic boycotts of Israel in Europe. The same is true for trade-union
efforts at economic boycotts. Trotskyites who infiltrated the Labour Party
and the trade unions back in the 1980s are an important factor in spreading
this poison.”
Professor Robert Wistrich holds the Neuberger Chair for Modern
European and Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and
heads the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.
In his seminal A Lethal Obsession (Random House, 2010), Dr. Wistrich
documents antisemitism from antiquity to the global jihad.
In his remarks to me, Dr, Wistrich made the following observations:
There is also no other Western society where jihadi radicalism has proved
as violent and dangerous as in the UK. Although it is not the determining
factor in this extremism, it plays a role. This Islamist radicalism has
helped shape the direction of overall antisemitism in the UK.
Another pioneering role of the UK, especially in the area of antiIsraelism, is the longstanding bias in BBC reporting and commentary
about the Jewish world and Israel in particular. Double standards have
long been a defining characteristic of its Middle East coverage. This has
had debilitating consequences. The BBC plays a special role, owing to its
long-established prestige as a news source widely considered to be objec-
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tive. It carries a weight beyond that of any other Western media
institution.
Antisemitism in Great Britain has been around for almost a thousand
years of recorded history. Medieval England already led in antisemitism.
In the Middle Ages, England pioneered the blood libel. The William of
Norwich case in 1144 marked the first time Jews were accused of using
the blood of Christian children for the Passover unleavened bread
(matza). In the twelfth century, medieval Britain was a persecutory Catholic society, particularly when it came to Jews. In this environment, the
English Church was a leader in instituting cruel legislation and discriminatory conduct toward Jews, unparalleled in the rest of Europe.
From the Norman conquest of 1066 onward, there was a steady process—particularly during the thirteenth century—of persecution, forced
conversion, extortion, and expropriation of Jews. This culminated in the
expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 under Edward I. It was the
first ejection of a major Jewish community in Europe. Britain was not
only the first country in medieval Europe to expel Jews, but also one of
the last to take them back after more than 350 years.
The long absence of Jews from the British Isles did not mean that in
the intervening period antisemitism disappeared. This is an instructive
early example of how society does not need the physical presence of
Jews for the potency of the anti-Jewish stereotypes to penetrate the culture. The force of the anti-Jewish stereotype in classic English literature
is so powerful that it ultimately is retained in the contemporary “collective unconscious” of the country’s culture.
The Shylock image influenced the entire West because it fits so well
with the evolution of market capitalism from its early days. Shylock is
the English archetype of the villainous Jew. Those who talk about how
humanistic, universal, and empathetic his portrait is are ignoring not only
how it was perceived at the time, but also its historical consequences.
In Britain, as in much of Europe, the proclaimed anti-racism of the
left-wing variety often feeds the new antisemitism—which is primarily
directed against Israel. If one suggests that such leftists are antisemites in
disguise, they are likely to become enraged and retort that one is playing
the antisemitic card. This has become a code word for saying, in effect,
“You are a dishonest, deceitful, manipulative Jew” or “You are a “ ‘lover
of Jews.’ ” These antisemites in disguise claim that Zionists supposedly
use the “accusation of antisemitism” to distort and silence the criticism of
Israel and its human rights abuses. The word “criticism” in this context is
misplaced. It is a euphemism or license for the demonization of Israel.
And that in turn is a major form of antisemitism in our time.
Britain can pride itself, however, on the publication of Report of the
All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism,1 which did a thorough, though not perfect, job of investigating the rise of anti-Jewish sen1. Available online at http://www.antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/AllParty-Parliamentary-Inquiry-into-Antisemitism-REPORT.pdf
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A MILLENNIUM OF BRITISH ANTISEMITISM
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timent in the UK. The report does not contradict anything I have been
saying, though it was too soft on Muslim antisemitism.
*Manfred Gerstenfeld is an Israeli expert on antisemitism, emeritus chairman of the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and a recipient of the 2012 JSA Lifetime
Achievement award.
From The Tablet to The Prague Cemetery:
The Jew, The Freemason, and the
Diana Vaughan Hoax
Simon Mayers*
In a recent review, psychologist David Sokol stated: “Understanding
the successful antisemitic leader’s mind is an important tool in countering
the damage they do. Umberto Eco in The Prague Cemetery may have given
us some insight into those psyches.”1
While Umberto Eco may have provided us with some insights into the
disturbed but creative mind of the successful antisemitic leader, I think he
was trying to achieve something else. In a lecture delivered on May 15,
2008, at Bologna University, and recently published in a new volume of
essays, Eco explains that the process of “inventing the enemy” has featured
in almost all cultures. In this lecture, “inventing the enemy” takes on an
ontological significance, “important not only to define our identity but also
to provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth.” We are,
he suggests, “beings who need an enemy.” Consequently, “when there is no
enemy, we have to invent one.”2
Eco drew upon a wide range of examples from across history, such as
Saint Augustine’s condemnation of the pagans, the diabolization of prosti1. David Sokol, “The Successful Antisemite,” review of The Prague Cemetery
by Umberto Eco, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism 4, no. 1 (2012), 310.
2. Umberto Eco, “Inventing the Enemy,” in Inventing the Enemy and Other
Occasional Writings, trans. Richard Dixon (London: Harvill Seeker, 2012), 2, 20.
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tutes, lepers, gypsies, witches and “the Negro,” the ancient theological myth
of the Jewish Antichrist, and Hitler’s construction of “the Jewish mongrel.”3 He was justifiably disturbed by this process, and the prospect that
“our moral sense” may be “impotent when faced with the age-old need for
enemies.”4 I believe it was this widespread cultural cultivation of the socalled enemy that he had in mind when he wrote The Prague Cemetery.
Sokol observed that The Prague Cemetery is a “confusing and challenging novel.”5 This can also be said of many of Eco’s other fictional
works, and their complexity is partly explained by Eco’s belief that “people
are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.”6 In the case of The
Prague Cemetery, however, the confusion also arises because the episodes
upon which it was based were rather fantastic to begin with.
One of the more unusual characters in the novel is accurately described
by Sokol as a “strange character” who “switches into bizarre personalities.”7 Though he added some creative flourishes to her already very bizarre
personality, Diana Vaughan was not invented by Eco. She had a reality
dating back to the late nineteenth century, as a textual construction within a
number of discourses. In the original version, Diana Vaughan was a nobleminded lady who abandoned the misguided worship of Lucifer, converted
to Roman Catholicism, and revealed the secret satanic inner workings of
Freemasonry. In The Prague Cemetery, Eco removed the linear development from “Palladian” Freemason to Roman Catholic, thereby introducing
a multiple personality disorder to an already fantastic construction—with
the “good” Diana being a virtuous Christian, and the “bad” Diana a sexually
depraved Masonic Luciferian.8
Eco may have embellished the Diana Vaughan narratives, yet as a
skeptical Catholic critic pointed out in a letter to The Tablet in 1897, they
were already a “preposterous extravagance,” with tales of “the embracing of
the chaste Diana by the beautiful demon Asmodeus, the flying through the
air on the back of monster eagles down the mouths of volcanoes in full
eruption, the profanation of hosts, the blasphemous parodies of Masses and
3. Ibid, 2-17.
4. Ibid, 18.
5. Sokol, “The Successful Antisemite,” 305.
6. Stephen Moss, interview with Umberto Eco, The Guardian (online),
November 27, 2011 (accessed December 28, 2012), http://www.guardian.co.uk/
books/2011/nov/27/umberto-eco-people-tired-simple-things
7. Sokol, “The Successful Antisemite,” 309.
8. See Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery, trans. Richard Dixon (London:
Vintage, 2012), chap. 22.
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FROM THE TABLET TO THE PRAGUE CEMETERY
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devotions . . . and the lion’s tail animated by the devil to make a necklace
for Diana.”9
Diana Vaughan began her “existence” in 1895. Léo Taxil (formerly
Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès), a French writer and lapsed
Catholic/disgraced ex-Freemason, crafted the memoirs of Diana Vaughan
as a fictitious female apostate from “Palladian” Freemasonry.10 Taxil also
wrote other elaborate stories about devil worship and sinister rituals in
Masonic lodges, some of which were published under pseudonyms. These
tales included bizarre accounts of Host desecration, satanic magic, murder,
the Antichrist, and the manifestations of Lucifer and Asmodeus. While
Taxil was the original inventor of Diana Vaughan, his construction took on
a life of its own in a number of discourses outside of his control.
If Diana Vaughan is discussed, it is usually in the context of French
discourse. What is generally unknown is that the Diana Vaughan narratives
played an important role in constructing “the enemy” in the English Catholic discourse during the late nineteenth century.
The English Catholic newspaper in which Diana Vaughan made her
first appearance was The Tablet, which was owned by Herbert Vaughan, the
cardinal archbishop of Westminster and head of the English Catholic hierarchy (the shared surname with Diana being coincidental). Herbert Vaughan
purchased the newspaper in 1868, and used it as a forum for the articulation
of Ultramontane views. The paper became the semi-official newspaper for
the English Catholic community.
In August 1895, an editorial in The Tablet celebrated the inauguration
of the Anti-Masonic Congress. The paper referred to this international gathering of Catholics as “the most hopeful augury for the future of society on
the continent.” According to the editorial, the main aim of the movement
was “to prove to the world, by the most convincing evidence, the evils and
disasters of which freemasonry has been the cause to mankind at large and
to the Catholic Church in particular.”
The Tablet suggested that the Anti-Masonic Congress was important
because it permitted Catholics to “rally their forces from the state of helpless disorganization which condemned them to political extinction despite
their great numerical preponderance.” This statement seems to correlate
9. Anonymous reviewer, Letters to the Editor, The Tablet, April 17, 1897, 617618. In this letter, and in the Month (the periodical of the English Jesuits), the critic
lamented that “respected ecclesiastics” were found defending the cause of Diana
Vaughan. “The Diana Vaughan Hoax,” Month LXXXIX (April 1897), 442.
10. Léo Taxil [Miss Diana Vaughan, pseud.], Mémoires d’une Ex-Palladiste
(Paris, 1895-1897). The mémoires were published as a series of installments from
July 1895 through April 1897.
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with Eco’s argument that the process of “inventing the enemy,” in this case
“the Freemason,” has played a significant role in shoring up cultural
identity.
It was in this editorial that Diana Vaughan made her appearance.
According to the editorial, “much attention has recently been called to the
doings of the various sects of Freemasons abroad by the sudden conversion
of one of their high priestesses, Miss Diana Vaughan, ex-Grand Mistress of
the Luciferians or Palladians.” Taking Taxil’s lurid narratives at face value,
The Tablet reported that prior to conversion, Diana had tried to set up a
more moderate reformed sect of Palladium Freemasonry—because despite
“the strange perversion of mind by which an intelligent and high-souled
woman dedicated herself to the worship of Lucifer,” she was not blind to
the “degrading character of the rites practised by her fellow-worshippers.”11
The Tablet, August 17, 1895
In spite of attempts by the influential and scholarly mystic Arthur
Waite to demonstrate the non-existence of “Palladian” Freemasonry,12 The
Tablet reported in 1896 that it remained “strongly persuaded that there is an
inner Masonry whose workings are unknown to the general run of Masons,”
and that “Satanism is practised under circumstances at least pointing to
11. “The Anti-Masonic Congress,” The Tablet, August 17, 1895, 250-251.
12. See Arthur Edward Waite, Devil Worship in France or the Question of Lucifer (London: George Redway, 1896).
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FROM THE TABLET TO THE PRAGUE CEMETERY
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Masonic association.”13 A week later, The Tablet reported that the AntiMasonic Congress had set up a “special committee” to deal with the “burning questions” relating to Diana Vaughan. The paper stated: “That there is
in France a sect devoted to the worship of Lucifer, as the champion of
rebellious humanity, is, we believe, a well-attested fact, and the propagation
of this diabolical creed has been ascribed by M. Taxil and M. Ricoux to an
inner ring of the Masonic body called Palladic Masonry.” The Tablet concluded that Arthur Waite’s book “traverses and impugns these statements,
but without any conclusive refutation of their general drift.”14
While the original Diana Vaughan narratives were anti-Masonic in
character, the construction of “the Jew” as enemy was woven into the discourse that developed around them. For example, one of the many letters
published in The Tablet expressing support and admiration for Diana
Vaughan suggested that Jews and Freemasons were working together to
“cast discredit on the damaging revelations of Masonic devilry revealed by
Diana Vaughan.” The letter, which was by Norbert Jones, a member of the
Canons Regular of the Lateran, cited a correspondence from Amand Joseph
Fava, the bishop of Grenoble. According to Jones, the bishop stated that
“Miss Diana Vaughan does exist, she has written and she had made her first
Communion.” Jones concluded that the bishop’s correspondence shows that
those who doubt the existence of Diana Vaughan and “talk of deception in
the matter are themselves the real dupes of Jew Masons.” The bishop of
Grenoble referred to “Nathan” and other “prominent Masons sent about to
cast discredit on Miss Vaughan’s damaging attack on Masonry.” According
to Jones, this Nathan was “an English Jew” and the “Grand Master of
French and Italian Freemasonry.”
Jones also claimed that “it is well known in Holland that since January
up to June, 1896, a certain M. Rosen, in reality a spy of the Italian
archmason Lemmi, has been visiting many Dutch ecclesiastics and repeating to them that Diana Vaughan is a myth.” Jones claimed that Rosen is a
“Jewish Rabbi and a leading mason” and only “pretends to be a convert
from Masonry.”15 Another example is provided by a close friend and confidant of the owner of The Tablet,16 Baroness Mary Elizabeth Herbert, who
13. “Devil Worship in France,” review of Devil Worship in France or the Question of Lucifer, by Arthur Edward Waite, The Tablet, October 3, 1896, 529-530.
14. “Report of the Anti-Masonic Congress,” The Tablet, October 10, 1896, 565566.
15. Norbert Jones, Letters to the Editor, The Tablet, January 23, 1897, 138-139.
This letter includes the text of the correspondence from the bishop of Grenoble
(dated January 7, 1897).
16. Mary Elizabeth Herbert, the Baroness Herbert of Lea, was a convert to
Catholicism and the author of several religious books and pamphlets. For Herbert
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accepted with enthusiasm Domenico Margiotta’s account of the “noble and
generous character” of Diana Vaughan and his claims that Adriano Lemmi
was a Jew convert and a satanist.17
Articles in The Tablet as the Diana Vaughan hoax was coming to a
conclusion, and as the Dreyfus Affair was heating up, reveal the ongoing
process of casting “the Jew” and “the Freemason” in the role of the enemy.
For example, in March 1897, a few weeks before the conclusion of the
Diana Vaughan hoax,18 the paper argued that an antisemitic policy was the
understandable if regrettable means of dealing with the so-called “alliance”
between Jews and Freemasons. The paper stated that:
In criticizing the Anti-Semitic policy of the clerical party on the Continent, it must be remembered that the Ghetto is there the focus and centre
of the Liberal warfare against Catholicism, and that Jews and Freemasons
form every-where the vanguard of the forces of infidelity. . . . The alliance of the Synagogue with the Lodges is in all continental countries the
symbol of the triumph of infidelity over Christianity, and the creed of
modern, no less than of ancient Judaism, is hostility to the Christian
name.19
Another Tablet article stated that:
We shall not, we trust, be accused of palliating or condoning the excesses
of anti-Semitism, by pointing out that the Jews, in France, Italy, and Austria, the three principal Catholic nations of the continent, exercise a politiVaughan’s letters to Mary Elizabeth Herbert, see Shane Leslie, ed., Letters of Herbert Cardinal Vaughan to Lady Herbert of Lea, 1867 to 1903 (London: Burns
Oates, 1942).
17. Mary Elizabeth Herbert, review of two books by Domenico Margiotta—
Adriano Lemmi: Supreme Head of the Freemasons and Le Palladisme; Or the Worship of Lucifer, Dublin Review CXVIII (January 1896), 192-201. Taxil described
Margiotta as “an unexpected auxiliary.” According to Taxil, “he began as one of
the hoaxed,” and, fearing ridicule, he “chose to declare himself an accomplice
rather than a blind volunteer in our navy.” Alain Bernheim, A. William Samii, and
Eric Serejski, “The Confession of Léo Taxil,” Heredom: Transactions of the Scottish Rite Research Society 5 (1996), 159.
18. On April 19, 1897, a large audience gathered in the auditorium of the
Société Géographique in Paris in order to meet the elusive Diana Vaughan. The
audience was surprised when Taxil appeared on the stage and announced that the
whole tale of Palladian Freemasonry had been a hoax. An English translation of
Taxil’s speech is provided in Bernheim, Samii, and Serejski, “The Confession of
Léo Taxil,” 137-168.
19. “Antisemitism in the Austrian Election,” The Tablet, March 27, 1897, 481482.
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cal influence entirely disproportioned to their numbers, and that this
influence is always exercised against the religion of the country. In close
alliance with the Freemasons, . . . they form the backbone of the party of
aggressive liberalism, with war to the knife against the Church as the sum
and aim of its policy.”20
The Diana Vaughan narratives in The Tablet demonstrate the power of
discourse to construct a protean reality that is readily accepted, repeated,
and adapted by newspaper editor and reader alike.
In his review of The Prague Cemetery, Sokol suggests that what distinguishes the “successful antisemite” from “the-run-of-the mill” variety is
“his special motivations and skills.” He explains that “the successful hater
has these communication skills in abundance; the followers need no special
skill.”21 He also suggests that there is “some indication that the successful
antisemite . . . may be mentally ill.”22 It is, however, difficult to explain the
pervasive hostile constructions of “the Jew” and “the Freemason” in the
English Catholic discourse during the late nineteenth century by looking for
a talented but mentally disturbed individual. The Diana Vaughan narratives
in The Tablet were by no means exceptional. Constructions of “the Jew”
and “the Freemason,” blending contemporary stereotypes of greed, cowardice, disloyalty, and secrecy with religious myths about deicide, ritual murder, sorcery, devil worship, and the Antichrist, were a pervasive theme in
the English Catholic discourse during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Such constructions can be found in the lectures, sermons, and pastoral
letters of a wide range of distinguished priests, bishops, and archbishops.
They can also be found in editorials, articles, and letters in a wide range of
newspapers and periodicals, such as the Catholic Times, Catholic Herald,
Catholic Gazette, Catholic Federationist, The Universe, and The Month.23
The wide range of texts in which such constructions can be found suggest
that creative antisemitism was not the preserve of a handful of skilled, crea20. “Captain Dreyfus and his Champions,” The Tablet, February 12, 1898, 238.
21. Sokol, “The Successful Antisemite,” 306.
22. Ibid, 309.
23. The stereotyping and mythologizing of Jews and Freemasons in a wide
range of English Catholic texts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is examined in Simon Mayers, “From ‘the Pharisee’ to ‘the Zionist Menace’:
Myths, Stereotypes and Constructions of the Jew in English Catholic Discourse
(1896-1929),” PhD thesis, University of Manchester (2012); and Simon Mayers,
“From the Christ-Killer to the Luciferian: The Mythologized Jew and Freemason in
Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century English Catholic Discourse,” Melilah 8 (2011). The Diana Vaughan hoax and a number of other episodes that cast
Jews and Freemasons in the role of villain are examined in these studies.
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tive, but mentally ill personalities; something much more disturbing and
difficult to deal with seems to be indicated. It was often the wider cultural
consciousness, rather than just the mentally disturbed individual, that was
willing to accept bizarre fantasies, myths, and fairy tales about Jews and
Freemasons as fact. As psychologist Steven Baum has argued:
In the social mind, Jews conspire, and plot, and ready themselves to
undermine and betray all that is good, godly, and orderly. The Jews the
fantasizing public is waiting for are not real people, but are imaginary
social ideas and superstitions based on legend, fable, and fantasy.24
Umberto Eco suggested that the process of “inventing the enemy,”
whether that role was assigned to pagans, Jews, Freemasons, gypsies, or
another outside group, has been a deplorable but pervasive feature of civilization. He posited that cultures require an enemy, and when there is no
genuine external threat, an internal one is usually invented in compensation.
It would seem to be this widespread cultural process that was at the root of
the hostile constructions of “the Jew” and “the Freemason” in the English
Catholic discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and
presumably in other discourses too. Eco suggests that stereotypes can be
destroyed when a genuine effort is made to understand other people without
denying or disrespecting their distinctiveness. He was, however, far from
sanguine about the possibility, suggesting that efforts to understand those
labeled as the enemy tend to be “the prerogative of poets, saints, or traitors.
Our innermost impulses are of quite another kind.”25 One can only hope
that Eco was being overly pessimistic about the prospects of de-inventing
“the enemy.”
*Simon Mayers has a PhD from the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of
Manchester. His areas of interest include the history of Jewish-Catholic relations,
the history of antisemitism and anti-Judaism, and constructions of “evil” and “the
other” in various discourses. E-mail: [email protected]
24. Steven K. Baum, “When Fairy Tales Kill,” Journal for the Study of
Antisemitism 1, no. 2 (2009), 201-202.
25. Eco, “Inventing the Enemy,” 18.
Hungarian Nazis (Photos by Zina Mihailova)
Budapest Hatefest—Part I: The Great Synagogue
Eszter Garai-Édler*
On February 20, 2013, the Hungarian far-right, Neo-Nazi party Jobbik
organized a demonstration in front of the Great Synagogue of Budapest.
Jobbik believed that it was “forbidden to be Hungarian” and felt threatened.
The triggering event was the Eurochallenge Cup basketball match on February 19, 2013, when the town of Tiszaliget hosted the Hungarian Szolnoki
Olaj and the Israeli Hapoel Holon—and the Hungarian flag and/or Szekely
flag (the type of flag used by a subgroup of the Hungarian minority living
mostly in Szekely Land, an ethno-cultural region in eastern Transylvania,
Romania) was prohibited from being displayed in the Tiszaliget sports hall.
In response, the Jobbiks protested in front of the Great Synagogue, on
Dohany Street, to show that “Hungary belongs to the Hungarians!”; they
aired their grievances on Facebook, titled “In Hungary the Hungarian flag
cannot be banned!”; and they protested at the Western Railway Station and
from there marched with a police escort to Tivadar Herzl Park, in front of
the Great Synagogue. In the end, about 12-15 Hungarian Scythians—a
nomadic people residing in the East European Pontic-Caspian steppe and
parts of Central Asia—gathered at the demonstration. The handsome girls
and boys, clad in black uniforms, lined up in a straight single line in front of
the main entrance of the synagogue.
The Hungarian and the Szekely flags were quickly unfurled, followed
by the flags of the ultra-nationalistic, irredentist organizations Betyarsereg
(Outlaw Army) and Hatvannegy Varmegye Ifjusagi Mozgalom (64 Counties Youth Movement). The movement, which was founded by Laszlo
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Toroczkai in 2001, got its name from the miscounted number of local government units. Their motto is “Faith, loyalty, bravery”; their symbol is the
country apple with the cross, taken from the old Hungarian crown symbols.
The demonstrators sang the national anthem, then the Szekely anthem, followed by a recital of the Szozat—a 19th-century poem set to music and
considered as the second national anthem of Hungary.
Upon hearing of the plans for this Nazi gathering, my co-organizer
Zina Mihailova and I called an antifascist demonstration at the Great Synagogue for 5:30 p.m. When we arrived, there were already a few young men
securing the site and reporting any and all developments gathering at the
Western Railways Station Square. The commander of the synagogue security guard force informed us that per police request, we were allowed to
demonstrate in the courtyard of the closed synagogue.
Then, not unlike our ancestors of seventy years earlier, we were led
into the synagogue garden to protest behind the synagogue gates. We were
only permitted to photograph the event from behind the synagogue fence.
There were some exchanges, but the story speaks for itself.
*Eszter Garai-Édler is desk editor at Geographical Institute, Research Centre for
Astronomy and Earth Sciences (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), H-1112 Budapest, Budaörsi út 45. E-mail to [email protected], Skype: eszter_garai
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Budapest Hatefest—Part II: Adam Csillag
Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf*
Hungarian Jews are fearful of how openly antisemitic and xenophobic
their politicians and non-Jewish countrymen are becoming. Some are even
declaring their fear that the EU state is on the path toward an ultra-nationalistic regime bent on persecuting Jews and Roma, not unlike Germany in the
early to mid 1930s.
The trepidation being felt by Jews, Roma, and other minorities in Hungary prompted an independent Jewish-Hungarian documentary filmmaker,
Adam Csillag, to start detailing his government’s activities and those of the
far-right-wing Jobbik opposition party. He’s particularly focused on efforts
to limit freedom of the press and on antisemitic and anti-Roma activity over
the past few years.
A recent Canadian billboard campaign in Hungary targeting would-be
Roma asylum-seekers hoping to migrate to Canada with the message that
new immigration laws severely limit their ability to seek refuge from persecution there led Csillag to contact the Canadian Jewish News (CJN) to alert
Canada’s Jewish community to the situation in his country.
Hungary is on Canada’s designated “safe countries” list of democratic
nations that it deems to have adequate legal and institutional protection for
their citizens. Csillag said there are legitimate reasons for Roma, and perhaps soon Jews, to seek asylum elsewhere. “Hungary is lying to Canadian
politicians when it says it is democratic,” he said. “Jobbik and its paramilitary [groups] are doing terrible things to Roma. I witnessed serial killings of
Roma in 2008. The police are against the Roma.”
In a recent phone interview from his home in Budapest, with his
daughter Anna translating, Csillag said public discourse in Hungary has
reached the point where “a disturbing amount” of people are unabashed
about insulting minorities, particularly Jews and Roma. He said he’s now
advising his daughter and all Jewish youth in Hungary to leave for their
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own safety and a better future. Anna, who is half-Jewish on her father’s
side, confirmed that for the past few years while attending university, her
friends and classmates have never been shy about telling her how much
they like her “despite” her heritage. Beyond that, Csillag said, many politicians in both the ruling Fidesz party—led by prime minister Viktor
Orban—and Jobbik share similar ideas regarding foreigners and minorities
on Hungarian soil.
A January 31 report in Spiegel Online seems to confirm Csillag’s
assertions that the boundaries between Fidesz and Jobbik’s ideologies “are
blurring.” Csillag, who acknowledged that his speaking out and raising an
alarm might endanger him, pointed out that while Orban was in opposition,
he began setting up grassroots, nationalistic groups to promote a pure Hungary. Many of the “main personalities” of those groups have since become
influential members of Jobbik, he said. The reason Orban set up the civilian
groups was to discredit the then-ruling Hungarian Socialist Party and those
on the left by labeling them anti-Hungarian, according to Csillag.
Orban’s friend and Fidesz co-founder, prominent Hungarian social
commentator Zsolt Bayer, wrote in the daily Magyar Hirlap newspaper in
January that Roma are “unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among
people. These Roma are animals, and they behave like animals. These animals shouldn’t be allowed to exist. In no way. That needs to be solved.
They should be stamped out—immediately and regardless of the method.”
Neither Orban nor any other Fidesz member denounced the article. In the
past, Bayer has also referred to Jews as “stinking excrement called something like Cohen,” according to the World Jewish Congress. Members of
Fidesz have also publicly demonstrated support for Miklos Horthy, the
World War II-era Hungarian prime minister who helped the Nazis murder
tens of thousands of the country’s Jews and Roma.
Last November, Jobbik member Marton Gyongyosi called for Jews to
be registered on lists as threats to national security. Massive protests broke
out in Budapest, prompting Gyongyosi to apologize and say his remarks
were misinterpreted—though the parliamentarian was never disciplined for
his comments. Orban’s office eventually denounced Gyongyosi’s remarks,
though it only did so 16 hours after the comments were uttered. Jewish
groups in Hungary were critical of the delay.
At the time, Hungarian Holocaust survivor and executive director of
the Hungarian Jewish Congregations’ Association Gusztav Zoltai said the
event and lack of action by Fidesz and Jobbik made Hungary “the shame of
Europe.” Csillag said Fidesz has also slowly been curtailing freedom of the
press and free speech, noting that most of the country’s TV and radio stations are increasingly falling under the control of the government and provoking anger at anyone who dares speak out against it.
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“My activities aren’t big enough to be a threat to the government,” he
said, noting that he’s usually out on the streets about three times a week to
document “the decline in democracy” in Hungary. “There’s only one radio
station that you could still consider to be ‘free,’ and that’s only because of
international media scrutiny,” Csillag said. “The government is building a
façade of democracy; behind that they are destroying basic rights. They are
giving Hungarians the option to focus their economic fears through hate.”
The net result, he said, is similar to what transpired in prewar Nazi Germany, where Roma and Jews were scapegoated for all of the country’s
problems. Csillag said that while there are still “plenty of good-willed people” in Hungary, power resides with Fidesz, which continues to foment
“anti-foreigner sentiment. “This is not just against Roma. It’s also against
Jews,” he said.
“I tell my daughter she needs to find a way to leave Hungary and find
a more stable place to live. If I am being honest, I cannot tell my children
that Hungary will be a good place to live in the coming years. I tell them to
prepare to leave at any moment,” Csillag added. “The [official] Jewish
community organizations must stop making compromises and speak much
more loudly now. They believe they only have Jobbik to fear, but they
should know better—that Fidesz is also the danger.”
*Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf is a writer and editor based in Toronto. Reprinted with
permission from Canadian Jewish News, February 19, 2013, where it appeared
under the title “Hungarian filmmaker fears for his children.” Photo of filmmaker
Adam Csillag by Gabriella Csoszo.
Post-Chavez Venezuela
Sammy Eppel*
When Vice President Nicolas Maduro announced to the world that
President Chavez had died, it was a traumatic moment for his followers and
no less a shock to his opponents. The entire country was watching and listening as the news was broadcast on radio and television. Maduro’s assertion that Chavez’s cancer was induced by his enemies, offering Arafat as an
example, sent chills down the spine of our community.
Sure enough, some followers that were outside the military hospital
immediately began shouting that the commandant was taken away by Jews!
With the outpouring of grief came the indictment that Chavez was murdered. All kinds of wild conspiracy theories began to take hold while scientists and doctors (on the government payroll) offered “proof” and began to
elaborate multiple conspiracy theories. Graffiti began to appear blaming the
Jews. The Jewish community went on high alert. They feared that a radical
group or someone from the lunatic fringe would avenge the commandant’s
death.
Think about Chavez’s contender Henrique Capriles. He was baptized a
Roman Catholic and was a devout follower of the Virgin, yet he was
unmercifully attacked and demonized when his Jewish ancestry was made
public. Looking ahead, 2013 will be a year of great economic crisis, and
given the devious nature of the regime, it is likely that “the Jews” will
continue to be the scapegoats.
After Chavez’s death, a snap election was called between Maduro and
Capriles in the next 40 days and with only two weeks of campaigning. During that time, official media continued with a clearly antisemitic overtone.
The elections were a disaster and caused a tremendous political crisis that
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exacerbated tempers and could produce an even more difficult situation for
Venezuelan Jews.
*Sammy Eppel is a Caracas-based political columnist, consultant, and frequent JSA
contributor.
Ksenofontov’s Noah Damning Ham
African Americans, Ambivalence,
and Antisemitism
Harold Brackman*
At UCLA, my doctoral dissertation on Black-Jewish relations grew out
of undergraduate gestation in those days when “Negro” was a polite term
for African American. Though never published as a book, the dissertation
had significant influence—to the good, I like to think—on the study of
what Ben Halpern called “the classic American minorities.” Yet it also
included one page among seven hundred that has caused me considerable
embarrassment.
I began a chapter with a long discussion of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, with Egypt and Sudan extending into East Africa. I concluded, on
balance, that biblical attitudes were favorable to the beauty and valor of
dark-skinned peoples, some of whom fought for or in alliance with Jews.1
Then I turned to the Talmud.
My fateful generalization was that “there is no denying that the Babylonian Talmud was the first source to read Negrophobic content” into the
Bible story of the disrespectful behavior of Noah’s son, Ham, and the
resulting curse (Genesis 9:18). Ham—who had already been blessed—is
not cursed. Instead, Noah’s curse falls on Ham’s son, Canaan, identified as
1. Ben Halpern, Blacks and Jews (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971).
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the progenitor of the people later conquered by the Israelites. Noah’s other
son, Cush—identified as the father of African peoples—is also not cursed.
But my reading at the time of Talmudic translations and secondary discussions in English led me to emphasize the significance of a few post-biblical
folkloric motifs unfavorable to Ham, including one suggesting he was smitten in the skin or “blackened in his face as a punishment” for the sin of
sexual depravity on the Ark.2
MY BLACK-JEWISH BLUES
Three years had passed before I realize that I had oversimplified in a
misleading way Talmudic racial attitudes. The Ethiopian Jewish scholar
Ephraim Isaac’s “Genesis, Judaism and ‘the Sons of Ham’ ” appeared in the
journal Slavery and Abolition (May 1980). In this essay, Isaac systematically demolished the overemphasis on Talmudic glosses on the so-called
“Curse of Ham” as well as discussions of this subject in my dissertation
and, among other places, in Winthrop Jordan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
(1968). Jordan influenced a whole generation of American scholars, including me. Unfortunately, he—like me—was entirely ignorant of both Hebrew
and Aramaic. His interpretation was based partly on a rather sloppy piecing
together of two or three folktales from the Soncino translation of the Talmud, plus reliance on Robert Graves and Raphael Patai’s popular but unreliable Hebrew Myths (1964). As soon as I read Isaac’s essay, I knew I had
made a mistake. My friend, now Yale emeritus professor David B. Davis
(also a Pulitzer Prize winner), also had second thoughts; he repudiated Jordan’s simplistic view in favor of Isaac’s in his own book, Slavery and
Human Progress (1984). Isaac had shown that some Talmudic glosses that
have been interpreted as racist were really not even about racial difference!
