UP TO THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, Nazi, fascist, and extreme right-wing movements were the main sponsors and carriers of antisemitism. There was little if any open antisemitism on the left; Muslim antisemitism was traditional in character and played no important role except sporadically and on a local level. This changed toward the end of the twentieth century as political movements in the Nazi and fascist tradition greatly weakened with the defeat of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Indeed, in many countries such movements were outlawed and, with a very few exceptions, had no major role even as the opposition. Furthermore, after the murder of millions of Jews, few Jews were left in Europe to be targets, except the communities in France and Britain.
Antisemitism did not disappear, but the particular bestiality of the mass murder made it difficult even for latter-day admirers of Hitler to explain and justify this particular aspect of Nazism. They could not argue that the mass murder had been justified, and therefore the line taken by most of them was denial—the Holocaust had never taken place, or, at most, had been greatly exaggerated.
There were other reasons for the decline of the importance of antisemitism within neofascist doctrine. One has been mentioned already—the small number of Jews who had survived made it virtually impossible to turn antisemitism into the main plank of a political movement in Europe. On the other hand, there were new social tensions caused by the postwar immigration to Europe—the arrival of millions of “guest workers,” many of whom came from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Their numbers greatly exceeded those of the prewar Jewish communities; in contrast to the Jews, many of them had no wish to assimilate, to accept the culture and way of life of the host country. In view of their high birth rates, their presence over the years caused major demographic changes—something the Jewish presence had never done, as the Jewish birth rate had been low and declining.
True, it could not be argued with regard to these newcomers (as it had been said of the Jews during an earlier period) that they dominated the economic and cultural life of their host countries. These new arrivals dominated the street, public housing, public transport, and public services; some of them displayed open hostility toward the way of life of the host country and in some cases engaged in terrorism. Although xenophobia did not disappear, its advocates were compelled to look for different targets if they wanted to have political impact. One example: Ten percent of the French expressed strong anti-Jewish feelings in a public opinion poll in 2002, but the antagonism toward Muslims was considerably stronger, almost three times as frequently expressed. In Britain, Germany, Russia, and other European countries, unfavorable views vis-à-vis Muslims were twice as frequently expressed than negative views vis-à-vis Jews. Events in the Middle East certainly affected the image of Israel in the media, yet this was not reflected in popular attitudes toward Jews; in fact, such attitudes were slightly more favorable in 2002 than they had been in 1991.
Uncontrolled immigration rather than the Jewish presence provided the basis for neofascism beginning in the 1970s. While neofascism was still strongly nationalist and xenophobic in outlook, there was a new element, an orientation toward Europe or, perhaps more accurately, toward a fortress Europe, simply because the political weight of the various countries that had once been great powers had greatly declined over the years. It is not much of an exaggeration to define neofascism as defensive in nature—not of its own volition but because of its weakness, in contrast to the aggressive character of the traditional fascism.
In some instances there was even a genuine retreat from antisemitism, such as in Italy where neofascism had been a force to reckon with after the end of World War Two. Gianfranco Fini, head of the National Alliance and later a minister in the Silvio Berlusconi government dissociated himself and his party from racism and antisemitism as did the other major right-wing party, the Northern League. To the extent that there were antisemitic publications or activities in Italy, they came from very small segments of the extreme right that consist of a few hundred members only, from the extreme conservative wing of the Catholic Church, and from the far left—one of whose ideologists wrote that Jews were “practically nonassimilable germs,” a statement that was defended by the radical Manifesto group.
The Italian Jewish community consists of 30,000, the French of 600,000, most of them refugees or descendants of refugees from North Africa. Jews are far more prominent in the economic, cultural, and political life of France than of Italy. Antisemitism has been rampant in France since the 1970s and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right-wing National Front has polled close to 20 percent in some elections. Its voting reservoir comes mainly from the old blue-collar working class and its leaders have never made a secret of their anti-Jewish feelings. Le Pen has more than once declared that the Holocaust was no more than a footnote to twentieth-century history and not a very important one at that. In his party’s political activities and propaganda, however, the main issue has been immigration from Africa (5 million Muslims now live in France). There was a marked increase in antisemitic incidents in France beginning in the 1990s, manifested in graffiti, threats, arson, and physical attacks, but to the extent that the perpetrators could be identified, relatively few came from groups like the National Front; many incidents were attributed to young Muslims.
Antisemitic activities in Britain and Germany have been sponsored by smaller and more radical right-wing groups, and in these countries too, the influx of millions of foreigners, rather than Jewish conspiracies, had become the main political issue. Public opinion polls showed that not-too-friendly attitudes toward Jews extended well beyond these extremist groups; substantial sections of the population in most European countries expressed the opinion that Jews had too much influence, that their loyalty to the country of residence could not be taken for granted, that they were harping too loudly and for too long on the mass murder of their coreligionists during World War Two.
In Germany a substantial part of the population was critical of the financial restitution that was made to Jews for property stolen under the Nazis and for other damage suffered. Opinion polls in Germany in 2004 showed that only about one-third of the population was opposed to antisemitism; between 6 and 8 percent firmly believed in antisemitism, and the majority of the population held views somewhere in between. Similar polls in Russia showed that 42 percent believed that Jews had too much influence and 28 percent suggested restoration of a Pale of Settlement (such as had existed in czarist times) to which Jews should be confined. These feelings, however, did not necessarily translate into political action.
