Chapter 17
The Problem of Anti-Semitism
In This Chapter
Examining 2,000 years of persecution
Exposing some common myths and misperceptions about Jews
Finding ways to heal
When Ted was 14, his family moved from a largely Jewish neighborhood to an area where far fewer Jews lived, and he was one of three Jewish kids in his school. It was the first time he got beat up simply because he was Jewish. But what he remembers hurting even more was his best friend, some months into the school year, announcing, “My parents say I can’t come to your house anymore because you’re Jewish.” To this day, Ted can’t figure out what his friend’s parents were worried about, but these events sensitized him to the common anti-Jewish feelings that often still exist just below the surface.
Many younger Jews who may never have been personally touched by anti-Semitism still sense that dealing with anti-Jewish sentiment is somehow part of being Jewish. Many people are surprised to find out that hate crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions in the United States are still many times more prevalent than attacks on Muslims or any other religious group. In fact, the reality and the threat of hatred against Jews, particularly following the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust (see Chapter 15), led whole generations to base their Jewish identity on being victims. At the same time, Jews increasingly want to avoid this victim role.
Anti-Semitism has been, and is, a fact of life for many Jews. However, in this chapter, our goal is to discuss the historical truth of anti-Semitism without over-emphasizing its importance in the development of Jewish identity.
Recounting the Incomprehensible
No other group of people has suffered as much throughout history (and still survives) as the Jewish people. The centuries of oppression and exile seem so senseless, based on incredible ignorance, suspicion, and fear. As Harry Golden, a great American Jewish humorist, once wrote, “Let’s face it — anti-Semitism cannot possibly be explained; it can merely be recounted.” Table 17-1 lists a few of the many consequences of anti-Semitism over the past two millennia.
Table 17-1 Selected Acts of Anti-Semitism in the Common Era
|
Date (All dates are in the Common Era.) |
Event |
|
135 |
Romans prohibit (upon pain of death) circumcision, reading the Torah, eating unleavened bread during Passover, and other required Jewish rituals |
|
200 |
The Roman Emperor Severus prohibits conversion to Judaism upon penalty of death |
|
306 |
Roman law prohibits Jews and Christians from eating together, intermarrying, or having sexual relations |
|
489 |
Citizens of Antioch slaughter Jews, burn the synagogue, and throw the bodies of Jews into the fire |
|
681 |
The Synod of Toledo mandates to burn the Talmud and other Jewish texts |
|
855 |
Louis II expels Jews from Italy |
|
1021 |
A group of Jews in Rome are arrested, accused of causing an earthquake and hurricane by tormenting a “host” (the wafer used in Mass), and then burned to death after confessing under torture |
|
1099 |
The First Crusaders arrive in Palestine and slaughter 30,000 Muslims and Jews. Jerusalem’s Jews are gathered in the synagogue and burned alive |
|
1180 |
The King of France, Philip Augustus, seizes all Jewish property and expels Jews from the country |
|
1290 |
England expels Jews from the country |
|
1306 |
France expels Jews from the country |
|
1349 |
Jews throughout Europe are massacred: The entire Jewish community of Basle is burned to death; 6,000 Jews are burned to death in Mainz; 500 Jews are killed in Brussels; Jews in Frankfurt and Vienna commit suicide to avoid torture |
|
1391 |
Tens of thousands of Jews are killed in anti-Jewish riots in Spain, tens of thousands more are saved by forced conversion; the Inquisition begins, during which 50,000 Jews are killed |
|
1492 |
Expulsion of Jews from Spain |
|
1517 |
The Pope declares all Jews must wear badges of shame and live in ghettos |
|
1543 |
Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation, declares that the Jews’ “synagogues should be set on fire . . . their houses should likewise be broken down and destroyed . . . their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach . . .” |
|
1648 |
The Chmielnicki Pogroms occur: 100,000 to 200,000 Jews are killed in the Ukraine |
|
1862 |
General Ulysses Grant orders all Jews to be expelled from Tennessee (an order almost immediately rescinded by President Abraham Lincoln) |
|
1894 |
Alfred Dreyfus, an assimilated Jew, is falsely accused of espionage in France |
|
1900 –1920 |
Thousands of Jews are killed in pogroms across Eastern Europe |
|
1915 |
Russia forcibly moves 600,000 Jews from the Western border to the interior; over 100,000 die of exposure or starvation |
|
1925 |
Adolf Hitler publishes Mein Kampf, in which he writes, “Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” |
|
1941 – 1945 |
The Holocaust. Almost six million Jews (including 1.5 million children) are killed in death camps |
Fearing an Unknown Quantity: The Origins of Hate
Historically, Jewish law has led to Jews being misunderstood. Jews couldn’t traditionally eat in non-Jewish (nonkosher) homes or intermarry with non-Jews, so there was little social interaction between the communities. Similarly, Jews had to be able to walk to synagogue for Shabbat (see Chapter 18), so they tended to live in small clusters, apart from non-Jews. And, because Jews insisted on practicing their own religion their own way, they were labeled “against the gods” by early pagans — which was later echoed as “against Christ” by the early Christians. Although Judaism posed little or no threat to the non-Jews, Jews were different, and just being different is often seen as a threat in itself.
