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September 10, 2004
A history of Jew-hatred
What is inherent to Jews that elicits others' wrath?
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
The World Jewish Congress is spearheading a campaign to amass one
million signatures on a petition calling for a stand-alone resolution
at the United Nations against anti-Semitism.
The effort to get the UN to acknowledge and act against anti-Semitism
on a "stand-alone" basis is significant for several reasons.
There has been resistance at the UN and elsewhere to confront anti-Semitism
as a particular phenomenon. There is a distinct trend observable
in Europe, North America and elsewhere that anti-Semitism will cease
to be a problem when Israel ceases to infuriate its neighbors and
their friends. The equation of global anti-Semitism with particular
events in the Middle East not only downplays the significance of
virulent Jew-hatred, it also reverts to one of the defining characteristics
of age-old anti-Semitism: blaming the victims.
Anti-Semitism cannot be considered nor fought without understanding
its unique attributes. The social science of determining why people
hate is an imprecise one. Volumes have been written attempting to
understand it. Among the classic studies of anti-Semitism written
in recent decades, two in particular deserve revisiting as the world
considers how to confront a phenomenon of hatred we once thought
had past its prime.
In 1965, in the afterglow of the revolutionary Second Vatican Council,
a Catholic priest, Rev. Edward H. Flannery, wrote The Anguish
of the Jews.
Central to the Second Vatican Council, which was a modernizing conclave
that altered church teachings on a range of subjects, was the massive
reconsideration of the Church's relationship with Jews. Flannery's
book, published just at the end of the council, which ran from 1962
until 1965, is one of the most compendious studies of the anti-Semitic
strain that has run through the entire length of recorded history.
The book's subtitle – "A Catholic Priest Writes of 23
Centuries of Anti-Semitism" – is nevertheless a subtle
sharing of blame. As advanced as Flannery's study was in terms of
condemning his own church's complicity in Jew-hatred, the predating
of anti-Semitism to before the time of Christ rejects the suggestion
that this is a Christian phenomenon and Flannery convincingly backs
up his thesis.
Jews dehumanized
Flannery's book is particularly valuable for putting anti-Semitism
in a context larger than the Holocaust. Since 1945, extreme anti-Semitism
has been indelibly associated with fascism. There is a danger in
this, because it diverts attention from the permutations and elasticity
of anti-Semitism. All fascists may be anti-Semites, but not all
anti-Semites are fascists.
"The inclination to regard Hitler as a latter-day aberration
with little or no roots in the past or connection with the present
is still widespread, and thus the problem is not faced," Flannery
writes.
He traces the beginnings of what we now call anti-Semitism to the
Greek and Roman civilizations. But he acknowledges that it was during
the first five centuries of the Christian era that some of the enduring
imagery of anti-Semitism was conjured.
"There can be little doubt that in these early centuries a
theological construct of the Jew was created, which by the fourth
century had lost many of its human characteristics," writes
Flannery. "[The] accusers, having entertained few relations
with real Jews, constructed a theological abstraction having little
relation to reality."
Most effective of these abstractions was the Jew as Jesus-killer,
an accusation that gained force with Emperor Constantine's deathbed
conversion to Christianity in 329 CE, which represented the Christianizing
of the Roman Empire. Though an individual king may have made things
easier or more difficult for "his" Jews, a comparatively
friendly or dastardly pope could now alter the fortunes of Jews
across the continent. Forced conversions became common from this
period until the end of the 19th century.
"At the close of the [third] century, he was no more than a
special type of unbeliever," Flannery writes of the Jews. "At
the end of the fourth, he was a semi-satanic figure, cursed by God,
and marked off by the state."
From the fourth century, the fate of the Jewish people fell into
a startlingly predictable routine. The similarities of anti-Jewish
ideology and actions regardless of the nationality, religion or
geography of the perpetrators is breathtaking in its consistency.
Flannery meticulously diarizes it. It is impossible to read Flannery's
accounts of 400 to 1900 without marvelling at how the specific characteristics
of anti-Semitism that took shape in the fourth century have proved
so remarkably resilient that they evoke a depressing sense of familiarity
to the modern reader.
Upon the template of Christ-killer was overlaid a litany of sins
for which the Jews, among others but usually alone, have been accused
by Christian and Muslim, communist and fascist, capitalist and socialist,
internationalist and anti-globalist.
Hostility increases
As Islam became a threat to Christianity, a new phase of anti-Semitism
emerged, with Jews routinely accused of complicity with the other
side, a phenomenon that would recur through history in innumerable
contexts.
Then there were the Crusades.
"To the Jews it was a thunderclap out of the blue," says
Flannery. Although ostensibly an effort to send hordes of Christian
zealots to the Muslim-controlled Holy Land to reclaim it for Christianity,
the rules were flexible and, inevitably, some Crusaders turned their
attentions to the infidels closer to home. Heading east, the Christians
left a trail of blood on the road to Jerusalem. Before they even
left Europe, the Crusaders had killed an estimated 10,000 Jews –
who were not even their stated enemy. Flannery writes of an odd
lack of sympathy to the Jews in the aftermath of these attacks.