There seems to have been no obvious (or at least no consistent) correlation between antisemitism in postwar Europe and the size of the Jewish communities. Hungary is the only country in Eastern Europe with a sizable Jewish community, whereas Romania has only about 1,500 Jews; as far as the extent and intensity of antisemitism is concerned, there was hardly any difference between the two countries. The number of Jews in Spain and in Greece is now minuscule (20,000 and 1,500 respectively); however, public opinion polls showed a higher degree of anti-Jewish feelings than in, for instance, France and Britain, which have much larger Jewish communities. But such antisemitism was latent, subacute rather than manifest. It showed itself in popular aversion to Jews rather than in any specific political or social activities.
The case of Greece is of interest; it once had a sizable Jewish community, most of which was deported and murdered during the war. Antisemitism today is found mainly among some radical church circles and among the left—including the left-wing intelligentsia (Mikis Theodorakis included) and terrorist groups—hardly among conservative and center parties. Groups belonging to the extreme right in Belgium and Holland, to give another example, have gone out of their way to stress that they had nothing to do with fascism, old or new. Nor did the ideologues of the New Right (or neofascism)—such as Italy’s Giulio Evola, France’s Alain de Benoist, or Belgium’s Jean François Thiriart—show any pronounced interest in antisemitism. They were preoccupied with the establishment of a European front—political as well as cultural, opposing the United States. Some of them expressed ecological concerns, others favored a third way, combining ideological elements of the far right with those of the extreme left, something like the National Bolshevism of the 1920s brought up to date. Above all, there is antiglobalism and anti-Americanism as the doctrinal glue; according to de Benoist, “America is the most evil rogue state and thus our greatest enemy.” From this passionate anti-Americanism it is only one step to the allegation that everything in America belongs to the Jews and that they have a decisive impact on its policy. De Benoist may be too cautious to make this step, but leading German sectarians such as Horst Mahler, once a leading left-wing terrorist, had no such hesitations.
If extreme right-wing groups have had electoral successes, it has been based almost entirely on the fear of the rising number of immigrants, the apparent impotence of the political establishment to limit immigration, and the emergence of expanding local ghettos. However, in the 1990s, and especially after September 11, 2001, such concerns were no longer limited to the extreme right; they were voiced equally from the center and the left. On the other hand, violent opposition against immigrants from the Middle East and Africa would go hand in hand with sympathies for such figures as Saddam Hussein (for instance, in the case of Le Pen in France or Jörg Haider in Austria), and in some instances even for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
If in the political and ideological arsenal of neofascism and the extreme right in Europe, antisemitism suffered a steady decline, the question arises: who was behind the continuing anti-Jewish threats and attacks? Certain radical sects and individuals ought to be mentioned, who owing to recent techniques in the field of communication (the Internet and blogging) have found it easier than ever before to spread their gospel. Such sects continue to exist in virtually every country and there are individuals who have their followers among them. The names of two should be mentioned here. Horst Mahler, one of the cofounders of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, over the years has become a leading ideologist of the German neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. According to Mahler, the hatred of Jews is natural, and the Auschwitz lie was invented by the Jews to keep the German people in perpetual servitude. In France, Roger Garaudy, former member of the Politburo of the Communist party, has gone through a similar shift from extreme left to extreme right views. For these two men—and they are by no means the only ones—antisemitism was certainly a basic ingredient of their new ideology. Jacques Verges, a well-known lawyer, had been a prominent Maoist sympathizer, but he moved on to defend Klaus Barbie, one of the leading figures in the execution of the final solution in wartime France. “Carlos the Jackal,” the infamous terrorist of the 1970s and 1980s and the most radical left-winger of them all, converted to Islamism and his political opinions developed accordingly.
In addition to these figures, youth groups such as the skinheads have emerged; some are well organized on a nationwide and even international basis, others who have developed their own subcultures pop up sporadically. Some are ideologically motivated at least in part; others are criminal or semicriminal. With their own uniforms, music styles, football violence, and their thirst for militant action, they certainly have been strongly affected by antisemitism even though their immediate targets are usually other groups deemed hostile simply because they are more easily identifiable.
Antiracialist legislation concerning both incitement and discrimination in France, Germany, and other European countries has compelled antisemites to use circumlocutions to describe their purposes. The laws are not too difficult to circumvent by using coded terms for Jewish people (“East Coast” or “New York”), just as Soviet Communists had done during Stalin’s last years. Furthermore, such legislation has had unexpected repercussions: statistics concerning antisemitic activities in Western Europe were showing that many were carried out not by the foot soldiers of the extreme right or of the far left but by young Muslims. However, to state this baldly could be interpreted as “Islamophobia,” for even if true, it singles out one specific ethnic group as particularly prone to engage in anti-Jewish activities. It could be argued that even the publication of statistics on antisemitism is racialist in character and should be discontinued. Since there are many more Muslims than Jews in postwar Europe, their sensitivities had to be taken into account in order not to poison relations between the communities. Thus, it came as no surprise that a major study on the subject, Manifestations of Antisemitism in the EU 2002–2003, undertaken by the European Union communities through the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, had to be substantially rewritten because it had called a spade a spade and not an agricultural implement.
