Antisemitism In The Contemporary World

Michael Curtis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429717888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Original essays by various scholars on the questions of whether there are new forms of antisemitism, whether there has been a resurgence of antisemitism in the current age, and whether critical attitudes towards Zionism or opposition to the State of Israel and its policies have given new impetus to antisemitism. The contributors also examine the complex relationship between the State of Israel and the Jewish community worldwide

Part OnePhilosophy and Ideology

DOI: 10.4324/9780429035845-2

2Philosophical Reflections on Antisemitism

DOI: 10.4324/9780429035845-3

Emil L. Fackenheim

I would like to begin with a personal anecdote dating back some forty years. I was a Reform rabbi in Hamilton, Canada, and by tradition in that city the Reform rabbi is almost automatically chairman of the Public Relations Committee of the Jewish community. One afternoon, in that capacity, I got an urgent phone call from some members of a small Orthodox synagogue. It was a great emergency, they said, and I had to come right over. So I jumped on the bus and went there. There I was told that a terrible catastrophe had occurred, and that I had to write letters to newspapers all over Canada. What had happened? A window had been broken! So I told them not to worry, that some kids had thrown stones, and that they might have done it just as easily at a church. And I went home thinking there were still some Jews w'ho saw an antisemite behind every tree.

I report this anecdote because although in a superficial sense I was right, I now think that in a profound sense these old East European Jews were right and I was wrong. Remember, that was the time when one part of the world was murdering every available Jew while the rest of the world was doing very little about it. It has taken researchers a long time to find out what the government of Canada, our country, was doing—or rather was not doing—about saving some Jewish souls. These old Jews, I think, knew the depressing facts in their guts. They had relatives being murdered on the other side, and they were helpless. Compared to that monumental manifestation of antisemitism, the reason for which the kids threw stones and whether they would have been equally likely to throw those stones at a church constituted a very minor point.

So I now repent of my "liberal" folly of forty years ago. I also distance myself from the kind of Jewish intellectuals who place liberal slogans and ideologies between themselves and the stark particularity of the phenomenon known as antisemitism. There are those quick conclusions that antisemitism is a "prejudice," and of course one removes prejudice with "enlightenment." Then there is the quick resort to the "scapegoat theory," which never bothers to explain why the scapegoats are always, or for the most part, the Jews. There is a certain mentality among many liberal Jewish intellectuals that is unable to face reality and instead places ideologies between itself and that reality. I have learned to reject such escapist ideologies from ordinary Jewish people, and in particular from survivors—the very people who are often pictured by these intellectuals as "traumatized." Yet the survivors are the ones who know best that we cannot afford to see an antisemite behind a tree when one isn't there.

This chapter is an edited version of a paper delivered at a symposium at York University, Toronto, in honor of the late Professor Harry Crowe.

I have also learned a lot from some Gentile scholars who, because they are Gentiles, are free of the Jewish hangups I am alluding to. Perhaps foremost among them is the man in whose honor this chapter was originally written. I have never participated in the annual University of Toronto Zionist Symposium when the committee would have dreamt of choosing anyone except Harry Crowe as chairman and when Harry did not bring profound insights to bear on whatever the topic was. I also want to mention—especially because this chapter will involve a great deal of criticism of Christianity—a great Christian thinker, probably the greatest of our time. In the 1940s Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the following: "When a minority group is hated for its virtues as well as its vices, and when its vices are hated, not so much because they are vices, but because they bear the stamp of uniqueness, we are obviously dealing with a collective psychology that is not easily altered by a little more enlightenment."¹ I have pondered this statement many times and concluded that what is needed is philosophical reflection. (I distinguish this sharply from ideology, which is escapist and, in this case, flees into generalities. Philosophy must be anything but escapist.) When there is something unique to wonder at, it is precisely then that philosophy must not resort to generalities but, rather, must stop at the phenomenon in question.

