Antisemitism and Modernity

Innovation and Continuity

Hyam Maccoby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134384891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The subject of anti-Semitism, not long ago thought to be a dead issue, has been revised due to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Maccoby traces the now topical discussion of the origins of Anti-Semitism, and especially its development in the modern world. The key questions that are addressed include:

• 
  
  

• How is it that this medieval prejudice proved so lasting and potent?

• 
  
  

• Are the roots of anti-Semitism religious? If so, how do these roots differ in Christianity and Islam?

• 
  
  

• By what means did it bridge the gap between medievalism and Enlightenment?

• 
  
  

• How was it that many of the most respected Enlightenment figures (such as Voltaire) dedicated as they were to tolerance and pluralism, retained a virulent anti-Semitism?

These questions, and many more, are dealt with as Maccoby explores the roots of the anti-Semitism, tracing it from its origins, and shows how it has changed in accordance with the shifting ideas of the modern world but without changing in its essence.

Antisemitism and Modernity is essential reading for those with interests in the development of anti-Semitism, its manifestation in the current world and its future.

Part I
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

1
ANTISEMITISM

An historical overview

Antisemitism is hatred directed against Jews, and we must first be clear what is meant by this entity ‘the Jews’.

The term ‘Jew’ is derived from ‘Judah’ which was the name of a prominent tribe of the Israelites. In about 975 BCE, the Israelites became split into two kingdoms, the Northern (called Israel, containing ten tribes) and the Southern (called Judah, containing only the tribe of Judah and half the tribe of Benjamin, together with the priestly tribe of Levi, of which one section was the Kohanim or priests, descendants of Aaron). In 740 BCE, the Northern Kingdom ceased to exist, having been destroyed by the Assyrians. The ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom (or at least their upper classes) were sent into exile in remote regions of the Assyrian Empire, and their fate is unknown, though many legends about their continued existence in India, Africa and even England and America arose in the course of subsequent centuries. Only the Southern Kingdom of Judah remained as a national entity. Consequently, the nation that had been known for about 600 years as the Israelites now began to be known as Judahites, or Jews (Hebrew, yehudim; Greek, Iudaioi; Latin, Judaei). When the Southern Kingdom too was destroyed by the Babylonians in 588 BCE, the Jews who were exiled to Babylonia retained their identity; and when they returned to their land in the two migrations of 536 and 457 BCE, it became again the land of Judah. Even the remnants of the population of the Northern Kingdom, who eventually became reunited with the commonwealth of the South, were now known as Jews, and the name ‘Israelite’ fell into disuse (except for certain religious purposes), only to be resuscitated with the birth of Israel in 1948 CE. By a strange historical inversion, Israelites (or Israelis) are now a sub-class of Jews, whereas originally, Judahites (or Jews) were a sub-class of Israelites.

Why then did this particular group of humanity give rise to a special kind of hatred or xenophobia that had to be given a specific name, antisemitism? The name ‘antisemitism’ itself is a modern coinage and is based on a particular theory according to which hatred of the Jews arises because of the alleged inferiority of their race, that is, because they are Semites. This theory was not taken very seriously even by people who called themselves racialist antisemites. Hitler, for example, did not hate Arabs and made common cause with the Mufti of Jerusalem in opposing Jews. The word ‘antisemitism’, whatever the theory behind it, never meant anything but ‘hatred of Jews’. It is a pity that such an inexact word has become current for something that ought to be called ‘Jew-hatred’ or ‘Judaeophobia’; but ‘antisemitism’ has entered European languages and must be used for the purpose, even though every now and again someone professes to misunderstand it. Even the Jew-hatred of the ancient world, which had no racialist theory behind it, is correctly called ‘antisemitism’, and even medieval or modern Arab hatred of the Jews has to be called by the same name.

Of course, every nation excites hatred in its neighbours or rivals, and so we have the phenomenon of Anglophobia or Francophobia or USA-phobia. This hatred tends to be greater, the greater the pretensions of the nation in question to world-leadership in politics, commerce or culture. The hatred can then develop into a kind of paranoia, in which the target nation is regarded as plotting devilishly against the rest of mankind. The Jews have always been a small nation; but their pretensions to world-leadership, in the religious field, have been very great, since they have regarded themselves as the chosen people of the Creator of the universe. The hatred directed against them has been in proportion to the awesomeness of this claim.