WHAT HAS BEEN SAID with regard to Western Europe and the prominent part of young radical Muslims in antisemitic activities is certainly not true with regard to Eastern Europe and Russia, which experienced a considerable upsurge in antisemitism after the breakup of the Soviet empire. This upsurge did not come as a complete surprise; everywhere in this part of the world ethnic tensions that had been suppressed under the dictatorships came to the fore once the pressure from above disappeared.
Antisemitism in Russia had deep roots; to a certain extent it had been official state policy particularly during Stalin’s last years and to a lesser extent under his successors. Unofficial discrimination against Jews continued in many fields. While Jews could be frequently found as deputies in many organizations in industry or in academe, the top jobs were virtually barred to them. They could not serve in the army except perhaps in the medical corps or in some scientific capacity, could not join the foreign ministry or the security services. A low level of antisemitic literature, both fiction and nonfiction, continued to appear. During the last years of Soviet rule, unofficial antisemitic groups (such as Pamyat) made their appearance. Jews were attacked by the nationalists for being responsible for Bolshevism and by the Communists for having undermined the Soviet state and society and having brought about its downfall; there had been, after all, a fairly large number of Jews among the dissidents.
These accusations found many believers among the many who suffered under the Communist regime—and from the consequences of its breakdown. Old antisemitic themes and motifs reappeared: those described in the Protocols; the Jews had always intended to harm Mother Russia; one of Lenin’s grandparents had been a Jew who had been baptized. Influential circles within the Orthodox Church contributed their part to the campaign. The fact that Jews had been among the main victims of the Soviet regime especially during the last decades of its existence did not help much, nor did the fact that the majority of Russian and Ukrainian Jews had left the country after the breakup of the Soviet Union. It could always be argued that individual Jews were among the main benefactors of perestroika and the privatization of the economy. Within a few years, many of the oligarchs who had amassed billions found themselves exiled or in prison, and although this might have helped the politicians who were responsible for their ouster, it did not soften opinions about the Jews.
How to explain the survival of antisemitism in Russia? That these feelings were deeply rooted in the country, and that considerable numbers of Jews had been instrumental in supporting and representing an unpopular regime did not help. Still, this explanation is not altogether satisfactory: Stalinist Russia in its time enjoyed a reasonable amount of popular support from its citizens, and antisemitism had been rampant in Russia well before 1917. In addition, Jews had virtually disappeared from the party leadership after World War Two. But anti-Jewish sentiments, even if suppressed, survived, and once they could be vented more freely than before, they reappeared.
Russia after the breakdown of Communism was a country in economic and social crisis and full of national resentment—not unlike Germany after the First World War; similar also was the resulting search for those responsible for the downfall of the mighty empire. True, it was not easy to put all the blame on the Jews, because in recent years those who have challenged Soviet power were not the Jews but the ungrateful non-Russian nationalities in the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Nor did the Jews blow up Russian theaters, schools, and housing complexes. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for nationalists and former Communists to elevate antisemitism to the main plank of their political program; even the most simple-minded could not be persuaded that Jewish terrorists were ambushing Russian soldiers in Chechnya. But even if it was not the most important single issue in the programs of the nationalists and the Communists, the Jewish problem did survive as a factor in Russia’s political life.
The Jews in all of Eastern Europe today probably number no more than 100,000 and about three-quarters of these live in Hungary. Neofascist parties appeared after 1989 in all these countries; the impetus for their emergence was in most cases social, such as unemployment, but traditional extreme nationalism did play a role in Romania and Hungary. These neofascist movements differ considerably from their prewar predecessors—there is no strict organization, no cult of the leader; the parties are predominantly populist in orientation, aiming for representation in parliament (as in Poland, Hungary, and Romania) rather than dominating the street.
What role does antisemitism play at present in the political life of these countries? A relatively small one, in view of the tiny number of Jews surviving—which is, moreover, rapidly shrinking through emigration, mixed marriage, and a low birth rate. The antisemitic propaganda is often rabid, but the Jewish issue is simply not important enough to serve the cause of these parties. For East European ruling parties and governments, antisemitism of this kind is an embarrassment in view of their desire to become integrated in a united Europe.
There is an inclination (for instance, in Romania and the Baltic countries) to play down the involvement of these countries in the massacre of the Jews during the Second World War. The fact that Jews were prominently represented in the post-1945 Communist leadership is dwelt upon; the fact that Jews were purged from the party—for instance, in the Slansky trial of 1952 in Prague—is seldom mentioned, and neither are the waves of expulsion of Jews from Poland in 1958 and 1968.
It is argued that more Poles than Jews were killed under the Nazis and the Communists, and in Romania there was a strong trend to rehabilitate Marshal Ion Antonescu and the other pro-Nazi leaders from the Second World War. At the same time, it ought to be mentioned that individuals of Jewish extraction have represented their countries in leading positions—Bronislav Geremek and after him Adam Rotfeld as Polish foreign minister, Petre Roman as Romanian prime minister. Muslim antisemitism has appeared in Chechnya and occasionally in the Central Asian republics, mainly as an importation, but it has been of little political consequence, and in some Muslim republics it has not appeared at all.