"Strangely, in the wake of the massacres, popular hostility
toward Jews increased and their social position suffered further
deterioration. A vague assumption that the atrocities must have
been deserved gradually took possession of the suggestible popular
mind," says Flannery.
The phenomenon of assigning blame to Jews for their own misfortune
is a theme that has failed to wither with time.
Another phenomenon, the association in the popular imagination of
Jews with commerce and international finance is, like most stereotypes,
not without its kernel of truth. Flannery outlines the circumstances
by which, over centuries, but especially in the late Middle Ages,
Jews were forced out of most pursuits, driven eventually into those
pursuits that Christians imagined themselves above. Forbidden in
most jurisdictions from service in government, law or the army,
Jews were limited largely to private sector occupations. Pre-industrial
societies were primarily agricultural, but Jews had learned from
experience not to invest their efforts in anything that could not
be easily packed up. So Jews became overwhelmingly an urban people
before industrialization made urbanization popular.
Throughout this time, Jews learned the value of ready money in exchange
for their lives.
"He had literally to buy not only his rights but his very existence,"
Flannery writes. "Money became to him as precious as the air
he breathed, the bread he ate."
With liquid assets always needed to buy their way out of the vise
of a king or lord, the Jewish involvement in finance became a spiral
of inevitable disaster, with the leaders seeing their Jews as a
sponge to be squeezed for cash, then cast out when exhausted. The
need for ever more money required ever higher rates of interest
from the clients of the moneylenders, creating a situation where
the very funds demanded by the king for protection had to be drawn
by Jews from the already infuriated anti-Semitic mobs. Jews were
expelled from entire countries. Jews were cast out until their worth
to the monarch as scapegoats or economic henchmen became missed,
then they'd be lured back with promises of security, only to undergo
the wrath of the people or the king again when they were deemed
to have outlasted their usefulness. Flannery's book is a litany
of such goings and comings from one empire or another, from biblical
times until 1948. Invariably, it seems, when the Jews were in favor
with the king, they were resented by the masses and vice versa.
A question answered
Where Jews were permitted to remain, the authorities had a mania
for signifying their distinctiveness with special badges, hats or
clothing – identifiers that remained popular on and off until
the 1930s.
Flannery's remarkable and sensitive testament of Jew-hatred nevertheless
ends on a note that seems jarring even in context of 2,300 years
of anti-Semitism. Seeking an answer to the perhaps unanswerable,
Flannery posits that there may be something inherent to the Jews
that elicits the passions of anti-Semites. Left as a rhetorical
question, such an assertion seems incendiary.
But about two decades later, in a book that remains a classic of
the genre, Dennis Prager and Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in 1983 penned
Why the Jews: The Reasons for Anti-Semitism. Their treatise
picks up where Flannery's jarring question left off and asserts
that, yes, there is something inherent that makes it attractive
to single Jews out from among the nations. Jewish values and practices,
they argue, are directly threatening to many non-Jews.
"Contrary to modern understandings of anti-Semitism ... the
historical record confirms the traditional Jewish view of anti-Semitism
that the Jews were hated because of distinctly Jewish factors. Modern
attempts to dejudaize anti-Semitism, to attribute it to economic,
social and political reasons, and universalize it into merely another
instance of bigotry are as opposed to the facts of Jewish history
as they are to the historical Jewish understanding of anti-Semitism,"
they write.
All but the modern Jews understood, according to Telushkin and Prager,
that they were hated for a variety of reasons that centred on their
very identity as Jews. Dedication to God, Torah and Israel –
all or any one of these – has been seen as a direct challenge
to non-Jews' own gods, laws or national allegiances. The central
Jewish imperative of tikkun olam, the repair of the world,
is by definition a threat to any existing order. Prager and Telushkin
contend further that the Jewish tradition represents a higher quality
of life, in that it incorporates an emphasis on education, family
stability, mutual aid, moderation in alcohol and a range of other
factors that are recognized and resented by some non-Jews. On top
of all this, they argue, chosenness is to some non-Jews like a red
flag to a bull.
The resolution to the problem of anti-Semitism, they conclude, rests
in part from inculcating the values that define Jews – even
those that challenge the status quo – into society at large.
Telushkin's and Prager's solution rests not on eliminating that
which makes Jews different, but emphasizing and spreading it.
"Jewish history has taught Jews well the dangers of reactionary
religious and political ideologies, and the need for pluralism and
a non-dogmatic approach to religious beliefs.... As Jews have believed
since anti-Semitism began, only in a world guided by ethical monotheism
will Jews be able to live in peace."
Read in the context of 2004, decades after the words were put to
paper, these two books still provide lucid and important perspectives
on a hatred that won't die. Is anybody reading?
Pat Johnson is a British Columbia writer and commentator.
The petition for a stand-alone resolution against anti-Semitism
can be accessed at www.worldjewishcongress.org/petition/resolution1.cfm.
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