The Jewish notion of chosenness looks back to the event that was believed to have formed the Israelites as a nation: the Exodus from Egypt. The stupendous of God in history, by which a slave-people was rescued, led through the desert, given a Law of freedom and launched into a Promised Land, was held to have marked out the people of Israel, later the Jews, as having special significance in the history of the human race. This was not because of any special merit on their part; on the contrary, the Bible, which gives the story on which Judaism is based, stresses the shortcomings of both the Chosen People and their leaders, who continually have to be upbraided by prophets to prevent them from straying from their mission. The fate of exile, first of the Ten Tribes of the Northern Kingdom, and then of the Judaeans, was interpreted by the prophets as a punishment for failure to live up to the role for which God had chosen them, but also as an opportunity for repentance and return to that role.

This religious myth and sense of vocation was unique in the ancient world in that it marked out the Israelites/Jews as unassimilable by surrounding cultures. The God who delivered them from Egypt was regarded (certainly from the eighth century BCE onwards and possibly before) as not merely a national god, but as a universal deity, creator of all. Consequently, there was no possibility of the usual religious syncretism, by which other ancient nations pooled their gods. The Israelites/Jews refused to allow any validity to other gods and held aloof from all ‘idolatry’, refusing to intermarry with ‘idolaters’ on ideological, not racialistic, grounds (there was no bar on intermarriage with Gentiles, such as Ruth, who embraced the Jewish faith).

This attitude naturally aroused hostility from some members of other nations and religions, who saw the Israelites/Jews as sullenly unsociable and intolerant, rather than as spearheading a universalistic faith. Antisemitism, in its earliest form, concentrated on this alleged unsociability and inassimilability, the Jews being represented as hostile to the rest of the human race. This early form of antisemitism was especially strong when the Jews were faced with a surrounding culture which placed great value on its own civilizing mission, and therefore regarded Jewish resistance to assimilation as an insult to its own mission.

It has often been misrepresented that the Jewish sense of being a chosen people was in fact a narrow insularism, rather than a sense of universal vocation. In particular, the time of the return from Babylon under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah is often regarded as the initiation of a period of isolationism in which the universalistic vision of the prophets was abandoned. Such an interpretation has usually been advanced in the interests of an historical scheme in which it was only the advent of Christianity that re-introduced universalistic ideas. Ezra, it is alleged, banned all intermarriage with Gentiles and made the Jews into a priestly caste.¹ If this were true it would be most puzzling that the Judaism which followed the teaching of Ezra believed strongly in proselytism and gave canonical status to the books of Ruth, Jonah and Job. In fact, the ‘strange wives’ whom Ezra banned were those who refused to become converted to Judaism and who brought up their children in idolatrous faiths.² Similarly, the refusal to allow the ‘adversaries’ to join in the rebuilding of the Temple was not because of considerations of racial or priestly purity, but because they were idolaters who joined worship of Jahweh with that of other deities.

The ban on intermarriage with Gentiles was always motivated by the aim of preserving the faith, not the race, and was not essentially different from the later Christian ban on intermarriage with non-Christians. The expression ‘the holy seed’ used in Ezra has no racialist connotation; it refers not only to those born into the faith but also to those descended from converts (including the royal messianic house of David). Thus there is no ground for the common view that the reforms of Ezra prepared the ground for later antisemitism by strengthening Jewish isolationism. Ezra was merely putting into practice the usual Jewish defence against syncretism and adulteration of the faith at a time when these posed an especial threat. The same applies to the reforms of Nehemiah,³ in which the case of Solomon is explicitly invoked. Jewish isolationism was religiously and ideologically motivated and stemmed directly from the inability of a universalistic faith to compromise with polytheism.

The Jews appear to have experienced little antisemitism during their subjection to the Babylonian and Persian empires, which were tolerant of all faiths and had little sense of cultural mission themselves. The biblical book of Esther might seem to portray a lively antisemitism in Persian times, but this book was actually written during the period of Greek domination and what it portrays anachronistically is Hellenistic antisemitism, with its emphasis on Jewish resistance to assimilation.⁴

The birth of antisemitism, in its sense of settled antipathy to the Jews (as opposed to temporary hostility caused by events), can be traced to the period of Hellenistic domination and to the clash between Hellenism and Judaism. Both Judaism and Hellenism had a sense of mission, and they were therefore natural rivals. The Jews, however, did not hate Hellenism, but in many ways admired it. It was the assumption of the Jews that they could adopt or reject what they pleased from Hellenism, while continuing to regard themselves as possessing a superior wisdom, justifying a status as a dedicated, separate group, that infuriated many Hellenistic cultural figures and provoked a campaign of vilification against the Jews that anticipated most of the slanders and motifs of later antisemitism.