TRADITIONAL ACCUSATIONS against Jews remained part and parcel of antisemitic doctrine after 1945, but there was one major new element—Holocaust denial. As seen from an antisemitic point of view, the murder of millions of Jews in Europe was a major embarrassment and political obstacle. The unspeakable barbarism of Auschwitz and the other death camps antagonized decent people irrespective of their politics and ostracized the antisemites: if these were the consequences of antisemitism, who would want to be part of a movement of this kind? Hence, the necessity to show that there had been no Auschwitz, or that it had been greatly exaggerated, or that the Nazi leadership had not known about it.
The Nazi leadership had taken great care to obliterate all traces of the death camps. Orders had been given to destroy all gas chambers and that no survivor of the camps was to fall alive into the hands of the Russians and the Western Allies. However, the leadership could not erase their earlier public pronouncements of their intentions. Hitler had announced in his 1939 anniversary speech to the Reichstag, even before unleashing the war, that the war would lead not to “the Bolshevization of the world” but to “the annihilation of the Jewish race,” and Heinrich Himmler in a famous speech to SS leaders in Poznan in October 1943 had mentioned a “very grave matter . . . about which we will never speak publicly . . . I mean the extermination of the Jewish race.” Though many Germans knew that the Jews had been deported and would not return, few had an overall picture of the extent of the mass murder—the details were suppressed at the time—the way it was organized and carried out. Many German soldiers after the war said that they had never witnessed anything of this kind—especially if they had served in the navy, the air force, or in North Africa, they were no doubt sincere and truthful.
The first well-known case of Holocaust denial occurred in France soon after the war. A socialist parliamentary deputy named Paul Rassinier argued that since he had been a prisoner at the Nazi camp of Buchenwald in 1943 and had never seen a gas chamber, the Holocaust must have been a lie. The murder of six million Jews was simply a myth. But why should anyone wish to launch or perpetrate such an infamous lie? According to Rassinier and many who followed in his steps, it must have been an Allies-Jewish intrigue, part of a scheme to blackmail Germany to indemnify the so-called victims, and perhaps also to mobilize support for the establishment of the state of Israel.
There is little doubt that Rassinier, whose evidence strongly influenced other early “revisionists” such as David Hoggan, who developed his ideas on the subject in a Harvard dissertation, was sincerely convinced of the essential truth of his arguments. But his evidence was based wholly on his own experience, and he had been detained in a German concentration camp that housed mainly political prisoners, common criminals, homosexuals, Christian pacifists—Buchenwald and Dachau were the most notorious of these but they were never meant to be death factories with gas chambers for the annihilation of Jews. The death camps, including Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Sobibor, were all located outside of Germany in the occupied territories.
Following the pioneering work of Rassinier, Holocaust denial (also called revisionism or negationism) spread to many countries. Among its most prominent representatives were Robert Faurisson, a literature professor in France; David Irving and “Richard Harwood” in Britain; Fred Leuchter and Ernst Zuendel in Canada; Arthur R. Butz in the United States. Institutions and periodicals were founded with the sole aim of refuting the “Auschwitz lie,” such as the Journal of Historical Review and the Annales d’histoire revisioniste in the United States and France respectively. None of these experts had any specialized knowledge of the subject or had been in Eastern Europe during the war. That their findings were found false in a number of trials (against Irving, Zuendel, and Faurisson) has made no difference; the revisionists regarded themselves as fighters for historical truth against the overwhelming forces of world Jewry.
Politically, the Holocaust deniers hailed from a variety of camps even though a majority belonged to the far right, but there are also members of the French extreme left (La vieille taupe) among them. A few were professional nay-sayers who can be found in every historical debate; even while Napoleon was still alive, books were published demonstrating that he had never existed. A subsequent generation of revisionists, some of them Jewish by origin, and mainly from the extreme left, would not deny that Jews had been killed or maintain that the mass murder was a hoax. Instead, they claimed that it had been based on the collaboration between Nazis and Zionists, and that the sole purpose of the great publicity given to the Holocaust decades after the event was to provide political help to the state of Israel and its right-wing, semifascist policies.
Some of the revisionists argued that no Jews had been killed at all, though some tens of thousands might have died as a result of diseases or the harsh living conditions in Eastern Europe during the war. Others claimed that the Nazi leaders were perfectly justified in taking extreme measures against the Jews since they had declared war on Germany. Yet others pointed to the fact that no written order by Hitler to engage in the extermination had ever been found; the idea that orders to carry out mass murder are seldom if ever given in writing had not occurred to them.
What of the admission by Nazis who had taken a leading part in the “final solution” and openly admitted it—such as Rudolf Hoess, the first commandant of Auschwitz; or Adolf Eichmann, in charge of “Emigration and Evacuation” (Nazi euphemisms for expulsion and deportation), who organized and managed the transportation of Jews to the death camps; or Kurt Gerstein, who had tried to alert the Allies to the use of poison gas for killing the Jews? This was not serious evidence, it is argued; these people had obviously been tortured.
Some revisionists focus on technical questions. They claim that gas chambers had not been found, and when confronted with evidence to the contrary, they would claim that the structures had served other purposes, such as disinfection. They argue that it would have been technically impossible to kill so many people in so short a time. Still others concentrate on statistics; they claim that the number of Jews living in Eastern Europe had been exaggerated, and the number of survivors artificially inflated. This still leaves millions unaccounted for—where had they disappeared? Perhaps, the revisionists speculate, they had emigrated to America or some other countries during the war.