Subsequently, I learned from Bernard Lewis and David H. Aaron that these
Talmudic folktales, rather than being original, may have been a borrowing
from the Church Father Ephrem the Syrian, who independently and perhaps
earlier than Talmudic fabulists spun negative stories about Ham.3
2. Harold Brackman, “The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: A History of BlackJewish Relations Through 1900” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles,
1977), 80.
3. Ephraim Isaac, “Genesis, Judaism and the ‘Sons of Ham,’ ” Slavery and
Abolition 1 (1980): 3-17; David B. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 82-101; Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in
the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990), 124; David H. Aaron, “Early Rabbinic Exegesis on Noah’s Son Ham and
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The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (1991), by the anonymous “Historical Research Department” of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the
Nation of Islam, soon appeared on the literary scene—conspicuous by
omission was Noah’s curse and the alleged Jewish origins of African American racism. I was the first to write a book demolishing the Farrakhanites’
libelous thesis about Jewish domination of the slave trade, and only then did
Wellesley’s Tony Martin, a Farrakhan acolyte, open up a second front
against me.
In his The Jewish Onslaught (1993, self-published), Martin selectively
quoted from my dissertation regarding the Talmud and Ham’s claim of Jewish culpability in modern racism. The quotation was accurate but nevertheless misleading. As Martin and those who followed in his footsteps fail to
point out, my dissertation devotes one page to the Ham curse juxtaposed to
the ten-page Muslim-led Black African slave trade; the writers discussed
there were Arab Muslim.4
As the controversy over The Secret Relationship became big news in
the early 1990s, I did my best to correct the record by writing a letter to the
editor of The New York Times (published February 14, 1994). Then I convinced Isaac to write a short refutation, “Afterword: The Talmud Does Not
Teach Racism,” to my book, Ministry of Lies (1994). Finally, I wrote a
detailed correction of my dissertation error as well as other American scholars’ mistakes, published in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1997.5
In addition to the pioneering work of Isaacs, a number of other distinguished scholars—including Bernard Lewis, David H. Aaron, Benjamin
Braude, Paul Freedman, David M. Goldenberg, and Jonathan Schorch, all
with the requisite knowledge of the ancient languages—have rejected the
mischievous, misleading notion that a few fragmentary folktales of ambiguous meaning in the Talmud were “the origins of anti-black racism.”6
the So-Called ‘Hamitic Hypothesis,’ ” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 (1995): 724-26.
4. Tony Martin, The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1993), 34-35; Brackman, “The Ebb and Flow
of Conflict,” 88-102.
5. Harold Brackman, Ministry of Lies: The Truth behind the Nation of Islam’s
“The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews” (New York: Four Walls Eight
Windows Press, 1994); William and Mary Quarterly 54 (July 1997): 682-86, letter
from Harold Brackman.
6. Aaron, “Early Rabbinic Exegesis on Noah’s Son Ham,” 724-26; Benjamin
Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary Quarterly 54
(January 1997): 103-42; Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 86-104; David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of
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In the 19th century, American apologists for the antebellum South’s
peculiar institution found a convenient rationalization for race-based slavery in biblical and even Talmudic passages, which they interpreted or, more
often, misinterpreted, for proslavery, racist purposes. This story—which I
also told in my dissertation when discussing the range of attitudes toward
slavery and race held by American Jews before the Civil War—has most
recently been retold in Stephen R. Haynes’ Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (2002). Alas, Haynes’ book continues to
propagate the outdated, erroneous view that the rabbis invented racism—a
claim that, whatever Haynes intended, has become a foundation of the new
African American antisemitism.7
PREJUDICE
IN
BLACK
AND
WHITE
Why after the Holocaust should we continue to study antisemitism in
general and African American antisemitism in particular? The poet Maya
Angelou recalls her youthful dream that there was no more “need to discuss
racial prejudice. Hadn’t we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining
Jews from the hell of concentration camps? Race prejudice was dead.”8
Were this true of both racism and antisemitism!
Despite Angelou’s disappointed hope, polls show that, at least in the
United States, overall levels of antisemitism—as well as anti-black
racism—are much lower than during the Great Depression and World War
II (the big drop occurring mostly between the 1960s and 1990s). And
nobody can deny that African Americans—around 10 percent of the American population—are only a fraction of all antisemites.9
The reasons, it seems to me, to continue to study Jew hatred, including
nonwhite antisemitism, are these. First, there is reason to be skeptical about
reported post-Holocaust levels of antisemitism because the decline probably
partly reflects that it’s no longer polite, post-Hitler, to be antisemitic. Yet in
many influential circles, it’s quite all right to be “anti-Zionist” or “antiHam: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Racism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 168-77; Jonathan Schorch, Jews and Blacks in
the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 135-65.
7. Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American
Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 24-25.
8. Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name (New York: Random House,
1974), 2.
9. See Leonard Dinnerstein, “Antisemitism in America: An Update 19952012,” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism 4 (2012): 557-66; also, Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994),
198.
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monotheist” (see the controversy over Jan Assmann’s latest work)—ideologies that, at least sometimes, are used as a cover by antisemites.10
Second, regarding African Americans, polling data has shown a substantial minority (now measured at around 30 percent) to be antisemitic—a
level of hostility that has remained quite high since the first polls in the
1960s, even while hostility to Jews among the general population has
declined to around 15 percent.11
Despite this, the resistances to studying African American antisemitism in particular remain quite strong. First is the argument that African
Americans can’t be prejudiced against Jews because they are immune to
“racism” by virtue of their status (in the past and perhaps the present) as an
“oppressed minority.” In other words, only the racism—or antisemitism—
of “dominant groups” with the power to inflict harm is to be taken
seriously.12
This argument, implicit in politically correct prejudice, pops up in the
oddest of places. For example, Daniel Boyarin, in his book about the Apostle Paul, quotes and embraces the argument of biblical scholar E. P. Sanders
that: “We shall all agree that exclusivism is bad when practiced by the dominant group. Things look different if one thinks of minority groups that are
trying to maintain their own identity.” Hence, it’s tolerable for the Amish—
or persecuted Diaspora Jews—to buoy themselves psychologically by
adopting “exclusivist” or “intolerant” attitudes toward “outsiders.” While
this rationalization for prejudice may seem appealing at first thought, it
becomes problematic in practice. Many of the same observers who dismiss
Louis Farrakhan’s antisemitism as “insignificant” because African Americans are allegedly powerless to do harm to Jews—one might ask the relatives of Yankel Rosenbaum, the rabbinic student stabbed to death in 1991’s
Crown Heights riot, how they feel about this!—also interpret every ambiguous word or action by Jews or Israelis, no matter the mitigating circumstances or existential threats they face, as “racist.”13
10. Robert S. Wistrich, ed., Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary
World (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1990); Jan Assmann,
The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2010); Richard Wolin, “Biblical Blame Shift,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 15, 2013.
11. Dinnerstein, “Antisemitism in America,” 557-66; Anti-Defamation League,
“ADL Poll Finds Antisemitic Attitudes on Rise in America,” http://archive.adl.org/
PresRele/ASUS_12/6154_12.htm
12. Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 87.
13. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 250-52.
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Bigots come in all colors and creeds. Though bigots with power are
more dangerous, bigots with less power are also odious. Adolph Reed, Jr.,
could not be more wrong to mock the existence of “Blackantisemitism”
[sic], which he compares to “ ‘Africanized’ killer bees . . . a racialized
fantasy, a projection of white anxieties about dark horrors lurking beyond
the horizon.”14 Another argument against focusing on nonwhite intolerance
is that Jews should not throw stones because they need to give much more
attention to “Jewish racism” than to African American Jew hatred. This
relativistic argument was implicitly embodied in the title of an early anthology on the subject, introduced by Nat Hentoff: Black Antisemitism and Jewish Racism (1969). In this work, Hentoff adopted the self-critical argument
that Jews are “the goyim” in America—the only question is “who among us
are the Germans.”15
Of course, it’s true that there have long been and no doubt still are
Jewish racists. The search for them is part of the motive for the development of “whiteness studies,” which explore the alleged Jewish quest to
“become white” in America. Jewish “whiteness studies”—as practiced
deftly by Matthew Fry Jacobson and Eric L. Goldstein and clumsily by
Karen Brodkin (she outs “grandma’s racism”!)—are a fashionable update
of the traditional study of the American Jewish quest to succeed by assimilating, however great the price.16 In addition, the “whiteness studies” movement ironically echoes African American criticism of Jews for “passing as
white.”17
14. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land, 87.
15. Nat Hentoff, introduction to James Baldwin et al., Black Antisemitism and
Jewish Racism (New York: R. W. Baron, 1969), xvii.
16. Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Paul Ritterband, “Modern Times and Jewish Assimilation,” in
The Americanization of the Jews, ed. Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen
(Washington Square, NY: NYU Press, 1995), 377-94; Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 171-200; Eric L. Goldstein,
The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2006); Karen Brodkin Sachs, How the Jews Became
White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1998), 18. See also Emily Miller Budick’s account of the
running battle between Ralph Ellison and Irving Howe, whom Ellison accused of
“passing for white.” Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22.
17. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 235-39. See Budick, Blacks and Jews in
Literary Conversation, 22. James Baldwin made a similar charge to Ellison’s:
James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 739-48.
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Here, too, I bear an uncomfortable relation to this movement, whose
practitioners sometimes cite my dissertation—uncomfortable because,
despite the flattering attention, I rather feel like paraphrasing Karl Marx’s
disclaimer: “Je ne suis pas Marxiste.” Of course, the more able acolytes of
“whiteness studies” have a point; the question is what exactly that point is.
It is quite legitimate to argue that American Jews have always been of two
minds about African Americans—some embracing and empathetic, others
(in decreasing numbers over time) quite the opposite. In fact, I would even
argue that “ambivalence” is a key, if not the key, to understanding how both
Jews and African Americans have always felt about each other.18
Since long before the Depression Era and World War II, African
American attitudes toward Jews had been a study in ambivalence. Identifying with the Bible’s Chosen People, African Americans also held up modern-day Jews as a model of economic success, educational attainment, and
group solidarity. But, fusing envy with emulation and antagonism with
admiration, they simultaneously projected a negative mirror image of Jews
as a pariah people, stripped of divine favor and guilty of exploiting the
blacks who patronized Jewish merchants in the South as well as the North.
Yet, a close reading of Eric Goldstein’s acclaimed The Price of Whiteness suggests that it is precisely the Jewish version of ambivalence about
self-definition—the need to be “the same as yet different from” other
whites—that has also made American Jews into “unreliable whites”: just as
the Ku Klux Klan has always suspected!19
Goldstein answers the traditional account of Black-Jewish civil rights
cooperation with a counter-narrative of assimilating Jews absorbing the
racial prejudice of popular culture almost by osmosis. It is easy to cite
examples, such as the period from World War I to World War II, when
“Jewish Hollywood” tolerated or propagated demeaning “Sambo” stereotypes of black people. This is the master thesis of Michael Paul Rogin’s
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot
(1996). Among the most malicious spinoffs of “whiteness studies” is
Harvard-educated Jeffrey Melnick’s A Right to Sing the Blues: African
Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (1999), which elaborates the
alleged unending Jewish ripoff of black popular culture. According to Mel18. On “whiteness studies” as an ideology redefining historical research, see
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); David R. Roediger, ed., Working Toward
Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Perseus, 2005);
and Joe L. Kicheloe et al., eds., White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Others have also emphasized “ambivalence”—but usually about Jews or African Americans, not both.
19. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 235-39.
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nick, Jews “stole” African Americans’ music—yet, African Americans are
immune from the charge of “stealing” the Jews’ religion by appropriating
Hebrew Bible stories. Melnick followed with Black-Jewish Relations on
Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (2000), which flirts with
the argument that it was the northern Jewish businessman Frank’s stereotypically ugly “Jewish looks” that almost guaranteed his lynching for raping and murdering Mary Phagan in Jim Crow Georgia on the basis of the
dubious testimony of his African American janitor.20
Yet the Jewish desire to assimilate—to “become white”—was a very
complicated thing. Sears Roebuck’s Julius Rosenwald, a second-generation
German Jew raised in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, came to explain his legendary philanthropic impulse toward African
Americans not by citing his Jewish roots, but in terms of “We Anglo-Saxons.” He credited upper-class WASP William Henry Baldwin, Jr., general
manager of the Southern Pacific Railroad, with awakening his “more or less
dormant sympathies” toward African Americans needing education. In
other words, it was precisely Rosenwald’s aspiration to be accepted by “the
best whites”—in Yiddish edeler goys (“refined Gentiles”)—that led him to
embrace and not shun black people.
Hasia R. Diner’s In the Almost Promised Land (1977) demonstrated
that Eastern European Jewish immigrants combined aspirations to assimilate with sympathy for African Americans, manifest across the Yiddish
newspaper spectrum in an implicit affirmation that racial tolerance was both
a Jewish and an American value. As the Forvertz put it in 1917: “The situation of the Negroes in America is very comparable to the situation of the
Jews . . . in Russia. The Negro diaspora, the special laws . . . the Negro
hopes are very similar to those which we Jews lived through.”
This attitude extended not only to the first NAACP presidents Joel and
Arthur Spingarn (German Jews), but also to the Jewish labor movement,
20. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 153-57; Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to
Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993); Michael Paul Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in
The Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American
Popular Song (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Melnick, BlackJewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (Jackson,
MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 54-55; Terry Teachout, “The TwoWay Street,” Commentary (June 2011), 58-61; Harold Brackman, “Let’s Face the
Music and Dance: African Americans, Jews, and the Creation of Modern Popular
Music,” Simon Wiesenthal Center, October 2010, http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/
apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=LSKWLbPJLnF&b=4441467&ct=8842371#.Uhdc4X
949w4
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particularly in the garment trades, which aligned itself with African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph.21
The point, which Eric Goldstein sometimes hints at, is that as successive generations of twentieth-century Jewish Americans became “more
white” in the sense of assimilated and successful, they often also became
more, not less, affirming of what they perceived to be the cause of racial
justice in the name of being Jewish.
This is a paradox, perhaps, in the minds of “whiteness studies” ideologues as well as Black Nationalists like Farrakhan. Farrakhan—Black separatist Elijah Muhammad’s successor as head of the Nation of Islam—
views the civil rights movement as a Jewish conspiracy to sell African
Americans on a bogus integrationist agenda; others see “whiteness” as the
equivalent of “original sin” that Jews can’t escape. But there is no contradiction in the minds of mainstream American Jews—among whom pollsters
today have a tough job finding any who admit to racial prejudice.22
The ultimate irony of “whiteness studies” is that they have become the
vogue at precisely the same time that new demographic trends—particularly the growing number of, as well as the self-consciousness of, “Jews of
color” (estimates 100,000 to 250,000)—are remaking the face of the Jewish
future in a multiracial direction, primarily through the impact of interracial
intermarriage. And Ethiopian Jews may have their complaints with what
they perceive as “the Establishment” in both the United States and Israel,
but they don’t take kindly to being lectured that Judaism or Jews are necessarily “white racists.” I take issue with Melanie Kaye/Kantrowicz’s antiIsrael “radical Diasporism,” but she’s on point in her criticisms of what she
calls “faddist White Studies.”23
There have been Jews of many different hues—by descent or conversion—probably since “the mixed multitude” leaving Egypt with Moses.
Ethiopia’s Falashas or Beta Israel fall within this covenantal fellowship
21. Hasia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks,
1915-1935 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 28-88, 199-235; Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 94, 286; Cheryl L. Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: BlackJewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006), 26.
22. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 4-5. Jewish women multiculturalists may
have a particularly hard time maintaining their Jewish identity white satisfying their
“Third World” allies; if they abandon Jewishness, they are still suspect as “white.”
See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 374-84.
23. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowicz, The Color of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical
Diasporism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 5-7, 36.
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under the 1971 ruling by chief rabbi Ovadia Yossef that they are “descendants of Jewish tribes that moved South to Cush”—a ruling that became the
basis of their incorporation under Israel’s Law of Return in 1975. In the
United States, though the extent is debated, some slaves were converted by
their masters to Judaism, while other African Americans after the Civil War
began “converting themselves” by forming “Black-Jewish” sects that sometimes conformed to Jewish religious practices, but sometimes did not. Then,
after World War I came a second wave of Black-Jewish sects founded primarily by West Indian immigrants, some claiming deep Jewish roots. One
such “Black Jew,” Arnold Ford, actually tried to convert Black Nationalist
Marcus Garvey to Judaism. Though small in number then compared to now,
“Black Jews” always represented a challenge for advocates of a lily-white
Judaism as well as for latter-day “whiteness studies” ideologues invested in
the same ideology—that American Jews are deep-dyed culturally white.24
Finally, the impact of African American attitudes and behavior on
Jewish Americans remains uncertain. The “whiteness school” has a tendency to treat African Americans as “invisible”—passive characters who
are acted upon, but who don’t act back. Prejudicial black attitudes toward
Jews going back to slavery or post-slavery times, the rise of African American antisemitic demagogues starting with Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, and
Harlem race riots with anti-Jewish implications in 1935 and 1943 do not
register on the radar screen of “whiteness” ideologues—not unlike Captain
Ahab’s pursuit of the Great White Whale. I would argue that it’s the
“whiteness studies” ideologues who are really the monomaniacs hunting
Moby Dick.25
24. Elly M. Wynia, Church of God and Saints of Christ: The Rise of Black Jews
(New York: Garland, 1994); James E. Landing, Black Judaism: Story of an American Movement (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2002), 50-61; Yvonne
Chireau, “Black Culture and Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters
with Judaism, 1790-1930; an Overview,” in Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism, ed. Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 24; Roberta S. Gold, “The Black Jews of
Harlem: Representation, Identity, and Race, 1920-1939,” American Quarterly 55
(June 2003): 179-225; Wilson J. Moses, The Wings of Ethiopia: Studies in American-American Life and Letters (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1990), 2741.
25. Cheryl L. Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great
Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Dommenic J. Capeci, Jr.,
The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).
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Only when he considers the 1960s does Goldstein recognize that African Americans, like Black Nationalists and Black Power Movements, can
have an impact on American Jewish attitudes, in mostly negative ways.26
Historical accuracy as well as political honesty require accepting that
African American hostility toward Jews—one side of a two-sided, ambivalent tradition—has roots that must be explored because, without such exploration, there can be no adequate understanding of current Black-Jewish
tensions.27
This year, 2013, marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Leo Frank
case and founding of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the fiftieth anniversary of Norman Podhoretz’s famous (or infamous) essay in Commentary, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” and Louis Farrakhan’s 80th
birthday—so it seems to be a ripe time for this study.
ATTITUDES: PRE
AND
POST CIVIL WAR
How did African Americans acquire their attitudes toward Jews? There
were at least several thousand African Muslims, sold as slaves across the
Atlantic, who may have carried such attitudes with them from the Old
World. Then there is the well-reported case of a self-identified African Jew,
“Uncle Billy” Simmons, who claimed to be a Rechabite from Madagascar.
Congregation Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, authorized his
seating “in the nave of the Temple,” despite the congregation’s formal ban
against admitting “free people of color.”28
Obviously, what mattered infinitely more were African American contacts with the Southern Jews. According to one study, one fourth of Southern Jews—the same percentage as the non-Jewish population—owned
slaves. The master-slave relationship between Jews and African Americans
mostly occurred in cities rather than on plantations. It usually was unexceptional, but sometimes produced remarkable results. Daniel Warburg, a German immigrant to “Creole” New Orleans, with a slave woman fathered
Daniel Eugène Warburg, whom he educated in Europe. Francis Lewis Cardozo, Sr., and Thomas Y. Cardozo—African American political leaders in
26. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 213-21.
27. On the predominately positive side of the dualism, see Harold Brackman,
“Zionism in Black and White, Part I: 1898-1948,” Midstream 56 (January 2010):
17-23, and “Part II: 1948-2010,” Midstream 56 (Spring 2010): 23-28.
28. Michael Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African
Muslims in the Americas (London: Cambridge University Press, 2005); James William Hagy, This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston
(Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 101.
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South Carolina during Reconstruction—were children of a distinguished
Jewish father.29
Though it is true that the great majority of Southern Jews did not challenge slavery and racial subordination, there were significant exceptions. In
researching my dissertation, I found German-Jewish immigrant peddlers
who offended the white master class by calling their African American
slave customers “Mr.” The Friedman brothers of rural Georgia went so far
as to buy a slave, Peter Still, from his master without revealing that their
real purpose was to take him to Ohio to free him.30
What did Southern African Americans think of the Jews they encountered? Evidence about how they viewed “real Jews” is scarce. Anecdotes,
related by whites for humorous effect, included the following; “An old
pious Negro mammy” pestered her mistress to see “some of the Children of
Israel.” The mistress allowed her to visit a nearby village, where a Jewish
peddler could be found. The servant soon returned, indignantly exclaiming:
“Missus! Dat’s no Children o’ Israel. Dat’s de same ol’ Jew peddler w’at
sole me dem pisen, brass yearrings [last year] . . . Sih low down w’ite man
as dat, he never belong to no Lan’ o’ Cainyan.”31
Then there’s the tale of the slave girl who hid beneath her bed in fear
of meeting her new mistress. This colloquy then occurred: “Why don’t you
want to live with Miss Isaacs? She is a good lady and will make you a kind
mistress.” The slave girl’s answer: “They tell me Miss Isaacs is a Jew; an if
the Jews kill the Lord and Master, what will they do to a poor little nigger
like me?”32
Beneath this self-serving humor—both racially patronizing and tinged
with antisemitism—there probably was a kernel of truth about the contrast
29. Bertram Wallace Korn, “Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South,” in The
Jewish Experience in America (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1969), vol. 3, 179-80, 200-08; Bertram Wallace Korn, The Early Jews of
New Orleans (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969), 181-82;
John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 13-14, 98; Charles Reznikoff with Uriah Z. Engleman, The Jews
of Charleston (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1950), 160-61.
30. Maxwell Whiteman, ed., The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: The Narrative
of Peter and Vina Still after Forty Years of Slavery (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1971); Cyrus Adler, I Have Considered These Days (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1941), 4-5; Naomi W. Cohen, A
Dual Heritage: The Public Career of Oscar S. Straus (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), 6; Brackman, “The Ebb and Flow of Conflict,”
267-70.
31. Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 198.
32. Brackman, “The Ebb and Flow of Conflict,” 273-74.
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between African attitudes toward “real Jews” and “biblical Hebrews.” On
the one hand, African Americans in the South may have appreciated their
respectful treatment—first by German Jewish and then Eastern European
Jewish peddlers. Yet there was probably also tension in the relationship,
reflected in the incident from 1873 of three black plantation hands being
lynched after they robbed and killed an itinerant Jewish newcomer from
Germany.33
Was this post-slavery murder an “ordinary” heinous crime? Probably.
Yet we can never know if it was influenced by the teachings of the old
white master class, who catechized their slaves: “Q. Who killed Jesus? A.
The wicked Jews.” And masters also delighted in one verse of a spiritual
sung by slaves: “Virgin Mary had one son. The cruel Jews him hung.”34
On the other hand, there was an overwhelmingly positive identification
on the part of slaves and then freed people with the Hebrew Bible. An
unusual case would be pious Lucy Marks, a member of Philadelphia’s Congregation Mivveh Israel buried in their cemetery. It’s uncertain whether she
descended from “Black-Jewish” slaves from the Caribbean or acquired her
Judaism in the household of Rachel Marks.35
While Christian slaves prayed for a new Moses or Joshua to deliver
them from bondage, black abolitionists also began quoting the Old Testament prophecy that “Great men will come from Egypt, and Ethiopia will
stretch out her hand to God” (Psalms 68:32). This identification, not with
“the Hebrew children” but with the biblical Hamites who were empire
builders in Africa, subtly nurtured what by the late nineteenth century was a
nascent, not necessarily antisemitic, Black Nationalism. African American
abolitionists tended to identify with Jewish emancipation struggles in the
present as well as past, yet occasionally they slipped into antisemitic language to castigate white proslavery churches as “synagogues of Satan” on
the same level as Jewish “swine of the Scriptures.”36
After freedom was finally won in 1865, African Americans continued
to cling to the symbolism of the Exodus from Egypt as a harbinger for them
33. Rudolf Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana (New York: KTAV Publishing
House, 1970), 61.
34. Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 198; Brackman, “The Ebb and Flow
of Conflict,” 273-74.
35. Kaye/Kantrowitz, Colors of Jews, 48; Whiteman, ed., The Kidnapped and
the Ransomed, 15.
36. Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 236-39; Jarmain Wesley
Loguen, As a Slave and as a Freeman (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968
[1859]), 266; Brackman, “The Ebb and Flow of Conflict,” 302.
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as a “newly chosen people” who would eventually escape sharecropping,
segregation, and lynching.37
Yet, there was a subtle post-Civil War change in mainstream African
American Christianity that affected attitudes toward Jews. Northern white
Protestant seminaries sent missionaries south to train the first generation of
free southern black ministers and teachers. The missionaries often sought to
“de-Judaize” the faith of the freed people, who, allegedly, did not understand the New Testament. According to one Northern army chaplain,
“There is no part of the Bible with which they are so familiar as the story of
the deliverance of the Children of Israel. Moses is their ideal of all that is
high, and noble, and perfect, in man. [They] have been accustomed to
regard Christ not so much in the light of a Spiritual Deliver, as that of a
second Moses.”38
African American leaders of churches and schools responded to such
pressures by demoting the slave songs and folk tales in favor of new Christological hymns and sermons. They castigated Jewish businessmen who
violated Sunday closing laws for “desecrating our Sabbath and insulting our
religion.” While not hard-core antisemitism, the emerging Black Fundamentalist mindset helped create a cultural environment in which “Christ
killer” accusations against Jews could more easily insinuate themselves.
According to the autobiographical recollections of African American writers, the view of Jews as deicides remained a powerful force in shaping
twentieth-century African American religiosity.39
Richard Wright wrote in Black Boy (1945) of his Mississippi and Tennessee childhood: “All of us Black people who lived in the neighborhood
hated Jews, not because they exploited us, but because we had been taught
at home and in Sunday School that Jews were ‘Christ killers.’ ” James
Baldwin, a minister’s stepson, wrote in his essay for Commentary, “The
Harlem Ghetto: 1948,” that “the traditional Christian accusation that the
Jews killed Christ is neither questioned nor doubted. . . . Just as society
must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol. Georgia has the
37. Arnold Shankman, Ambivalent Friends: Afro-Americans View the Immigrant (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 115; Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz, Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (New
York; Simon and Schuster, 2010), 110-12.
38. Peter Kolchin, First Freedoms: The Responses of American Blacks to
Emancipation and Reconstruction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 118.
39. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 174-76; Shankman, Ambivalent Friends, 123.
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Negro and Harlem has the Jew.” Only later did Baldwin argue that African
American antisemitism was pretty much solely an “antiwhite” reflex.40
The overall generalization that needs to be made at this juncture is
that—before the large-scale Black-Jewish encounters in the context of
twentieth-century ghettos—powerful ideological currents were already in
play among African Americans that could generate and sustain antisemitic
traditions.
GHETTO BLOODSUCKERS
In the 1990s, Louis Farrakhan embellished the charge that Jewish
merchants, by then a declining presence in African American neighborhoods, were “bloodsuckers.” The accusation was an old one, going back to
1900 or even a little before, when African Americans and Jews began their
modern encounter in urban neighborhoods, first in the South and then
increasingly in the North. Indeed, the pejorative “Jew merchant” was
applied by African Americans to Greek, Italian, and later Arab and other
white ethnic businessmen.41
Itinerant Eastern European Jewish merchants began to travel throughout the South in the 1880s. Like German-Jewish immigrant peddlers earlier,
they won black clientele by offering them a combination of courtesy and
credit. This meant a smile and a handshake, the respectful appellation “Mr.”
or “Mrs.,” and selling consumer goods for the promise of future payment in
cotton.42
No particular friend of the Jews, the Southern historian Bell Wiley,
like others, recalled that in his hometown the lone Jewish storekeeper “got
most of the black trade because he treated Negroes as human beings and
was kindly to them, taking time to joke, inquire about their families and
otherwise manifest interest in them.”43
40. Shankman, Ambivalent Friends, 133-34; Richard Wright, Black Boy (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), 70; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 68, 73; Sundquist, Strangers in the Land, 40; James
Baldwin, “Negroes Are Antisemitic Because They’re Anti-White,” The New York
Times, April 9, 1967, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwinantisem.html
41. Clive Webb, “Jewish Merchants and Black Customers in the Age of Jim
Crow,” Southern Jewish History 2 (1999): 55-80.
42. Harry Golden, Forgotten Pioneer (Cleveland: World Publishing Company,
1963).
43. Webb, “Jewish Merchants and Black Customers in the Age of Jim Crow,”
55-80.
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Once again, ambivalence reigned, starting in the post-Civil War South
as African Americans transitioned from rural areas, where Jewish peddlers
went out of their way to accommodate the freed people—in Tennessee, in
1868, suffering lynching as a consequence—to cities where the situation
was more complex. Did Jewish peddlers and merchants catering to a black
clientele charge too much? Historian Clive Webb has raised the question,
but exactly what should low-capital/high-risk Jewish businessmen have
charged black customers to whom they advanced credit, which almost nonJewish merchants did? No doubt some drove a hard bargain. But then
there’s David Pearlman, arriving in Georgia in 1880, who actually charged
his black customers less than he charged whites. Jewish merchants were
often the only option for black tenant farmers or sharecroppers who wanted
to stretch their purchasing power to buy, not only seed and farming tools,
but consumer goods ranging from wedding rings to calico dresses to a new
pair of shoes. Webb condescends to as “sentimental” or “romantic” Louis
Schmeir’s sympathetic, well-documented account of Jewish peddlers in the
Jim Crow South, but withholds appropriate adjectives as “vicious” and
“undocumented” the aspersions cast by African American antisemites such
as Harold Cruse, whom he quotes.44
Credit was welcome, but ambivalence was reflected in North Carolina
black folklore, where Jim Jones buys from a Jewish merchant a suit that
shrinks as soon as he goes out in the rain. Returning to the store, he asks the
merchant, “Do you remember me?” The merchant responds: “Sure, I
remember you. How you’s grown!” More chilling, the African American
sociologist St. Claire Drake remembers a hot day when he and his grandmother passed the house of a Jew, who invited them in for a cold drink. As
soon as they returned home, his grandmother warned him that “they”
clearly cheat blacks: “You’ve got to be careful.” Mark Twain—not a
friendly observer—generalized: “Whites detested the Jew, and it is doubtful
if the Negro loved him.”
In early twentieth-century Atlanta, propinquity sometimes meant serious crime. Peters Street clothier Morris Greenblatt was shot and killed by a
repeat thief. Two Jewish women were stabbed outside Grady Hospital. The
following year, Jacob Hirsowitz, one of the leading members of the Russian
community, was murdered by several Negroes who attempted to steal a
revolver from his pawnshop. Aaron Morris, a recently arrived barber, was
killed after trying to protect his landlady from assault. One again, there’s no
evidence of antisemitic motivation—but, given neighborhood friction, one
44. Louis Schmier, “For Him the Schwartzers Couldn’t Do Enough: A Jewish
Peddler and His Black Customers,” Southern Jewish History 73 (1983), 39-55;
Webb, “Jewish Merchants and Black Customers in the Age of Jim Crow,” 57, 76.
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can wonder. It is no surprise that if in a racial tinderbox like Atlanta—after
a white riot in 1906 against African Americans was wrongly blamed on a
Jewish saloon keeper selling to black customers—Black-Jewish relations
took a turn for the worse, culminating in the Leo Frank case, when African
American and Jewish newspapers recriminated against each other. Historian
and educator Horace Mann Bond remembered a childhood taunt—“nigger,
nigger, nigger”—from the son of an Atlanta store owner, to which he
responded “You Christ killer.”45
Booker T. Washington combined private reservations about Eastern
European Jewish immigrants with public praise for assimilating American
Jews as a role model for aspiring African Americans. In his home county of
Tuskegee, Alabama, black voters reputedly helped elect Sam Marx
sheriff.46
In New York City, the Eastern European Jewish influx was making the
East Side a world in itself at the same time that native-born black New
Yorkers, supplemented by the first Southern arrivals, were moving to the
West Side. Not until Harlem was transformed after 1900 was there a largescale interaction. Even so, there was enough contact to generate both cooperation and conflict. The first collaborations between mostly German-Jewish managers and African performers predate the Jazz Age, dating back to
the 1890s. In terms of conflict and prejudice, immigrant Jewish merchants
sometimes stereotyped their black customers, while “Colonel Hardscrabble,” a columnist for the African American New York Globe, reported to his
readers how “a fork-nosed Jew” victimized him on the East Side. In 1905,
Jessie Fortune, a black schoolteacher, told readers of the New York Age
about her sojourn to the East Side: “The [Jews’] sole aim seems to be earning money.” And, according to a columnist in the New York Age in 1912,
45. Webb, “Jewish Merchants and Black Customers,” 60; Steven Hertzberg,
Strangers Within the Gate: The Jews of Atlanta, 1845-1915 (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society of America, 1978), 181-201; Shankman, Ambivalent Friends,
138n3. I know of only one instance of a Jew accused of participation in racist
violence against African Americans. After Springfield, Illinois, erupted in a race
riot in 1908, Abraham Raymer, a Russian immigrant peddler from St. Louis, was
indicted for murder for allegedly inciting the mob that stabbed and lynched African
American William Donegan. Ironically, the mob also attacked a Jewish-owned
pawnshop. Raymer was the only Jew among 115 identified rioters. He may have
been guilty of incitement by yelling “nigger!,” but was acquitted. See Roberta
Senechal de la Roche, In Lincoln’s Shadow: The 1908 Race Riot in Springfield,
Illinois (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 73, 97, 107,
168-71.
46. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington in Perspective (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1988), 152-63.
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“Because the [Russian] peasant is sometimes slow witted and uneducated,
the Jew if allowed a free hand could devour him.” “Negroes are fleeing
from the American Kishineff [sic], Evansville, Indiana,” another African
newspaper had declared in 1903; “shall the Negroes look to the czar of
Russia for protection, since neither the President of the United States nor
the Mayor of Evansville seems interested in protecting them?”47
W. E. B. Du Bois during his antisemitic phase, ca. 1896
It was from the status-conscious, race-conscious milieu of late nineteenth-century America that Massachusetts-born W. E. B. Du Bois
emerged. Later, after working closely with Jews for years in the NAACP
and admiring 1917’s Balfour Declaration, Du Bois developed into a paragon of Black-Jewish cooperation, opposing the antisemitic demagoguery of
Marcus Garvey in Harlem as well as Hitler in Berlin. But earlier, his attitude had been quite different.
Though Joel E. Spingarn, Arthur Spingarn, Henry Moskowitz, Rabbi
Stephen S. Wise, Lillian Wald, and other Jews were prominent in the formation of the NAACP, Du Bois’ brainchild, he began his career tinged with
fin-de-siècle antisemitism. Studying at the University of Berlin in the
1890s, he returned to the United States imbued not only with the latest in
German scholarly methods but also with his own version of the Volkisch
47. Isabel Boiko Price, “Black Response to Antisemitism: Negroes and Jews in
New York, 1880 to World War II” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1973),
35; Shankman, Ambivalent Friends, 133; Philip S. Foner, “Black-Jewish Relations
in the Opening Years of the Twentieth Century,” Phylon 36 (1975): 363.
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nationalism associated with historian Heinrich von Treitschke. Described
by Du Bois as “the fire-eating pan-German” and “by far the most interesting” of his professors, Treitschke modernized Martin Luther’s lament that
“the Jews are our misfortune.” Du Bois rejected Treitschke’s disparagement
of Africans as a race without a history and mulattoes as an inferior breed,
but absorbed to some degree Treitschke’s view of Jews as degenerate internationalists incapable of assimilating into the organic nation state. Though
Du Bois recollected that he “followed the Dreyfus case” and was aware of
“Jewish pogroms and segregation in Russia,” his interest did not then translate into fellow feeling. When visiting Poland during a summer recess, he
was light complexioned enough to have a question whispered in his ear by
the driver of a rickety cab in a town north of Slovenia. The driver asked
whether Du Bois wanted to rent a room in the part of town “unter die
Juden?” He “stared and then said yes. I stayed at a little Jewish inn.” Yet
despite being mistaken for one, Du Bois found Jews to be “a half-veiled
mystery” lacking a “strong middle class,” and, as he complained about the
Jewish passengers on the ship that carried him back to America, typified by
“the low mean cheating Pobel [rabble].”48
The same sentiments pervaded the unsettling passages in The Souls of
Black Folk (1903), removed from the 1953 edition, disparaging as “heir[s]
to the slave baron” the “shrewd and unscrupulous” Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the South who, together with the “thrifty and avaricious”
Yankees, “could squeeze more blood from debt-cursed tenants.” The putative victims of Jewish-Yankee exploitation were Du Bois’ fellow African
Americans, who figured in his romantic racialism as the newly chosen people, destined to infuse America’s Anglo-Saxon civilization with desperately
needed spirituality, passion, and “soul.”49
48. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of the German Ideology: Intellectual Origins
of the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1964), 200-2; The Autobiography of
W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: International Publishers,
1968), 164; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 18681919 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 136, 241, 248; Michael P.
Kramer, “W. E. B. Du Bois, American Nationalism, and the Jewish Question,” in
Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, ed. Reynolds J. ScottChildress (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 184-86.
49. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David W. Blight and Robert
Gooding-Williams (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 112-5, 136-7, 157, 20910n20; Kramer, “W. E. B. Du Bois, American Nationalism, and the Jewish Question,” 171, 180, 187-89; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993),
461-3.
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Marcus Garvey, ca. 1920
MARCUS GARVEY,
AKA
BLACK MOSES
A movement that had elements of Black Nationalism, but would be
more accurately called Pan-Africanism, emerged in the late nineteenth century. Founding father Edward Wilmot Blyden, whose career triangulated
between the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa with visits to the Holy
Land, embraced Theodor Herzl and “that marvelous movement called Zionism” as a model for African liberation. W. E. B. Dubois—in the wake of the
Balfour Declaration after he outgrew his callow antisemitism—joined this
same tradition. But this black perspective became a very different matter
with Jamaica-born Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey.50
Arriving in the United States in 1915, Garvey may then have seen
African Americans and American Jews as Diaspora peoples each destined
to renew ties with their ancestral homelands, but this was a view he later
deemphasized. The year 1919 witnessed Garvey’s meteoric rise as leader of
probably the first authentic African American mass movement—a movement that with “Black Zionism” raised the banner of “Back to Africa.”
Jailed for mail fraud, he blamed his conviction on Jewish prosecutors and
judges and the NAACP. He defied the NAACP by cultivating the support of
the KKK. Deported as an undesirable alien, Garvey was an exile in London
50. Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832-1912
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 64-65; Benyamin Neuberger, “Early
African Nationalism, Judaism, and Zionism: Edward Wilmot Blyden,” Jewish
Social Studies 47 (Spring 1985): 151-65.
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by 1933, when he declared “Hats off to Hitler the German Nazi” and “What
the Negro needs is a Hitler.” Only later, after Nazi Germany blessed Italy’s
Ethiopian aggression and revealed its own African colonial ambitions, did
Garvey have second thoughts.51
ATTITUDES: PRE-POST HOLOCAUST
“World politics . . . are, in the final analysis, of secondary importance
to American Negroes,” Gunnar Myrdal observed during World War II,
“except as avenues for the expression of dissatisfaction. What really matters
to . . . [the American Negro] is his treatment at home, in his own country.”
Myrdal’s conclusion is in need of elaboration and qualification.52
The rise of Hitler came at the trough of Great Depression in the United
States, when isolationist sentiment was in the ascendant among the African
American public as well as the general American public. This was true even
of Paul Robeson, later the personification of Black-Jewish unity against fascism. In London in 1933 for the opening of All God’s Chillun Got Wings,
he maintained his persona as an apolitical artist and did not immediately see
the significance of Hitler’s installation as German chancellor.53
Back in the United States, starting in March 1933, the black press carried stories about “the new Germany.” Within a week of the Reichstag election of March 5, the capitol’s black newspaper, the Washington Tribune,
featured the headline: “Jewish Massacres Feared Soon in Germany,” with
the subhead: “6,000,000 Are Living in Fear with Action Imminent, London
Paper Says.” Just after the first official boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in Germany, on April 1, the Pittsburgh Courier editorially deplored
“Jewish Pogroms in Germany.” Also appearing on April 1 was a widely
syndicated column by Howard University sociologist Kelly Miller, entitled
“Hitler—The German Ku Klux,” describing Hitler as “the master Ku
Kluxer of Germany.”54
51. Harold Brackman, “Just Another Klansman?” Midstream 47 (January
2001): 19; Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and
the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 198-99.
52. Gunnar Myrdal with Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose, The American
Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1944), 106.
53. Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1989), 132-33,
626n48.
54. Lunabelle Wedlock, The Reaction of Negro Publications and Organizations
to German Antisemitism (Washington, DC: Howard University Studies in the
Social Sciences, 1942); 63; “Jewish Pogroms in Germany,” editorial, Pittsburgh
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The NAACP crystallized anti-Nazi sentiment among African Americans during the summer of 1933, the year of the beating death, seen as
racially motivated, of leftist Hilarius “Lari” Gilges by Nazi thugs in Dusseldorf. At the behest of executive secretary Walter White, Du Bois, the editor
of The Crisis, drafted “a strong statement” denouncing “the vicious campaign of race prejudice directed against Jews and Negroes by the Hitler
Government.”55
White newspapers in both the North and the South refused to equate
Nazi antisemitism with American racism. African American opinion journals, which accused white America of a double standard, insisted precisely
on this linkage. Traveling to Germany aboard the S.S. St. Louis, the same
ship that three years later carried German-Jewish refugees on their illstarred odyssey to Cuba, Du Bois toured Hitler’s Germany in 1936 at the
time of the Berlin Olympics. He was appalled by the pervasive antisemitism, and not taken in by Nazi attempts to obscure it.56
Unfortunately, other African American opinion makers continued to
make the invidious distinctions that led Lunabelle Wedlock to conclude at
the time that black newspapers “are either indifferent to German antisemitism or view with evident pleasure the degradation of a minority other than
their own.” In the wake of Kristallnacht, The Crisis editorialized that “it is
doubtful if any section or group has sympathized more whole-heartedly . . .
[with the Jews] than Negro Americans, for they have known the same type
of persecution ever since the beginning of America.” Yet the Philadelphia
Tribune put a different gloss on the comparison: “To be a Jew in Germany
is hell, for one to be a Negro in America is twice as bad.”57
The vein of invidious resentment of the attention paid to Jewish victims was mined by the so-called “Black Hitlers”—Sufi Abdul Hamid, Robert O. Jordan, and Carlos Cooks—whose antisemitic rabble-rousing was a
Courier, April 1, 1933, 10; Kelly Miller, “Hitler—The German Ku Klux,” Norfolk
Journal and Guide, April 1, 1933, 2: 6.
55. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color
Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 302; Richard Jonathan
Seth Rosenberg, “‘How Far the Promised Land?’: World Affairs and the American
Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam” (PhD. diss., Harvard
University, 1997), 243-47.
56. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the
American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 397-99; Werner
Sollors, “W. E. B. Du Bois in Nazi Germany,” Amerikastudien/American Studies
44 (1999): 207-22.
57. Gilroy, Against Race, 292; Roi Ottley, New World A-Coming (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 334-37; Wedlock, The Reaction of Negro Publications
and Organizations to German Antisemitism, 184, 228.
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facet of the New York street scene during the era of the Harlem riots of
1935 and 1943. The so-called Harlem Labor Union declared: “Harlem’s
worst enemies are the Jews. . . . Jews and leprosy are synonymous.” A letter
writer in the New York Amsterdam News exclaimed, “Why everyone knows
the Jews own Harlem, and they’re doing to us what they did to the
Germans. But at least Hitler is throwing them out.” In 1941, a situationwanted ad in the Cincinnati Enquire read: “Colored woman wants week
work; neat; with references; no Jewish people.” Later, Robert O. Jordan, a
former follower of Marcus Garvey, declared that Hitler was “the greatest
man of all times.” Such sentiments led Ralph Bunche, who directed
Lunabelle Wedlock’s Howard University study of wartime black antisemitism, to conclude that “no people in the world today is immune from the
contagion of racial stereotypes and race hatred.”58
Sympathy for Tojo’s Japan was commonplace among African Americans before and even after Pearl Harbor. But not so Hitler’s Reich. ProJapanese demagogue Robert O. Jordan was unusual in declaring: “I’ll cut
my throat if Hitler doesn’t win the war.” During the Popular Front, New
York City councilman Ben Davis, Jr., an African American communist,
declared, “Show me an antisemite, and I’ll show you a Negro-hater.”
Unfortunately, Harlem in 1943 erupted in a black-on-white riot that even
Davis’ comrade Mike Gold denounced as “an anti-Jewish pogrom.”59
Track star Jesse Owens held no grudges against that “nice man” Hitler,
who had avoided shaking hands with black medal winners at the 1936
Olympics. Even so, the reluctant Owens was recruited along with the genuinely antifascist Joe Louis, who knocked out Germany’s Max Schmeling in
58. Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 205; Wedlock, The Reaction of
Negro Publications and Organizations to German Antisemitism; Hasia R. Diner,
“Between Words and Deeds: Jews and Blacks in America, 1880-1935,” in Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the
United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York: Oxford University
Press 1997), 87-106; Winston C. McDowell, “Keeping Them ‘In the Same Boat
Together’? Sufi Abdul Hamid, African-Americans, Jews, and the Harlem Jobs
Boycotts,” in African-Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in
Convergence and Conflict, ed. V. P. Franklin, Nancy L. Grant, Harold M. Kletnick,
and Genna Rae McNeil (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 20836; Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?,” 126-27.
59. Reginald Kearney, African-American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or
Sedition? (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 88-91, 102;
Roi Ottley, New World A-Coming, 334-36; Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Riots and
Ruins (New York: Richard P. Smith, 1945), 48; Ernest Kaiser, “Racial Dialectics:
The Aptheker-Myrdal School Controversy,” Phylon 9 (1948): 299-300; Kenneth
Clark, “Group Violence . . .: A Study of the 1943 Harlem Riot,” Journal of Social
Psychology 19 (May 1944): 329.
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1938, as a pop cultural icon by the biracial liberal-left coalition. The
NAACP reciprocated for the support of Jewish liberals and leftists by striking a sympathetic stance regarding European refugee relief. At the time of
the futile 1938 Evian-les-Bains Conference, NAACP executive secretary
Walter White ignored strong anti-immigrant sentiment among African
Americans and applauded the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to provide
a haven for Jewish refugees from Hitler.60
The revival of the Popular Front after the Nazi war machine invaded
the USSR, in June 1941, dissipated isolationist sentiment among African
American elites. After US entry into World War II, the Popular Front came
to see the war as a Janus-faced global struggle against racism at home as
well as fascism abroad. This “Double V” campaign provided common
ground for reinforcing Black-Jewish cooperation around a home-front civil
rights agenda. Yet, few African American intellectuals displayed W. E. B.
Du Bois’ intense interest in Hitler’s “war against the Jews” and his unwavering sympathy for the Zionist cause.61
After World War II, a time when Stalin’s Russia still favored the
fledgling Jewish state, African American communists, or fellow travelers
like Du Bois and Paul Robeson, saw no contradiction between their leftist
internationalism and pro-Zionism. At the other end of the political spectrum, the small number of African American conservatives such as George
Schuyler, Joel A. Rogers, and Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad
opposed both. In 1938, columnist George Schuyler, Harlem editor of the
Pittsburgh Courier, described Kristallnacht as “heartless, unreasonable and
unjust,” but added that “the Nazis have actually been moderate in their murder compared to Stalin’s Asiatic Tammany.” Until very late in World War
II, Schuyler ignored reports of the Nazi death camps except as an argument
60. Gerald Horne, “Black, White, and Red: Jewish and African-Americans in
the Communist Party,” in The Narrow Bridge: Jewish Views on Multiculturalism,
ed. Maria Brettschneider (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996),
123-35; William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (New York: Free Press,
1986), 3-4, 90-91; Chris Mead, Champion: Joe Louis (New York: Scribner, 1986),
136-38, 145, 159.
61. Bat-Ami Zucker, “Black Americans’ Reaction to the Persecution of European Jews,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 3 (1986), 188-89; Cheryl L. Greenberg, “Negotiating Coalition: Black and Jewish Civil Rights Agencies in the
Twentieth Century,” in Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of
Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 157; Lee Finkle, Forum for Protest:
The Black Press during World War II (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans
and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
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against the internment of Japanese Americans and as a potential cause of
trouble if the Jewish survivors tried to resettle in Arab Palestine. Then in
June 1945, he shed crocodile tears for the 250,000 Polish Jews forcibly
relocated to wartime Siberia and reiterated to his readers that, compared to
Soviet gulags, “Buechenwald [sic] and Dachua [sic] seem like YMCA summer camps.” Finally, in 1948, Schuyler voiced concern that UN mediator
Ralph Bunche was a Jewish pawn who was “likely to increase [the] hostility of the colored people of the East for American Negroes.” Characterizing
the Hebrew Bible as “the Jewish Mein Kampf,” he denounced Zionism as
“hogwash . . . steeped in a religious and racial exclusiveness . . . not
unreminiscent of the barbarous days of the so-called Mosaic period,” and
accused the Zionists of prejudice against dark-skinned Jews.62
Novelist James Baldwin drew the very different lesson that Hitler had
established a precedent that might be applied “on the day that the United
States decided to murder its Negroes systematically instead of little by little
and catch-as-catch-can.”63
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki two months later,
ending the war in the Pacific, further increased the unease of African American observers like poet Langston Hughes about the racial balance of blame
for World War II atrocities. And African American sociologist Horace R.
Cayton predicted that America might someday be “accused of another and,
in a sense, more horrible war guilt” for its “conspiracy of silence” about
racism at home. The destruction of European Jewry was usually not treated
as the malignant core of Hitler’s crimes in either the black or the white
press.64
The NAACP’s The Crisis editorialized as late as February 1947 that
“The Jews mattered only incidentally to Hitler & Co. [as] an instrument of
power.” This view facilitated the desire to move as quickly as possible
beyond a focus on the Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide.65
But what really distinguished African American press reaction to Nazi
genocide was not so much the common tendency of the time to blur Jewish
62. George S. Schuyler, Black and Conservative (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington
House, 1966), 248-49; Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of
American Anticommunism (New York: Free Press,1995), 59.
63. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), 74-75.
64. Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986-88), 2: 103-04; Horace R. Cayton, “War Guilt,” Pittsburgh
Courier, March 17, 1945, 9; Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American
Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986),
256-59; Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1999), 64-66.
65. “Watch Out America!,” editorial, The Crisis 54 (February 1947), 41.
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and non-Jewish victimization but rather the preoccupation with the black
experience in Nazi Europe as well as with the special meaning that the
Holocaust might have for African Americans. In 1946, The Crisis captioned
pictures of an antiblack bombing in Tennessee as a “Kristallnacht.”66
Yet even before V-E Day, the black papers carried reports about the
Third Reich’s racism as exhibited by German prisoners of war. The New
York Age passed along a report that prewar boxer and captured wartime
paratrooper Max Schmeling—“no better than Hitler, Goering, and the
rest”—still “sneered at the mention of Joe Louis when . . . seen in a prison
camp.” On the other hand, Pittsburgh Courier correspondent Roi Ottley,
who personally interviewed German prisoners in the European theater in
March 1945, reported that “they never looked nor acted like arrogant,
preening, boot-strutting supermen” and were “free of anti-Negro feelings.”
His iconoclastic report was a precursor of the portrayal in postwar black
newspapers and also in novels of the conquered Germans treating African
American soldiers stationed in Germany better than they were treated by
their white fellow soldiers or had been treated back in the United States.67
Robert W. Kesting unearthed almost a half century later in US Army
war crimes archives evidence of Nazi atrocities against black POWs. The
commander of the 1st Battalion of the 17th SS Infantry near Raids, France,
in June 1944, ordered that “no Negro prisoners of war were to be taken
alive,” and that near Tours, in August 1944, “100 Negro prisoners of war
[were ordered] to be executed” once they completed the task of digging
their own graves. Such incidents, if then widely known, might have muted
the tendency found in postwar African American writing to imagine Germany as a sort of “paradise of equality” for nonwhites.68
Favorable images of postwar Germany—transmuted from hell for
Jews to heaven for African American expatriates—once again raise questions about African American ambivalence toward Jews as the two minorities were about to partner as never before in the civil rights struggle.
66. “Editor Sees Parallel of Nazi Germany in America,” Pittsburgh Courier,
May 26, 1945, 2; “What Happened at Columbia,” The Crisis 53 (April 1946), 110.
67. Ludlow W. Werner, “Across the Desk,” New York Age, May 25, 1945, 6;
Roi Ottley, “No Race, Theory Political,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 2, 1945, 1.
68. James E. Smith, “Hero Found No Jim Crow in Nazi Camp,” Pittsburgh
Courier, March 3, 1945, 1; Albert Duckett, “No Color Line in a Prison Camp:
Inhuman Cruelty Meted Out Equally,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 12, 1945, 2; Robert
W. Kesting, “Forgotten Victims: Blacks in the Holocaust,” Journal of Negro History 77 (Winter 1992): 30-36; Leon C. Standifer, Binding Up the Wounds: An
American Soldier in Occupied Germany, 1945-1946 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
State University Press, 1997), 150-73; Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 176-78.
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Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., ca. 1965
KING
VS.
BLACK NATIONALISM
In the 1960s, African American opinion shifted increasingly away
from a liberal integrationist agenda toward the emphasis on the Black
Nationalist militancy and Pan Africanism that had always been the essence
of “Black Zionism”—yet attitudes toward the Jews’ parallel Zionist project
deteriorated rather than improved.
Amid efforts by black separatists to expel white (mostly Jewish) members from its ranks, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) set off a firestorm in June 1967, when it published a newsletter full
of antisemitic articles and cartoons, including a photo of Israelis shooting
Arabs during the 1967 war over the caption: “This is the Gaza Strip, Palestine, not Dachau, Germany.” Readers were told, “Zionists conquered Arab
homes and land through terror, force, and massacres.” The magazine of the
violent Black Panther Party followed with an “anti-Zionist” poem threatening: “We’re gonna piss upon the Wailing Wall.”69
In September 1968, at the National Convention on New Politics in
Chicago, the Black Caucus forced through a resolution (later rescinded)
condemning “Zionist imperialism” that profoundly embarrassed Rev. King,
who spoke at the event. Even before SNCC entered the fray, the Nation of
Islam sharply denounced Israel. The irony was that Israel’s harshest critics
69. Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance (New York: Scribner, 1988), 80-81;
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 267-68.
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among Black Nationalists refused to give up their own claim on Zionism. In
1964, the year before he was felled by an assassin’s bullet, Malcolm X
declared: “Pan Africanism will do for the people of African descent all over
the world, the same that Zionism has done for Jews all over the world.” A
few years later, Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers averred: “The Jews
did it. It worked. So now Afro-Americans must do the same thing.” Following the rise of the Black Power movement in 1965, Midstream editor
Shlomo Katz tried to reach out halfway by urging “Jews who think along
Zionist lines [to be] more sensitive to the emerging pattern of Negro evolution . . . because of the numerous similarities between the two groups.”70
No rapprochement proved possible because of a radical reorientation
of Black Nationalist thought toward Israel in relation to Africa. Previously,
Psalms 68:31—”Princes shall come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall stretch
forth her hands to God”—had been read to emphasize the prophetic role of
Ethiopia as a bridge between Black Africa and the Holy Land. Now,
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) of SNCC and the Black Panther Party
rejected biblical Ethiopianism as “ignorance manipulated by Zionism,” and
enlisted instead under Nasser’s banner: “We are Africans wherever we are.
[Israel] is moving to take over Egypt. Egypt is our motherland—it’s in
Africa.” The transformation of Israel was complete—from an anticolonial
David battling the British Goliath to an imperialist ally of America’s Philistines, intent on conquering the Egyptian frontier of African anticolonialism.
What began as a political identification with Egypt as an anti-imperial bastion gradually evolved over the following decades into the new Afrocentric
cultural mystique glamorizing ancient Egypt as the “black” inspiration of
all civilization.71
One account by an African American of the 1965 Watts riots—the
start of the decades-long black-on-white violence—saw a group of rioters
“with rifles, trucks with gas on them burning in a selected fashion . . .
Jewish stores.” This was the time when Amiri Baraka, formerly known as
70. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land, 161; Theodore Draper, The Rediscovery
of Black Nationalism (New York: Ramparts Press, 1970), 116; Shlomo Katz, introduction to Negro and Jew: An Encounter in America (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1967), reprinted in Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks
and Jews in the United States, ed. Maurianne Adams and John Bracey (Amherst,
MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 643.
71. Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes
(London: Verso, 1998), 122-37; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 205-07.
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Leroi Jones, expressed his attitude in verse: “I got the extermination blues,
jewboy. I got the hitler syndrome figured.”72
Malcolm X—who announced in 1964 that Hitler’s Jewish victims
“brought it on themselves”—continued to harbor such views while his
Autobiography (1965) was being heavily edited by Alex Haley, to tone
down the antisemitism. There is some evidence that, just before his assassination, Malcolm decided that his new authentic Islamic faith required him
to embrace “the brotherhood of all men . . . Jews, Christians, and Muslims
alike.”73
Gary T. Marx’s five-year study for the ADL, Protest and Prejudice,
appeared in 1967. Marx did everything under the sun to explain away the
significance of his findings that seemed to show disproportionately high
levels of African American antisemitism. He scored blacks with “no opinion” or only “moderate levels” of prejudice as “non-antisemites.” This
allowed him to come to the conclusion that only 30 percent of Northern
blacks were antisemitic—in line with the white percentage. Had he used the
same classification procedures that Kenneth Clark had used in 1946, the
percentage would have jumped to 70 percent! Not surprisingly, Lucy D.
Dawidowicz raised Cain about the credibility of such polls.74
By the end of the 1960s, novels like Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s
Planet (1970) and Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants (1971) contained plot
lines about Jewish-Black confrontations that would have been unimaginable
a decade before. In Bellow’s novel, it’s the shocking mugging by an African American of a Holocaust survivor. In Malamud’s novel, it’s the surreal
neighbors’ struggle between Jewish novelist Harry Lesser and crazed black
writer Willie Spearmint, whose novel (which Lesser retrieves from the gar72. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 109-10; Sundquist, Strangers
in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, 8, 330-31.
73. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Penguin
Books, 2011), 246, 398, 407; Manning Marable, “Rediscovering Malcolm’s Life:
An Adventure in Living,” in Black Routes to Islam, ed. Manning Marable and
Hishaam D. Aidi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 311-12. For an attempt
to explain away Malcolm’s antisemitism, see V. P. Franklin, ed., “The Portrayal of
Jews in The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” in African Americans and Jews in the
Twentieth Century, 293-308.
74. Gary T. Marx, Protest and Prejudice: A Study of Belief in the Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 147, 183; Gary T. Marx, “Negro
Antisemitism,” The Nation 206 (January 1, 1968): 11-13; “Study Proves Negroes
Not Strongly Antisemitic,” Christian Century 83 (October 19, 1966): 1265; Lucy
D. Dawidowicz, “Can Antisemitism Be Measured?,” Commentary 18 (July 1970):
36-43; Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong?: The Creation and Collapse of the
Black-Jewish Alliance (New York: Free Press, 1995), 272-73.
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bage) contains a story—“The First Pogrom of the U.S. of A.”—in which
the pogrom occurs at warp speed: “There is none of the Hitler shit of
smashing store windows, forcing Zionists to scrub sidewalks, or rubbing
their faces in dog crap.” Instead, there was immediate execution of American Jews and their black helpers.75
This increasingly inhospitable political and intellectual environment
presented acute problems, not only to Jewish intellectuals, but also to African American moderates like Whitney Young, Bayard Rustin, and Martin
Luther King, Jr., who subscribed to the old pro-Israel gospel. Just before the
Six-Day War began, King signed on to an open letter in The New York
Times by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and others urging President Lyndon
Johnson to honor the American commitment to Israel. Yet King was
sharply criticized from within as well as without his inner circle for too
closely identifying with “the Zionist Jew” and compromising his pacifist
principles. Though shaken and forced to abort a planned Mideast trip, King
did not retreat. Responding to a hostile question during a 1968 speech, he
declared: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking
antisemitism.”76
Interviewed by Conservative Judaism in Memphis on March 25,
1968—ten days before his assassination, King declared:
I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of
democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done,
how desert land can almost be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood
and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be
a reality.77
After the King assassination, a black mob broke into Cincinnati’s
Rochdale temple; a Boston synagogue almost suffered the same fate. A
1970’s New York Times article began with “An Appeal by Black Americans
for United States Support for Israel.” But public opinion polls already
reflected the pattern of racial divergence that has prevailed ever since: high
75. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land, 161-68, 412-22, 432.
76. Marc Schneier, Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Jewish
Community (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1999), 159-70; David J.
Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 561; Greenberg, Troubling the Waters, 229.
77. Martin Luther King. Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and
Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper, 1986), 670. The fulsome testimonial to Israel by King that ostensibly appeared in the Saturday Review
about this time (and is quoted by Rabbi Marc Schneier) is bogus.
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levels of black antisemitism coupled with lukewarm support for Israel compared to whites. Meeting in Gary, Indiana (March 1972), the National
Black Political Convention passed a resolution (subsequently toned down)
blaming Israel for “fascist aggression” in the Middle East and “working
hand in hand with other imperialistic interests in Africa.” The outbreak of
the 1973 War precipitated a counterreaction with 15 African American congressmen cosponsoring a resolution urging US military resupply of Israel,
and 75 black labor leaders calling on African Americans to “stand with
Israel in its struggle to live and be free.” In the same spirit, civil rights
leader Bayard Rustin spearheaded the formation of Black Americans in
Support of Israel Committee (BASIC) in 1975.78
In the wake of the Arab oil embargo that resulted in 21 Black African
nations suspending diplomatic relations with Israel in November 1975, the
UN General Assembly passed its “Zionism equals racism” resolution. Only
five African nations voted against the resolution—the Central African
Republic, the Africa Coast, Liberia, Malawi, and Swaziland—nine nations
abstained, and nine others tried unsuccessfully to stall the vote. (The month
before the passage of the resolution, Uganda’s Ida Amin spoke before the
General Assembly calling for “the extinction of Israel.”) When America’s
UN ambassador called Amin “a racist murderer,” African American press
reaction was split. New York City mayor Abe Beame refused Egyptian
president Anwar Sadat the city’s hospitality, and the Amsterdam News
noted pointedly that “many New Yorkers feel the two [Zionism and racism]
are connected.”79
Spurned by virtually all the Third World countries, including Black
Africa, Israel had decided in 1974 to reinstate diplomatic relations with
South Africa. In 1976, Bayard Rustin challenged the American Jewish community to speak out against Israel’s South African ties.80
Much worse acrimony followed when American Jews in general and
Zionists in particular were unfairly blamed in 1979 for the resignation of
Andrew Young, the first African American to serve as US ambassador to
78. Marvin Weitz, “Black Attitudes to Jews in the United States from World
War II to 1976” (PhD diss., Yeshiva University, 1977), 289-92, 294, 297; The New
York Times, October 21, 1973, 17; Friedman, What Went Wrong?, 321.
79. Weitz, “Black Attitudes,” 319-24; Amsterdam News, editorial, October 30,
1975, A4; Wilkins in the New York Post, November 8, 1975, 27; Seymour Maxwell
Finger, “The United Nations,” in The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 829-30.
80. Naomi Chazan, “The Fallacies of Pragmatism,” in Jews in Black Perspectives, ed. Joseph R. Washington, Jr. (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 151, 167; Richard L. Sklar, “Africa and the Middle East: What
Blacks and Jews Owe to Each Other,” in Jews in Black Perspectives, 141.
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the UN, following revelations that he had a secret meeting against American policy with a PLO representative and lied about it. Even Bayard Rustin
was among 200 prominent black leaders signing an angry statement. Jesse
Jackson spoke for many when he said: “The real resistance to black progress has been coming not from the Ku Klux Klan but from our former allies
in the American Jewish community.”81
Having received a $3 million nonrepayable “loan” from Libya’s
Qadaffi in 1972, the Nation of Islam stated “the fact” that Tel Aviv was
responsible for Young’s ouster. The NAACP adopted a resolution urging
the Carter administration to reexamine its pledge to Israel not to negotiate
with the PLO.82
Rev. Louis Farrakhan, ca. 2002. Photo: Jim Wallace, Smithsonian
LOUIS FARRAKHAN RISING
Had Farrakhan’s battle with prostate cancer ended soon after 1996’s
Million Man March on Washington, his legacy would have been quite dif81. Friedman, What Went Wrong?, 24: Robert G. Weisbord and Richard
Kazarian, Jr., Israel in Black American Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1985), 124-126; Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah
Muhammad (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 372; Kaufman, Broken Alliance,
246.
82. Arthur J. Magida, Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His
Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 102; Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997),
255-56.
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ferent from what it is now. Then, he staged a political triumph by attracting
about 700,000 African Americans around such goals as reducing gang
crime and drug use. Despite his bizarre three-hour speech at the march—
free of antisemitism but replete with conspiracy theories right out of the
UFO and anti-Masonic playbooks—his controversial career would have
culminated in a milestone of African American cultural renewal. Instead,
Farrakhan lived on after the march, but failed to carry through on his
renewal program and to continue his prior career as a serial bigot, vilifying
not only Jews but Korean and Arab storekeepers, gays, single mothers, and
of course the United States.83
Born Louis Eugene Wolcott in the Bronx in 1933, Farrakhan first tried
a career as a pop singer, billed “Calypso Gene” or “The Charmer,” before
emerging into prominence under the name Minister Louis X (later changed
to Farrakhan). He rose as a disciple of Malcolm X in Elijah Muhammad’s
Nation of Islam. Farrakhan’s NOI career had elements of a Shakespearean
tragedy, with him self-cast as the betrayer of his mentor, Malcolm X, whom
Ossie Davis eulogized as “our own black shining prince!”84
When Malcolm X left the NOI for orthodox Islam, Farrakhan attacked
Malcolm as “an international hobo” who should come home “to face the
music” and have his head “on the sidewalk.”85
In 1993, when Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, repeated her conviction that Farrakhan was involved in her husband’s assassination, he shot
back: “We don’t give a damn about no white man law if you attack what we
love. And frankly, it ain’t none of your business. . . . And a nation gotta be
able to deal with traitors and cutthroats and turncoats. The white man deals
with his. The Jews deal with theirs.” Not until 2000 did he admit: “I may
have been complicit in words that I spoke” regarding Malcolm’s assassination. Karl Evanzz, a former report for the Washington Post, wrote a book
arguing that Farrakhan’s complicity involved more than rhetoric.86
83. Magida, Prophet of Rage, 192-202; Robert Singh, The Farrakhan Phenomenon: Race, Reaction, and the Paranoid Style in American Politics (Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997).
84. Magida, Prophet of Rage, 1-57; Marable, Malcolm X, 458-59.
85. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965 (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 540.