I

To begin with, let me therefore list some peculiarities of antisemitism that would seem to call for philosophical reflection. The first one Niebuhr has already brought to our attention: the peculiarity that Jews are criticized by antisemites for their virtues as well as for their vices. For example, nineteenth-century antisemites claimed to hate Jews because they were a "nation within a nation" (i.e., still had some collective vitality) and a "bloodless shadow" (i.e., because they did not have it). The familiar shout was "Hep! Hep!" which is the abbreviation of a Latin phrase ("Hyroselyma Est Perdita") meaning "Jerusalem is destroyed." They gloated over that, that Jews were not a nation! The Jews, in other words, must not be a nation like other nations and also must not not be a nation like other nations. One feels like saying, "Antisemite, please make up your mind. Which is the virtue and which is the vice? Take your pick, criticize Jews for the vice, but not for the virtue!"

In our own century, a generation ago, Jews were criticized for supposedly flocking like sheep to the slaughter, when others in the same situation might have been praised for the martyrdom with which they faced death without resisting their persecutors when this was futile. Yet today Jews are criticized for being militarists, when others in the same situation would surely be praised for the courage with which they defend themselves against those who want to destroy them. Once again, one would like to say to the antisemite, "Make up your mind. Which is the virtue, which is the vice?" Here, then, is one phenomenon for which I see no counterpart in any other form of "prejudice" or in any of the countless other evils that beset our world. Of course, it is very easy to mention antisemitism and then immediately to talk about other evils, like racism, or the war in Vietnam, or Hiroshima. The typical liberal intellectual or clergyman quickly draws parallels between them and antisemitism! The liberal, as Jean-Paul Sartre has said, is a very busy man, fighting as he does many evils. However, when we talk about antisemitism, let us not talk about other evils—which is not to say, of course, that other evils might not be equally bad or even worse.

The next unique, and perhaps related, characteristic of antisemitism is its extraordinary persistence. Civilizations change, yet antisemitism persists. Again and again, a new world comes into being and it is said that antisemitism was only a "medieval" thing, now past. (Maybe it was just "religious prejudice.") And then, after a while, along comes a Voltaire, and in the new world antisemitism reappears as an antireligious prejudice.

Third, and presumably related to the second characteristic, there seems to be an extraordinary mutability to the phenomenon, such that many would say the various forms are not the same at all. ("Religious" antisemitism, say, has no connection with "racist" antisemitism.) Undoubtedly, there are profound differences. But no one reflecting deeply on the issue can sav that the two are not the same phenomenon at all.

Next, I have used the word "prejudice" in quotation marks. Unlike a genuine prejudice, antisemitism does not seem to disappear when knowledge comes on the scene. Let me give two examples, one at the lowest, most horrendous level, the other at the highest and most exalted, if indeed not saintly, level. In 1944, Joseph Goebbels declared in a public speech in the Berlin Sportpalast that in this war all the nations of Europe had suffered, but that there was one people who had not suffered but only profited from the war—the Jews. Of course, Goebbels, if anyone, knew that when he was uttering these words most of the Jews of Europe had already been murdered. This did not stop him from saying what he did with every sign of conviction.

That was the horrendous. Let me turn now to the most exalted. Among recent Christian theologians few have been more saintly, more courageous than Karl Barth. In his Dogmatics, Barth described a visit to a synagogue in Prague, the famous Altneuschul. He remarked that when he saw the synagogue surrounded by a cemetery, he realized that Jews were the shadow of a people no longer alive. A few friends and I once had a meeting with Barth, one of the few if not the only JewishChristian dialogue in which the great thinker ever participated. One of us, perhaps the most forward of the lot, and in this it was proper to be forward—Steven Schwarzschild—said to Barth: “Professor Barth, did you go inside that synagogue? If you had, you would have seen Jews profoundly alive, Jews studying the Talmud." In retrospect, I wonder whether, had Barth gone inside that synagogue, it would have made any difference. Jews would still have been a shadow. Knowledge apparently does not by itself remove antisemitism, which is why one cannot call it a prejudice. (“Prejudice" is judgment before knowledge.) And one could give a long list of saints as well as sinners, of the experts as well as the ignorant, who were and are antisemites.