It is perfectly true that wholly exact population figures did not exist (even though during the war the SS produced statistical progress reports about the number of Jews liquidated). To be precise, it is known how many Jews had lived and were deported from countries such as Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Holland, but there are no exact figures about, for instance, the Soviet Union. It is true, furthermore, that the number of Jews killed in Auschwitz was initially exaggerated, but the number of those who died on the way to the death camps was understated. Estimates by serious historians of the total number of those killed vary between 5.1 and 5.9 million.
Such discrepancies are not something extraordinary; there are no exact figures about the losses of other peoples—military and civilians—in both World War One and Two, even as far as Germany is concerned, a country with a nearly perfect statistical tradition. This is true particularly with regard to the later phases of World War Two, when the Nazi administration had broken down, when confusion reigned, when many were buried without the customary registration. There were also cases of exaggeration of the losses, such as in the bombing of Dresden toward the very end of the war: many historians assumed until fairly recently that between 100,000 and 200,000 had been killed, whereas exact investigation eventually showed that the number of victims was about 35,000. But about the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen European Jewry there can be no disagreement—before the war there had been major communities on the continent; after the war they existed no longer.
Lastly, there has emerged a more moderate trend of revisionism in the form of “the relativists.” The relativists argue that while a few million Jews had probably been killed, this should be seen in historical perspective. A great many people perished during that war—and on other occasions throughout history. In other words, while the Holocaust was sad and reprehensible, it was by no means unique in the annals of history. This was the official line in the Soviet Union and the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. The Jews had suffered, but not more than other people, and it is wrong to single out their suffering or to set up special memorials. Nor is it clear that the Nazis had intended all along to kill European Jewry, they argue: is it not true that up to the outbreak of the war their policy had been to force the Jews to emigrate? What happened after 1939 is not clear, they claim—perhaps some local leaders had been overzealous in carrying out what they thought was Hitler’s desire; perhaps such local initiatives had developed a momentum of their own with one thing leading to another.
A great deal of energy has been invested by Jewish experts and others to refute the revisionist arguments. This has not been too difficult because the evidence concerning the organization and execution of the mass murder is overwhelming. Refutation is a necessary exercise, but it can never be wholly successful because Holocaust revisionism is more often than not politically motivated and thus impervious to rational refutation. As quickly as one set of revisionist arguments is refuted beyond any shadow of doubt, the negationists will bring up another set of arguments, however spurious.
ARAB AND MUSLIM ATTITUDES toward the Holocaust are of particular interest. During the first two decades after the end of World War Two, this was not an issue of great interest to Arab governments, the media, the intellectuals, or the men and women in the street. This began to change only in the 1970s, and there was a crescendo during the subsequent years with a flood of movies, television documentaries, books, articles, conferences, and other events arguing at one and the same time that the Holocaust had been justified and that it had never taken place.
The arguments used were more or less the same as those used by European classical antisemitism; but since there were no laws against racialist incitement as in Europe, Arab media could be far more outspoken than the European antisemites. It was maintained that the Jews were the enemies of all mankind, were seditious bloodsuckers; if they had been persecuted at all times in all countries, it was simply their own fault. Jews, it was claimed, were essentially evil and wanted to dominate not just Germany but the whole world. For the most part, the field of accusations against the Jews had been exhausted by European antisemites and there were only a few innovations emanating from the Middle East. The traditional blood libel (that Jews were killing Christian children for ritual purposes on Passover) did not make much sense in the Muslim world. Instead, it was claimed that Jews were abducting and slaughtering Arab children in order use their body organs for transplantation to their own. The Jews were, an Iranian professor declared on Tehran television, the source of all corrupt traits in humanity; Hitler had therefore been perfectly justified gassing and burning them; if anything, he should be blamed for letting some of them survive. But soon after, the president of Iran made it known that the Holocaust had never taken place. Again, it was not made quite clear why the Jews, eager to dominate the world, had made a start in Palestine; a small country without any natural resources would seem the worst possible base for global expansion.
This kind of argument is shared by the Islamists, the secular nationalists, and also parts of the Arab left. However popular among the less-educated sections of society, it proved sometimes an embarrassment to governments and also to a minority of intellectuals, largely because of the impression it created in the West but also because of the intellectual company statements like these attracted. Lastly, there were some who were not enthusiastic about this line of propaganda because they knew that it was largely nonsense.
Denial of the Holocaust has been official Arab policy for a long time. In the early 1950s Charles Malik, Lebanese foreign minister and a Christian, had declared that the murder of the Jews in Europe had been mere Zionist propaganda, and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the hero of pan-Arab nationalism in the 1960s, put it even more strongly: “no person, not even the most simple one takes seriously the lie of the six million Jews who were killed.” This thesis was subsequently taken up by the Islamists and their intellectual supporters, who viewed the Holocaust as the founding myth of the state of Israel. Leading Western rejectionists, such as Roger Garaudy, toured the Middle East and were given enormous publicity.
As for the specific arguments concerning the “Auschwitz lie,” they had all been advanced by European and American revisionists: there had not been that many Jews in Europe in the first place; they had not been deported; death camps had not existed; it would have been physically impossible to murder so many people in such short a period; the admissions by leading executioners such as Rudolf Hoess and Adolf Eichmann had been extracted by means of torture. And if indeed a few thousand Jews had perished, this had happened following an agreement between Zionists and Nazis according to which assimilated Jews should be liquidated whereas Zionist Jews should be permitted to survive.