Because non-Jews knew little about Jews, it was easy for them to paint the Jews as whatever they most feared. Jews have alternately been described as being radical liberals or tight-fisted capitalists, pushy and butting in where they’re not wanted or clannish and reclusive, stingy or excessive and flamboyant. Curiously, however, unlike many persecuted groups, the Jews are almost never seen as stupid, poor, or uneducated (though many Jews have certainly fallen into those categories).
For centuries, Jews were forbidden to own land, barred from trades, and often forced to live in ghettos, effectively cornering them into roles such as lending money or brokering loans (which may have been considered un-Christian because these professions involved handling money). Of course, everyone loves a guy who loans them money . . . until he asks for it to be paid back.
Exploding Dangerous and False Beliefs
Anti-Semites have long justified their terrible beliefs and acts by accusing the objects of their hatred of even worse beliefs and deeds. Here are some of the myths that Jew haters have generated to defend anti-Semitic acts.
Belief #1: The Jews killed Jesus
Probably the most common war cry among anti-Semites in the past 2,000 years has been “the Jews killed Jesus.” To get the facts straight: The Jews didn’t kill Jesus. The Romans killed Jesus. Jesus’s followers and supporters were all Jewish (as was Jesus, of course). The Sadducee priests, who largely managed the Roman protectorate, were clearly in league with the Roman authorities, and many others in the Jewish community feared punishment if they appeared to support Jesus — or anyone else considered a threat to the status quo. However, the worst you could say is that a tiny fraction of Jews today may be the descendants of those priests or others who were involved.
On the other hand, the Romans had a clear policy: Crucify any Jewish authority figure who rebelled against Roman rule. Some historians say up to 100,000 anti-Roman revolutionaries were crucified, most of whom were likely Jewish. Jesus was clearly Jewish, clearly rabbinic (he prayed and taught in Jewish synagogues), and clearly against the authority of the pagan Romans. Saying that the Jews killed Jesus is like saying the Jews ran the Nazi death camps.
Nevertheless, this didn’t stop Christian leaders from declaring the Jews guilty for nearly 2,000 years. St. John Chrysostom (344 to 407) announced that the Jews were “ . . . lustful, rapacious, greedy, perfidious bandits . . . inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil . . . they have surpassed the ferocity of wild beasts, for they murder their offspring and immolate them to the devil.”
The reformist Martin Luther (1483 to 1546), founder of the Protestant movement, was surprisingly sympathetic in his attitudes toward the Jews — until he found that they didn’t want to follow his form of Christianity any more than the Catholicism against which he had revolted. From then on, he advocated burning synagogues and killing Jews.
Somehow the idea that the Jews wouldn’t embrace Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, was so upsetting to Christians that they felt that each rejection itself amounted to a “killing” of Jesus.