86. Alona Wartofsky, “ ‘Brother Minister’: The Martyrdom of Malcolm X,”
Washington Post, February 17, 1995; “Widow of Malcolm X Suspects Farrakhan
Had Role in Killing,” The New York Times, March 13, 1994; Karl Evanzz, The
Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (New York: Thundermouth Press, 1992).
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Rev. Jesse Jackson, ca. 2000
Farrakhan’s rise began with his alliance to Rev. Jesse Jackson in the
late 1970s. Starting in 1979, African American critics of Israel went on the
offensive through the new medium of “peace missions” to the Middle East
that invariably embarrassed the Jewish state. Grasping the blood-stained
body of the mortally wounded Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the balcony
of the Memphis Lorraine Motel in April 1968, Jesse Jackson also seized his
leadership mantle. By 1979, he was ready to seize the opening presented by
the Andrew Young debacle. Having already visited Libya in 1972, Jackson
went to the Middle East, in September 1979, in response to an invitation
from Yasser Arafat. Leaders of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference were also invited, but Jackson dominated, visiting Israel as well as
Arafat in Lebanon and other Arab countries. He was denied a meeting by
prime minister Begin, but was hoisted on the shoulders of Palestinian
youths in Nablus shouting “Jackson! Arafat!”; Anwar Sadat and Hafez AlAssad treated him like a visiting head of state. Though his attempt to broker
Israeli recognition of the PLO in return for a pause in terrorist violence
went nowhere, he proclaimed his mission a triumph. Returning to the
United States, he abandoned any pretense of even-handedness by announcing that he accepted substantial Arab donations to his Operation PUSHBreadbasket and declaring Zionism “a poisonous reed.” (Jackson subsequently repudiated such rhetoric.)87
87. Richard L. Sklar, “Africa and the Middle East: What Blacks and Jews Owe
to Each Other,” in Jews in Black Perspectives, 141; Marshall Frady, Jesse: The Life
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Jackson’s 1979 peace mission proved just a trial run for his bombastic
foray in 1984 to Syria to retrieve captured black pilot Robert O. Goodman,
Jr., shot down by the Syrians over eastern Lebanon. By this time, Jackson’s
“rainbow coalition” was preparing his run in the 1984 presidential primaries. Ultimately, his candidacy was fatally embarrassed by his association
with Farrakhan. In 1978, after Elijah Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen
Muhammed, moved in the direction of authentic Islam, Farrakhan had broken with him and reconstituted the Nation of Islam. He became notorious in
the 1980s for calling Judaism a “gutter” or “dirty” religion and Hitler “a
very great man”—statements his apologists continue to explain away—
while also warning: “I am your last chance, Jews, when God puts you in the
oven. (A decade later, Farrakhan’s right-hand man Khalid Abdul Muhammad asked: “Everybody talks about Hitler exterminating six million
Jews. . . . But doesn’t anybody ever ask what did they do to Hitler?”)88
Providing security for Jackson’s campaign, Farrakhan exploited his
relationship with Jackson to catapult himself into the spotlight as an African
American leader in his own right, staging, in 1984, his own high-profile
pilgrimage to Qadaffi’s Libya, which gave the NOI another $5 million
“loan.” Jackson referred to New York as “Hymietown,” but Farrakhan’s
inflammatory antisemitic, anti-Israel statements strained Black-Jewish relations even more. Calling Hitler “a very great man,” Farrakhan claimed that
his equally notorious statement—“There can never be any peace structured
on injustice, thievery, lying, deceit, and using God’s name to shield your
dirty religion”—was aimed not at Judaism but at Zionism. This interpretation gave little solace to friends of Israel. The 1980s were also the decade
when Steve Coakley—with Farrakhan’s approval—accused Jewish doctors
of injecting black babies with the AIDS virus.89
Following 1996’s Million Man March, the Simon Wiesenthal Center
prevailed on a reluctant Pasadena Rose Parade Committee to include the
center’s float commemorating the fiftieth anniversary in 1997 of the breaking of major league baseball’s color line by Jackie Robinson, whose
hometown was Pasadena. Wiesenthal Center associate dean Rabbi Abraham
and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (New York: Random House, 1996), 297-98, 33454.
88. Dinnerstein, Antisemitism, 220-21; Louis Farrakhan, Back Where We
Belong: Selected Speeches, ed. Joseph D. Eure and Richard M. Jerome (Philadelphia: International Press, 1989), 121; Vibert L. White, Jr., Inside the Nation of
Islam: A Historical and Personal Testimony (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida
Press, 2001), 120.
89. Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 207-11, 255; Friedman, What Went Wrong?,
329-30.
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Cooper and I have continued to track Louis Farrakhan, looking for a heartfelt change-of-mind that would result in a forward-looking dialogue with
the Jewish community. No such luck. Typically, Farrakhan would combine
promises to meet with rabbis, with self-justifying declarations that he’s
“only told the truth” about Jews—followed by renewed outbursts of
antisemitism.90
At 2012’s Nation of Islam’s Saviours’ Day conclave, Farrakhan had
harsh words directed at President Barack Obama for “assassinating” Osama
bin Laden as well as helping to take out the Nation of Islam’s long-time,
multimillion-dollar sugar daddy, Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi. Invoking
his crackpot, pseudo-Islamic theology, Farrakhan explained that America
was on the receiving end of heavenly wrath in the form of obesity and
climate change.91
As for the Jews, most belong to “the Synagogue of Satan,” whose
members “were not the origin of Hollywood, but took it over.” Farrakhan
nevertheless tipped off “brother” Obama that he is headed for assassination—by Zionists.92
At the NOI convention, Farrakhan’s organization continued to push
the libel that Jews dominated the slave trade and masterminded sharecropping and segregation, the subjects of Vol. 1 and now Vol. 2 of the anonymously authored Farrakhan-published product: The Secret Relationship
Between Blacks and Jews.93
Farrakhan’s conspiracy theories have run the gamut, ranging from the
evil scientist Yacub, who created the malevolent white race, to the evil Jews
who invented AIDS and caused the hole on the ozone layer, to the evil Jews
who orchestrated the recent global financial meltdown as well as world
wars and Mideast conflicts. Regarding potential military conflict with a
nuclear-armed Iran, he said: “I advise white and black America, Hispanic
and Asian America, why would you send your children to die in a war
90. Steven G. Norwood and Harold Brackman, “Going to Bat for Jackie Robinson,” Journal of Sport History 26 (1999): 118-44.
91. Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, “Farrakhan: Still Hateful—But
Increasingly Obsolete,” New York Daily News, March 15, 2012, http://www.ny
dailynews.com/opinion/louis-farrakhan-hateful-increasingly-obsolete-article-1.103
8975
92. Louis Farrakhan, speech, “Where Is Satan’s Synagogue and What Is His
Plan,” April 25, 2012, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctqt4QdcK38
93. Nation of Islam’s Historical Research Department, The Secret Relationship
Between Blacks and Jews (Chicago: self-published in 2 vols., 1991, 2010).
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engineered by Zionists who love Israel more than they love the United
States of America?”94
At the University of California, Berkeley, he told students attending
the Afrikan Black Coalition Conference not to enter coalitions or dialogue
with the evil Jews, saying: “I personally don’t care if I ever get along if I’ve
got to hide the truth to win a friend.”95
In other speeches, Farrakhan has declared that: “The Federal Reserve
is the synagogue of Satan. The Rockefellers, the DuPonts, the House of
Rothschild, these are the people that have corrupted the entire world.” And
that “the Black man and woman have always been looked upon as the
‘property’ of White America; and particularly, members of the Jewish community. They’ve always looked at you as ‘belonging’ to them.”
Farrakhan’s allies, the New Black Panther Party, used the divisive
Trayvon Martin tragedy to sow more seeds of Black-Jewish discord. They
offered a $10,000 bounty for the capture of Zimmerman and called for the
mobilization of 10,000 black men to capture him. When one of their leaders, Mikhail Muhammad, was asked if he were inciting violence, he simply
said, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Their Florida representative
called Zimmerman “ a wicked white beast” and falsely claimed that “his
father is a Jew; he’s a no-good Jew.”96
Around Christmas, Farrakhan said the Sandy Hook school massacre
was God’s payback: “Could it be that God wants us to see that until you can
feel the pain and suffering of others that has been inflicted upon them on
the basis of a lie, and America’s reach for the resources of that area of the
world, then maybe you will understand that this may be ‘chickens coming
home to roost.’ ‘For as thou hast done’—the Book says: ‘So shall it be done
unto you.’ ”97
94. Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad; Cooper and Brackman, “Farrakhan Still Hateful,” New York Daily News, http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/
louis-farrakhan-hateful-increasingly-obsolete-article-1.1038975
95. Cooper and Brackman, “Farrakhan Still Hateful.”
96. Anti-Defamation League, “Louis Farrakhan Puts His Antisemitism on Full
Display; Deepens Conspiracy Theories About Jewish Control,” March 19, 2010,
http://archive.adl.org/NR/exeres/E1F02C20-88E6-4ACC-A258-C60803BD216C,0
B1623CA-D5A4-465D-A369-DF6E8679CD9E,frameless.htm. Amanda Susskind
and Nolan Rollins, “Is the Civil Rights Movement Over?,” Los Angeles Jewish
Journal, August 23, 2013, http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/
is_the_civil_rights_movement_over
97. “Farrakhan Claims CT Shooting Massacre Could Be a Lesson from God:
‘Chickens Coming Home to Roost,’ ” The Blaze, December 21, 2012, http://www
.theblaze.com/stories/2012/12/21/farrakhan-claims-ct-shooting-massacre-could-bea-lesson-from-god-chickens-coming-home-to-roost/
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Now, in 2013, he offers his latest post mortem for the United States:
“This nation has been built on violence. Uncivilized, uncultivated, brutal,
wild . . . and that’s why the prophet gave America one of those names as a
beast—both of the Book of Daniel and in the Book of Revelations.”98
At a time when Americans are increasingly concerned with the dangers of incivility and name calling, the NOI’s supreme leader remains a
prime example of how not to treat people who differ from you in race,
religion, or sexual orientation.
With a backward-looking message of hate, Farrakhan’s UFO—the
“mother ship”—navigates cyberspace spewing noxious emissions designed
to poke a hole in the ozone layer protecting tolerance. According to ADL
polls, the percentage of African Americans “unquestionably antisemitic” is
around twice the national average. Yet younger, better educated African
Americans are less—not more—prejudiced against Jews than were their
elders.99
CONCLUSION
It’s premature to call in the mourners for America’s promise of tolerance. But it remains to be seen when the post-Barack Obama era comes
which legacy—that of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., or that of Minister Louis Farrakhan—will inspire the next generation of African American leaders. Despite serious tensions, mostly over his Mideast policies,
Barack Obama has managed to keep both African Americans and Jews in
his column. Will such unity persist?
In 1948, James Baldwin argued in Commentary that African Americans were profoundly “ambivalent” about Jews. He was right. Jews, I think,
have made decisive progress in overcoming their own historical “ambivalences” toward blacks. It’s time for African Americans to reciprocate for the
sake of mutual benefit.100 Otherwise, African Americans and Jews are
likely to strive to reposition themselves by forging new intergroup alliances—particularly with Latinos. The question is whether this repositioning
98. “Farrakhan Promises God Has ‘Execution’ Planned for America: A ‘Savage,’ ‘Brutal’ and ‘Uncivilized’ People and Nation,” The Blaze, January 14, 2013,
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/01/14/farrakhan-promises-god-has-execu
tion-planned-for-america-a-savage-brutal-uncivilized-nation/
99. Anti-Defamation League, “ADL Poll Finds Antisemitic Attitudes on Rise in
America,” http://archive.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/6154_12.htm; Hubert G.
Locke, The Black Antisemitism Controversy: Protestant Views and Perspectives
(Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 56, argued on the basis of
then-current polling data for a decline in levels of African American antisemitism.
100. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 68.
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will positively supplement—or instead supplant—the historic Black-Jewish
civil rights alliance. The answer may hinge on whether American Americans are ready to turn their back on Farrakhan’s legacy of antisemitism.101
*Historian Harold Brackman is a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and
its Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
101. Steven P. Erie and Harold Brackman, “At Rainbow’s End: Empowerment
Prospects for Latinos and Asian Pacifics in Los Angeles,” in Racial and Ethnic
Politics in California, ed. Michael B. Preston et al. (Berkeley: IGS Press, Institute
of Governmental Studies, University of California at Berkeley, rev. ed., 1998), 73107; Rex Weiner, “Jews and Latinos Seek Common Ground,” Jewish Daily Forward, October 7, 2011, http://forward.com/articles/143986/jews-and-latinos-seekcommon-ground/
Tackling Antisemitism on Facebook
Andre Oboler*
The first hurdle to combating antisemitism is being able to recognize it. A
new report from the Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI), “Recognizing
Hate Speech: Antisemitism on Facebook,” systematically reports on 47
antisemitic incidents on Facebook. Most of the incidents involve entire
pages dedicated to antisemitic content; the report provided multiple examples of antisemitic content from each item. The importance of the report is
not the documentation of antisemitism by Facebook users; it is the review
of Facebook’s own response to the problem.
All the items were reported to Facebook. The report examines which
of these items were immediately removed, and which complaints were
rejected. Of the 47 items reported to Facebook, 15 items were still online at
the time the report was published. Given that senior representatives of
Facebook had been given the list of items over a month before the report’s
publication, these 15 items represent content that Facebook, at a senior level
and with significant time for consideration, refused to accept as antisemitic
hate speech.
The 15 items can be divided into several classes of content. Perhaps
the most surprising class Facebook failed to recognize were pages dedicated
to the promotion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Four such pages
were included in the report. All had been discovered and reported in October 2012; one had also been exposed in an earlier OHPI report. Complaints
about all four were rejected by Facebook. At the time of this writing, two of
the four continue operating. Facebook evidently does not regard the promo-
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tion of the Protocols to be hate speech per se; this can now be added to that
other well-known problem: Holocaust denial, which Facebook also refuses
to recognize as hate speech per se.
The more general category of conspiracy theories also appeared to be
difficult for Facebook. Content alleging Jewish control of the media and
world governments is not recognized as antisemitism. These are not borderline cases; they are classic examples of some of the most well-documented
forms of antisemitism. There is no excuse for a company like Facebook to
fail to recognize this content as antisemitic or for them to fail to remove it
in line with their own policy against hate speech.
Other forms of content Facebook struggled with included new
antisemitism, where the State of Israel is represented with the symbolism of
Nazism or is targeted for elimination.
Content mocking and trivializing the Holocaust was also common;
sometimes this content was removed, and sometimes not.
The OHPI report provides an important systematic review of the way
Facebook handles antisemitism; the only possible conclusion is that
Facebook has a serious problem. The report provides 14 recommendations
to meet this problem. The majority of the recommendations, which are
generic in nature, will also improve Facebook’s response to other forms of
hate speech.
Following the report, OHPI launched a petition calling on Facebook to
both remove the examples listed in the report and to adopt the recommendations. After a month, Facebook appears to have shut down most, but not all,
of the items listed. Two of the pages promoting the Protocols, for example,
remain online.
As items in the report were shut down, their content, which we used as
examples in our report, vanished. Other copies of the same content, however, remain available on Facebook. We hope Facebook’s initial response
when these copies are reported will be better than it was the last time. It
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took seven months and formal complaints against Facebook by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry to get some of the items in the OHPI
report removed. This level of effort should not be required. The continuing
exceptions, though few in number, still give some cause for concern.
Some antisemitism-fighting organizations have promoted their strong
links with Internet companies as evidence of their work combating online
antisemitism. Committees with industry participation have been announced
as major breakthroughs. In light of this report, and its exposure of real and
systemic problems, it appears these efforts may have been more effective at
protecting the interests of the companies than in combating antisemitism.
We need to return to an evidenced-based approach that focuses on monitoring, analyzing, and responding to trends. This applies as much to the online
world as it does to systemic antisemitism in any other sphere of life. If
OHPI’s report has taught Facebook to recognize even just a few additional
antisemitic tropes, that alone would make it one of the most effective
responses to online antisemitism seen to date.
*Andre Oboler is CEO of the Online Hate Prevention Institute (www.ohpi.org.au)
and co-chair of the Global Forum’s Online Antisemitism Working Group.
Coping in Copenhagen
Bashy Quraishy*
On February 23, 2013, Copenhagen witnessed a very strange set of
events in Nørrebro, the northern borough of the city, which has been in the
eye of the media and the center of a political storm for the last few weeks.
The reason: a school headmaster had warned some Jewish parents not to
enroll their children in her school due to pending harassment by some Palestinian kids. The ensuing statements—from the prime minister to editors
of national newspapers (even the racist and anti-Islam political parties, e.g.,
the Danish Peoples Party and the Stop Islamization of Denmark organization)—immediately emerged with anti-Islam avowals and a demonstration
titled “Today, We Are All Jews.” Their aim was not so much to support the
Jewish people but to inflame Nørrebro’s Jewish and Muslim tensions.
I attended the demonstration of Stop Islamization—no more than 20
people—which posted Israeli flags and posters that read: “Today, We All
Are Jews.” I asked their leader, Anders Gravers, if he really wanted to
demonstrate against antisemitism, why was he shouting anti-Islam slogans
and why were Jewish people not supporting him? He said Jews could not
support him because they all were in the synagogue. I could not believe my
ears and I informed him who I was and how both Jews and Muslims are
involved in our network.
What I disliked most was that those who are openly anti-Islam and
anti-Muslims presented themselves as pro-Jewish by shouting anti-Muslim
slogans, and carrying Israeli flags and Stars of David. To counter demonstrate, nearly one hundred anti-racist activists marched toward the demonstration but were stopped by two hundred riot police and armored cars and
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by blocking all the entrance roads. With friends like these, my Jewish
brothers and sisters do not need enemies.
*Bashy Quraishy is the secretary general of the European Muslim Initiative for
Social Cohesion (EMISCO), Strasbourg, and a member of the Advisory Board
Migration Research Centre, Hacettepe University, Ankara. He can be viewed at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7dfNTdrpn4 and contacted via e-mail at bashy
@mail.dk
Aliyah 2013
Fiamma Nirenstein*
Upon entering the small room on the first floor, you sign the request to
be accepted as citizen of the State of Israel. The officer of the Jewish
agency informed me the very first thing: “If you wish to call someone in
Israel, that is the phone to use,” and pointed at an old black phone connected to the wall with a wire. Mobile phones did not yet exist when the
right to return was introduced. When the officer and I sat down, he gave me
1,200 shekels, approximately 250 euros, and I smiled, a bit abashed; I was
not expecting this gift, but I think for many it’s very important to receive a
small sum of money so I was glad to have it to give. I had to open a bank
account with that money; that was the rule. Then other papers followed—in
fact the first step—deeds of undertaking of the state toward you; the document for the national health insurance; the one for the bank; and, the most
meaningful—the document similar to a passport, according to which you
are an oleh chadash(a)—a new immigrant, or, better yet, a new citizen,
someone who just “entered”; and the teudat zehut (identity card, certificate
of identification) which has your number, the number that everybody knows
by heart. I will remember it too, proudly—just as I recall my husband
repeating his number like a mantra when he is on the phone arranging to
pay something . . . his teudat zehut, his identity card). This is truly Israeli—
and now I also have it. And then the officer, after a little while and cautiously, shook my hand and smiled at me, now that he had finally carried
out all his duties, one by one. I will never forget his imposing aspect, no
ceremonies, no rhetoric—only a handshake. His face was saying you came
here to work, you made a step for which you will smile when you’ll deserve
it; we ran the risk and came back after two thousand years to enjoy the
happiness of our people, of our land.
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That’s no joke; in the harsh and brotherly style in which Moroccan,
Iraqi, Tunisian, Egyptian, and Ethiopian immigrants were welcomed in
their time, escaping from their date-scented lives, once delighted by the
morning walks to Cairo’s synagogues, and then devastated by persecution
and hunger. Or in the style in which Polish and Russians have reached here
on foot or in broken and unsafe ships, persecuted in their homeland by
Cossacks and by the agonizing sounds of the shtetl . . . and the Germans,
Spanish, Italians, and French, raised in the troubled history of Europe, so
rich in its aspirations but so poor in achieving them.
I did the aliyah, and now being Italian and being Israeli are the same
thing. I wanted it as a necessary step, as a gift to Florence, where I was
born, and as a tribute to Jerusalem, which celebrates the Renaissance philosophy to save the world from human vileness, with man’s aspiration to
transcend nature to shape history.
I was welcomed as I thought, as family—and I really mean family. I
recognize an Israeli from far, like an Italian, a native of Florence or of
Jerusalem; it’s part of my DNA. It’s not easy to explain, and it’s so many
things. It’s the gesture of a man around sixty years old who walks along the
street with one shoulder raised higher than the other, his light physical
handicap reminding me of the intellectual arrogance of my father, so shy
and resolute. Or, on the contrary, it’s an athletic guy walking along the
street seeming like part of my family, his features softened and rounded and
his stature taller during decades of fleeing, searching for peace and then
ending up here, during the war. It’s the old woman at the Italian temple who
wears gloves like my grandmother Rosina and who saw the Shoah and
offers me her cheek to kiss and looks at me with pride, as if I were her
niece. It’s the cabdriver who wants to know how much I make, how much I
pay in rent, how many children I have, and what my husband does. It’s the
boys and girls, and the handsome soldiers, smiling with no fear, no stress,
who cheer at the checkpoints if you say hi to them when passing by. It’s the
waiters at McDonald’s and Cafè Cafit, who take a couple of hours from
their studies to make a meager wage. It’s the Jewish and Arab nurses at
Hadassah Hospital. It’s the girls with low necklines, so beautiful, resolute
and simple, even when they are sexy, and it’s the girls with modest dresses
and the head scarf, who know that it is a challenge to be Jewish like that,
and who love sitting at the bet café with their friends. It’s the children who,
like chickens in a henhouse, run around in large numbers (from a European
point of view); it’s the family from a kibbutz that asks me stupid questions
on Berlusconi; it’s Batia, who remembers when she was small and that in
Mishmar Hasharon, when parents were being kept from their children, she
was sent once to the hospital alone to undergo a tonsillectomy. And it’s the
obsessed attitude of a mother who holds on to her son and repeats a quantity
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of annoying, useless recommendations: eat, wear a sweater, tishmor al
atzmecha—watch out and be careful when you go to Gaza or to the border
of Hezbollah, the one with Lebanon and Syria. Tishmor, but the shomer, the
Jewish legal guardian, does not sleep—it’s also written in the Bible.
The first day of aliyah, while I attended a conference on Europe at Bar
Ilan University, a harsh, deafening alarm sounded twice, to announce an
exercise that is being carried out all over Israel, meant for the civil population. We smiled, a bit embarrassed, and stopped the discussion for a
moment; everywhere in Israel adults were bringing children from schools to
shelters. It happens a lot. Many children, from Kiriat Shmone or Sderot or
even Haifa, are used to going to shelters; adults lead the way, conveying
them with safety, laughing and joking around. But these same adults are
perfectly aware that it’s not a laughing matter, that a chemical or biological
attack may occur—even if it’s a pessimistic scenario, perhaps these exercises can really help protecting against them. Everybody knows that, and
they smile, a bit embarrassed in having this little fear before the immense
risk that the air they breathe, the blue sky, the hamsin wind, is improper, not
permitted.
While the alarm was buzzing and we kept on discussing Europe, I
remembered that during the war of 1991, when Saddam Hussein was
launching missiles on Jerusalem, my sister Simona and I were sitting in this
bathtub with our masks on; even the dog, Dafka, was waiting with us for
the alarm to stop. You can imagine the large security measures taken: the
door was taped and the radio announcer was saying to not drink the water—
who would have thought that the bathtub would have been a real shelter if
we had been hit? But we were happy. We did what we could; we were
showing our determination in following all the instructions, and we kept on
reading, saying stupidities under that mask, and finally ventured out and
had some tea in the kitchen. This is Israel, so you play a game based on
habit, challenge, courage, and common interests—and hope to remain a
good democratic country in spite of everything.
I’m not sure from a personal or physical perspective if here in Israel
it’s better or worse for me. I’m so lucky that in Italy I live between Rome
and Florence, where I grew up, and where my life has always been brightened by beautiful scenery like the Dome of Brunelleschi, by the works of
Michelangelo, of Donatello . . . I have friends in Rome since I started my
career in journalism, people with whom I enjoy discussing everything and
going out with for supper, and I also love being in the oldest Jewish community in the world, boasting a history of two thousand years of existence
in this city.
I dreamed for five years of being able to show in Parliament that
defending Israel is also part of being Italian, as well as the commitment
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made in 1945 concerning the equal rights of ethnic groups, religions, ideas,
and genders, in view of the not-easy choice to be a democratic republic, as
we can see today. I think that many members of Parliament (and from Parliament it reached the citizens) understood this . . . I think. Is it an illusion?
It’s hard for me to know; future choices will tell. What does seem clear to
me is that the choice of Israel is linked to overcoming that sense of emptiness permeating today’s troubled Europe, where the sense of solidarity,
common goals, and control over one’s destiny has been lost—a kind of
magical evidence that the will changes fate, as hard as it may seem to
believe. Just think about the steady commitment to laws that have kept
Israel a democracy during 65 years of war. The acknowledgment of the
certainty that Israel both supports and conveys these possibilities is
expressed in my choice of being an Italian woman who also becomes
Israeli.
*Fiamma Nirenstein is a journalist, author, and former member of the Italian parliament, chairing and funding the Parliamentary Committee for the Inquiry on
Antisemitism. Her most recent work includes A Gerusalemme (Rizzoli, 2012). A
founding JSA Board member and contributor, she is the recipient of multiple
awards and honors, and made her aliyah in May of 2013. Reprinted with permission from Shalom, July 11, 2013.
The Land of No Antisemitism
Anshel Pfeffer*
“There is no antisemitism here and there never has been.” This sentence was repeated to me over and over during my stay this week on the
shore of the Caspian Sea. Jews, non-Jews, government officials, dissidents,
local residents, and Israeli diplomats and rabbis. Not only was this the constant refrain but I don’t remember ever being in a country where I felt so
comfortable being identified as an Israeli. And Azerbaijan, in case you were
not aware, is 95 percent Muslim, of the Shi’ite variety, and literally down
the road—about an hour’s drive from Baku—is the Islamic Republic of
Iran. I was offered a host of reasons for this phenomenon of philosemitism.
The fact is that Azeris and Jews have lived together in this region for over
two and a half millennia, apparently from the first exile after the destruction
of Solomon’s temple, and Judaism in these parts preceded the other religions. And as the centuries rolled on, both nations suffered under the imperial rule of the Greeks, Persians, Ottomans, and Russia. The Azeris never
actually ruled over the Jews.
The last empire, the Soviet one, greatly added to the number of Azerbaijan’s Jews when the dispersion of populations carried out by Joseph Stalin brought at least 100,000 additional Jews, most of them well educated.
As a result, I was told that “nearly everyone who grew up in Baku remembers being treated by a Jewish doctor, studying under Jewish teachers, and
having a Jewish lawyer take care of their affairs.” And then, of course, not
all Shi’ites are Hezbollah; a great many of them believe that the cult of Ali
actually calls upon them to be tolerant to the members of other religions—
and anyway, even before the communists came and forced godlessness
upon them, the Azerbaijanis were predominantly secular.
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Their friendliness toward Israelis can be easily explained by the fact
that Israel was one of the first countries to recognize Azerbaijani independence in 1991, and the two countries have built a formidable strategic alliance (more about this elsewhere in this essay). And yet, all these reasons
don’t add up to a full explanation of how over 100 generations in which in
neighboring lands pogroms and expulsions were regular occurrences and in
later times evolved into virulent anti-Zionism, the land of the Azeris
remained a safe haven. To this day, president Ilham Aliyev is a frequent
visitor to the Jewish community centers—he even gave money for a Sefer
Torah and directed that the government finance the rebuilding of a
synagogue.
There was another question, though, that bothered me even more. This
wasn’t a peaceful land. Not far away the war of Nagorno-Karabakh was
waged less than 20 years ago, and with it came ethnic cleansing on both
sides of Armenians and Azerbaijanis. When such hatreds are playing out,
Jews have rarely remained unscathed. And even with the fighting reduced
to a trickle in recent years, Azerbaijan had hardly become a shining beacon
of democracy. Huge oil revenues began coming in as new offshore wells
were discovered, but instead of benefiting the entire society, it merely
served to bolster a kleptocratic regime that beats up demonstrators, arbitrarily jails journalists and dissidents, and fixes election results.
As a firm believer in the rule that a litmus test of the human rights
situation in a country is how it treats its Jews, I began to wonder whether
that rule is still true in countries like Azerbaijan and Putin’s Russia, where
the autocratic leader uses his security forces to fight against antisemitism,
allows the Jewish community to run its own state schools, and contributes
to the community from his own pocket—though, of course, it’s not really
his own.
Can a dictator be bad for his people and at the same time good for his
Jews? And what if he is doing so in the hope of receiving the backing of the
“Jewish lobby” in Washington?
Frustrated, I looked up Azerbaijan’s record in the websites devoted to
monitoring antisemitism across the globe. I’m not a great fan of these sites,
as they tend to magnify the trivial and miss the real trends, but I had little
choice in sources. They seemed to bear out what I had been hearing—there
were remarkably few incidents, and those that had taken place were dealt
with swiftly by the authorities. They seemed to be mainly nasty conspiracy
theories put out by marginal politicians from fringe Islamist or crypto-communist parties. There was a pattern here: Antisemitism in Azerbaijan is
something that comes from the opposition.
According to the Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism,
no antisemitic incidents whatsoever were reported in Azerbaijan in 2012,
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and only one in 2011—the Jewish-Russian journalist Vladimir Solovyov
received antisemitic hate mail from Azerbaijanis after he had criticized
Azerbaijan Airlines’ refusal to allow an Armenian passenger on one of its
flights. I probably shouldn’t extrapolate from one isolated case, but it seems
that Jews are tolerated and protected when they are acting in the role of
loyal Azeri citizens. What would happen if they joined the ranks of the real
opposition, which is not allowed even to win a few seats in the tame parliament? Throughout the annals of Diaspora, Jews have adopted a policy of
not giving the ruler undue reason to resent them. That finally began to
change in the 20th century, when Jews were at the frontline of freedom and
human rights movements. From Jews fighting apartheid in South Africa,
who didn’t feel they had to remain on the sidelines or else they would be
inviting persecution of their community, to Jews taking part in the civil
rights movement in the United States to Jews advocating an end to the monarchy in Britain, they felt free to represent unpopular views without worrying about wider repercussions.
I do not begrudge the Jews of Baku their safety and prosperity, but it
seems that they know their place, with the gallery of pictures hanging in the
synagogue foyer of President Aliyev lighting Hanukkah candles and meeting Shimon Peres. The real test will come when a sizable group of young
Jewish men and women join the growing protest movement against Aliyev:
Will the community still deserve his protection then? Ultimately, the real
guarantee for a minority’s security can only be democracy, not the good
will of a corrupt and despotic dictator.
*Anschel Pfeffer is a journalist at Haaretz and lives in Jerusalem. Reprinted with
permission from Haaretz, where it appeared on March 2, 2013.
Insightful Gloominess
Clemens Heni’s Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon
(Berlin: Edition Critic, 2013). 648 pp. $42
Asaf Romirowsky*
The study of antisemitism has taken many turns and twists over the
years. The goal remains: understanding where this hatred emanates from
and how it continues to cascade throughout the generations. While the
scholarship has differed on exact definitions, the signs and trends have been
voluminous. Leon Poliakov, one of the early scholars of antisemitism, highlighted this uniqueness in his definition of antisemitism as “an effective sui
generis attitude of the gentiles towards the Jews . . .”
Clemens Heni holds a PhD in political science from Innsbruck and is
currently the director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of
Antisemitism. In his newest book, Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon,
Heni attempts to pick up where others have left off, deciphering the latest
trends of anti-Zionism and Islamism.
Both Christians and Muslims have embraced antisemitism wholeheartedly. It is this theological understanding that united Hitler and Haj Amin
Al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, given their common Jihadist
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agenda toward the Jews. As an example, Andrew G. Bostom, in his book
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History
(New York: Prometheus Books, 2008), quotes Bat Ye’or on Islamic
antisemitism and its dissemination throughout the Muslim world:
The pejorative characteristics of Jews as they are described in Muslim
religious texts are applied to modern Jews. Anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism are equivalent—due to the inferior status of Jews in Islam, and
because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish
state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah.
Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad. Here the Pan-Arab and antiWestern theses that consider Israel as an advanced instrument of the West
in the Islamic world come to reinforce religious anti-Judaism. The religious and political fuse in a purely Islamic context onto which are grafted
foreign elements. If, on the doctrinal level, Nazi influence is secondary to
the Islamic base, the technique with which the Antisemitic material has
been reworked, and the political purposes being pursued, present striking
similarites with Hitler’s Germany (168).
When it came to the rise of Nazism, which was racial to its core, the
fatalistic view toward Jews is synonymous with the Jihadi view found in the
Muslim world. As Walter Laqueur observes in his study, The Changing
Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day:
The Nazi murder of the Jews was total—not selective—and it was carried
out systematically, following industrial organization and techniques. It
was not a series of pogroms and somewhat spontaneous massacres, nor
was there an escape for the Jews. Jehovah’s Witnesses or Communists
could gain their freedom from the concentration camps if they abjured
their fate and promised to collaborate with the Nazis. As far as the Jews
were concerned, their religious or political beliefs were wholly unimportant to the Nazis. The Jews were killed not because of what they did or
thought but because they were Jews. In this respect the Holocaust was
unique.
Heni’s contribution lies in his ability to sharpen exactly how antisemitism is exceptional—not only because of its ruthlessness but also because of
its very character. He writes:
Antisemitism is a specific phenomenon. Critical research on antisemitism
concludes that racism, prejudice and antisemitism are not equivalent. No
single group of people, except for Jews, has ever been singled out and
blamed simultaneously for mutually exclusive developments like capitalism, communism or liberalism and humanism.
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Moreover, Heni is able to elucidate how antisemitism and anti-Zionism have been sold as two separate issues rather than the latter having
grown out of the former. In his treatment of Hannah Arendt, he writes:
Looking back on more than 2000 years of Jew-hatred, it was indeed realistic that antisemitism should be considered a constant power, resentment, with genocidal consequences. Remember: Arendt writes that Jews
take advantage of Jew-hatred, while the Jews have still been buried in the
oven of Auschwitz. The Holocaust was still going on in 1944/early 1945,
and Arendt aimed at the Zionist idea of being saved by a possible Jewish
state. More ignorance, arrogance and de-realization is hardly possible.
This might be, on the other side, the reason why so many scholars and the
public embrace Arendt. In recent years one can find huge lists of publications on her. [At] the same time, antisemitism is on the rise, including
and particularly aiming at Jewish nationalism, or the Jewish nation-state.
In Heni’s view, a critical tipping point in the global arena of antisemitism is the adaptation of Holocaust rhetoric to the Israeli-Palestinian
dynamic, such as equating the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) with the
Holocaust. This has engendered statements such as characterizing the Israeli
security fence being a method of ghettoizing the Palestinians—posing yet
another hurdle to the pro-Israeli community, which has to counter demands
to recognize a nonexistent Palestinian Holocaust. The task becomes increasingly difficult as the media consistently promotes the Palestinian angle.
The Arab-Muslim narrative sees the establishment of the State of
Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust as a clear validation of the linkage
between Nazism and the continuation of Jewish domination. The widespread use of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion during the Arafat years,
and even more so today under Hamas, has given this false representation
the status of a primary document in Palestinian textbooks. Moreover, the
Protocols has attained the status of academic scholarship in the Arab-Muslim world, not just a folk myth. This “academic legitimacy” based on counterfeit documents stimulates the modern antisemitism Heni describes,
thereby raising a new Arab-Muslim generation that religiously believes in
these “facts.”
Finally, Heni underscores why history especially matters when it
comes to racial Jewish hatred. The fact that the debate about antisemitism
has become so intellectualized that individuals have a difficult time distinguishing racism from acceptable criticism is in itself telling. The new or
revised antisemitism is built on the “old” medieval one; cycles of hatred
toward Jews reflected in Muslim and Christian writings still repeat many
old antisemitic canards, but are now willing to embrace junk science and
social Darwinian tropes whenever possible. Europe today, as we saw in the
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1930s, is seeing a steady growth in antisemitism under the guise of antiZionism. Not since the end of WWII has there been such a level of distress
among European Jewry. As Robert Wistrich writes, “Europe cannot fight
antisemitism if it appeases terrorists or blackens Israel’s name. We need to
insist that a linkage exists between blind ‘Palestinophilia,’ being soft on
terror and jihad, defaming Israel, and the current wave of antisemitic violence” (http://www.jcpa/org/phas/phas-25.html).
Heni’s analysis, while long and gloomy and tending to leave the reader
depressed about the possibility for any change, only shows that the age-old
basic Jewish hatred is alive and well. His study represents an important
contribution, as it offers an interpretation based on insights that can be useful in combating contemporary antisemitism.
*Asaf Romirowsky, PhD, is the acting executive director for Scholars for Peace in
the Middle East (SPME).
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Was the Best
(The Best of His Generation’s Leaders in Responding to the
Holocaust and the Best of the US Presidents
in Responding to Genocide—and
That Is Not a Compliment!)
Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman’s FDR and the Jews
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
433 pp. $29.95
Michael Berenbaum*
The late Milton Himmelfarb once commented: “The easiest way to get
booed by a Jewish audience is to tell them antisemitism is less severe a
problem than they think it is.” In Holocaust studies, the easiest way to get
booed by a Jewish audience is to tell them that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s
record regarding the Holocaust is less vile than they have been accustomed
to hearing.
The American Jewish community has developed a preferred narrative
with respect to American policy during the war. American Jewish leaders
were timid and divided, unwilling to press a Judeocentric issue—the fate of
the Jewish people under Nazi Germany—for fear of its being labeled a
parochial concern and spurring antisemitism by the exercise of Jewish
power. And Roosevelt, assured of Jews’ adoring support, was indifferent to
the fate of their brethren. American Jews serving in government were
unwilling to risk their power, position, and prestige to advance Jewish interests. In order to get ahead, they went along.
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Arthur Morse’s influential book, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle
of American Apathy, was among the first works to do damage to
Roosevelt’s reputation. Published in 1968, in the post–Six Day War euphoria, it painted a bleak picture of the Roosevelt administration’s failure to
rescue the Jews. Far more important and scholarly was David S. Wyman’s
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945, published some sixteen years later. Written by the grandson of two Protestant
ministers, its moral tone is one of pious disappointment at discovering that
America was less than it should have been during these decisive times and
that American Jewry’s leadership less forthcoming, less imaginative, and
less daring than it could have been to meet the most monumental of crises
to affect world Jewry. That these accusations were made by a Christian only
intensified their impact.
Wyman was also important in raising the question of why Auschwitz
was not bombed, which formed a chapter in his work; an earlier version of
this chapter had been published in 1978 in Commentary, a journal whose
reputation in the 1970s was far different from what it is today. Wyman’s
views were also seen on television in the influential documentary America
and the Holocaust, broadcast on PBS.
Other works followed, written primarily by Jewish historians under
such titles as The Jews Were Expendable. Wyman’s disciple, Rafael
Medoff, has created an institute in his honor and published works defending
Wyman’s position. Medoff’s early work, The Deafening Silence: American
Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust, has been reinforced by the more recent
work FDR and the Jews: A Breach of Faith. More moderate positions, however, such as presented in Henry Feingold’s well-researched and wellregarded The Politics of Rescue, failed to gain traction in the popular imagination. It seems that Jews—like most people—want simplicity, not
complexity.
Similarly, other historians have examined the records of their own
countries. In England, for example, Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s preeminent biographer and a Holocaust historian, wrote Auschwitz and the Allies,
and there is Bernard Wasserstein’s Britain and the Jews of Europe, 19391945. In Canada, Irving Abella and Harold Troper critically examined the
role of their country in None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe,
1933-1948. In Israel, Dina Porat’s The Blue and Yellow Stars of David
examined the Yishuv’s record during the Holocaust; Dalia Ofer’s Escaping
the Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel, 1939-1944 deals
with successful and unsuccessful rescue attempts. Roosevelt’s most ardent
defenders have counterattacked with their own works, such as William D.
Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have
Saved More Jews from the Nazis.
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At stake in this historical debate is not only the past, but also the present and the future. The issue has also become, as has virtually every other
issue in public and Jewish life, politicized and polarized. Politically conservative Jews delight in tarnishing the record of American liberalism’s
most shining star. They seem to be warning contemporary Jews not to be
taken in by the lure of liberalism. When the chips are down, they caution,
liberals will betray you.
For some writers in this field, a defense of revisionist Zionism is the
issue. Peter Bergson (a.k.a. Hillel Kook), the revisionist Zionist leader who
went against the establishment, is the hero; the wise and ever cautious men
such as Rabbi Stephen Wise, who constituted the Zionist figures of the Jewish establishment, or non-Zionists such as the leadership of the American
Jewish Committee, were either well-meaning dupes or, worse yet, leaders
who betrayed their people in their greatest hour of need. I recall attending a
meeting at the Israeli embassy in Washington soon after Lucy Dawidowicz
published a New York Times Magazine article defending American Jewish
actions during the Holocaust, when newly appointed Israeli ambassador
Moshe Arens asked incongruously, “Who is this woman?” He was unaware
of Dawidowicz as the author of the well-regarded The War Against the
Jews. After long government service, Arens wrote a history of the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising that maximized the role of revisionist fighters and minimized the Zionist-Bundist alliance that had long been regarded as the major
fighting group. Rewriting history vindicates the fighters’ political position.
Pierre Sauvage and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Moriah Films each
released documentaries on Peter Bergson, the latter attracted to Bergson’s
arduous—dare one say militant—activism. Only militant activism of the
style practiced by Bergson and the Wiesenthal Center will do to secure the
Jewish future; in addition, Bernard Weintraub’s fictional historical play The
Accomplices, which takes aim at Jewish leadership, was written to reinforce
the preferred narrative.
If for Zionists the message is to resist with arms, for Orthodox Jews,
the lesson is don’t trust the assimilationists, for they will not put Jewish
needs first. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint)
is vilified as being so concerned about technical violations of American law
when the lives of millions of Jews were at stake that one could forget how it
supported Jewish soup kitchens in German-occupied countries long into the
war, how it assisted the Yeshiva students of Shanghai, and how its requests
to transfer money, which sent the Treasury Department into action against
the State Department, resulted in the famous memo written by Treasury,
“On the Acquiescence of the US Government to the Murder of European
Jews.” But David Kranzler’s polemical work Thy Brother’s Blood: The
Orthodox Response During the Holocaust is revered, and Efraim Zuroff’s
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much more scholarly and balanced work The Response of Orthodox Jewry
in the United States to the Holocaust: The Activities of the Vaad HaHatzala Rescue Committee, 1939-1945 is dismissed for its conclusions,
which while accurate are deeply problematic to contemporary ideology.
After documenting the relatively small numbers of Jews saved by the
Va’ad, Zuroff turns to the impact of influential rabbis and Torah scholars:
The Va’ad was an effective tool for the Americanization of local Orthodox leadership. Had the Va’ad joined forces with the Joint, the overall
results probably would have been more beneficial to the Jewish people
than those achieved individually by each organization. And that too is a
lesson that should be learned from the history of the Holocaust.
But not by separatists. And for Israeli prime ministers, the inaction of
the American State Department during the Holocaust is proof positive that
only the Jewish state can save Jewish lives, and reason enough to never
trust an American initiative for peace. The failure to bomb Auschwitz was
invoked by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations
seemingly as a defensible rationale were he required to defend his decision
to bomb Iran. The Israeli Air Force flew missions from Israel to Auschwitz
to reinforce the national myth that only Israel and Israel alone can save the
Jewish people. During the Holocaust, there was no Israel, and one forgets
that the Israel of today has capacities that the Yishuv of 1942 and even the
state in 1956 or 1967 lacked. Had the Germans not been halted in North
Africa, the Yishuv itself would have been annihilated.
Yad Vashem’s exhibition of the failure to bomb Auschwitz only asks
the question: “Why Wasn’t Auschwitz Bombed?,” seemingly blaming the
Allies. It never tells its visitor that the leaders of the Yishuv in Palestine
voted not to request that Auschwitz be bombed on June 11, 1944, during the
height of the deportation of Hungarian Jews.1
I now turn to the work under review. If Fox News had not preempted
the term “Fair and Balanced,” one could summarize Breitman and Licht1. A word about Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum’s The Bombing
of Auschwitz (University of Kansas Press, 2000), which was based on the co-sponsored USHMM and National Museum of Air and Space conference marking the
museum’s 1993 opening. I was responsible for the content of the 10 films on the
US record during the Holocaust that the museum shows; for the rewriting of the
bombing of Auschwitz, based on the results of that conference; and for the presentation at the museum’s Research Institute, which I then directed, of Richard Levy’s
reconsideration of the Auschwitz bombing. (See Richard Levy, “The Bombing of
Auschwitz Revisited: A Critical Analysis,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 10
[1996]: 267-298).
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man’s treatment of FDR and his administration as fair and balanced. Richard Breitman is both an American and a Holocaust historian. His early
work, written with Alan Kraut, was on American immigration, and he has
written an important biography of Heinrich Himmler: Heinrich Himmler:
Architect of the Holocaust. As the long-time editor in chief of Holocaust
and Genocide Studies, Breitman is clearly on top of all recent Holocaust
research.
His co-author, Allan Lichtman, is best known for his books The Thirteen Keys to the Presidency and The Keys to the White House. He has also
written Prejudice and Old Politics, which was on the presidential campaign
of 1928, the first in which Roman Catholic Al Smith ran for the presidency
and the very campaign in which FDR was first elected governor of New
York. Lichtman has been a progressive candidate for the Senate, running on
an anti-Iraq-war platform for the seat vacated by Maryland senator Paul
Sarbanes. (And, though I have known Breitman for decades, I know nothing of his political views.) Both are professors of history at American University and have been honored for their teaching.
A word on their methodology: Breitman and Lichtman have done
extensive research, and have been careful to consider FDR’s record on the
Jews and the Holocaust within the context of the historical times in which
he lived, his full agenda for the nation, and the other issues that came across
his desk; they are also deeply mindful of the political timetable that FDR
faced and the other Herculean problems that confronted him and his administration. In addition, they consider Roosevelt’s early background. His parents were surprisingly free of the antisemitism that marked their class and
religion. Eleanor Roosevelt, whose solidarity with the Jews is legendary,
grew up an antisemite and had to overcome her youthful prejudice; FDR
did not. As governor of New York, Roosevelt well understood Jewish leaders and the nature of antisemitism in the twenties and thirties. As they write,
from his first campaign, Roosevelt learned that:
First, non-Jewish politicians should avoid entanglement in conflicts
among Jewish leaders. Second, Jews respond to non-Jewish issues and do
not necessarily vote en masse for Jewish candidates or Jewish causes.
Third, no Jewish leader or group can turn on or off a Jew bloc, though
many threaten to so do. To serve their interests, Jewish leaders may also
deny the existence of a Jewish vote. Fourth, anti-Semitism can be present
even when hidden from view, as evidenced by the so-called “silent”
Republican vote [against Ottinger, FDR’s Jewish Republican opponent
for governor]. Fifth, non-Jewish leaders could lean on Jewish talent like
[Samuel] Rosenman (34).
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Roosevelt was to recruit so much Jewish talent that his opponents
sometimes referred to the New Deal as the “Jew Deal.”
Breitman and Lichtman never isolate the Jewish issue from the rest of
the presidential agenda. Thus, the FDR of 1933, facing the full impact of
the Depression and having been elected to fix unemployment and the economic malaise, had very different priorities from the FDR of 1939, a president who now has an acute sense of impending war and the personal
mission of making his isolationist nation ready for war, even as he made the
most personal of decisions—to run for a third term—and thus break the
precedent set by George Washington.
All presidents have different political options immediately after reelection and before the election cycle for the next Congress begins, and any
president has more limited options as he faces reelection. To say that FDR
had a Democratic Congress is insufficient unless one also considers the
composition of the Democratic majority that he may or may have not commanded and the nature of the Republican opposition he faced. It begs the
following questions: Could FDR unite opposing forces to overcome isolationism and appeasement to approve his Lend-Lease program? Was this
different from a president who faced a surprise 1941 Japanese attack, but
the Axis outcome was bleak? Concerns such as these emerged in a mind
uncertain of the postwar outcome while suspecting that he would not live to
see the end of the war.
On the Jewish question, FDR often operated alone against both Congress and the significant members of his own administration. He enjoyed
the support of his Jewish staffers and of Jewish advisers such as Felix
Frankfurter and his secretary of the treasury, longtime friend and neighbor
Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Both men realized and supported his full agenda,
though they were at times reluctant to go to the well too often for fear that
they would be regarded merely as parochial and see their influence compromised. There is little evidence of their timidity or their lack of concern;
instead, there is ample evidence that they wanted to preserve the power of
their positions.
Breitman and Lichtman understand the president’s style of operation.
He was an indifferent administrator, far more powerful as one who charted
policy and persuaded the American people about its direction. He could
play off rivalries within his cabinet and sub-cabinet and within his constituencies. He did not trust the State Department even as it was staffed with
men of his class, religion, and school background—Groton and Harvard.
His secretary of state, Cordell Hull, who wanted to replace FDR in 1940,
was ineffective in his job and was undercut by the undersecretary, Sumner
Welles, who was close to the president and enjoyed his company. Even
though Hull’s wife was of Jewish ancestry, Welles was the one sympathetic
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to the Jews. His fall in 1944, orchestrated by Hull, left the Jews without an
ally in the State Department—without someone who could crack the
entrenched antisemitism of many of its senior staff.
For readers wanting a thumbnail sketch of the book, consider its introductory chapter. Breitman and Lichtman argue that there were four different
phases in Roosevelt’s relationship to the Jewish question. In his first term,
he placed political realism above criticizing the policies of Nazi Germany.
Faced with the enormous task of getting the nation on its feet again, he
focused his energy inward, on domestic concerns. Though he was not
unmindful of the menace of Hitler and Nazism, he was reluctant to divert
his attention away from the enormous challenge that he was elected to meet.
During FDR’s second term, he was far more receptive to Jewish concerns. He used his executive powers against a reluctant Congress, an uninterested electorate, and the opposition of labor and bureaucratic
machinations of his own State Department to loosen immigration restrictions. He backed efforts at Jewish resettlement, including Palestine and
Latin America; he was only marginally successful in this quest, however,
never enough to have a genuine impact on the problem or to secure the
safety of Jews seeking to flee Germany. He also backed Zionist aspirations
for continued immigration to Palestine against British opposition. Yet in
comparison—and the comparisons are unflattering to all—he did more than
any other leader of his time.
FDR’s response to Kristallnacht, November 1938 Nazi pogroms, the
burning of synagogues, the looting of Jewish businesses, and the arrest of
30,000 Jewish men age 16-60 and their deportation to concentration camps
was to recall his ambassador to Germany—but for “consultation,” not to
sever diplomatic relations. It was more than any other world leader did, but
that may not be a compliment. Americans of all religions and all political
persuasions were genuinely outraged by what they saw in Germany, as they
had internalized the American value of freedom of religion—but that did
not translate into support for immigration.
As war loomed on the horizon, Roosevelt was less willing to alienate
these political forces; he needed all the support he could get to combat
isolationism, to advance Lend-Lease, and to prepare the United States for
the war, which he well knew was unavoidable.
In the first years of the war, when the fate of the free world was literally in his hands alone, the president gave almost all his attention to the war
effort and was but occasionally interested in the Jewish question. Unfortunately, this coincided with the most intense German efforts to realize their
goal of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” As Christopher Browning has taught us, when the Wannsee Conference convened on January 20,
1942, some 75 to 80 percent of the Jews who were to be killed in the Holo-
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caust were still alive. Some 15 months later, the figures were reversed: four
out of five Jews were dead.
These were the very months when the president, the political leadership, the press, and the public were most concerned about the war, whose
outcome at that time was uncertain.
In the last eighteen months of his life, FDR could be more confident of
the final outcome of the war, which allowed him to concentrate his increasingly limited energy on the postwar world and with it to think again of the
Jews. Breitman and Lichtman described the battle between Henry Morgenthau and his dedicated, primarily non-Jewish staff to confront the State
Department and to press the president toward the creation of the War Refugee Board, but unlike Gregory Wallance, they do so without the skill of a
novelist; and unlike Arthur Morse, without the drama of a journalist; and
unlike David Wyman, without the moral outrage of a preacher’s kid. They
write as historians—with precision, footnotes, and reserved detachment:
The fourth Roosevelt came late to the task. His chosen instrument of
rescue, the War Refugee Board—the only agency of its kind in the
world—lacked the resources and authority for an immensely difficult
task. Throughout its tenure, the board remained underfunded, undermanned, and dependent on a military and State Department with decidedly different priorities. Still, the board helped to save as many as
200,000 Jewish lives, in addition to the more than 100,000 saved by
FDR’s second-term initiates for refugees. If established earlier, the War
Refugee Board would likely have saved some additional Jewish lives, but
cessation of the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews required the military defeat
of Germany and their allies (325).
As one who has written extensively on the bombing of Auschwitz, I
know well Breitman and Lichtman’s familiarity with the basic literature and
their measured conclusions. Bombing is the “preferred” solution precisely
because it is quick and does not involve the commitment of massive numbers of ground troops. Yet they know that bombing was only a viable
American option in the spring of 1944, when Italian air fields were secure
and the distance between them and Auschwitz was some 528 miles. The
decision to bomb Auschwitz also hinged on whether the information on
what was happening there was available and understood. As late as June 11,
1944, even the Jewish Agency in Palestine, headed by David Ben Gurion,
voted not to request that Auschwitz be bombed. “We do not know enough”
about the situation on the ground, they concluded, but it was four weeks
before the deportations of Hungarian Jews were halted. Only when the
Vr’ba-Wetzler Report, written by two Auschwitz escapees, reached Allied
hands and was deemed credible did “we know” with some precision what
was happening on the ground.
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Despite what some critics intent on preserving the preferred narrative
of the American Jewish community might say, this is no whitewash of
FDR. A careful reading of this book is not one that either Roosevelt’s
defenders or his attackers might prefer; it is fair and balanced, critical where
criticism is warranted, and careful in both the tone and the content of its
accusations. Breitman and Lichtman write:
Either Roosevelt did not see the plight of European Jews, as one that
compelled decisive presidential engagement, or he continued to worry
that whatever he might do or say would backfire, impairing the war
effort. During FDR’s first term the struggle to rebuild a shattered economy had kept him from risking political capital on Jewish priorities. In
1942, the urgency of world war had the same deterrent effect. This cautious wartime Roosevelt was politically and emotionally stingy when it
came to the plight of Jews—even given that he had no easy remedies for
a specific Jewish tragedy in Europe. He hoped that the sudden collapse of
Germany and the end of the war would resolve all ancillary issues, but
Germany did not crumble under pressure and FDR would not live to see
the war to its conclusion (210).
They also do not take sides in the war within American Jewish
leadership:
Each side could present measures and organize its own events, which
attracted somewhat different followers. Bergson could operate as an outsider agitator and publicist, while Wise could work both from within and
outside the Roosevelt administration. It was Wise who had publicly
released credible reports of the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews, alerting
Bergson among others to the horrors of the Holocaust. Wise could also
present Jewish concerns and proposals directly to Welles and occasionally FDR himself (218).
Parenthetically, one could say almost the same thing about Jewish
leadership during the struggle for Soviet Jewry. Regarding FDR’s Zionism,
there too they are fair and balanced:
Roosevelt sounded at times like a Zionist, at times like a skeptic about
Palestine’s capacity to absorb new settlers, and at times when speaking to
anti-Semites, like an anti-Semite himself. Often he would agree with
someone only to reverse course weeks or even days later. Beneath such
maneuvers and reversals, FDR showed some core beliefs. He approved of
the Balfour Declaration, and he disapproved of British retreats from it.
He never allowed the State Department to dictate American policy
toward Palestine or the region. Not by coincidence, his closest advisers
on Jewish issues, Rosenman and Morgenthau, favored continued Jewish
immigration to Palestine, but did not pressure the president to endorse to
a Jewish state there (260).
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Through action and not just words, Roosevelt helped stop the Nazis
from extending the Holocaust from Europe to the Middle East and North
Africa. Breitman and Lichtman conclude:
FDR was neither a hero of the Jews nor a bystander to the Nazis’ persecution and then annihilation of Jews. No simple or monolithic characterization of this complex president fits the historical record. FDR could not
fully meet all competing priorities as he led the nation through its worst
economic depression and most challenging foreign war. He had to make
difficult and painful trade-offs, and he adapted over time to shifting circumstances. His compromises might seem flawed in the light of what
later generations have learned about the depth and significance of the
Holocaust, a term that first came into widespread use many years after
FDR’s death. Still, Roosevelt reacted more decisively to Nazi crimes
against Jews than did any other world leader of his time (315).
And the authors point out that FDR’s record compares favorably with
that of both his predecessors and his successors. Woodrow Wilson did nothing about the Armenian genocide. Despite his emphasis on human rights,
President Jimmy Carter was ineffective with regard to the auto-genocide in
Cambodia. Both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton did little on Yugoslavia, and while Clinton later reversed his position and bombed Kosovo, he
stood by with regard to Rwanda, which in his words was the biggest regret
of his presidency. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been weak in
their response to Darfur and the Sudan, and one wonders how history will
judge Obama’s failure to lead his war-weary nation to do something significant about Syria.
So to say that Roosevelt was the best is hardly a compliment, as
Samantha Powers, now the US ambassador to the United Nations and the
author of The Problem from Hell, a Pulitzer Prize–winning book on
responses to genocide, well knows. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein may have
summed up the situation best when he wrote: “The Final Solution may have
been unstoppable by American Jewry, but it should have been unbearable
for them and it wasn’t. This is important, not alone for our understanding of
the past but for our sense of responsibility for the future.”
*Michael Berenbaum directs the Sigi Ziering Institute and is a professor of Jewish
studies at American Jewish University. He is the former project director overseeing the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and later the
direcctor of its Research Institute. He is also the former president of the Survivors
of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and co-editor with Michael Neufeld of The
Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It?
Antisemitism Terminal and Interminal
Günther Jikeli’s Antisemitismus und
Diskriminierungswahrnehmungen junger Muslime in Europa—
Ergebnisse einer Studie unter jungen muslimischen Männern
(Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2012). 341 pp. £22/$35
Doerte Letzmann*
This book is a thoughtful and well-balanced study of antisemitism
among young Muslim men in Europe. It is a timely contribution to a field
where there is still a lack of solid research, but that is at the same time
subject of much academic and general debate.
Reports on antisemitic hate crimes show that a significant number of
those who commit hate crimes against Jews identify themselves as Muslim
or Arab. The reasons for this are disputed. Some argue that it is the conflict
in the Middle East that creates hatred against Jews among Arabs and Muslims, even in Europe. At times, and this argument is most prevalent in Germany, it is argued that one contributing factor for Muslim antisemitism is
the discrimination Muslims experience as a minority in Western European
societies.
Günther Jikeli’s study, however, shows that there is neither a single
cause for Muslims’ antisemitism nor that Muslims are automatically
antisemitic. He also makes a strong case that there is in fact a specific Muslim antisemitism, a form of Jew-hatred that is legitimized through Islam.
In order to gain a better understanding of antisemitic thought patterns
and stereotypes among young Muslim men, Jikeli conducted and analyzed
interviews with 117 young Muslim men from different ethnic backgrounds
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in three different countries: Germany, France, and Britain. The key research
question for the interviews was how these young men legitimize their
antisemitic attitudes.
In the first part of the study, Jikeli gives a brief account of the history
of Muslims in Europe, discusses current research on Muslim antisemitism,
explains his research process—and its limitations—and introduces the 117
interviewees. We learn that most of them are from a working-class background and that their level of education, although varied, is lower than average (69). Jikeli discusses as well the significant differences between
Germany, France, and Britain with regard to the establishment and formation of Muslim communities.
One of the premises of the study is to find out not only what attitudes
these young men have toward Jews, but also how this is connected to the
issue of national identification in the respective countries and how the interviewees experience and evaluate discrimination against Muslims. The
author devotes a whole chapter to this issue, in which he shows that the
national identification of the interviewees heavily depends on the different
national contexts and the concepts of national identity in the respective
country in which they live (105). This comparative aspect is particularly
useful when it comes to generalizing the findings of the study. It is all the
more striking that, despite the differences between the Muslim communities
in the three countries and the different understanding of national identity,
there are very little differences between the antisemitic attitudes of the
young men.
Most of the men, in fact, display shocking levels of antisemitic attitudes, some of them even expressing the willingness to commit antisemitic
hate crimes (229). The antisemitic attitudes are analyzed in the main part of
the study, in which Jikeli establishes five categories of antisemitic thought
patterns from his sample: “classic” modern antisemitism, antisemitism with
reference to Israel, antisemitism with reference to Islam, religious or ethnic
identity, and expressions of antisemitism without rationalizing them. He
points out that these thought patterns do not exist separately from each
other but overlap, which supports his argument that there is not a single
cause of antisemitism among Muslims. While about half the interviewees
express hatred against Israel, many present elements of “classic” modern
antisemitism at the same time, which means a belief in a Jewish world conspiracy and being convinced that Jews control governments, the economy,
and the media (119). Jikeli notes that the hatred against Israel the interviewees express often spills over into antisemitism insofar as they have a certain
black-and-white view on the conflict in the Middle East, in which Palestinians, with whom they identify, are fighting against an evil power, and are
experiencing at the hands of the Jews what Jews experienced at the hands of
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the Nazis (155-160). Within this thought pattern, the idea that Jews are
child murderers is especially strong (161).
The most striking find of the study, however, is that while only about
half of the interviewees show antisemitic thought patterns with reference to
Israel, the majority of them legitimize their antisemitism with their religious
or ethnic identity. The strongest element of this thought pattern is the belief
in a “natural” antagonism and inevitable war between Jews and Muslims
(180). This argument is based on an understanding of Islamic texts as well
as vague ideas about the history of Jewish-Arab relations; several interviewees, in fact, state they are surprised that Hitler killed Jews although he
was not a Muslim (183). Jikeli also demonstrates that a number of interviewees do not try to rationalize their negative attitudes toward Jews but see
it as their right to hate Jews (213).
Following the close analysis of the interviews, Jikeli turns to possible
causes of antisemitic thought patterns among the Muslims in his sample. In
contrast to simplifying explanations of the causes of Muslim antisemitism,
he comes to the conclusion that while these causes are in fact multidimensional, experiences of discrimination are not a significant factor in the
development of antisemitic thought patterns (290).
Although the setup of the study necessarily limits the findings with
regard to representativeness, the results can provide a basis for further
research and should also inspire the implementation of educational
approaches that take the complexity of antisemitic thought patterns into
account. This study certainly refutes simplifying and apologetic arguments—such as the one that Muslims hate Jews because of the conflict in
the Middle East—which, in effect, are only ways of blaming Israel for Muslim antisemitism.
*Doerte Letzmann, who is completing her doctorate in history at London’s Royal
Holloway University, is the London director for the International Institute for Education and Research on Antisemitism.
A Must-Read for Christians
David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2013). 610 pp. $35
John T. Pawlikowski*
David Nirenberg has given us a volume that anyone interested in the
history of Western culture and politics, as well as those working in the area
of theology, must read. Whatever differences one might have with the
author here or there in his massive study, the overall achievement is monumental. But it is not merely a book that must be read. It is also a volume
that must be absorbed and discussed in scholarly communities that wish to
contribute positively to the framing of Western culture into the future.
The central argument put forth by Nirenberg is that “anti-Judaism”
very often constituted the framework for what was acceptable and what was
destructive as Western society moved through the centuries. “Anti-Judaism” became a core element in the self-understanding of intellectual, political, and religious leaders in the West. Intellectual, political, and religious
opposition was often portrayed as rooting out so-called “Judaizing” tendencies from Western consciousness.
Despite the title, Nirenberg does not focus his attention on the concrete
impact of “anti-Judaism” on the Jewish community in Western Europe—
though he recognizes that impact. He writes as a descriptive historian rather
than as a prescriptive or even judgmental scholar. He does not see his task
as assessing the moral status of those who promoted the anti-Judaic mindset; rather, he wishes to show that it became a fundamental barometer in the
evolution of Western society and even before, in the ancient worlds of
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Egypt and the Roman Empire. It is interesting that he does not include
Greece in his analysis even though Grecian culture has had a major influence on the development of Western consciousness and the socio-political
institutions it created. As a sidebar comment, the reader sometimes does get
the impression that Nirenberg is trying so hard to validate his basic thesis
about the role of anti-Judaism that he omits anything that does not quite
enhance such a validation. Perhaps the omission of ancient Greece in his
study is one of those “anythings.”
The range and depth of Nirenberg’s scholarship is strikingly impressive. This makes it difficult for a reviewer to comment extensively on sections of the book that fall outside the review’s academic parameters; this is
certainly the case with this reviewer. Hence I will leave it to others to assess
the full quality of his arguments in the sections on ancient Egypt, the
Islamic community, and the writings of William Shakespeare. With regard
to Nirenberg’s contention that Islam, in its beginnings, picked up the antiJudaic theme and recontoured it to its own needs, I wonder if he should
examine more explicitly the Islamic literature coming out of medieval
Spain to see whether Islamic thought in this setting showed any variance
with the overall Islamic tradition that he has studied. There in fact may be
no variance but the more open-minded approach to Judaism (and Christianity) exhibited by scholars in Muslim Spain forces us to at least raise the
question.
Given my own scholarly expertise, I would like to focus on
Nirenberg’s chapters dealing with Christianity’s contribution to the spread
of the anti-Judaic mindset as well as his analysis of the rise of modernity in
European intellectual and political circles, where religion was marginalized
in terms of formative influence or even totally discarded. Even so-called
“secularists” often embraced the anti-Judaic argument against their
opponents.
In terms of Nirenberg’s section on the contribution of the biblical and
patristic tradition to the cultivation of the anti-Judaic thesis I would score
his analysis quite highly. In fact, I would argue that no serious biblical
scholar of theologia can ignore the challenges he has presented in this section. It is a must read for Christians. But having made this strong commendation I need to add a caveat and a distinction.
The distinction is the easier of the two. There is little question that
Christian theology over the centuries interpreted biblical texts, especially
from the Pauline literature, in the way that Nirenberg describes and thus
contributes mightily to the process of solidifying anti-Judaism as part of the
bedrock of Western culture. But the question remains, and this is the caveat,
did the early church and subsequent theologians correctly interpret Paul?
There is a growing consensus among Pauline scholars today, both Christian
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and some Jewish, that Paul was badly misinterpreted on the Jewish question. Nirenberg shows an awareness of this recent scholarly literature on
Paul that began with the work of E. P. Sanders, but he really does not
incorporate it into his basic analysis of Paul in any significant way. This in
my judgment represents a scholarly defect in his presentation.