All the above aspects of uniqueness pale in comparison to yet another. This climactic one no discussion of antisemitism in our time can ignore. It is clearly present in the unsurpassable form of antisemitism—the Nazi Holocaust. And while one hates to mention any other form of antisemitism in the same breath as Nazism, to say that there is no connection would be absurd. Hence the need for philosophical reflection.

Not many philosophers have given it that. Among those few was Jean-Paul Sartre. And his book, Anti-Semite and Jew, deserves serious attention.² What he concluded from the facts as he knew them is that antisemitism is not a legitimate opinion, not a prejudice, but, rather, a criminal passion and that it is criminal because its ultimate goal is the death of the Jew. Here a searching philosopher has come to the bottom of things: What else can the real goal be when the enemy of Jews hates their virtues as well as their vices? Their vices as well as their virtues?

Sartre saw this very clearly. What he did not see is where this strange and unique phenomenon comes from, and how it could have arisen at all. The reason Sartre did not see this lies in his failure to consider history. To explain and understand the phenomenon without history is impossible.

II

A profound historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, early in his monumental work The Destruction of the European Jews, wrote a sentence that, when I first read it, shocked me profoundly. It continues to shock me but, pondering it again and again, I now find it necessary to quote it because I think it is true: "The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect 'you have no right to live among us as Jews.' The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: 'You have no right to live among us.' The German Nazis at last decreed: 'You have no right to live.'"³ I find this statement shocking yet true for two reasons. First, it asserts the persistence of Jew-hatred, during long centuries when many times it seemed to have virtually disappeared. The Middle Ages were by no means, as far as Jews are concerned, a uniformly black period. There were long periods of Christian-Jewish tolerance, if not friendship. The early vitriolic sermons of, say, Saint John Chrysostom seemed to have been forgotten. This, however, does not alter the shocking fact that during the Crusades Jew-hatred suddenly reappeared as if from un-derground. Again, before 1933 in Germany, if anyone had suggested to me that there was some connection between contemporary life and medieval church legislation against the Jews I would have laughed. Anyone would have laughed. Yet Hilberg has chilling tables of comparison between medieval-Christian and Nazi-German anti-Jewish legislation.

Persistence, then, is the first fact brought out by Hilberg, and it teaches a fundamental lesson—that it won't do to sweep Jew-hatred under the carpet. I am reminded of my student days some forty years ago, when I studied the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, with a very beloved teacher at the Toronto Institute of Medieval Studies. One day I came to his office to study St. Thomas and there on his desk was a pamphlet in French entitled "St. Thomas and the Jews." I said that I was interested and asked if I could borrow it. He replied that he didn't want me to see it. I insisted, and he gave it to me. It was written by a Catholic writer from Quebec who was deriving from St. Thomas the available anti-Jewish sentiments for modem application, to the effect that Jews do not deserve equal rights in a democratic but somehow Christian state. I think now that although my teacher had the right moral sensibility, he was wrong in thinking that I should not see the document or, more important, the anti-Jewish passages in Aquinas's work itself. Perhaps what we really should have studied was not St. Thomas's doctrine of analogy but rather how Jews and Christians together can cope with the phenomenon of Christian Jew-hatred that has been between them for so many centuries. No, sweeping the past under the carpet, though no doubt well-intentioned, won't do. That is the first lesson.

The second lesson comes when we consider the second fact implied in Hilberg's statement. If the persistence of antisemitism through the centuries is shocking, then what shall we say of the escalation of it? We have been told by the Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether that even St. Chrysostom never preached violence against Jews. (After all, the man was a saint.) Yet without those sermons of his, or others like them, the expulsions of Jews in the Middle Ages—surely acts of violence— could not have occurred. One can picture St. Chrysostom actually protesting against these violent acts while having to admit to himself that without his preachings they could not have taken place.

Yet, concerning escalation, the medieval version was dwarfed by the unsurpassable modem one, which did not occur until our own time. Torquemada burnt Jewish bodies in order to save Jewish souls. The Eichmanns of this...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents Page
• Preface Page
• Part One Philosophy and Ideology
• Part Three Israel and Zionism
• Part Four Discrimination: Action and Expression
• List of Contributors
• Index