Fortunately, the tide appears to be shifting. Incidents of Jews being beaten or urinated on by thugs yelling “Christ-killer” — events that weren’t uncommon even 40 or 50 years ago — are relatively rare today. This is partly due to the enlightened views of Pope John XXIII, who, in the shadow of the Holocaust, ordered that the reference to “perfidious Jews” be removed from the Good Friday liturgy in the late 1950s, and later pushed through Church reforms that paved the way for better relationships between Catholics and Jews.
In 1997, Pope John Paul II declared that “In the Christian world . . . the wrong and unjust interpretations of the New Testament relating to the Jewish people and their presumed guilt circulated for too long, contributing to feelings of hostility toward these people.” And finally, in the year 2000, on a visit to Jerusalem, he offered a deep and profound apology to the Jews for the long history of persecution.
Belief #2: There’s an international Jewish conspiracy
When we were growing up, we thought all the talk about an “international Jewish conspiracy” was just a joke, and we’d each laugh with our friends about it. After all, the Jews couldn’t stop the Holocaust — they couldn’t even get the Allies to bomb the train tracks leading to the death camps during World War II — much less control the destiny of everyone else. Sure, some Jews who manage big companies, but far more non-Jews hold those kinds of positions. So why do so many people really believe the Jews run the world?
A tract produced in Russia in the nineteenth century called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has played a large role in perpetuating the myth of an international Jewish conspiracy. This short book purports to be the minutes of a committee meeting in which powerful Jewish conspirators discuss how to overthrow Christianity and the world powers. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that thousands (perhaps millions) of Jews have suffered and died because people believed this document to be true.
However, The Protocols is clearly a work of fiction. In fact, it’s a work of fiction based on another fiction! In 1797, a French Jesuit wrote a political satire in which the French Revolution was blamed on the Order of Freemasons. If you compare The Protocols with this satire, it becomes clear what happened: Russian secret police in the late nineteenth century changed the names, characters, and some details, and “leaked” it out to the public as a newly discovered document — and a clear reason to persecute the Jews.
The Protocols traveled widely and quickly and was translated into many languages. In America, Henry Ford (the founder of Ford Motor Company) was deeply influenced by The Protocols, and he published a column called The International Jew (discussing ongoing “Jewish conspiracies”) in a newspaper he owned. Ford was such a prominent anti-Semite that Adolf Hitler reportedly kept a photo of him on his desk and, in the 1920s, said, “We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America . . . We have had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated in millions throughout Germany.”
Sadly, this myth continues to live on, as The Protocols continues to be distributed in many Muslim countries.
Belief #3: Jews practice ritual murder
Before accusations of international Jewish conspiracies were all the rage, anti-Semites routinely accused Jews of three other crimes:
Mass murder: Somewhere between a quarter and a half of the entire population of Europe — perhaps as many as 25 million people — died during the Black Death epidemic (1348 to 1350). The cause was clearly a bacteria spread by rats, but no one knew about that sort of thing in the fourteenth century. Rather, rumors spread widely that Jews had poisoned the wells in the afflicted areas, causing enraged mobs to slaughter more than 20,000 Jews.
Blood libel: You can make almost anyone squirm by talking about the idea of drinking human blood — it’s just one of those things that people immediately see as sick and wrong. So when some Christian authorities started accusing Jews of ritually murdering Christians (usually children) in order to drink their blood or use the blood in preparation of Passover matzah (unleavened bread) in the twelfth century (such accusations are referred to as “blood libel”), it caused a panic and terrible retributions against Jewish communities.
However, Judaism was the first religion to specifically outlaw human sacrifice and especially to outlaw drinking any blood (even that of animals). It would be easy to laugh off the blood libel as just an old medieval fable, but even as recently as 1970, books were printed in America that included folksongs about Jews drinking blood; and in that same year, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia declared that Jews annually celebrate Passover by drinking the blood of non-Jews. He also enjoyed giving out copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to visitors.