A determined attempt to obliterate the distinctiveness of the Jews and reduce them to the level of just another Hellenistic nation came from the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes, who in 168 BCE forcibly converted the Jewish Temple to the worship of Zeus and forbade the practice of Judaism. He also supported an antisemitic campaign in which the Jews were accused of hatred of mankind and of performing cultic human sacrifices. This first appearance of official antisemitism foreshadows its subsequent history, in that antisemitism was inextricably tied to anti-Judaism: the Jews were an evil nation because they had an evil religion, and their only way to normality was to abandon this religion. In 133 BCE came the first mooting of a policy of genocide towards the Jews. This came from the advisers of the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Sidetes, who urged this policy on the grounds of the Jews’ alleged unsociability and refusal to assimilate to other nations, and of the failure of Antiochus Epiphanes’ attempt to force them to conform.⁵ It may have been the occasion of this advice that led to the composition of the book of Esther, which displaces the genocidal advice to the earlier Persian era.

In the subsequent era of Roman hegemony, the chief antagonists of the Jews continued to be those who were fully committed to Hellenistic culture. While the Romans themselves were ostensibly Hellenists, their imperialist policy was, on the whole, practical and tolerant, more like the Persians than the Greeks. Only those few Roman emperors, such as Hadrian, who became apostles of Hellenism were antisemites, though others occasionally pursued antisemitic policies under the influence of Hellenistic advisers. Some Roman rulers (e.g. Julius Caesar) were pro-Jewish. The Romans recognized the right of Jews to practise their special worship and observances and to be exempt from what they regarded as idolatrous worship.

It was in the first century CE, in Hellenistic intellectual circles, especially in Alexandria, that a coherent historical schema and even a theology of anti-semitism was first developed. The historical schema can be seen in its most hostile form in the propaganda of Apion, as reported by Josephus. This builds on the biblical record, but gives it an antisemitic slant. The exodus from Egypt did take place, but not as a God-given deliverance. It was an ignominious expulsion of a rabble of lepers, who reacted by developing a misanthropic religion, the chief observance of which was human sacrifice. The theological antisemitism, stemming from Alexandria, also builds on biblical material, but with more knowledge of it, especially of the book of Genesis. This is the religious movement known as Gnosticism, which held that the Jewish God was in reality an evil or limited creator, or Demiurge, who had created this evil world and given an evil Torah to his followers, the Jews. The real heroes of the biblical story were marginal, non-Jewish figures such as Seth, Enoch or Melchizedek, who transmitted a genuine knowledge (gnosis) derived not from the Demiurge but from the High God against whom the Jewish God made his arrogant claims. The antisemitism of the Gnostic writings, such as the Apocalypse of Adam, is more contemptuous than virulent.The Jews are regarded as slavish adherents to a limited God and as deluded figures, rather than as diabolical murderers. Nevertheless, Gnosticism is significant in the history of antisemitism in that it gave antisemitism, for the first time, a cosmic dimension. The Jews were not just hateful outcasts who made a virtue of their isolation, as in Apion’s schema; they were the earthly minions of an evil figure of cosmic proportions, though not quite so frightening as the Devil of later Christianity.

Gnosticism, as scholars have increasingly realized, did not arise out of Christianity, but was an earlier or at least an independent development, which only later joined Christianity as a tributary stream, adopting a Christian form. The biblical content of Gnosticism has led some scholars to see it as a form of Judaism; but its antisemitic trend, relatively mild though it is, points rather to the conclusion that it is a fringe phenomenon arising among Hellenists both attracted and repelled by Judaism. Its cosmic anti-semitism is historically important since it contributed an essential ingredient to Christian antisemitism. Its technique of using Jewish materials in order to produce an antisemitic myth is also a foretaste of Christian antisemitism.