On a somewhat more sophisticated level it was argued that many Jews indeed might have been killed during World War Two, but this had nothing to do with Palestinians or the Arabs, and why should the Palestinians suffer and pay the price for crimes committed in Europe? And in any case, the crimes subsequently committed by the Jews in Palestine and elsewhere were infinitely greater than those of the Nazis. Arab purveyors of Holocaust denial faced certain obstacles. Whereas the accusation against the Zionists of having collaborated with the Nazis was a very serious and (if true) damaging accusation in Europe, this was not so in the Middle East, where Hitler and his party had enjoyed wide sympathies at the time.
This, in briefest outline, was the Arab and Muslim reaction to the Holocaust sixty years after the event. There are no reliable polls showing to what extent these versions were truly believed, but according to all evidence they were accepted by the majority, probably the great majority, of Arabs and stated with great emotional intensity.
NO MENTION HAS BEEN MADE so far of antisemitism in the United States. Few Jews lived in America before the middle of the nineteenth century, although the United States was a country of various groups of immigrants. The founding fathers envisaged the republic as Christian-Protestant in character but also stressed religious freedom. There had been from the very beginning prejudice and discrimination against Jews, but there were no ghettos in America, no pogroms, no systematic persecution. As Leonard Dinerstein, the historian of antisemitism in America, wrote in 1994, “They were not as victimized and as exploited as Irish Catholics, they were not pushed out of society as the Indians and they were not enslaved like the Africans.”
Antisemitism such as it was in the United States was religious in motivation; it came out of both Protestant and Catholic churches. In many places Jews were not considered socially acceptable, even if wealthy and well connected. A leading Jewish banker was barred by a judge from registering in a Saratoga Springs hotel in 1877. If high society and churchgoers rejected the Jews, so did the Populists (and later the Progressives) of the late nineteenth century. For them, the Jews were parasites; they had arrived as peddlers and within a few decades had become major merchants and bankers. Many of the ills of American farmers and artisans were attributed to the machinations of Jewish international finance capital as embodied by the Rothschilds. But the Rothschilds were not American, nor did they have a major presence in the United States.
Antisemitism manifested itself largely in keeping Jews out of certain professions, elite universities, and social and athletic clubs, but not as a major political issue. There was considerable opposition to Jewish immigration during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the years before World War One, but there was also opposition to Irish and Chinese immigrations. Still, immigrants were needed for the economic development of the country. Eventually unlimited immigration was stopped and schedules established to reduce the influx of newcomers. Antisemitism increased during the interwar period, mainly, no doubt, as the result of political and social tensions and the great economic depression. American Jews experienced some restrictions; they were generally not employed by leading corporations; they could not live in certain restricted communities, and they were sparsely represented in the professions. Henry Ford, one of the best known and most admired Americans, was also a rabid antisemite who engaged in anti-Jewish propaganda such as the promotion and distribution of the Protocols and other antisemitic material; he did, however, change his mind toward the end of his life.
Anti-Jewish accusations made in America followed more or less the same lines as in Europe. Jews were thought to be revolutionaries who were undermining traditional Christian and patriotic values; at the same time, they were condemned for being too eager and successful in the pursuit of mammon, of becoming too quickly the apostles and practitioners of capitalism. Fears were expressed that Jews had obtained too much economic and political power, even though few were among the leading bankers and none among the industrialists prior to World War Two. As for Jewish political influence, it was nearly nonexistent or, at best, insufficient to help open the gates of America a little wider for refugees from Nazism in the 1930s. By that time, Jews had attained leading positions in the print media, publishing, and the entertainment industry, especially in Hollywood, but out of fear of antisemitism they leaned over backward not to promote any specific Jewish concerns. To give but two examples: the New York Times, which was in Jewish hands, had very little to report about the mass murder of European Jewry during World War Two, and Hollywood moguls were equally silent.
During the 1930s, in the wake of the Great Depression, antisemitic organizations emerged that had a considerable outreach. Two of the most influential were headed by churchmen: Father Coughlin, a Catholic, and Gerald Smith, a Protestant. They bitterly attacked Roosevelt’s “Jew Deal” (and the Jews involved in his administration), claiming that the Jews were warmongers. Most of the elements of their sermons came from Nazi sources, although as fundamentalist Christians they could not share the basically pagan views of the Nazis. It was the misfortune of these movements that they coincided with Nazi attacks against America—both on the political and the military level, and that support for Hitler and all he stood for came to be considered unpatriotic and even treasonable. The Reverend William Dudley Pelley, another antisemitic leader, was charged with sedition and given a 15-year jail sentence.
This antisemitic tradition did not entirely disappear in the postwar period but found successors and imitators in a variety of sects and militias too numerous to mention. Some engaged in political propaganda, others prepared for terrorist actions such as the one in Oklahoma City in 1995. They all belonged to the extreme right, believed in the existence of a Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG, meaning the existing Washington administration) and all kinds of weird conspiracy theories concerning UFOs, Jews, international organizations, and virtually all racial and ethnic minorities. Some groups were fanatically religious, others pagan in orientation. They stood for social justice as they understood it, for states’ rights, against international finance. Some of the most outspoken of them believed that America could be saved from certain doom only as the result of the physical extermination of blacks, Latinos, Jews, and virtually all non-Nordic nationalities. The Turner Diaries, a fictional account glorifying extreme violence in graphic detail and the source of the ZOG phrase, sold more than 250,000 copies even though it was neither reviewed in the media nor sold in regular bookshops.