Desecration of the host: Catholics believe in transubstantiation, meaning that the wine and wafer (called a “host”) used in a Catholic mass actually transform into the blood and body of Jesus Christ, which are then eaten by the believers. Sometime in the Middle Ages, Christians began to accuse Jews of “desecrating the host” — that is, of breaking into churches, stealing the wafers, and then torturing these wafers by stepping on them or sticking pins in them. The accusers even said that Jews would stick nails in the host and that Jesus’s blood would leak out. Fortunately, this insane accusation has died out, for the most part.
Anti-Semitism in literature and art
For those of us who grew up in communities with a lot of Jews, it’s hard to understand that most people in the world — and even many people in America — may never have met a Jewish person. Remember that Jews comprise only 2.2 percent of the American population and fewer than a quarter of 1 percent of the world population (almost three times as many people live in California as there are Jews worldwide).
In fact, Ted has been a “first Jew” for a number of people. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that many people have no idea what Jews are really like and base their opinions almost entirely on gossip and what they read, hear, or see in the media. Maybe things could have been different if someone way back when had written Judaism For Dummies!
If you relied on what great authors such as Shakespeare or Chaucer wrote, you’d think Jews were greedy and sadistic Shylocks (see The Merchant of Venice) who drank Christians’ blood (see The Canterbury Tales). Charles Dickens’ most famous Jew was Oliver Twist’s Fagin, who Dickens calls the “merry old gentleman,” a popular colloquialism for the devil.
Of course, Shakespeare may have never met a Jewish person when he wrote the role of Shylock (the Jews had been expelled from England centuries earlier), and Dickens became surprisingly sympathetic to Jews only near the end of his life after actually getting to know some.
The artist Michelangelo didn’t help the cause of the Jews any when he sculpted Moses with two horns on his head. To this day, some people still believe that Jews have horns. Don’t laugh! A few years ago a friend of David’s had his head felt by someone who had simply grown up to believe this. Why would a luminary like Michelangelo paint such an image? A simple mistranslation of the Bible into Greek, in which “rays of light” was translated as “horns.”
Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) has long been trusted as a “sensible voice of America,” but any uneducated reader of his satirical essay Concerning the Jews would be swayed to believe a number of anti-Semitic stereotypes found there. He argues that the main reason Jews are hated is that they are too smart and wily at business and Christians can’t hope to compete with them.
Because he also noted a number of positive Jewish traits — such as honesty and trustworthiness — he was considered a Jew-lover and a foe to the anti-Semites.
From Religion to Race: Anti-Semitism in Modern Times
Before the nineteenth century, most anti-Jewish feeling was based on religious belief — if a Jew truly converted to Christianity, the persecution would likely end. However, with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century (see Chapter 15), anti-Semitic attitudes shifted from the focus on religious beliefs and practices to the theory that the Jews comprise an inferior race. This focus on ethnic Judaism led anti-Semites to use slurs like kike, yid, hebe, and sheeny. Or, on a more humorous note, the satirical description of a Jew in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian: “a Red Sea pedestrian.”
In his book To Life!, Rabbi Harold Kushner remembers Mordecai Kaplan saying that “expecting the antisemite to like you better because you were a nonobservant Jew was like expecting the bull not to attack you because you were a vegetarian.” And social class didn’t matter — because of the distribution of Jews throughout every level of society, rich Germans could hate the poor Jews, and poor Germans could hate the rich Jews. The epitome of this hatred, of course, was the Nazi charge not only to remove Jews from their lands but to actually kill every single Jewish person.
Israel and anti-Semitism
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 led to the rise of anti-Semitism in Arab communities, where it had been less prevalent. People often forget that Jews and Muslims — members of sibling religions, each tracing their ancestry back to Abraham — lived peacefully together for centuries. In fact, Jews tended to live much better in Muslim countries than Christians lands. However, based on political realities, anti-Semitic feelings began to rise in Arab countries. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, the number of Jews expelled from Muslim countries was approximately the same as the number of Palestinians disenfranchised by the Jewish population.