Moving to his analysis of the modern period, I find his claim for the
centrality of the anti-Judaic outlook rather persuasive. It significantly influences some of the leading thinkers of the period such as Immanuel Kant, as
well as many of the leaders who championed the rise of democracy in
Western Europe. As one trained in ethics, I cannot recall that the anti-Judaic
mindset was ever presented in my own academic training as a central issue
for these modern thinkers, who shaped both secular and religious thought in
key areas such as ethics and theology. The textual evidence Nirenberg
presents for his argument relative to the modern period seems to substantiate his claim about the perdurance of anti-Judaism as a defining element in
modern European thought. Ethicists in particular need to take note of
Nirenberg’s analysis.
As a historian, Nirenberg has confined himself to Western thought,
primarily in a European context. But we do live in a global society. And so
his analysis, while brilliant in the main, has its limitations. For one, it would
be helpful if Nirenberg were to do some comparative analysis with developments in Eastern Christian thought. And as the intellectual traditions of
Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are beginning to intersect with Western
thought there is need for other scholars better grounded in non-Western
thinking to compare the pervasiveness of anti-Judaism in Western thought
with the pervasive elements in non-Western thought. So I regard
Nirenberg’s volume as essential reading but—in our globalized society—
still incomplete.
*John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, PhD, teaches at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, and is a JSA Board member. He has written extensively on antisemitism and
Jewish-Catholic relations.
“Don’t You Love Farce?”
Jytte Klausen’s Cartoons That Shook the World
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 230 pp. $29.00
Alexander Traum*
In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published
twelve cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad, igniting a geopolitical
firestorm that stretched from Denmark to Indonesia. The cartoons, appearing in this relatively popular yet provincial periodical, triggered a diplomatic crisis, economic boycotts, and mass protests throughout the Muslim
world that caused hundreds of casualties, some fatal. Today, however, the
so-called “cartoon crisis” seems like a minor, somewhat insignificant footnote in history. Since their publication—and without provocation—millions
have taken to the street, demanding the dissolution of totalitarian regimes.
Tyrants were toppled. Today, a civil war in Syria continues unabated with
blood pouring into those streets.
Why, then, should we pay heed to twelve cartoons that led to neither
revolution nor reform, but to a discussion that dissipated as soon as the
media became bored? Published before the Arab Spring brought upheaval
to the region, Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons That Shook the World provides
an answer, documenting all facets of the crisis from the decisions surrounding publication to the subsequent uproars. The cartoons presented twelve
cartoonists’ interpretation of the invitation to draw the Prophet Muhammad
“as they see him.” They mostly mocked Islam’s founding figure, the most
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infamous cartoon featuring a depiction of Muhammad with a bomb in his
turban. Published alongside the cartoons was an essay by the paper’s culture editor, hailing the cartoons’ publication as a victory of freedom of
speech against self-censorship and political correctness. Local imams were
the first to object to the portrayals as a violation of their rights as Danish
citizens to equality and dignity. The cartoons subsequently became the
cause célèbre of the Egyptian government, then led by Hosni Mubarak,
which cynically coopted the cause for its own political ends. It was only
after the diplomatic corps of Muslim nations adopted this issue that these
very nations lost control, with protests erupting on the streets and extremist
factions taking over. Meanwhile, the Danish government, a weak coalition
of centrist and rightist political parties, obstinately ignored—and, at times,
exacerbated—the conflict for its own political ends.
Though the international media largely portrayed the crisis as a Clash
of Civilizations, Klausen, a Danish political scientist who teaches at Brandeis University, rejects this reading of events as a red herring. Instead, the
crisis, according to her, revealed the political, theological, and cultural tensions not only between the West and Islam but also among the West and
amid the Muslim world. Though Klausen has strong words about the Egyptian government’s cynical exploitation and Denmark’s incompetence, this
extensively researched book is cautious not to place the blame on any single
party; instead, it explores the crisis as it unfolded across continents, political
parties, and religious circles, presenting not only an exhaustive account of
this particular event but also a useful introduction to many of the challenges
that continue to concern the West’s—and particularly Europe’s—relationship with the Muslim world.
With its focus on anti-Islamic bigotry, this book has little to say
directly regarding anti-Jewish bigotry; for the most part, European Muslims
view criminalizing antisemitism as unfair, pointing up a double standard
when it comes to denigrating Islam.
At the same time, the book champions Jewish self-determination and
fighting antisemitism as essential human rights.
One result of the Cartoon Crisis was a move by Muslim states to push
for the recognition of “defamation of religions” as constituting a violation
of international human rights law. The resolutions proffered at the United
Nations General Assembly and the affiliate Human Rights Council purport
to protect religions generally, but only explicitly mention Islam—and
neither define religious defamatory speech nor explain who determines if a
particular speech constitutes religious defamation. While these resolutions
have passed the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly Session
(a solely symbolic gesture), these concepts have yet to be integrated into
international human rights norms.
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In the case of antisemitism, such hatred manifests itself in a myriad of
ways, from derision of Jewish beliefs and traditions to outright violence.
Societies should confront all forms of antisemitism, whether expressed as
mere intellectual conjecture, actual discrimination, or worse. At the same
time, we must be cognizant of the limitations of law in confronting bias.
Law should, and in fact only can, protect against hatred when manifested
through conduct. Laws protecting the exercise of religion, free from discrimination or hostility, are essential in a civilized society. Similarly, the
law should protect the right of a people to self-determination, a right that is
consistently downplayed or rejected when it comes to Israel’s right to exist
in peace and prosperity.
The law cannot, however, protect against hatred when manifested
through mere words or thoughts. Yes, there are occasions when words seek
to incite violence against a group, and such words should indeed be circumscribed. Given the history of Europe, whether laws that outlaw Nazi propaganda or Holocaust denial in that continent constitute incitement is an open
question. Ultimately, human rights norms should not be amended to suppress free expression in the name of protecting group beliefs. Though Klausen does not take a strong stance on this issue, her book highlights how
societies should confront group prejudice and how they should not. Accordingly, even though the book does not directly touch upon the problem of
antisemitism, it nevertheless is an important contribution in considering the
right of free speech in a pluralistic and globalized world.
*Alexander Traum is a former Brechner Legal Fellow at the Anti-Defamation
League and recent graduate of Fordham Law School. He is an ongoing contributor
to the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism.
Good, Better, Best
Alvin H. Rosenfeld’s (ed.)
Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 576 pp. $25
Steven K. Baum*
It has a good title, not unlike colleague Bernard Harrison’s Resurgence
of Anti-Semitism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Harrison has a chapter, as
do Matthias Küntzel (Jihad and Jew Hatred, Telos, 2007) and Robert Wistrich (Muslim Antisemitism: Clear and Present Danger, ADL, 2002), and
all forged the linkage of anti-Israeli sentiment and antisemitism. It has bignamed authors, e.g., Wistrich, Küntzel, and Dina Porat, and the lesser
known next generation of experts, e.g., Gunther Jikeli. There are chapters
that read like a status report for antisemitism hotspots in Western Europe
(UK, Spain, Norway) and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Romania, Poland,
Russia), including the tinderboxes of Turkey and Iran; a chapter on Greece
and the influence of the Golden Dawn Party may have proven helpful, however. Ilan Avisar’s chapter on Israeli anti-Zionism was stunning. Interspersed between the above are theoretical chapters of literary and political
themes, giving the feeling that the organization of the material is somewhat
random. Much of the focus returns, however, when masters such as Robert
Wistrich trace Islam and Marxism’s antisemitic roots and Emanuele
Ottolenghi, in his examination of Jewish self-hate, lets in fresh air.
In the main, Resurgent Antisemitism provides a solid overview for a
graduate student or professor in the newly established field of antisemitism
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studies. Once a reader completes the overview, he or she will walk away
with a fairly good command of contemporary issues in this burgeoning
field.
The reader departs with a fairly comprehensive understanding, but not
as good as it could be. Partly this is due to emerging parameters in a field of
moving targets. For instance, when and who imbibes the anti-Zionism that
crosses the line into antisemitism? Why do some become infected with the
social disease and not others? There are methodology problems as well, as
when some pollsters record anti-Zionism and antisemitism statements
inflating antisemitism rates while others do not, and report lower rates.
Even social scientists remain unclear regarding how much one concept
belongs to the other, i.e., some studies find moderate statistical correlations
between antisemitism and anti-Zionism (Baum, 2009; Cohen, Jussim,
Harber, & Bhasin, 2009; Kaplan & Small, 2006), while others do not.
A chapter on clinical and social pathology may have proved interesting—at present, we know very little. One wonders if the underlying psychology involved in anti-Zionist rhetoric is similar to Holocaust denial and
new forms of antisemitism.
Editor Alvin Rosenfeld directs Indiana University’s Institute for the
Study of Contemporary Antisemitism—one of the few established university-based programs for graduate studies in antisemitism; the other programs include Yale, Berlin, London, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. With a
background in Jewish studies and Holocaust history, he is well versed in
those areas with works such as The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2011).
Yet an understanding of antisemitism’s underlying mechanisms is
missing. The scientific literatures for antisemitism are replete with social
science–based stereotype research derived from sociology principles and
the social psychology of prejudice. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous quip
that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts rings true
here. Implied at times in the book is the notion that there is a kernel of truth
to all stereotypes—and that notion is simply false.
There is no scientific foundation to the popular belief of personality
and ethnic stereotypes—this in spite of multiple attempts to study them
(Terracciano, et al., 2005). Stereotypes, prejudice, and hate-filled ideas are
part of a culture’s social belief system—and, like superstitions, persist in
spite of all reason and evidence to the contrary. Such beliefs, which infect
most but not all members of that society, seem to have their origin in statesanctioned policies, key religions (predominately antisemitic Christianity
and Islam), and popular culture—e.g. folklore, jokes, music, poems, graffiti, statues, paintings, commemorations, and books, transmitted via word of
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mouth, rumor, and the Internet, and reinforced by the same. Such beliefs are
bound by laws of social fantasy and not reality.
Researchers have been long aware that antisemitic beliefs continue to
persist in nations devoid of actual Jews. At present, Muslim-based nations
hold the highest rates of antisemitism, yet have miniscule or no Jewish
populations.
Currently, there is no other edited book that competes with Resurgent
Antisemitism. Compared to itself, some parts are good, some parts are better, and some parts emerge as best in the field. Antisemitism studies is a
burgeoning discipline that will someday supersede Holocaust studies as
new forms of the social illness emerge and new generations learn the lessons of those who have come before them. Resurgent Antisemitism is a
good place to start.
*Steven K. Baum is editor for the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA) and
author of Antisemitism Explained (University Press of America, 2012). He is coeditor with Steven L. Jacobs and Florette Cohen of North American Antisemitism,
Vol. 14 (Brill, in press).
REFERENCES
Baum, S. K. (2009). Christian and Muslim antisemitism. Journal of Contemporary
Religion, 24, 137-155.
Cohen, F., Jussim, L., Harber, K., & Bhasin, G. (2009). Modern anti-semitism and
anti-Israeli attitudes. (2009). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
97, 290-306.
Kaplan, E. H., & Small, C. A. (2006). Anti-Israeli sentiment predicts anti-semitism
in Europe. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50, 548-561.
Terracciano, A., Abdel-Khalek, A. M., Adám, N., Adamovová, L., Ahn, C. K.,
Ahn, H. N., . . . McCrae, R. R. (2005). National character does not reflect
mean personality trait levels in 49 cultures. Science, 310 (October 7), 96-100.
“Natural and Understandable”
Responses to Zionism
Virginia Tilley (ed.), Beyond Occupation: Apartheid,
Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories
(Pluto Press, 2012). 352 pp. £22.50 Kindle £18.84
Colin Meade*
The legal framework in which the book Beyond Occupation:
Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories1 takes place is that of the show trial.
In this framework, the defendant, the Jewish state of Israel, is not
treated as a legal personality with the right to mount an effective defense,
but as an incarnation of evil whose essential nature is to be exposed. The
argument is circular: Israel’s evil nature means that its deeds are intrinsically evil, while the evil deeds are the proof of the evil nature.
According to Tilley et al., “evidence is to be confined, with few
restrictions, to Israeli practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and
to the period after the 1967 war.”2 However, the manner of presentation and
1. Virginia Tilley (ed.), Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and
International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Pluto Press, 2012).
2. Tilley et al., 3.
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the interpretation of this evidence are predetermined by a prior assumption
about the fundamental illegitimacy of the Jewish state from its initial establishment. Thus, on page 117 we read:
The 1952 World Zionist Organization-Jewish Agency (Status) Law . . .
specifies that Israel is the State of the Jewish people: “1. The State of
Israel regards itself as the creation of the entire Jewish people and its
gates are open, in accordance with its laws, to every Jew wishing to
immigrate to it.”
Tilley comments: “These provisions are not merely symbolic formulas,
but establish a juridical basis for systematic racial discrimination [=
apartheid—my insertion]. . . .” A Jewish state must (in Tilley et al.’s view)
be a racist state.
The assumption that Zionism = racism is used to underpin the claim
that the Jewish state is engaging in colonialism and apartheid in the “occupied Palestinian territories.” Without it, the charges would seem senseless,
since, through control of strategically crucial territory, the Jewish state is
trying not to deprive other peoples of political sovereignty, but to prevent
the Jewish people from losing it, while apartheid, according to the sources
on which Tilley et al. rely, involves discrimination aimed at ensuring domination of one group over another3 and there is no evidence at all that the
Jewish state has at any stage sought domination over non-Jews as an end in
itself. Having, via the assumption of intrinsic evil, transmuted acts of selfdetermination and self-defense into acts of colonialism and apartheid, these
misrepresented acts then provide the pseudo-proof of the otherwise
ungrounded initial assumption. Around and around we go, lost in the
authors’ brainstorm.
So, according to Tilley et al., any action taken to promote or defend a
policy of Jewish national self-determination is part of a policy of colonialism and apartheid. The defendant is guilty not of concrete crimes, but of
claiming the right to exist at all, but according to what law?
For all practical purposes and according to all the standard textbooks
on the subject, positive international law consists of written and unwritten
agreements—treaties and customary rules in which states formally accept
binding obligations to one another or to the international community as a
whole, plus decisions taken on the basis of such agreements, according to
the underlying principle of pacta sunt servanda: agreements must be kept.
3. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime
of Apartheid, Article One, http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/apartheidsupp.html
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Tilley et al., however, make free and ample use of documents that do
not express or reflect any such agreement between states, such as UN General Assembly resolutions, which, according to the UN Charter (a valid
treaty whose terms must be respected by its parties), are only “recommendations”; treaties that have never come into force; obiter dicta by judges;
comments by academics; statements and reports of UN functionaries; and
declarations by the (South) African National Congress and South African
Communist Party.4 On the basis of their pseudo-sources, Tilley et al. then
present their prejudices as principles of international law.
Thus, the authors dismiss the notion that the conflict in the former
Palestine is between two peoples for one land “on the ground that the conflict is fundamentally characterized, in terms of international law, by a
denial of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.” The legal evidence? A UNGA resolution: “UN General Assembly Resolution 2649 condemns ‘those Governments that deny the right to self-determination of
peoples recognized as being entitled to it, especially of the peoples of southern Africa and Palestine.’ ”5
Tilley et al.’s indifference to the basic principles of international law—
indeed of law in general—is displayed in their habit of cherry-picking from
their sources. Thus they note that, according to the British Mandate for
Palestine, the mandate territory should be treated as one unit; of this the
authors clearly approve.
Then, on the other hand, they claim that the provision in the Mandate
calling for support by the mandatory power for the establishment of a Jewish national home in the territory “confuses” this purely territorial premise
for self-determination. Evidently, the authors do not approve of this.6 Thus,
for Tilley et al. the same document can be a source and also not a source,
depending on their whim. Similarly, in one place (31), General Assembly
Resolution 181 (1947) is castigated for altering the original terms of the
mandate by dividing the territory of Palestine and producing a “gerrymandered map,” but on page 38 it is cited as grounds for the claim that
Jerusalem cannot be Israeli because it has been deemed international territory by the “international community.”
In a further convolution, the authors give their pseudo-sources not only
the function of upholding a legal case, but also the power to reshape material facts. Only such a belief can explain the assertion that the Jewish citizens of Israel “do not face a problem of self-determination,”7 regardless of
4.
5.
6.
7.
Tilley
Tilley
Tilley
Tilley
et
et
et
et
al., 19.
al., 20.
al, 30.
al., 32.
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the fact that powerful international forces proclaim their desire to abolish
the one and only Jewish state noisily and often. The logic here is: since the
GA has said that there is no problem, there is no problem. In Tilley’s world,
if the General Assembly votes that the world is flat and Israel has flattened
it, then we must all believe (lest we defy international law!) that the world
is indeed flat and Israel has indeed flattened it.
Given the authors’ willful attitude to legal sources and their apparent
belief that the universe is the product of General Assembly decisions, it
would be foolish to believe any of their manifold claims about facts without
independent verification. Following my own advice, I checked a reference
to the Basic Law: Israel Lands that appears immediately after the passage
on the right of return quoted above. Here, the authors write that this law
“provides that real property held by the State of Israel, Israel’s Development Authority and the Jewish National Fund must be held in perpetuity for
the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people.”8 What the law actually says,
however, is:
1. The ownership of Israel lands, being the lands in Israel of the State, the
Development Authority or the Keren Kayemet Le-Israel, shall not be
transferred either by sale or in any other manner; 2. Section 1 shall not
apply to classes of lands and classes of transactions determined for that
purpose by Law; 3. In this law, “lands” means land, houses, buildings
and anything permanently fixed to land.9
No mention of the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people at all. Its
manifold defects as a scholarly text also make the book a very hard read, in
which there is no unfolding argument, just a relentless repetition of the
same circular reasoning. One class of readers will nonetheless welcome its
existence—those who wish to find excuses for engaging in, inciting, or
excusing violence against Zionism and “Zionists.”
Finally, the question needs to be asked—is this is an antisemitic work?
The answer to this is not straightforward: the authors themselves would
certainly indignantly deny the charge; there is no mention of a global Jewish conspiracy, and the wider target of their anti-Zionist venom does not
seem to be anything Jewish at all, but rather “settler-colonialism” as practiced in South Africa, the United States, and Australia, of which Zionism is
said to be an example.10
8. Tilley et al., 117.
9. Tilley et al., 117. Source of original legal text: http://www.knesset.gov.il/
laws/special/eng/basic13_eng.htm
10. Tilley et al., 19-20.
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On the other hand, the authors’ failure to attribute any causal significance in the development of events to violent anti-Zionism and Arab Judeophobia suggests that they consider such phenomena to be “natural” and
“understandable” responses to Zionism and so not worthy of consideration.
These authors would not normally consider murderous violence and paranoid fantasies as “natural” or “understandable” responses to a nationalist
movement. They must therefore believe Zionism to be something other than
a nationalist movement—a conspiracy with a hidden agenda, perhaps?
*Colin Meade teaches government at London Metropolitan University, and has also
worked as a professional translator from French and German. He can be contacted
via email at [email protected]
Another Good German
Friedrich Reck’s Diary of a Man in Despair
(NYRB Classics—Reprint, 2013). 235 pp. $11.98
Daniel Leeson*
This is an extraordinary book, in which the author, a Prussian aristocrat, enraged by every action of the officials in the Nazi hierarchy, pours his
invective on all aspects of their leadership from May 1936 until Reck’s
assassination just prior to the war’s end.
Friedrich (Fritz) Reck (1884-1945) was the son of a politician and
landowner. He initially wanted to be a musician, but deviated, studying
medicine at Innsbruck. During the First World War, he served as an officer
in the Prussian Army, but was dismissed because he was a diabetic. In
1908, he married Anna Louise Büttner and had four children with her, three
daughters and one son. They divorced in 1930.
In 1911, Reck was a ship’s doctor in American waters, and later
worked as a journalist and theater critic in Stuttgart. In 1914, he relocated to
Pasing (near Munich), eventually remarrying in 1935; this marriage produced three more daughters. A conversion to Catholicism occurred two
years earlier.
Between the 1920s and 1930s, Reck became a novelist, producing
children’s adventure stories. One book, Bomben auf Monte Carlo, was
filmed twice. Several of his works were to be banned by the Nazis, and
none were published until after his death. His best-known work is Diary of
a Man in Despair—a statement of defiance of life under Nazi rule.
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Diary is perhaps one of the most powerful and moving (unclassifiable)
document of Nazi opposition. First published in 1947 by an obscure German publication house, the book attracted little attention until a newspaper
reprint in 1964, and a subsequent paperback reprint two years later.
The book tracks, with a caustic and outraged pen, Germany’s
decline—politically, ethically, and morally. The matter of the Jews, their
elimination from society via their slaughter, is rarely mentioned, in part due
to collective denial and cover-up even as Polish patriots—e.g., J. Karski
(http://tiny.cc/i79aww)—tried to go public.
The book begins in May 1936 with the death of German historian
Oswald Spengler. This review asks the reader to peruse several selected
passages that demonstrate the force and variety of Reck’s ideas. Consider
the following numbered examples.
1. August 11, 1934, describes the Night of the Long Knives purge,
which occurred between June 30 and July 2, 1934. Reck’s invective is fully
displayed. The event resulted in a series of political murders in which leading figures of the left-wing faction of the Nazi party were murdered, along
with anti-Nazi conservatives. Reck makes a particular point of noting
Hitler’s personal involvement in the murders as well as evidence of the
man’s cowardice:
I understand that Hitler himself took on the job of killing some of his
enemies in the course of his Apache-style raid on Bad Wiessee, and that
one of his intended victims fought back. Bellowing with rage, brandishing his pistol, he chased his Führer downstairs to the basement,
where Hitler finally found refuge behind an iron-sheathed door. Lovely
Hamlet-like beginning for our new regime!
Reck speaks venomously of Hitler, as well as his disgust with those
Germans who treat him as a mystic:
As in our case, a misbegotten failure conceived, so to speak, in the gutter,
because the great prophet and the opposition simply disintegrated, while
the rest of the world looked on in astonishment and incomprehension. As
with us (and in Berchtesgaden recently, crazed women swallowed the
gravel on which our handsome gypsy of a leader had set his foot), hysterical females, schoolmasters, renegade priests, the dregs and outsiders
from everywhere formed the main support of the regime.
My life in this pit will soon enter its fifth year. For more than fortytwo months, I have thought hate, have lain down with hate, have dreamed
hate and awakened with hate. I suffocate in the knowledge that I am the
prisoner of a horde of vicious apes and I rack my brains over the perpetual riddle of how this same people which so jealously watched over its
rights a few years ago, have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only
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allows itself to be dominated by the street-corner idlers of yesterday but
actually—height of shame—is incapable any longer of piercing its shame
for the shame that it is.
Here, Reck continues describing the Hitler he saw only recently:
I saw Hitler last in Seebruck, slowly gliding by in a car with armor-plate
sides, with an armed bodyguard of motorcycles in front as further protection: a jellylike, slag-gray face, a moon face into which two melancholy
jet-black eyes had been set like raisins. So sad, so unutterably insignificant, so basically misbegotten, is this countenance that only 30 years ago
in the darkest days of Wilhelmsism, such a face on an official would have
been impossible. Appearing in the chair of a minister, an apparition with
a face like this would have been disobeyed as soon as its mouth spoke an
order—and not merely by the higher officials in the ministry: no, by the
doormen, by the cleaning women!
And so the text goes, entry by entry, without letup, showing Reck’s
total hatred for the men who now ruled Germany. Reck barely controls his
absolute disgust with Hitler and the rest of the Nazi hierarchy—so much so,
that he considered assassinating the man:
I had driven into town, and since at that time, September 1932, the streets
were already quite unsafe, I had a loaded revolver with me. In the almost
deserted restaurant, I could easily have shot him. If only I had had an
inkling of the role this piece of filth was to play and of the years of
suffering he was to make us endure, I would have done it without a second thought. But I took him for a character actor out of a comic strip and
did not shoot (12).
2. On March 20, 1938, Reck speaks of his love for Germany and what
he thinks the new leadership has done to the country:
I know that this land is the living breathing heart of the world. I will go
on believing in this heartbeat, despite all covering layers of blood and
dirt. But I know also that the thing up there that rumbles and thunders is
the denial of right and justice, of truth and faith and everything that
makes life worth living. I believe that this is a caricature of Germany,
smeared by a malignant ape escaped from the leash (49).
3. In July 1938, Reck gives an acid-tongue report on the famed LouisSchmeling heavyweight boxing championship fight:
By order of King Mob, I am supposed to believe in a defeat for all
Germans because the highly paid German butcher boy who was knocked
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down in New York by another highly paid butcher boy happens to have
the same nationality as I. Four of us sat until the dawn of this warm
summer day to hear the outcome of this fight. When we heard that the
entire drama over there had been played out in two minutes we broke into
laughter. My dear countrymen, I hope that you will live to see the day
when you learn to believe in other gods than a few movie whores and a
couple of prize-fighters (54).
4. In December 1938, Jewish tribulation is mentioned. The event
described follows shortly after Kristallnacht, which occurred on the ninth of
the previous month:
I rack my brains trying to discover the meaning of this persecution of the
Jews which Göbbels has instigated. At a time when this regime urgently
needs peace, surely this must call forth the deadly enmity of the whole
world and make war inevitable . . . Aged Fräulein X lived in great seclusion in her two room apartment on Munich’s Maximilianstrasse. A well
known actor who had managed to win great popularity with the Nazis
decided that he wanted these two rooms. He found it unheard of for an
old Jewish woman to be inhabiting them and denounced the old lady to
get the apartments. This is tantamount to a deportation to a concentration
camp and slow death by starvation in those glorious times. Old Fräulein
X knew this very well, and felt herself to be too old and too weak for this
bitter path. She turned with an urgent plea for a quick-acting poison to
the mother of one of her pupils. The friend was a woman of character and
determination. First she offered every conceivable aid and protection to
the old, weary woman. When this did not work, she had the courage to go
to a Munich pharmacologist, a colleague of her husband’s to ask for the
poison. This gentleman, who to make matters worse, was himself a follower of Hitler, was furious at the very idea, and first refused. Then,
however, as the utter hopelessness of the case was driven home to him,
he overcame his sense of outrage sufficiently to slip a mixture of
curanine and potassium cyanide into her hands. The lady returned to
Fräulein X, already a dying woman, with the poison. And now it turned
out that with her tearful thanks for the poison, Fräulein X still had one
more request: would the friend sing Brahms’ Ernste Gesänge, before they
parted. The friend, who is a singer, complied. She left, and today at lunch
we got word that old Fräulein X had been found dead in her apartment.
The man who denounced her, the actor P., had grown impatient and was
at her door at the time. These are the things I have witnessed (62).
5. In April 1939, Reck speaks of the transformation of Bruno Brehm,
who was awarded the German National Book Prize in 1939; here, he is
describing Brehm’s change from one who sought favors from Jews to one
who became an open antisemite:
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Bruno Brehm who, as late as 1930 was seeking favors in the antechambers of the literary Jews of Vienna; who dedicated his books “in faithful
recollection” to their equally Jewish wives and who now, a few years
later, writes one inflammatory anti-Semitic article after the other (65).
6. In August 1939, Reck speaks of the outbreak of war and the disaster
that faces Germany as a result of that outbreak:
We stand on the threshold of a second world war, in which again all of
geography will be against the Germans, and which will derive from the
Bismarckian state. And I am quite sure that such a war declared by the
eternal Prussian as it will be, is lost before the first shot is fired. We will
not be able to talk about better days until we have before us the outlines
of the coming catastrophe. This perspective we will have only when we
are sitting atop the relatively small pile of rubble of which will result
from the relatively short war to come—a war which is inevitable, and
which will break out soon. . . .
The next morning, as I was on my way home, the blacksmith came
out to tell me the news: the pygmies to whom Germany’s fate is now
linked, have taken the leap, and at this very moment that power-drunk
schizophrenic’s voice is crackling out of every loudspeaker (74).
7. In January 1940, Reck speaks of Julius Streicher’s trial when the
Der Sturmer editor was accused of taking bribes, and of Hitler’s assumption
of a mistress, which allows Reck to hint at the man’s allegedly bizarre sexual behavior:
Herr Julius Streicher, the Third Reich’s great helden-tenor of anti-Semitism, was convicted by a jury of his Gauleiter peers of having taken
bribes from rich Nuremberg Jews. Rumor was he had been shot, but I
was convinced from the start that not a hair of his head would be touched.
Just as predicted, Streicher . . . came out safe and sound . . . The latest is
that the Great Man himself now has a mistress . . . Of course, we all
know what the circumstances, and the lady should really be described as
a maı̂tresse en titre (92).
8. In October 1940, Reck reiterates the key theme of German national
character:
With the Germans it is as I have said: every nation normally puts its
demons, its delusions, its impossible desires away into the cellars and
vaults and underground prisons of the unconscious. The Germans have
reversed the process and let them loose. The contents have escaped like
the winds out of Pandora’s Box. A storm is raging across this long-suffering old earth. Germany, drunk with victory is sick (96).
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9. In September 1941, Reck speaks of illnesses carried in food and of
government-sponsored prostitution:
In the meantime, the plebes are feeling the full fury of a German food
industry gone chemical-crazy. Sugar is now made out of firewood, sausage out of beech-wood pulp, and the beer is a stinking mess made of
whey. Yeast is made out of a chemical, and marmalade is colored to fool
people into thinking it is the real thing. The same for butter, except that
the coloring matter also contains a vile and indigestible substance, poisonous to the liver and doubtless responsible for the biliousness so common today. Everyone’s eyes are yellow, and . . . the incidence of cancer
has doubled the last four years.
As a result of the fermentation and gas resulting from pulpy, clayey
bread, the air in cafés is pestilential. No one even bothers anymore to
hold back his wind. As a result of this systematic poisoning of the blood,
people go about with boils and abscesses, and their body liquids are
fouled.
In my own basically highly moral little town, boulevard life has
been introduced by north German females sent here by the Nazi Mother
and Child organization, and the infection has spread to a portion of the
native population. With the prisoner-of-war camp guards, the women
have set up an “Isle of Delight” here (118).
10. In February 1943, Reck speaks of the treatment of wounded
soldiers:
There is a shortage of chloroform and morphine in the Army hospitals.
Doctors are protesting the fact that the hospital trains are arriving in
which the wounded lie on stinking straw in the ice-cold freight cars. In
Berlin, an entire unit of diabetics has perished for lack of insulin (161).
11. In March 1943, Reck criticizes Hitler and Göring for being reminiscent of Nero’s proverbial fiddling while Rome burns.
Herr Hitler is occupied elsewhere at the moment. He is concerned, not
while our cathedrals and national monuments are being turned into dust,
but with the teaching of counterpoint and the rules of harmony—Herr
Hitler is laying the foundation of National Socialist music. And recently,
Herr Göring was seen entering a party he was giving for his cronies wearing a fur coat that reached to his ankles, girded by a red morocco belt
studded with stolen diamonds (167).
12. On July 21, 1944, Reck speaks of an assassination attempt:
And now the attempt to assassinate Hitler. Carried out by the Count von
Stauffenberg whose irreproachable father I have always considered to be
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one of the last remaining examples of the true German nobleman. Behind
it—a revolt of the generals, long awaited:
Ah, now, really, gentlemen, this is a little late (190).
13. On October 14, 1944, Reck offers his final entry:
All that was entitled, supposedly, was a single night at a hotel, and so I
had come with just a small valise. They searched it for weapons: It was
not a good beginning. And when I asked for a lawyer, the response was
harsh (200).
Denounced for reviling German purity, Reck was taken into custody in
December 1944. He was sent to Dachau and on February 16, 1945, was
shot in the back of the neck—though it was claimed the next day that he
had died of typhus.
Fritz Reck demonstrated all the qualities that were once presumed to
have personified German high culture—human decency, a sympathy for the
downtrodden, and genuine support of a ruling system that was fair. One
often wonders how a culture that produced Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven
could have wreaked such havoc. Representing the goodness and the best in
people, Reck should have achieved eminence, and instead was buried by the
sheer force of the evil that surrounded him and all of Germany.
*Daniel Leeson is retired and resides with his wife in Palo Alto, California. He is a
frequent contributor to the JSA, writing on such diverse topics as Mormon posthumous baptizing of Jews, der Judensau, Wagnerian opera, and the intergenerational
blood libel of Tarnobrzeg, Poland.
Watching the Watchers
Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers
(Sony Picture Classics, 2013). DVD $20/$25 Blu-Ray
Sheldon Kirshner*
In Dror Moreh’s penetrating and important Israeli film, The Gatekeepers, six former directors of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic secret service,
candidly discuss their jobs, the war on terrorism, and Israel’s occupation of
the West Bank. In Moreh’s 97-minute film, nominated for the 2012 Best
Documentary Academy Award, the directors are Avraham Shalom, Yaakov
Peri, Carmi Gillon, Ami Ayalon, Avi Dichter, and Yuval Diskin. They
respectively served from 1980 until 2011.
Shalom, the oldest of the lot, was forced to resign after an Israeli newspaper exposed his role in the summary execution of two Palestinian terrorists who had been captured alive after hijacking a bus. Peri is credited
with setting up a network of Palestinian informers in the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip, upon which Israel relies to nip terrorism in the bud. Gillon, who
focused on Jewish terrorism, stepped down after his boss, Yitzhak Rabin,
was assassinated by a Jewish zealot. Ami Ayalon tried to rehabilitate the
Shin Bet in the wake of Rabin’s death and attempted to stamp out the first
embers of the second Palestinian uprising. Dichter, left to deal with the
violent repercussions of the intifadah, initiated Israel’s policy of targeted
assassinations of Palestinian terrorist leaders. Diskin carried on his work.
Although they performed their duties with a high degree of ruthlessness, they are not hawks, as one might assume, and support a two-state
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solution. As Peri suggests, “You become a bit of a leftist” after you’ve
waded into the depths of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Gatekeepers, however, is hardly a polemical work. Its content and mood are solely determined by the interviewees, who have access to information normally way
off the grid.