The very extremism of these sects puts them outside the pale, and they could not prevent the advance of the minorities (including the Jews) in the postwar period after the ban on all kinds of discrimination. If Jews were still excluded from certain clubs or professions, these were unimportant; to be Jewish or of Jewish extraction no longer constituted a hindrance in almost any field of human endeavor.
If there was a renewal of antisemitism (or at least a feeling of a second coming), this came from altogether different quarters than in the past. Black militants from the Nation of Islam and other such groups were in the front rank of attacks against the Jews. This came as a shock to Jewish communities; the majority of American Jews have been liberal in outlook and still are. No other group has been as active in the struggle for the civil rights of the blacks, and some had been killed as a result. While there had never been a formal Jewish-Black alliance, relations on the communal level had been seemingly normal, at times even warm and cordial. Martin Luther King, for example, and Adam Clayton Powell, the leading black politician of the Roosevelt era, had expressed friendly views vis-à-vis the Jews. How then to explain the sudden turn?
There had been in fact a fairly strong antisemitic element in the black mental makeup early on, probably under the impact of the southern Christian influence (“the Jews have killed our savior”). In later years, black migrants to the north met Jews in the big cities as landlords and shopkeepers who, they came to believe, exploited them. There were small-scale anti-Jewish riots in Harlem, New York, and in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. While the NAACP, one of the leading black organizations, opposed Nazism from the beginning, there were considerable sympathies for Hitler among the blacks at the time, including his policy toward the Jews. These sympathizers were quite oblivious of the fact that the Nazis regarded the blacks as an inferior race; the feeling in black neighborhoods was that even if the position of Jews in Nazi Germany might have been bad, it was not half as bad as that of the black in the United States. Above all there was the feeling, as Ralph Bunche put it (one of the first blacks to rise to a major position in the Department of State and formerly a political scientist at Howard University), “it was safe to scorn the Jew”; it was less safe to scorn the white majority.
Over the years, black resentment of the Jews may have grown because they were once a despised minority outside the mainstream of American society and had gradually succeeded, becoming wealthier, acquiring a good education, and rising in the social scale, while the situation in the black ghettos remained extremely bad for a long time. Seen from this perspective, the fact that Jews were so prominent in the struggle for equal rights was of little importance. Perhaps it was the bad conscience of the Jews that impelled them to make amends? Some historians discovered that Portuguese Jews had been involved in the slave trade. This allegation was correct, but true mainly with regard to Brazil and Curacao, and the role of the Jews in these unsavory dealings had certainly been of much less consequence than that of the Arab slave traders, let alone the black tribal leaders in Africa, who had sold without compunction their fellow citizens. A leading black historian estimated that the Jews involved in the American slave trade had been perhaps 2 percent.
All this rationalizes to some degree why the antisemitic wave of the 1980s and of Louis Farrakhan and his followers in the next decade should not have come as a total surprise. But it offers no full explanation because the source of black grievances and complaints about the Jews, real or perceived, had largely disappeared—the Jewish shopkeepers and landlords in the ghettos had moved out long ago, their place taken by Koreans, Latinos, and blacks. There were no longer many places where black and Jewish interests clashed, where indeed they met. It was still true that, as Bunche had put it many years before, it was safer to scorn the Jews than the white majority; it was also true that Jews were more sensitive and, instead of ignoring attacks, felt greatly aggrieved and reacted in almost every case. However, the importance of black antisemitism should not be overrated; it was never an issue of paramount political importance. For certain black leaders the issue was a convenient one to gain applause in meetings, but it was of no major relevance to the real concerns of the black community. It was not at the top of the agenda of Jewish communities either.
THE ISSUE OF CONTEMPORARY LEFT-WING ANTISEMITISM has been and continues to be a major bone of contention. Just as Arabs have argued for a long time that they cannot possibly be anti-Jewish (in contradistinction to being anti-Zionist) because they too are Semites, left-wing spokesmen have maintained that allegations of this kind are base calumnies; the left, standing for peace, progress, and equal rights for all, cannot possibly be motivated by antisemitism. This is true if the yardstick is the religious antisemitism of the churches or the Koran or the racialist antisemitism of the Nazis. Seen from this perspective, even the extreme left cannot possibly be defined as antisemitic—they do not want to exterminate the Jews, they simply want them to disappear as Jews, as Jean-Paul Sartre noted many years ago. In fact, not a few people of Jewish origin can be found in their ranks.
But this is only part of the story, for both the left and antisemitism have changed their character over time. Nor is it true that anti-Jewish attacks emanating from the extreme left are invariably connected with the policies of the state of Israel and its close alliance with imperialist America. One group of the German terrorist left, headed by Dieter Kunzelmann, planned to blow up a meeting of the leadership of the Berlin Jewish community in 1969, killing as many as possible. This was a meeting to commemorate Kristallnacht 1938, the largest Nazi prewar pogrom; it had nothing to do with the state of Israel and Zionism.