Many contemporary attacks on Jews (whether, verbal, written, or physical) have an anti-Zionist basis — that is, the attacker is angry at the country of Israel (its politicians, its actions, or even just its existence). However, the anger is unfairly expressed at Jews as a whole. For example, in 2011, soon after Israel’s defense forces stopped a ship from bringing supplies to the blockaded area of Gaza and nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed, anti-Semitic propaganda increased around the world, including swastikas painted on Jewish gravestones and hateful comments written on pro-Islamic online forums.
On the other hand, some attacks are clearly anti-Jewish but are targeted at Israel as a country. Ultimately, untangling the two is usually impossible.
The color of anti-Semitism
Although people of African descent tend to see Jews as simply part of the white majority, from the standpoint of the white racist, Jews are more or less the same category as those with darker skin — a nonwhite inferior “race.” Even though they share a minority status, many African-Americans have held anti-Semitic beliefs over the past 40 or 50 years.
For example, some people have claimed that the majority of slave holders were Jewish or that Jews created the slave trade, even though very few Jews were involved in the slave industry. Others claim that Jews have long oppressed the African-Americans in their communities, even though the Jews were often the only “white folks” who would hire their black neighbors for decent jobs at decent wages. Undoubtedly, suspicion and racism existed among many Jews (thus, the Yiddish epithet shvartze, which literally means “black,” but usually holds negative connotations), and it’s easy to point to business practices among some in the Jewish community that were racially unfair. But on the whole, the Jewish community has long been much more accepting than most other people.
Many people today don’t remember that Jews (identified as liberals) were among the forefront of those helping African-Americans gain basic civil rights, marching alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., and risking their lives (and losing them, in some cases) in order to help voter registration in the southern states. In fact, the NAACP — America’s leading black rights organization — not only had prominent Jews among it founders, but from 1966 to 1975, a Jew — Kivie Kaplan — was the group’s last non-Black president.
In the 1960s, as some African-Americans became increasingly interested in Islam, they began to identify more strongly with Arab nations and therefore became more anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. In the past 25 years, groups such as the Nation of Islam have spread significantly more anti-Semitic propaganda, such as Reverend Louis Farrakhan’s comments that Jews “are the most organized, rich, and powerful people, not only in America but in the world. . . . They are plotting against us even as we speak.” Other black leaders have announced that Jewish doctors caused AIDS by injecting it into black people and that Jews “undermined the very fabric of the society” in Germany. Somehow, even some Christian African-Americans seem to believe these outrageous claims.
Perhaps black organizations feel they need to build cohesiveness by rallying against a common enemy, and perhaps they feel that the Jew is an easier target than the larger “white power structure.” Whatever the case, it’s clear that an increasing divide exists between these two groups that were once bound together by similar experiences of oppression.
Twenty-first century anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism has significantly declined around the world in the past 30 years, but it’s far from gone. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), more than 1,200 cases of anti-Semitism (including vandalism, harassment, and assault) were reported in the United States in 2010. Anti-Jewish activity is still widespread throughout the world; here are just a few examples:
France: In 2012, thugs attacked three Jews on their way to synagogue, beating them with hammers and iron bars as they yelled, “Dirty Jews! If we see you again, you’re dead!”
Poland: In 2010, fans of a Polish soccer team displayed a giant banner with a caricature of a Jew wearing a kippah, labeled “Death to the Crooked Noses.”
Spain: In 2005, a Gallup Organization national survey showed that 69 percent believe that Jews are too powerful, 55 percent attribute “dark intentions” to them, and 72 percent were in favor of deporting Jews to Israel.
United States: The American National Socialist Movement (one of the larger neo-Nazi groups) sells an album called Jew Slaughter on its website, while noting in their membership materials that the Holocaust never happened and the world economy is a “Jew-infected system.”
The explosion of anti-Jewish material on the Internet, where various groups replay all the old myths of hatred, is certainly cause for concern and ongoing vigilance.
Toward Healing
We believe that there is healing to be done on all sides. Clearly, Jews need to become less focused on past victimizations and more willing to forgive. Non-Jews need to become more educated about the realities of Jews and Judaism in order to dispel old stereotypes and myths. Ultimately, we must all remember that creating any enemy called “them” dehumanizes everyone.