The Shin Bet is portrayed as a well-oiled organization that has been
astonishingly successful in keeping terrorism at bay. Shalom alludes to this,
but adds that the Palestinian problem was left to fester and that the prime
minister he worked for, Menachem Begin, did not take it into proper consideration. Gillon discusses interrogation techniques, mentioning in passing
sleep deprivation and shaking, and says that tough measures were used to
prevent suicide bombings. He observes that ideologically motivated Hamas
terrorists are harder to break than secular Palestinian nationalists.
In discussing the war on terrorism, one notorious incident of which
ignominiously ended his career, Shalom maintains that morality does not
enter into the equation. Disagreeing with Shalom’s harsh assessment, Diskin says that the Shin Bet cannot act outside the norms of the legal system.
Peri, who was recently elected to the Knesset as a Yesh Atid party representative, claims that the first Palestinian uprising was a spontaneous eruption
and that the Shin Bet did not foresee it. He adds that Israel should have
reached an accord with the Palestinians and withdrawn from the territories.
In related comments, Peri argues that Israeli governments have “coddled”
Jewish settlers and “looked away” as they built a web of settlements in the
West Bank and Gaza.
Gillon contends that Jewish extremists could have touched off a war
with the Muslim world had they blown up the Dome of the Rock in eastern
Jerusalem. He is bitter that members of a Jewish underground group were
released from prison so soon after their arrest. Gillon advised Rabin to wear
body armor and increase his security detail, but the prime minister refused,
a mistake that cost him his life. In Gillon’s view, Yigal Amir, the assassin,
changed the course of Israel’s history “big time.”
In a claim that has surely raised the hackles of politicians across the
board, Peri says that a succession of Israeli governments had no “real
desire” to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians following Rabin’s
murder. Ayalon dispassionately describes Hamas’ suicide bombing campaign, from the mid-1990s onward, as an attempt to equalize the balance of
power with Israel. Dichter fills in some of the blanks concerning Israel’s
response. For his part, Shalom decries a retaliatory policy dependent on
what he calls “overkill.” In a similar vein, Ayalon warns that targeted assassinations may lead to a greater upsurge of terrorism and further radicalize
the Palestinian leadership. Dichter reveals that Israel had an opportunity in
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2003 to kill Hamas’ entire leadership, but cancelled the operation out of
fear that innocent bystanders would be killed.
Without exception, the former directors call for negotiations with the
Palestinians, the sooner the better, warning that the status quo is unsustainable. “We’ve made life miserable for the Palestinians,” says Gillon. Shalom, in a reference to Israel’s “brutal occupation,” claims that the future is
“bleak and dark.” Clearly, whether or not you agree with their assessments,
The Gatekeepers does not mince words.
*Sheldon Kirshner is a columnist for the Canadian Jewish News, where this review
first appeared on February 25, 2013. Reprinted with permission.
Precarious Prosperity . . . for Some
Sonja Miltenberger’s Jüdisches Leben am Kurfürstendamm
(Berlin: Text-Verlag, 2011, German language edition).
239 pp. =
C 16
Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose*
Fürst is the German word for prince, while a Damm is a corduroy
road. In the 17th century, German nobility installed a corduroy road
between central Berlin and a hunting lodge to the west of the city. In 1875,
Chancellor Otto von Bismark began converting the way into a cosmopolitan, modern boulevard, with the intent of making Berlin competitive with
Paris and its Champs-Élysées. Known affectionately as the “Ku’damm,” the
Kurfürstendamm served, up through the 1920s and ’30s, as a prosperous
hub for culture and gracious living.
With her book Jüdisches Leben am Kurfürstendamm (Jewish Life on
Kurfürstendamm), Sonja Miltenberger of Berlin’s Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Museum has created a literary memorial to the Jewish people who
inhabited the Kurfürstendamm until Nazi persecution drove them away.
The opening pages document the establishment of the Jewish community
on and near the Kurfürstendamm. The Neo-Romanesque, liberal Fasanenstrasse Synagogue was erected just off the Kurfürstendamm beginning in
1910. Kaiser Wilhelm II gave the temple a maiolica-tiled ceremonial wedding hall and dedicated it to the Jews of Germany. As Miltenberger reports,
area Jewish residents established many charities; with few exceptions, those
charities were for the general population and not restricted to Jewish
beneficiaries.
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In advance of writing the book, Miltenberger published announcements asking surviving former Jewish residents of the Kurfürstendamm to
contact her for interviews. The respondents furnished her with rich details
of their lives in Berlin, as well with period photos and family memorabilia.
Given the time frame, most of the respondents were children when they
lived in Berlin. Ursula Rosenberg, born in 1926, recalls a life of piano lessons, baking sweets with girlfriends, and going to cafes with her parents,
but by 1938 she was participating in air-raid shelter drills. Tellingly, she
relates that during one drill, a Nazi from the Sturmabteilung tried to assign
her father to supervision of the drill. Her father said: “But I am Jewish,”
whereupon the Nazi told him that they would find somebody else.
Evelyn Bendix, who today lives in California, reminiscences goodhumoredly about the 14-room apartment her family inhabited at 62 Kurfürstendamm. One corridor in the dwelling was so large that she was able to
ride her tricycle around in it. In a public courtyard of the building, an organ
grinder would come with his monkey. Sabine Offermann, a star of the German operatic stage at the time, rehearsed in the family’s music room, which
was outfitted with a Bechstein grand. Evelyn was friends with the daughter
of a Swedish diplomat in Berlin. One evening, when Hitler was scheduled
to visit the Swedish embassy, the friend sprinkled sneezing powder all
around the outdoor area where Der Führer was to be received. The two
teens climbed up to a roof over the patio to watch the fun begin, but unfortunately, it rained. Evelyn loved sports, and was stunned in 1936 when her
mother told her she would be unable to get her tickets for the Olympics
because she was Jewish. Nonetheless, a friend snuck her in—but when
Hitler entered and the attendees saluted and shouted “Heil Hitler!,” Evelyn
bent over and pretended to be adjusting her shoe on her foot. Only after the
war, though, when she learned that her paternal uncle and his family were
killed in the Holocaust, and that her maternal uncle froze to death while
being transported to Auschwitz, did the full gravity of the situation sink in
for her.
Ruth Süssmann was born in the same apartment, 64 Kurfürstendamm,
where her parents had their wedding celebration. The family moved in circles of Great War veterans turned pacifists. Ruth recalls that in a public
school classroom in 1933, a classmate made an antisemitic remark, and the
teacher, Herr Beer, admonished her and said such language was not permitted in the school. Ironically, her uncle had a house in Wannsee and her
family vacationed in the winter in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Although Ruth
was too young to comprehend what her parents must have been going
through between 1933 and 1935, she has vivid recollections of squadrons of
uniformed SA troops singing propaganda songs while marching under her
apartment window. Today, she lives in Tel Aviv.
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FOR SOME
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Ruth Grünfeld, born in 1924 at 227 Kurfürstendamm, remembers her
mother cultivating potted hyacinths in the space between their dwelling’s
double windows. Her fondest memory of growing up there is of outings
with her grandmother, who allowed her to order hot chocolate with
whipped cream. She was routinely exposed to Nazi propaganda and says
she remembers all of their songs and movies. Somewhat disturbingly, Ruth
relates that she and her family were very enthusiastic over the news that the
Saar had been returned to Germany. (The Saar was occupied by France and
Britain at the end of World War I. During the early years of the Nazi Reich,
it served as a refuge to those being persecuted by the Nazis. In 1935,
though, a plebiscite returned the territory to Germany). Otherwise, Ruth
remembers her grandfather taking her backstage to greet the performers at a
cabaret, and playing tennis on courts on Leibnitzstrasse. After the Nuremberg Laws were put into effect, she attended the Theodor Herzl School,
bizarrely with an address on Adolf Hitler Platz. Her comment, “Then one
day, it came to an end,” marks the end of her interview.
Anna Lichtental, who today resides in Buenos Aires, recollects the
business successes her mother and father enjoyed in the textile sector, especially in the silk garment trade. Anna says that although in the first years of
Hitler’s dictatorship, her parents still were able to do business, they understood that they were in grave danger.
Later sections of the book, which are devoted to increasingly harsh
persecution of Jews—including Nazi theft of their properties and other
assets—continue to incorporate some memories of Jews present at the time,
but rely as well on the general historical record to pinpoint how Nazi policies bore down on Jewish residents of the Kurfürstendamm. A chapter covering emigration quotes Ruth Grünfeld saying “I am not a survivor, I’m a
lucky escapist.” A painful chapter of the book reports on Jews who
attempted to hide from the Nazis in Kurfürstendamm basements and on
those who opted for suicide rather than to submit to deportation to a concentration camp.
A second section of the volume compiles, building by building, the
names and vital statistics for all currently known Nazi-era Jewish residents
of the Kurfürstendamm. For some notables, biographical sketches are provided. Theodor Landau, a professor and prominent gynecologist, lived at 26
Kurfürstendamm from 1908 to 1932. His daughter, the poet and author Lola
Landau, continued to write in German even after she fled to Israel. Friedrich Schorr, a cantor’s son who is considered the greatest Wagnerian bassbaritone of his generation, briefly lived at 177 Kurfürstendamm before fleeing to the United States. The Intrators listed as living at 185 Kurfürstendamm—Jakob, Rosa, and Manfred—are relatives of Joanne Intrator,
one of the authors of this book review.
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Without any reservations, we recommend that an English-language
publisher release a translation of this valuable book. As vigilant as we
always must be against antisemitism, it is gratifying to see how many nonJewish Germans in today’s Berlin dedicate themselves to paying warmhearted homage to the Nazis’ Jewish victims.
*Joanne Intrator is a New York-based psychiatrist who is completing a book on the
World War II confiscation of property belonging to her family; see http://
www.jmberlin.de/1933/en/. Scott Rose is a New York-based writer.
Endings Without Beginnings
“1933: The Beginning of the End”
Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose*
The Jewish Museum Berlin’s online exhibit “1933: The Beginning of
the End of German Jewry,” http://www.jmberlin.de/1933/en/, is very personal to me. On April 8, 1933, my father, Gerhard Intrator, had been working in Berlin as a trainee for the civil service. He received a sickeningly
polite form letter from the president of the Regional Court informing him
that if he was of Jewish heritage, he would have to file a request to resign
his position immediately, and swear that he was not in possession of any
office documents or books.
That fatidic letter is part of the Jewish Museum Berlin’s online exhibit,
which throughout 2013 is placing a fascinating selection of “On-this-dayin-1933” documents, photos, and explanatory texts related to the Nazis’
drastic first steps in the Holocaust as part of their efforts toward Gleichschaltung, which was the forced alignment of all official aspects of the state
with the Nazi Party.
Because I am a psychiatrist, Nazi notices to Jewish doctors, forbidding
them to practice only because they were Jewish, particularly stimulate my
curiosity. Something of a flip side to the monstrous practice of Nazi doctors
torturing concentration camp prisoners with inhumane “experiments” is that
there were long-established Jewish doctors conscientiously treating nonJewish Germans, but then stopped from doing so through Gleichschaltung-
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related policies. The April 28 entry in the 1933 exhibit, for example, is a
Nazi letter dismissing dentist Grethe Kroto from a position she had held for
four years. Another entry, for the May 5 exhibit, includes multiple racebased dismissals for Dr. Heinrich Ziegler and his wife, Dr. Margot Ziegler.
Because Heinrich Ziegler had fought on the German side in WWI, he was
permitted to work in his private practice until 1938, when the Nazis revoked
the licenses of almost all Jewish doctors in Germany.
Frequently in the 1933 exhibit entries, we see that the 1933 commencement of Nazi persecution reached one decisive peak or another by
1938. In that year, my grandfather Jakob Intrator and his cousin Jakob Berglas lost their property at Wallstrasse 16 through a racially motivated forced
auction. A Kafkaesque experience evolved as I tried to pursue restitution
during the 1990s. The burden of proof was on me and the heirs to prove
poor business practices were not involved, as opposed to simple Nazi confiscation. I wound up settling the estate with the Aryan heiress who stole
the building from my family. The experience stuck in my craw as a form of
revictimization, since the stolen building employed slave labor and manufactured everything from anti-aircraft parts to paraphernalia—e.g., from
Nazi flags, banners, and uniforms to the infamous yellow Star of David
patches fellow Jews were forced to wear.
An April 1 entry in the 1933 exhibit details the Nazi boycott of Jewish
businesses as it affected the Jewish-owned Bamberg & Hertz chain of
men’s stores. The Cologne, Leipzig, and Stuttgart branches were forcibly
sold or dissolved in 1938. Then there is a March 30 entry in the 1933
exhibit dealing with Jakob Biswanger & Cie, a Jewish-owned liqueurs shop
in business for one hundred years when the Nazis forced its closure in 1938.
The March 28 entry of the 1933 exhibit involves the German-Jewish
student Mirjam Frank, whose teacher Ferdinand Last was deported with his
wife to Auschwitz, where they were murdered in 1943. Mirjam escaped via
a Kindertransport to England, but was not reunited with her parents—who,
in 1939, were able to flee to Shanghai—until 1947, in the United States. As
happened, by 1938, my father’s cousin Jakob Berglas had been forced out
of business in Germany and was in Shanghai, attempting to rescue European Jews by organizing the resettlement of 100,000 Jews to the underdeveloped Yunnan province of south-central China. The Berglas plan, alas,
was never implemented.
The May 1 entry in the 1933 exhibit shows Martin Dzubas
photographing Hitler and Paul von Hindenburg as they rode together in a
convertible with its top down during the May Day rally in Berlin’s Lustgarten. Dzubas wound up murdered in a concentration camp in 1941. Who
can even begin to imagine what he must have been thinking and feeling as
he photographed Hitler with von Hindenburg? In a restitution-case meeting
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I had with German officials, I was so appalled that one of them maliciously
dared to insist that my grandfather might not have been a victim of Nazi
persecution that I whipped out a camera and took a flash picture of the
officials. Almost surreally, those German officials were so panicked by the
prospect of having their photo published along with an account of their
shoddy behavior that they favorably modified their handling of my case.
The Jewish Museum Berlin’s online exhibit “1933: The Beginning of
the End of German Jewry” is an ongoing must-see for anybody interested in
Holocaust history. Because the exhibit is based mainly on documents and
photos given to the museum by survivors or their descendants, each entry
provides us with valuable insight into how the Nazis’ Machtergreifung—
their taking of power—affected individual German Jews. We do honor to
ourselves and to the Nazis’ victims by making a study of their plight. And
we do well to recall that the vortex of barbarism constituting the Nazi Reich
is thoroughly repudiated by Rabbi Hillel’s answer to a non-Jew who asked
him to explain the Torah while standing on one foot: “What is hateful to
you,” Rabbi Hillel said, “do not do to anybody else. That is the whole
Torah; the rest is commentary. Now go and study it.”
*Joanne Intrator is a Manhattan-based psychiatrist. She is completing a book on her
family and the Holocaust. Scott Rose is a Manhattan-based writer.
When Silence Equaled Death
Richard Trank’s Against the Tide
(DVD 2009/2012, Moriah Films, 1 hour, 43 minutes) $19
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ksl5seQs50
Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose*
The familiar voice narrating the opening words of director Richard
Trank’s film Against the Tide is that of Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman begins:
“On November 24, 1942, Rabbi Stephen Wise, the most powerful and
respected Jewish leader in America, held a press conference in Washington,
D.C. The State Department had confirmed that the Nazis were ‘killing
European Jews as part of a plan of mass extermination.’ ”
Although the State Department had confirmed that over two million
European Jews had already been murdered, the Washington Post gave the
story of Rabbi Wise’s press conference only four column inches on page 6.
How’s that for news judgment?
One person who read the Post’s story was Peter Bergson, a/k/a Hillel
Kook. Born in 1915 in the Russian empire, Bergson moved with his family
to Palestine in 1924. In 1940, he came to the United States, chiefly to
organize support for Zionist causes.
Thunderstruck by the news that two million European Jews had
already been killed, Bergson dropped everything he was doing in order to
devote himself to the rescue of the remaining Jews in Europe. Against the
Tide—which Trank wrote and produced in collaboration with Rabbi Marvin
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Hier for the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Moriah Films)—only serendipitously became an account of Bergson’s activism, which was aimed at getting the American establishment to be more proactive about rescuing the
Nazis’ victims. The filmmakers had intended to produce a documentary
concerning the Allies’ treatment of Jewish refugees. Researching that topic,
however, they came across a filmed interview of Bergson that Claude
Lanzmann conducted in 1978 for his documentary Shoah, but did not wind
up using in his eight-hour final version.
Throughout Against the Tide, outtakes from Lanzmann’s interview of
Bergson are interspersed with a chronology of Bergson’s David-againstGoliath activism, along with additional commentary from scholars, including his daughter, Rebecca Bergson.
Bergson ran up against the FDR administration’s indifference to his
entreaties, an indifference stemming from the pretense that anything other
than defeating the Germans in the war was unimportant. Second, Bergson
found that Rabbi Wise was FDR’s Jewish community lapdog, but that the
lapdog could transmogrify into a rabid Doberman. Though Bergson’s only
aim was that of using non-violent acts to motivate Americans to rescue the
remaining Jews of Europe, Wise fought fiercely to squelch Bergson’s
activism.
As the film recounts, on August 8, 1942, Gerhart Riegner, secretary of
the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, had sent a telegram informing of the
Nazis’ progress in enacting the so-called “Final Solution.” The US State
Department attempted to suppress the telegram, so that it would not reach
Wise. Riegner, however, had sent it to multiple receivers, one of whom got
it into Wise’s hands. When Wise went to the State Department, they asked
him to remain silent until they could confirm Riegner’s report. Wise
complied.
What happened next was flabbergasting. After the State Department
confirmed what Riegner reported—and following Wise’s press conference—Wise called a meeting with the leaders of 34 major Jewish-American
organizations, during which he convinced them “to keep silent and not to
act on the news of the extermination plan.”
Meanwhile, in the ghettos of Poland, Jews had heard rumors of
Riegner’s telegram and believed that Wise would be springing into action to
help to save their lives. Instead, it was Bergson who sprang into action, and
Wise betrayed the hopes of the Jews of Poland by trying mightily to thwart
Bergson.
Among Bergson’s tactics was taking out full-page ads in The New
York Times in order to alert readers to the ongoing Holocaust (about which
the Jewish-owned Times was barely reporting). Bergson teamed with Ben
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Hecht—“The Shakespeare of Hollywood”—in the creation of We Will
Never Die, a pageant dramatizing Jewish history and the present-day suffering of the Jews of Europe. The pageant toured all over the country, benefiting from the participation of top talent, both Jewish and non-Jewish. When
it was given in Washington, D.C., Eleanor Roosevelt attended, and was so
moved that she wrote a column about it.
Yet Wise and those who followed his lead tried to eliminate the Bergson Group through a variety of means, including stimulating an IRS investigation of them (the investigation found that the allegations were baseless).
Among the reasons that Wise et al. gave for not advocating more strongly
for rescue was fear of antisemitic backlash and of creating an impression
that the United States was involved in “a Jewish war.” Wise had been a
founder of the NAACP, yet could not bring himself to get his own Jewish
community to ask for more help for Jews caught in the Nazi death trap.
Writing about this period on the website Historical and Investigative
Research (www.hirhome.com), Francisco Gil-White reminded readers of
this Jewish joke:
Sam and Irving are facing the firing squad. The executioner comes forward to place the blindfold on them. Sam disdainfully and proudly refuses, tearing the thing from his face. Irving turns to him and pleads:
“Please Sam, don’t make trouble!”
Wise and his adherents had complex motivations, but in an absolute
sense, they were craven, petty, and wrong not to follow Bergson’s lead. Yet
one thing Against the Tide does not really do—outstanding though the documentary is—is to give a full accounting of antisemitism in the United
States up through Wise’s time. To understand why Wise and his adherents
were so neurotic and passive, and so marked by internalized antisemitism,
we might consider that (just to cite a few examples): 1) Leo Frank was
lynched in Georgia in 1913; 2) US Army recruits for World War I were
given a manual that read “The foreign born, and especially Jews, are more
apt to malinger than the native-born”; 3) Henry Ford—a “pillar of American society”—was a raving Jew hater; 4) Father Charles Coughlin, a Michigan Catholic priest with a popular weekly radio broadcast, was fixated on
demonizing Jews, and mocked FDR’s New Deal as “The Jew Deal.”
Given that popular American bigots with radio shows were quick to
label government programs they did not like as “Jewish,” even though President Roosevelt was Episcopalian, it is possible to comprehend why certain
American Jews had fears that the war might be thought of as “a Jewish
war,” were they to speak up more forcefully against government policies
that in effect turned a blind eye to the fate of the Jews of Europe. Instead of
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excoriating Wise, as many do (and rightly so), it would be helpful to our
understanding if a researcher would penetratingly detail how antisemitism
shaped this flawed man and contributed to his disturbing behavior.
US immigration policy throughout the Nazi period was abysmal and
contributed its share of trapping countless victims in Hitler’s Europe. Assistant secretary of state Breckinridge Long hated Jews and used the power of
his office to curtail immigration. His superficial alibi for abandoning Jews
to their deaths was that he feared large-scale immigration could lead to the
Nazis, the Japanese, or the Russians sneaking spies into the country. One of
us, Intrator, had family members stranded in Europe by Long’s hateful
immigration policies; some of them died in concentration camps. In order
that they should not have died in vain, Against the Tide should be required
viewing in every American high school’s history curriculum, and the lessons to be drawn from it should contribute to our thoughts and actions in
the world today. It is to be hoped that we will all find ways of being less
Wise and more Bergson.
*Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose are a New York-based psychiatrist and writer.
Both are frequent contributors to the JSA.
Von Trotta’s Triumph
Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt
(Zeitgeist Films 2012; DVD available 2013)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIUbQR9b1P8&feature=youtu.be
Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose*
At first glance, the non-Jewish, blond German actress Barbara Sukowa
might not seem a director’s sine que non for a film with Hannah Arendt as
its protagonist. Indeed, in a 1964 German TV interview with Günter Gaus,
Arendt explained that although her mother was non-observant, outside the
house others noticed that the young Hannah looked Jewish, thus making her
aware that she was, in fact, a Jew. In that interview, Arendt states and then
repeats that she understood that she looked Jewish, but never felt inferior to
anybody because of her appearance.
In 2002, when director Margarethe von Trotta and screenwriter Pamela
Katz first finished their screenplay for the film that became Hannah Arendt,
the producers willing to go ahead with the movie at that time did not deem
Sukowa suitable for playing Arendt. So von Trotta waited until more agreeable backers could be found. Significantly, the consortium of production
companies that invested in the movie with Sukowa as its star are located in
Germany, Luxembourg, France, and Israel.
Originally titled The Controversy, the film portrays Arendt and her
milieu during the period that she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in
Jerusalem for The New Yorker. The broad outlines of the story will be
familiar to anybody with an interest in Holocaust studies. Arendt had convinced New Yorker editor William Shawn to contract her to report on the
Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Instead of writing a straightforward news
account of the trial, however, Arendt produced a prodigiously detailed and
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multidirectional meditation on the Holocaust that just happened to center—
rather fiercely—on the Eichmann trial. The celebrated and/or notorious
takeaway concept from Arendt’s coverage—The Banality of Evil—wound
up as the subtitle of the book version of her opus: Eichmann in Jerusalem:
A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Shawn and his assistant editors immediately recognized that the pages
Arendt devoted to a critical examination of the activities of Jewish Council
leaders in Holocaust-era ghettos and concentration camps would provoke a
public uproar. He advised Arendt to cut that passage, but she stood her
ground. That part of the story provides a key insight into why von Trotta
was so attracted to Arendt as a film subject; the two are prominent, strongwilled women who stick to their guns.
Von Trotta employs a reasonably good strategy for integrating original
black-and-white footage from the Eichmann trial into her color film. Where
she is most brilliant, though, is in selecting which portions of the trial to
include. In the third installment of Eichmann in Jerusalem, published on
March 2, 1963, Arendt told of the appearance in the witness box of Pinchas
Freudiger, the only member of one of the Jewish Councils to appear at the
trial. Some present at the trial considered that Freudiger had improperly
exploited his advantages at the expense of other Jews’ lives. They shouted
their anger at him, and the trial had to be suspended for a time. As her
conclusion to reflections on these matters, Arendt wrote that had men like
Freudiger offered passive resistance to the Nazis instead of helping them to
organize The Final Solution, fewer Jews would have died.
For all that that observation might contain a kernel of truth, viewed
from certain perspectives it constitutes an academic exercise in victim
blaming. Many of Arendt’s contemporaries, including some in her circle of
friends, were repulsed by what they interpreted to be her shifting of blame
from Eichmann onto the leaders of the Jewish Councils. What von Trotta
shows in her film Hannah Arendt, though, is Holocaust survivors screaming
invective across the courtroom at one of the very same Jewish Council leaders whom Arendt took to task in her text. Alas, the subtlety and the skillful
cinematic communication of ambiguity likely is lost on viewers who do not
know anything about Pinchas Freudiger.
We mention in passing—though this certainly is known to a majority
of our readers—that the present-day consensus is that Arendt was wrong
about Eichmann. He was, beyond all doubt, a virulent antisemite. Moreover, he was no mere cog in a wheel; he enthusiastically sought fulfillment
of Hitler’s evil plan to eliminate all Jews.
Von Trotta has said that she insisted on casting Sukowa as Arendt
because she needed an actress suited to being shown thinking. The director’s patience in waiting for the correct backers paid off handsomely. In
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internalizing the character, and then projecting the character for the camera,
Sukowa succeeds in playing Arendt convincingly, despite not looking a
thing like her. For every twilit frame in which we see Hannah pensively
prone, or pacing—a smoldering cigarette in her hand—there are corresponding scenes in which her passion for, and burden of, ideas comes flowing out in a mesmerizing manner. One scene has her dazzling undergrads
with a sickening and penetratingly accurate explanation of the dehumanizing processes visited on concentration-camp prisoners. That scene is a prequel to the climactic scene in which—commandingly, at the head of a
lecture hall—she answers to her critics with a lengthy oration that includes
the thought that because Jews are human, crimes against them by definition
are crimes against humanity.
Sukowa’s virtuosic performance in that long and unconventional scene
fully vindicates von Trotta’s casting judgment. The remaining principals are
all engagingly involved in the movie. As Arendt’s second husband Heinrich
Blüchner, Axel Milberg is fittingly prickly at times, while at others he
brings to life the indulgent, over-the-top flirtatiousness characteristic of
many of the letters the two exchanged. Playing the historically fascinating
figure of Hans Jonas, the German-Jewish philosopher, Ulrich Noethen
brings scowling but nuanced gravity to his critiques of Arendt. Janet
McTear is a regular hoot as Arendt’s long-time friend and wisecracking
supporter Mary McCarthy.
It is heartening to report that Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt,
beyond being very well received in Germany, inspired dramatically elevated sales of Arendt’s books as well as a spike in public willingness to
confront the tragic past. On the other hand, the Nazi bishop Alois Hudal’s
efforts in sneaking Eichmann out of Europe through the ratlines to Argentina were just a tiny part of the larger picture that includes Vatican-endorsed
assistance to known Nazi war criminals. When Eichmann was captured in
Argentina so that he could be brought to justice, Jew haters in Argentina—
egged on by some of the other surviving Nazis whom the Vatican had
helped to reach South America—mounted sustained terroristic attacks
against Argentinian Jews. A wall outside the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos
Aires was defaced with red-letter graffiti reading “If Eichmann dies—death
to the Jews.” One nineteen-year-old Jewish girl in Argentina was kidnapped
and tortured with swastikas carved into her flesh. Do not hold your breath
waiting for a pope to acknowledge that the Vatican’s support of the ratlines
was wrong and then to arrange for compensation for the victims or their
descendants.
*Joanne Intrator is a psychiatrist who is completing a book on her family’s experience during the Holocaust; Scott Rose is a writer. Both live in New York.
The Blood Libel Is Alive and Well—
in Fact and Fiction!
Pierre Birnbaum’s
A Tale of Ritual Murder in the Age of Louis XIV:
The Trial of Raphael Levy, 1669
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 192 pp. $60/£39.25
Raphael Israeli’s Blood Libel and Its Derivatives:
The Scourge of Anti-Semitism
(New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction, 2012). 273 pp. $39.95/£25.68
Hannah R. Johnson’s Blood Libel:
The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). 250 pp. $70/£45.79
Zygmunt Miloszewski’s A Grain of Truth
(London: Bitter Lemon, 2012). 352 pp. $14.95/£9.78 (pb.)
Barbara Corrado Pope’s The Blood of Lorraine
(New York: Pegasus, 2011). 384 pp. $15.95/£10.43 (pb.)
Steven Leonard Jacobs*
The most insidious charges against the Jewish people—that Jews preparing the Passover meal (seder) kidnap and kill innocent children and
drain their blood for unleavened bread (matza)—has been a consistent staple of the antisemitic diet for hundred of years.1 The five texts reviewed
1. The following headline examples are all taken from the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI): “Syrian Author Muhammad Nimr Al-
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here—three scholarly studies and two works of fiction—testify to the
endurance of this calumny even now.
While Birnbaum and Johnson discuss the past and specific cases of the
blood libel, Israeli identifies its transmorphing into the current strain of
Arab/Muslim antisemitism. What ties the two works of fiction together is
the seeming willingness of the larger societies—i.e., contemporary Poland
in the case of Miloszewski and late-nineteenth/early twentieth-century
France in the case of Pope—to attribute criminal behavior, conspiracies,
and murder to the Jews in their midst, and thus reveal the veneer of their
supposed progressive civilizations through the duplicity of such
attributions.
For Pierre Birnbaum, the case at hand is the false accusation of ritual
murder by, and the subsequent trial, imprisonment, and execution of, one
Raphael Levy—a mainstay of his Jewish community in Metz, France, in
1669. As Birnbaum, the University of Paris political science professor
(emeritus), notes in his introduction:
Behind this lurid fantasy [of ritual murder/blood libel] lay a bottomless
demonology and a culture permeated with magical thinking . . . This legend was born in the Catholic West. Between the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, Christian anti-Judaism was built around three closely related
myths: (1) that Jews crucified young Christian males in order to reenact
and mock the crucifixion of Christ, (2) that they kidnapped and killed
Christian boys to obtain blood for their rituals, and (3) that they sought to
profane hosts that through transubstantiation had become the body of
Christ, in order to kill him again.
These three myths formed the basis of medieval anti-Judaism, even if
it was often difficult to distinguish them with such analytic clarity:
The myth of ritual murder was based on the preposterous idea that Jews
cannot make matzoh without Christian blood. Despite abundant evidence
that Jews do not eat food unless all the blood has been drained out of it,
and despite all the indications of the constant vigilance that this atavism,
so deeply embedded in their beliefs and customs, obliged them to maintain, the idea that Jews thirsty for the blood of Christian children kidnapped them and collected their blood in special receptacles became the
Madani on Iranian TV: ‘In Many Countries, the Jews Kill People and Mix Their
Blood with the Matza of Zion’ ” (September 8, 2010); “Lebanese Writer [Sana
Kojok]: ‘Jews Make Passover Matzah with the Blood of Non-Jews’ ” (March 29,
2013); “Former Hamas Official [Dr. Mustafa Al-Lidawi]: ‘In the Past, the Jews
Slaughtered Christian Children on Passover; Today They Torment and Kill Palestinians Instead’ ” (May 6, 2013).
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central theme of countless sermons, legends, plays as well as paintings by
the greatest masters, which decorated any number of churches (4-5).
Thus, it is in this setting and framed by religion—in this case Roman
Catholic Christianity prior to the advent of the Protestantisms (which
would, however, continue this nefarious tradition centuries later), most
especially the charge of deicide (murderers of God/Christ)—that four-yearold Didier Le Moyne was found murdered in September 1669, his body
gutted, and that a community of believers, despite the imprecations of King
Louis XIV, so readily affirmed those guilty of his murder as the Jews, and
particularly one of its leading residents, Raphael Levy.
“The Levy affair thus occurred in a context where Jews were the target
of permanent, generalized suspicion,” Birnbaum writes, and thus reveals a
century before Jews would become citizens of France (1791) both the fragility and unease of Jewish-Christian relations of the times. As Birnbaum
notes, “Everything in fact separated the Jews of Boulay, Helz, and Metz
from their non-Jewish neighbors. They belonged to separated and rival
social universes and to starkly contrasting cultural milieus. In seventeenth
century France, the Jews still formed a separated, homogeneous, endogamous group” (39-40).
Especially fascinating in Birnbaum’s telling of Levy’s tragic story are
Levy’s own words, as revealed in the interrogation documents, his letters
and petitions, and his will, all of which have survived. “Raphael worked out
his own sociological explanation for the terrible charge against him: that the
permanent minority status of the Jews in the midst of an often hostile population made them the perfect scapegoats. [When was it ever not thus?—
SLJ] He emphasized an important point: “the crucial role of ordinary people
in dramatizing the allegation” (96).
Somewhat ironically, however, officially, the Roman Catholic Church
of France chose not to intervene in “L’affaire Levy”; thus, the circuitous
route to Levy’s death was largely a secular matter left to courts and magistrates. Yet, Birnbaum’s excellent text draws our attention to the fact that:
what one sees is a confrontation of two religions living side-by-side in
mutual distrust, as if religion were a structural factor in shaping an antagonism, or at any rate an insuperable separation, conducive to irrational
outbursts and belief in myths such as ritual murder. In Christian eyes,
Jews were remote and alien beings (101).
Thus, whatever lesson is to be learned from this sad affair, it is most
assuredly not the proximity of Jews to their neighbors, but, rather, respect-
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ful knowledge of their differences that has the potential to lessen such outbursts of violence, irrational or other.
University of Pittsburgh English professor Hannah Johnson charts a
somewhat different path in her equally excellent and important text. Initially, Johnson focuses on the death of twelve-year-old William of Norwich,
England (1132-44), whose murder was attributed to the Jewish community
as a case of ritual murder/blood libel, and may very well be the first
recorded instance of such a baseless antisemitic charge. William, who was
invariably granted sainthood status—though never officially canonized—
had his story told in a multi-volume Latin text entitled The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich by the resident Benedictine monk Thomas of
Monmouth. Almost fifty years later, a pogrom in 1189-90 against the Jewish communities of both Norwich and York—in part, perhaps, because of
the supposed lack of justice (no one was either specifically charged with the
murder and thus brought to trial and executed)—resulted in both the slaughter of many of the Jewish residents and the suicides of others.2
For Johnson, painting on a far larger canvas, “this book is about recent
scholars’ efforts to account for an explosive accusation and its implications
for understanding the dynamics of persecution in Western history” (2)—
essentially, how we today read and interpret the past. Significantly, she suggests that “ethics shapes methodological decisions in the study of the accusation” and “questions about methodology, in turn, pose ethical problems of
interpretation and understanding” (2). It is this very interweaving that
should give us pause as she critically reviews the work of others and concludes that, all too often and all too easily, we make faulty judgments about
the past, judgments not grounded in the data itself and what it suggests, but
in our own and often unacknowledged presuppositions. Further complicating the work of reading, interpreting, and understanding the past is the reality that, like all of us—historians, too—do not “escape the influence of
ideology” (7). Johnson also argues that cultural influences, both then and
now, play important roles in the entire process. The implications, therefore,
of these various decisive factors are important today, even if sometimes
neglected. As she writes:
This book is situated at this juncture, where the interests of historians and
literary specialists meet, and asks questions about methodological issues
2. Fifty years later, in 1255, also in England, nine-year-old Hugh of Lincoln
was murdered, and again a charge of blood libel/ritual murder was brought against
the Jewish community, specifically a Jew named Copin, who confessed under torture. Like his predecessor, Hugh was elevated as well to unofficial sainthood and
even became the subject of a popular ballad in the 1750s.
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of concern for both in understanding the dynamics of Jewish-Christian
relations . . . (19).
My work emerges from a broad tradition of cultural criticism and
intellectual history that is the province of literary critics as well as historians . . . I also see method itself as a form of theory, since methodological
guidelines operate in a framework for making sense of evidence, and
form another metacritical apparatus for thinking about the work historians do (23).
Carefully rereading Thomas of Monmouth’s accounting of the murder
of William, Johnson correctly concludes that what Thomas did to the detriment of the Jews of his day was reconfigure the story itself and thus the
Christian audience could not but find the Jews—the Christians’ eternal enemies—guilty as charged:
By reconfiguring William’s death as a martyrdom, Thomas hopes to
show a new triumph of Christian understanding over alleged Jewish literalism that parallels the way the two communities interpret the Crucifixion: the Jews of Norwich supposedly kill a boy, but Thomas resurrects a
saint, someone more than human, from his remains, just as the Jews
believe Christ died a man, while Christians proclaim that he is the son of
God (41).
And, despite the fact that there were those who questioned the veracity
of Thomas’s account, including some of his fellow monks, his paralleling
William’s death with that of the Christ and his attribution of miracles to
William, again paralleling the Christ, remained a powerful hold upon the
Christians of Norwich and beyond. Here, then, we have a classic case of
antisemitism as the “rationality of the irrational,” and one that must not be
deferred by any appeal whatsoever to factuality.
Johnson then carefully assesses the work of two important scholars:
the late Gavin Langmuir of Stanford University, whose two volumes History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000) and Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990) continue to be required reading for all students of
antisemitism; and Israeli scholar Israel Yuval, whose Two Nations in Your
Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), continues to generate much excitement in medieval studies. Johnson applauds Langmuir for
his “historical uncertainty surrounding the ritual murder accusation as a
specifically moral space” (62), as well as his important and significant dis-
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tinction between anti-Judaism as the product of a certain kind of perverse
rationality versus antisemitism as imaginative irrationality (66).3
Equally, she applauds Yuval for his (and her) recognition that “ideology cannot simply be excised from scholarship, since it forms part of the
web of assumptions and experience that form the scholar himself” (121).
Johnson concludes her book with a fascinating discussion of Ariel
Toaff, entitled “The Ariel Toaff Affair and the Question of Complicity,”
and the controversy still surrounding the publication of his 2007 book
Pasque di sangue: Ebrei d’Europa e omicidi rituali (Bloody Passover: The
Jews of Europe and Ritual Murder), in which Toaff, a professor of history
at Bar-Ilan University and the son of a former chief rabbi of Italy, suggests
that there may, in fact, be some truth in the charge of ritual murder/blood
libel during the Middle Ages by renegade Jews in response to the all-pervasive antisemitism of the times. Almost uniformly, however, the international scholarly community has rejected Toaff’s work as shoddy, relying
too much on accepting accounts of tortured Jews as legitimate, historically
accurate records. Here, Johnson’s interests are not in the factuality or nonfactuality of Toaff’s assertions and claims, but instead in the controversies
of interpretive readings surrounding them and the vested interests of those
on the attack, both in Israel and elsewhere. In bringing those attacks to her
readers’ attention, Johnson reconfirms the role of ideology as an important
signifier on topics having ethical resonances beyond the world of scholarship into the larger Jewish and Christian communities and the ongoing
research and study of antisemitism itself.
A wholly different text is that of Raphael Israeli, in his Blood Libel
and Its Derivatives. At times coming perilously close to a rant, both his
passion and his anger are transparent and not without justification. As
Israeli, professor of Islamic, Chinese, and Middle Eastern history at Hebrew
University, Jerusalem, notes in his introduction:
Such accusations as “apartheid,” discrimination, “racism,” well-poisoning, plots against the young generation of Muslims in order to harm the
reproductive sectors of Muslim/Arab societies, the use of weapons of
mass destruction to commit “genocide” against the Palestinians and other
Arabs, injecting HIV-positive blood and other poisonous substances into
Palestinian children, poisoning Arab lands under the guise of “agricultural aid,” distributing aphrodisiac chewing gum among Arab women in
order to corrupt them sexually, plotting to poison the Arabs’ water and
lands, killing innocent Arabs, and laying sieges to peaceful citizens are
3. An interesting and relevant article that Johnson herself references is that of
Robert C. Stacy (1998), “From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: Jews and
the Body of Christ,” Jewish History 12(1): 11-28.
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all derivatives of the blood libel adopted by the Arab/Muslim war
machine in their struggle against Israel (xvii).
Israeli’s book, then, is the concretization by an abundance of examples
of these absurdly antisemitic calumnies, all of them wholly without substance. He notes as well that:
The two extant ideas which are linked to the blood libel and find extensive expression in both Muslim propaganda and in the occasional support
Western media lend to it, are the following: the Jewish innate hatred of
humankind, born out of the doctrine of the elected people, which connotes ethnic superiority (hence racism); and the accusation of murder of
non-Jewish children, in our case Palestinian children, that has been
hurled against Israel by many Muslim states, not least of which has been
Erdogan’s Turkey (52).
Israeli is also equally at home criticizing and condemning the United
Nations and “lenient scholars” (his term) such as Bernard Lewis, Marc
Cohen, and Moshe Maoz, who have historically contextualized Muslim/
Arab treatment of both Jews and Christians, while applauding the work of
conservatives Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or, and Andrew Bostom, who have
“demonstrated and solidly documented the sorry story of the extermination
of entire Jewish communities or their forced conversion under Islam” (118).
Even Jews in Israel who have expressed positive sentiments regarding
Moroccan kings and monarchs have evoked his ire (129).
It is, however, first, last, and always the Muslim/Arab world surrounding the beleaguered State of Israel that is Israeli’s focus. As he notes:
The Arabs and Muslims are so steeped in their own propaganda and campaigns of hatred against Jews and Israel, that they have grown to believe
in their own delusions, as the popular television series and books based
on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which are liberally cited in the
writings of radical Muslims, such as the platform of Hamas and the public declarations that one hears from Hizbullah and Iran attest (162).
On balance, Israeli’s book is both a depressing and a frightening text,
but, he believes, all is not yet lost. He prescribes several steps that can be
taken to combat this oldest of the world’s hatreds:
The first step is to understand the dangers posed by Arab and Islamic
anti-Semitism in the modern world, since it has taken the lead from the
Western world in battling against Israel and gaining its delegitimation
and demonization . . . On a practical level what needs to be done is the
following: Arab antisemitism must be monitored and its manifestations
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must be made available to Western media and opinion makers. Its publications must be translated into Western languages in the hope that exposure of these virulent materials will lead to international protests and
diplomatic pressure on the relevant Arab governments and institutions
(209). . . .
Another course of fighting virulent antisemitism, especially, the
blood libel, is to wage incessant, insistent, and long-hauled struggle by
legal means and by launching information campaigns, to pursue the antiSemites and to scuttle their bigoted hatred by suing them in courts of law
in Western democracies where there is a rule of law (228).
The challenge, then, for the readers of Israeli’s text—and I am confident he would agree—would be to expand the options and possibilities for
action and activism on the part of all those, Jews and non-Jews alike, willing to commit themselves to and engage in the ongoing battle against
antisemitism, and not only in its anti-Israel and anti-Zionist expressions but
also everywhere this hydra-headed beast continues to present itself.
A Grain of Truth is the second crime novel/police procedural now
translated into English from the pen of Zygmunt Miloszewski, former editor
of the Polish edition of Newsweek. As he said in a recent interview in Tablet
(April 18, 2013), “For a while . . . I was the favorite writer of the nationalist, anti-Semitic right-wing,” a writer who refuses to examine the murkier
side of previously unpunished crimes during the Communist era and takeover of Poland. Both his novels follow the peripatetic career of Teodor
Szacki, divorced husband, estranged father of a daughter, and prosecuting
judge, formerly of Warsaw and now banished to Sandomierz after a disastrous and botched criminal investigation. In Entanglement (2010), he investigates a murder in Warsaw and uncovers the continuing machinations of
the Secret Police who, though no longer in political favor, still abuse the
dark side of power.
In A Grain of Truth, a series of bizarre and grisly murders continue to
show evidence of the historical “crime” of blood libel/ritual murder, even
though the post-World War II communities of Poland have been thoroughly
decimated and eviscerated by the Holocaust/Shoah, and the Jews of
Sandomierz are, collectively almost non-existent. (It is estimated that its
prewar Jewish population of 2,500 was annihilated primarily in Belzec and
Treblinka.) For Szacki, his dogged pursuit of both truth and murderer does
not align with this antisemitism, and thus, A Grain of Truth becomes a
window into contemporary Poland and the realization that, despite the
absence of Jews throughout the country, antisemitism is alive and well.
Jews do appear in the novel, though they are not the central focus of this
well-written and well-translated tale, one that this reviewer urges to be read.
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It is, also, a look at a country recovering from the past, energetically present, and building for the future.
Pierre Birnbaum’s historical assessment of the Jews of seventeenthcentury France inhabiting a separate and rival universe, a contrasting social
milieu, and “a separated, homogeneous, endogamous group” is transparently clear in Barbara Pope’s The Blood of Lorraine, though its historical
context is nineteenth-century France and beyond with the trial, on charges
of espionage and treason, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus looming in the background and an influencing factor in the conduct of French citizenry, particularly its Catholic members, in their attitudes toward “their Jews.” It is even
more complicated by the geographical location of Lorraine close to the German border, which caused Jews once living in Germany to emigrate into
Lorraine, and by the unease accompanying the integration of Jews into
French life after the Revolution. Again, a grisly murder of a child has taken
place, its body gutted, and the victim’s parents, who are themselves
denizens of that society, proclaiming loudly that the Jews are guilty. This
time it is magistrate Bernard Martin who is called upon to investigate the
crime at the importuning of fellow and Jewish magistrate David Singer,
who has been initially assigned the case. The situation is fraught with political sensitivities, and Martin finds himself questioning not only his commitments to the rule of law, his own ignorance and prejudices about Jews—
about whom he knows precious little—his friendship and relationship with
Singer, the pervasive presence of the Roman Catholic Church, and other
uncomfortable considerations. Like Szacki, he too has been “removed”
from his previous posting, this time from Nancy, and as the result of a badly
handled investigation.
Both novels are replete with back stories (in Miloszewski, it’s Szacki’s
relationship with his daughter and his personal loneliness; in Pope, it’s Martin’s pregnant wife, who miscarries their first child; his non-French fatherin-law; and his tenuous relationship with his own mother), all of which
make for good reads. In both as well, the killers are not Jews and the endings and uncoverings are solidly written and well worth reading about. As
reflections of current reality in both settings, the all-too-easy recourse to
“blaming the Jews” should serve as constant reminders that antisemitism,
not only in Poland and France, is far from a done deal in the West, and, like
its counterpart in the Middle East, is still worthy of attention and response.
*Steven Leonard Jacobs holds the Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies
at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Dr. Jacobs is the associate editor for the
Journal for the Study of Antisemitism and the author of several papers and books
on genocide, Judaica, and antisemitism. He can be contacted via
[email protected]
Antisemitica
Remembering Pogroms—
Kishniev, Limerick, Warsaw
Kishinev 1903-1905
The Russian-language antisemitic newspaper Bessarabetz
(Bessarabian) published articles such as “Death to the Jews!” and “Crusade
against the Hated Race!” When a Ukrainian Christian boy, Mikhail
Rybachenko, was murdered and a girl committed suicide by poisoning
herself and then was proclaimed dead in a Jewish hospital, Bessarabetz
insinuated that both were murdered by Jews and alleging the blood libel—
the children had been killed to use their blood in preparation of the Passover
matzoh. A second newspaper, Svet (Light), made similar allegations,
supported by the Russian Orthodox bishop. The Kishinev pogrom began on
April 19 after Easter Sunday and went on for three days. Forty-nine Jews
were killed, 92 were severely wounded, and 500 were slightly wounded;
over seven hundred houses and businesses were looted and destroyed. No
intervention attempt was made by the police or military to stop the riots
until the third day. This non-intervention is an argument in support of the
opinion that the pogrom was sponsored, or at least tolerated, by the state. A
second pogrom took place on October 19-20, 1905. This time the riots
began as political protests against the tsar but turned into an attack on Jews
wherever they could be found. By the time the riots were over, 19 Jews had
been killed and 56 injured. Jewish self-defense leagues, organized after the
first pogrom, stopped some of the violence, but were not wholly successful.
This pogrom was part of a much larger movement of 600 pogroms that
swept the Russian empire after the 1905 October Manifesto.
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Limerick, 1904
Fleeing persecution from Lithuania in 1878, a small number of Jewish
tradespeople arrived in Limerick, Ireland. The community established a
synagogue and a cemetery in the 1880s. Easter Sunday of 1884 saw the first
of what were to be a series of sporadic violent anti-Jewish attacks and
protests. The wife and child of Lieb Siev were injured by stones and their
house damaged by an angry crowd, for which the ringleaders were
sentenced to hard labor for a month. In 1892, two families were beaten, and
a stoning took place on November 24, 1896. Many details about Limerick’s
Jewish families are recorded in the 1901 census, which shows that most
were peddlers, though a few were described as drapery dealers and grocers.
In 1904, a young Catholic priest, Father John Creagh of the Redemptorist
order, delivered a fiery sermon castigating Jews for their rejection of Christ,
being usurers and allies of the Freemasons, persecuting the Church in
France, taking over the local economy, and selling shoddy goods at inflated
prices, to be paid for in installments. He urged Catholics “not to deal with
the Jews.” After 80 Jews had been driven from their homes, Creagh was
disowned by his superiors, saying that religious persecution had no place in
Ireland. The Limerick pogrom was the economic boycott waged against the
small Jewish community for over two years. Dermot Keogh suggests that
the name Jews gave to the pogrom, the “Limerick Boycott,” derives from
their previous Lithuanian experience, even though no one was killed or
seriously injured in the Irish pogrom. Limerick’s Protestant community,
many of whom were also traders, supported the Jews throughout the
pogrom, but ultimately Limerick’s Jews fled the city.
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Warsaw, 1881
In Warsaw on Christmas 1881, the outbreak of panic after a false
warning of fire in the crowded Holy Cross Church resulted in 29 deaths in a
stampede. It was believed that the false alarm was raised by pickpockets,
who used the ruse to allow them to rob people during the panic. A crowd
gathered on the scene of the event and some unknown persons started to
spread a rumor—subsequently proved to be unfounded—that two Jewish
pickpockets had been caught in the church. The mob began to attack Jews,
Jewish stores, businesses, and residences in the streets adjoining the Holy
Cross Church. The riots in Warsaw continued for three days, until Russian
authorities (who controlled the police as well as the military in the city)
intervened, arresting 2,600 people. During the Warsaw pogrom, two people
were left dead and 24 injured. The pogrom also left about a thousand
Jewish families financially devastated. In the months afterward, about one
thousand Warsaw Jews emigrated to the United States. The pogrom
worsened Polish-Jewish relations, and was criticized by almost the entire
Polish elite, including writers Eliza Orzeszkowa and Boleslaw Prus, and
several other noted activists.
Antisemitic Myths and Shrines (UK)
Jews as killers of Christ
Cloisters Cross, Bury St. Edmunds, 12th century, walrus ivory
The first Jews arrived in England in 1066, remaining unprotected by laws
that applied to Christians. Prohibited from key guilds and professions,
some sought work in unpopular fields (i.e., tax collecting, moneylending). It
was not long before rumors of secret ritual abduction and bloodletting
Christian children (blood libel), fueled by unfamiliar religious practice and
vocational and social alienation, reached a tipping point and accepted as
fact. By 1190, calls to avenge such alleged Jewish practices resulted in
mass killings, such as the Tower of York immolation of 150 Jews. By 1287,
King Edward of Gascony had seized all Jewish property and expelled his
Jewish subjects, followed by a full Edict of Expulsion aimed at England’s
remaining two thousand Jews. The list below highlights just a few of the
many rumors and shrines that breathed life into those allegations.
Bury St. Edmunds: A twelfth-century ivory relic called the Cloisters Cross
depicts the Jews as killers of Christ and is displayed at St. Edmundsbury
Cathedral, Suffolk.
Herbert of Huntingdon (d. 1180): Alleged murdered by the Jews.
Harold of Gloucester (d. 1168): Alleged murdered by the Jews.
Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1255): A boy who disappeared and whose body was
found a month later in a well. Upon being threatened with torture, a local
Jewish man “confessed” to the murder and stated that it was the custom of
Jews to engage in a ritual murder once each year. Hugh’s body was said to
have been thrown into a running stream, but the water had immediately
ejected it. It was then buried, but was found above ground the next day. The
body was then thrown into a drinking well; when a brilliant light and sweet
odor became manifest, the body was deemed holy. Upon its recovery, the
hands and feet were pierced with wounds and the forehead was lacerated.
Eighteen Jews confessed and were hanged. Hugh was treated as a martyr,
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with songs and poems written about him. A well was built in what was once
a Jewish neighborhood, alleged to be where the boy’s body was found.
(Feast Day July 27)
Robert of Bury (d. 1181): a Christian child who was allegedly murdered by
Jews on Palm Sunday; 57 Jews were killed to avenge his death. The Jewish
community was soon expelled from Bury. Benedictine shrines are on
display at Bury, Norwich, Gloucester, and Lincoln.
Synagoga: The statue of a blindfolded woman looking down (away from
heaven), unable to see the light of Christianity. In some settings, the
downturning Synagoga is juxtaposed with the Christian Ecclesia, who looks
up toward the heavens. Displayed in Canterbury, Lincoln, Peterborough,
and Rochester.
William of Norwich (d. 1144): A 14-year-old boy whose body was
allegedly found mutilated in ways that resembled the wounds of Christ,
causing people to suspect that the Jews had killed him in a ritual murder. A
widespread attack began on the Jewish population in London and York,
leading to massacres. On February 6, 1190, all Norwich Jews who didn’t
escape to a local castle were slaughtered in their village; the rest were killed
as they left the castle. Until the sixteenth century, offerings were made at
William’s tomb.
MEDIEVAL ANTISEMITIC LAWS
Jews cannot proselytize Judaism.
Jews are subject to special identification/badges/clothing.
Jews cannot eat with or intermarry Christians.
Jews cannot own property or act as an agent in contracts.
Jews will be barred from crafts, guilds, and professions
and are subject to special taxes.
Jews cannot enter the military or civic offices, or serve as elected officials.
Jews cannot testify against Christians or employ Christian servants.
Jews cannot attend university or be Freemen in London.
Christians are forbidden to see Jewish doctors.
Jews returned to England four hundred years later in 1655, as part of Oliver Cromwell’s decision to involve Spanish Jewish trade. British citizenship
began in 1753 via the “Jew Bill,” but Jewish naturalization was defeated,
followed by a full emancipation bill that passed in the House of Commons
and lost in the House of Lords (1833). After an eleven-year debate over
modifying Parliament’s Christian oath, Baron Lionel de Rothschild became
a member of the House of Commons in 1858, paving the way for legislation
that allowed full citizenship for Jews (1890).
Jew in a Box
Benjamin Weinthal*
It’s safe to assume that the German organizers of an exhibit that centers around a Jew sitting in a Plexiglas box, answering questions from
museum-goers, anticipated some controversy. “We wanted to provoke,
that’s true, and some people may find the show outrageous or objectionable.
But that’s fine by us,” the Berlin Jewish Museum’s curator says of the
exhibit, “The Whole Truth . . . Everything You Always Wanted to Know
about Jews.” But even they may not have anticipated the level of vitriol that
has greeted the project. The general secretary of the 105,000-member Central Council of Jews in Germany, Stephan J. Kramer, promptly ridiculed the
exhibition, saying, “Why don’t they give him a banana and a glass of water,
turn up the heat and make the Jew feel really cozy in his glass box?”
According to Kramer, “They actually asked me if I wanted to participate.
But I told them I’m not available.” Criticism has come from all sides: The
popular German-language pro-Israel, pro-American website, Die Achse des
Guten (The Axis of Good), labeled the exhibit “Jews for Dummies.”
Germany’s postwar treatment of Jews has always been a kind of litmus
test for whether the country is on the path to rehabilitation. After the Third
Reich exterminated some six million Jews, relations between Germany and
Jews have been, well, complex. “It’s a horrible thing to do—completely
degrading and not helpful,” says Eran Levy, an Israeli who lives in Berlin,
adding that “the Jewish Museum absolutely missed the point if they wanted
to do anything to improve the relations between Germans and Jews.”
Henryk M. Broder, one of Germany’s leading commentators on German-Jewish relations and a journalist with the large right-of-center daily
Die Welt, described the exhibit as “pathetic and useless.” In an e-mail to
me, Broder, who is a German Jew himself and the author of numerous
books on the community, compared the exhibit to “the ‘völkerschauen’ with
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black Africans”—shows in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany in
which people from foreign lands were displayed like animals at carnivallike festivals.
Broder said the exhibit is “evidence that the Jews are still exotic
regardless of how they try to act and be ‘normal.’ ” He added that if something along these lines were done with Muslims in the Jewish Museum, the
Muslims would burn the place down. “But the Jews have so little feeling for
a sense of honor and self-respect that they need to participate,” he said.
In defense of the exhibit, the museum’s director, Cilly Kugelmann,
issued a postmodern response in a local Berlin paper: “We don’t give an
exclusive answer. We show many perspectives.” Tina Luedecke, a museum
representative, justified the “Jew in the Box” exhibit, saying: “A lot of our
visitors don’t know any Jews and have questions they want to ask. With this
exhibition we offer an opportunity for those people to get to know more
about Jews and Jewish life.”
So, is the exhibit a kind of useful—if by German standards provocative—pedagogy? Or is it an offensive form of kitsch performance art that
dehumanizes Jews? And putting aside the heated feelings, is the show contributing to some wobbly semblance of “normalcy” between German Jews
and Germans?
The exhibit spans seven rooms of an upper floor of the Berlin Jewish
Museum, which opened in 2001 and was designed by renowned architect
Daniel Libeskind. The installation presents 30 questions in the various
exhibit rooms and aims to provide insights through quotes, objects, and
texts. It’s a bit simplistic. “How can you recognize a Jew?,” “Are the Jews
the Chosen People?,” “Is a German allowed to criticize Israel?,” and “Why
do Jews live in Germany?” are some of the questions that confront visitors.
But the attention-grabbing part of the exhibit takes place in the Plexiglas box, where a diverse group of Jews from the United States, Britain,
Germany, Israel, and elsewhere work shifts. Leeor Engländer, a 30-year-old
German Jewish journalist at Die Welt, says he sits because “it is important
to me to use the attention to clear up prejudices and misunderstandings.”
A museum administrator told me during my visit this week that a
steady 300 to 400 visitors per day have visited the exhibit since the March
22 opening.
This isn’t the first time the museum has provoked controversy. Last
year, the museum hosted the University of California, Berkeley, academic
Dr. Judith Butler, who urged roughly 700 Germans at a sold-out podium
discussion to boycott Israel. The crowd lavished euphoric applause on the
speaker, then the museum banned audience questions about Butler’s cordial
words for Hamas and Hezbollah. (Butler had previously described Hamas
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and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the
left, that are part of a global left.”)
Gerald Steinberg, who heads the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor and is
a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University, termed the cultural
institution at the time the “Berlin anti-Jewish Museum.” In an unusual
move for Israel’s cautious diplomats in Berlin, the embassy rebuked the
event at the publicly funded museum. Butler’s boycott call raised the ire of
many Jews in Germany: the taxpayer-funded museum’s decision to showcase a speaker who would call for a boycott of Israeli institutions recalled
the Nazi period when Berlin served as the launching pad for a boycott
movement against German-Jewish businesses.
The recent controversies at the museum are a reminder of the strains
inherent in the relationship between the over 81 million Germans and the
country’s tiny Jewish population—somewhere between 105,000 and
200,000. The late playwright and filmmaker Ranier Werner Fassbinder
summed up the source of the tension well in his 1975 play, Garbage: The
City and Death, in which an antisemitic character declares, “And it’s the
Jew’ s fault, because he makes us feel guilty because he exists. If he’d
stayed where he came from, or if they’d gassed him, I would sleep better.”
Fassbinder—in starkly dramatic terms—neatly captured why the presence of Jews makes many Germans uncomfortable. It is worth recalling that
in the immediate post-Holocaust period, Nazis were still present in all
walks of life and a repressive silence largely blanketed public discussions
about the role of ordinary Germans in the eradication of European Jewry.
Of course, it’s harder to maintain the illusion when there are living reminders of the crime in your midst. The German social and cultural Marxist
philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer—who had fled to the
United States during the war because of their Jewish backgrounds and later
returned from exile—diagnosed this phenomenon as “guilt-defensiveness
antisemitism” (Schuldabwehrantisemitsmus).
The pressing question is, are there major generational shifts underway
in Germany undercutting the antisemitism associated with pathological
guilt? Or has Schuldabwehrantisemitsmus morphed into a normalcy that has
swung the pendulum back the other way, allowing for a disproportionally
intense criticism of the Jewish state and Israelis?
The exhibit tackles this oft-ignored contemporary form of antisemitism
in the Federal Republic—namely, the loathing of Israel. Projected on a wall
in the first room of the exhibit is a giant version of a December 2012 article
from the left-liberal daily Die Taz on how to write a text slamming Israel
while insulating oneself against charges of antisemitism. With biting irony
and sarcasm, Philip Meinhold, the author of the article, provides 10 tips,
such as: Find an anti-Israel Jewish “state witness” to quote “since anyone
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quoting a Jew—that’s the nature of the beast—cannot hate Jews”; don’t cite
the radical Islamic organization Hamas in the piece since it will “distract”
from the subject of criticizing Israel; and parade your left-wing credentials
because leftists in Germany are “known to oppose Nazis” and thus cannot
be opposed to Jews.
Hannah Pool, a 20-year-old student from Cologne, told me after reading Meinhold’s article that his strong irony sheds light on how “simple the
Germans make criticism of Israel,” rather than working to understand the
historical context of the country’s troubles. Pool said she read Adorno’s
writings on Germany working its way through its Nazi past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) as a high school student.
She referenced in particular the German novelist and Nobel laureate
Günter Grass, who triggered a recent round of debate over antisemitism.
Grass, a long-standing Social Democratic party activist and former member
of the Nazi Waffen SS as a teenager, declared last April in his widely
reprinted poem, “What Must Be Said,” that “Israel’s atomic power endangers an already fragile world peace” and claimed that the Jewish state seeks
to obliterate the Iranian population. The blowback against Grass’s poem
and his views on the Middle East was potent and the renowned author was
sharply criticized by commentators across the political spectrum.
An Act II of the Grass debate riveted the nation’s media and intellectuals last fall, when Jakob Augstein, a columnist and partial owner of Der
Spiegel, attacked Israel, Orthodox Jews, and the U.S. Republican Party in a
series of commentaries. As a result, the Los Angeles-based Simon
Wiesenthal Center included Augstein in its 2012 annual list of the “Top Ten
Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic Slurs.” Augstein, arguably Grass’s greatest advocate in the German media, expressed his gratitude to the novelist for his
slashing criticism of the Jewish state: “One must, therefore, thank him for
taking it upon himself to speak for us all.”
Quotes from Augstein’s “When in Doubt, Think Left” column appear
at the exhibit. One example cited is his column that attributed all of the
woes of the Arab Spring to Israeli and U.S. Republican conduct. “The fire
burns in Libya, Sudan, Yemen. . . . But those who set the fires live elsewhere. . . . Whom does this all this violence benefit? Always the insane and
unscrupulous. And this time it’s the U.S. Republicans and Israeli government,” Augstein wrote.
But many of the burning questions at the Jewish Museum seem a bit
more mundane.
I asked Ido Porat, an Israeli seated in the glass box at the time I visited,
what sort of questions he received. He said they included: “Do Jews believe
in Hell or Paradise?” and “What brought me to Germany?” Another partici-
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pant, British-born Ronni Golz, who has lived in Germany for over 40 years,
told me “the whole exhibit is enlightening because it is not dead serious.”
Yet, in the same breath, he added: “It is serious.”
Golz said the exhibit sends a humorous message in the tradition of the
Mel Brooks film The Producers and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator
that “it is time to relax” the fraught relations between Jews and Germans.
He said some of the objections—complaints that the box resembled the one
Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was kept in during his trial in Israel in
1961—were “neurotic.” During his time in the box, Golz said he was questioned about a number of topics: Israel and the peace process, circumcision
and kosher dietary laws, and how many Jews live in Germany.
The frivolous, relaxed atmosphere of the exhibit appealed to Claudio
Kühn, a law student, who said he appreciated that it forced the viewer to
grapple with difficult questions but in a way that generates laughter. When
asked about whether there is growing normalcy between Germans and German Jews, however, he said the tight security control at the museum’s
entrance makes him aware of the lack of normalcy.
Karin Schaal-Büscher, a middle-aged woman who works for the
teacher’s union in Berlin, expressed mixed feelings about the glass box.
“The confinement reminds me of Auschwitz and Treblinka,” she said. She
expressed a dissatisfaction with the lack of women in the exhibit—“the volunteers in the box have mostly been male”—but considered the exhibit to
be worthy of a visit.
Perhaps more awkward than anything are the lengths the museum goes
to showcase celebrities who are Jewish or have a Jewish connection. Posters, which hang in the last room of the exhibit, show Elizabeth Taylor (who
converted to Judaism) and British soccer icon David Beckham (who has a
Jewish grandfather) wearing a yarmulke. A video installation runs clips of
American Jewish comedians like Sarah Silverman and Larry David. There
you go, Germany—that’s the Jews for you. Laugh a bit. In the end, it’s
undoubtedly well intentioned, but it’s hard to imagine that a major change
in this most tense of historical relationships will come from this exhibit—
not so long as Germans still have to go to a museum to see Jews.
*Benjamin Weinthal is a European affairs correspondent for The Jerusalem Post
and a Berlin-based fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Reprinted by permission from the April 4, 2013, Foreign Policy article of the same
name.
Dr. Cohen’s Traveling Antisemitica Show
Simon Cohen is a London-based physician who has collected one of
Europe’s largest antisemitica displays in Western Europe and North
America. There are several pieces available for show and private sale. Dr.
Cohen often takes his collection to museums and Jewish studies and programs, and several pieces are available to such programs. He can be contacted at [email protected]
Children’s book (c. 1820)
New Game of the Jew
(Edward Wallis, Publisher, 1807)*
*Jewish moneylender board game available on Amazon.com ($9).
Original available from Gamestal.net (£3,250).
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“Jews”
Czes/law Mi/losz
We’re neither poems for you to fetishise
nor emblems of the murdered of the twentieth century,
we don’t hold all possibilities in Talmudic minds
live burdened with the grief you want us to.
We’re not the monsters of the Middle East,
the devils of the diaspora, nor do we know
the selves we recognise in one another.
We’re in danger in your midst and where you don’t know us,
a barometer of your pasts and futures
that you never consult,
and yet we ourselves live
by the tremble of mercury
which we always ask ourselves to shape,
for which we’re quoted against ourselves.
There’s no monopoly of suffering
what did the first victims know
who’s parents sent them with wobbly legs
gaped mouths, vacant grins, rage, the evidence
of the trial they were to heart, hands, purse;
yes look I’m a Jew and I’ve said purse,
judge me if you want; the first victims
were piped away like Hamlyn’s children,
only before the rats and other vermin.
Sticker placed on renowned professors’ office door
Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University, March 16, 2013
“Jews! The university belongs to us, not to you!
Regards: The Students”
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