It is one of the fundamental tenets of belief of the extreme left that while other nations have the right to have their own state, the Jews have not. They did live after all for two millennia without a state, and any attempt to turn back the wheels of history is essentially reactionary. It is bound to conflict with the vital interests of other people and dispossess them. Hence, the extreme left concludes that Arab and Muslim enemies of Israel are progressive because they are anti-American and anticapitalist, however illiberal their ideology in other respects; that they should be supported, whereas Israel and those affirming its right of existence are a priori enemies of progress and peace.
This thinking leads to a rapprochement between the extreme left and the extreme Islamists on both the doctrinal and the political level, as in Britain. On the fringes of their anti-Zionist demonstrations, there have been calls to “kill the Jews” and physical attacks, but the extreme left argues that they cannot be made responsible for such regrettable excesses of zeal on the part of their partners. It is a well known fact, they further argue, that progressive movements in backward countries are still afflicted with antiquated ideological elements. Still, with all this, they are basically progressive, and the illiberal ideological remnants of the past are bound to disappear over time; they are less important, the far left claims, than the “objective” progressive role of these movements. If they do not make fine distinctions between Zionists, Israelis, and Jews, the extreme left says, this is regrettable but forgivable. The inhabitants of Israel are after all mostly Jews, and the Arabs’ hatred is therefore bound to be directed against all Jews, just as in the Second World War “German” became a synonym for Nazi.
The case of the extreme left against Israel and the collaboration of the extreme left with antisemitic groups can be more easily justified on pragmatic than doctrinal grounds. It has provoked ideological differences among the left in Europe as well as in America. However, the turn of the extreme left against the Jews is by no means limited to the misdeeds of the state of Israel and its close collaboration with the United States. Historically, it goes back to well before the American-Israeli alliance came into being in the 1970s and it extends to a great variety of issues. Antiglobalists regard the Jews as an enemy because of their alleged support of international capitalism; radical feminists are very critical of the Jews because five thousand years ago they were instrumental in replacing the matriarchy with the patriarchy. In Europe, left-wing internationalists regard Jews as a conflict-causing element—at a time when national borders are disappearing in Europe, why do the Jews need a state of their own? (According to a public opinion poll in 2003, 59 percent of Europeans believed that Israel was the country most dangerous to the preservation of world peace.) It seemed to follow that but for these nationalist, indeed atavistic, aspirations, there would be peace and harmony between the third world and Europe, and the danger of terrorism as well as other such threats would be much reduced.
Some writers of the left, including some Jews, have argued that the importance of the Holocaust has been exaggerated, if not deliberately exploited. One Jewish academic of this persuasion, a Canadian professor named Michael Neumann, has argued that antisemitism hardly exists and where it exists, it ought to be treated as a huge joke. Mikis Theodorakis, famed Greek musician and composer and a hero of the European left, said in an interview that the Jews were the root of all evil, that they controlled not only world finance but all orchestras that would not perform his works. He also noted that there was really no antisemitism and that Jews were simply masochists who liked the role of victims. Similar voices have not been infrequent on the left.
When the British Labor party launched antisemitic attacks against two Conservative leaders (Michael Howard and Oliver Lettwin) who were of Jewish extraction, this had nothing to do with Zionism and Israel since these political figures were in no way involved in pro-Israel activities (or indeed in Jewish life), but simply with the fact that as Jews they were vulnerable. (About half of the British electorate indicated that it would not want a Jew as prime minister.) It could well be that those who launched these attacks were motivated merely by “practical” considerations. The influence of Muslim communities in Western Europe is growing and they might well be decisive in dozens of electoral constituencies. Why not appease these communities by propaganda that caters to their popular moods such as antisemitism? This is true not only for Britain but also for France and other European countries, and such activities are likely to increase in the years to come.
Old-style Communists in Russia and its nationalist allies—the differences between these two groups are now barely visible to the naked eye—accused Jews of ritual murder and demanded the ban of all Jewish organizations in January 2005. But this had nothing to do with Zionism and Israel, and it would not be difficult to adduce other such examples.
It would be an exaggeration to maintain that contemporary antisemitism is exclusively or predominantly left wing in character, just as in previous ages it would have been an exaggeration to apportion all the responsibility for antisemitism to conservatives. But it is true that for a variety of reasons the extreme left (or, to be precise, what now goes by that name) has in recent years adopted an anti-Jewish stance which in part can be explained with reference to opposition to Israel, but which also has components quite unconnected with Zionism and Israel.
According to research in Western Europe in 2002, 63 percent of those surveyed in Spain believed Jews had too much power in the business world (44 percent in Belgium, 42 percent in France, 40 percent in Austria, 37 percent in Switzerland, 32 percent in Germany, and 21 percent in the United Kingdom). Perhaps more significantly, 58 percent in Germany thought that Jews were talking too much about the Holocaust (57 percent in Spain, 56 percent in Austria, 52 percent in Switzerland, 46 percent in France, 43 percent in Italy). It can be argued that such figures may be meaningless since the figures for those who had never even heard of the Holocaust were almost as high (and even higher among the younger generation). But as so often happens, it was the perception that mattered, not the facts. In brief, while the conflict between Israel and the Arabs has provided much fuel for the spread of anti-Jewish feeling in the Muslim world, it cannot explain antisemitism among blacks in the United States any more than it can among groups in Russia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.