Alexandrian antisemitism arose partly for social reasons, since the Hellenistic upper class, who had been displaced from influence by Roman rule, resented the competition of the upstart Jews. Chiefly, however, the rivalry was cultural. Alexandrian Jews, such as Philo, had mastered Greek culture but were using it to pursue a missionizing campaign for Judaism. Converts to Judaism were many throughout the Roman Empire and Hellenists felt threatened in their position as cultural arbiters. Also a class of Roman intellectuals arose, many of them aristocrats, who absorbed Hellenistic antisemitism and employed it to defend Roman tradition against Eastern religious inroads. Among these, the most bitter opponent of the Jews was the historian Tacitus, who wrote an ostensibly objective account of the history of the Jews. In this, he repeats every antisemitic libel current in the Greco-Roman world. In this antisemitic tract, Tacitus presents the Jews as a threat to the purity of the Roman Empire and as bringers of degeneracy.The chief thrust of his argument is that the Jews, being antisocial, except within their own community, can never cooperate with the rest of humanity and are therefore always bound to be bad citizens in any overall political system.

These antisemitic attitudes of Greek-influenced Roman intellectuals gained popular support during the period of Jewish rebellion against Rome. The basic Roman attitude, however, remained one of toleration. Jewish attempts to achieve independence were understood as natural in a proud nation that had been subjected to bad provincial government; and it was also understood that the Jews could be loyal and useful members of the Roman Empire (as they had been in previous empires) as long as their religion was not suppressed or insulted.

The Jews were by no means silent in the face of Hellenistic antisemitic attacks. The voluminous works of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo (c.25–40 CE) constitute a sustained defence of Judaism against the charge of narrow sectarianism. He demonstrates that Judaism is a universalistic religion, aiming at the conversion of all humanity to the worship of the One God and obedience to his Law of truth and justice; and that the separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity is not caused by misanthropy, but by their sense of dedication and vocation in their mission. He also attempts to show that Judaism is in harmony with the best of Greek thought, especially that of Plato. An important earlier defence against the charges of sectarianism and bad citizenship is the Letter of Aristeas, written in Alexandria in about 170 BCE, which portrays the admiration shown for Judaism by the ruler Ptolemy II Philadelpus at the time of the composition of the Septuagint (c.260 BCE). A systematic defence of Judaism against antisemitic charges is the treatise Against Apion, by the historian Josephus, replying with great effectiveness to the assaults of the leading Alexandrian antisemitic theorist, and showing Jewish history in a favourable light. Indeed, the great major works of Josephus, the Antiquities and the Jewish War can be regarded as sustained defences of the Jewish record on a broad historical scale, demonstrating Jewish loyalty to benevolent rulers, and the nobility and awesome antiquity of the Jewish religion.

The earlier works are inspired by a desire for reconciliation between the Jewish and Hellenistic cultures: but there was also an angrier, more attacking, kind of Jewish response to antisemitism. These were the works which responded in kind by asserting the moral inferiority of non-Jewish religion and culture. Such were the Jewish Sybilline Oracles (written in the second century BCE and later in imitation of a non-Jewish genre of prophecy) denouncing the sins of paganism and foretelling a messianic age when Jewish ideas would prevail and the wicked would be punished. Even these works, however, adopted a cross-cultural stance, envisaging an age when Jews and repentant Gentiles would join in the worship of the One God.

The form of antisemitism that was transmitted from the ancient world to medieval times, and so to the modern world, was Christian antisemitism. Behind Christian antisemitism lies the Hellenistic antisemitism discussed previously and also some other important factors.

In its earliest form, as found in the Jerusalem Church, Christianity was a branch of Judaism and was not antisemitic.⁶ The leaders of the Jerusalem Church, James, Jesus’ brother, Peter and John, were observant Jews who were devoted to the Temple service, recognized the Jewish priesthood and practised circumcision, Sabbath and festivals, and dietary laws like other Jews. They regarded Jesus as the Jewish messiah, who had been crucified by the Romans but had been resurrected by a miracle of God and would soon resume his messianic mission of liberation. The devotion of the Jerusalem Church to Judaism creates a strong presumption that Jesus himself was a loyal Jew who did not intend to found a new religion.

When, however, Jesus began to be worshipped as a divine sacrificial figure who was the centre of a new religion superseding Judaism and no longer concerned with Jewish aims of liberation, a split took place in the Christian Church. The Jewish-Christians continued to regard Jesus as a human messiah figure, while those who worshipped Jes...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
• PART II FROM THEOLOGY TO PHILOSOPHY
• PART III THE JEWS IN MYTH AND IMAGINATION
• PART IV THE HOLOCAUST AND AFTER
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY