This past year my wife and I were staying over the Christmas vacation in our flat in Kensington in London near the Israeli Embassy. At the end of December Israel launched a massive bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip; for a week the Embassy was surrounded by police and metal barriers. In the background were mounted riot police. In the late afternoons a crowd of Palestinians gathered behind the barricades and shouted slogans in support of the Palestinian cause. Interspersed among the crowd were placards denouncing Israeli policy, as well as children waving Palestinian flags.
Over the weekend tens of thousands of protesters against the war marched from Hyde Park down Kensington Church Street. My wife and I were having lunch in a cafe on their route and watched from our table near the window. The throng was composed of young Arabs, as well as the elderly wearing badges and holding flags. Many of those in the crowd were ordinary British citizens sympathetic to the cause.
After lunch we made our way across the street and were caught up in a flood of protesters. One took a multicoloured badge from his coat with the slogan ‘Free Palestine’ and handed it to me. “Join us,” he said as he marched off into the distance. My wife pinned it on my lapel and we followed the crowd as they descended in the direction of the Embassy. I must have been the only rabbi caught up in the march. Yet, despite my Jewish credentials, I had no hesitation joining the protesters, even if this happened by accident.
Every day as I watched television and read the newspapers, I was sickened by the horror of this onslaught. I could not help but be reminded of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War, who fought against the Germans. Few in number, these brave fighters engaged in a hopeless struggle against insuperable odds. Eventually they were killed and the Warsaw Ghetto set alight.
Paradoxically the Jewish community seems blind to the obvious parallels. Supporters of Israel are anxious to point out that Hamas has officially refused to recognise the existence of the Jewish State in the Middle East. For this reason suicide bombers are willing to give up their lives in the struggle to free the Holy Land from what are perceived as foreign invaders and usurpers. Hamas is intent on driving the Jewish population into the sea. Given such determination on the part of Palestinians, Israel has no choice to defend itself. No doubt such reasoning contributed to the recent shift to the right in the Israeli elections this February.
Such an argument is persuasive. But, in my view, this assault against Gaza will not destroy Israel’s enemies. On the contrary, it will harden the hearts of those Palestinians who watch helplessly as Gaza is bombed and destroyed. Arab nations will support their brothers and sisters who are massacred. And beyond the Arab world, sympathetic supporters of the Palestinians will turn against the Jewish state, as well as Jews in the diaspora. Already, we are hearing the cry for Jewish children to be killed wherever they live.
The twenty-first century thus bears witness to the continuing hostility that has been expressed towards Jewry for nearly 4,000 years. Today, it is the peoples of the Islamic world who have become proponents of rabid anti-Semitism; in the last century the Nazis sought to bring about the genocide of the Jewish people; in previous centuries, the Church attempted to eliminate Jews through conversion, persecution and murder.
Why is it that Jews have been so bitterly hated for nearly four millennia? The aim of this volume is to answer this question by surveying the history of anti-Semitism from a global perspective. As will be seen, numerous factors created a climate of Jew-hatred. Scripture records that the Jews were oppressed by the Egyptian Pharaoh; through Moses’ deliverance the ancient Israelites escaped bondage, eventually settling in the land that God had promised the Patriarchs. There they established a kingdom, but were subject to constant attack from their neighbours.
In the Graeco-Roman world, Jews were viewed as aliens and xenophobic. In the Hellenistic world, the common view was that anything non-Greek was uncivilized. In this context Judaism was regarded with contempt. With the emergence of Christianity such hostility towards Jewry intensified. Drawing upon Hellenistic ideas that had penetrated the Jewish religion, Christianity absorbed pagan hostility to the Jewish people and utilized aspects of Pharisaic Judaism to distance itself from the faith from which it had evolved. Eventually, such anti-Jewish sentiment became an essential element of Christianity.
The New Testament served as the basis for the early Church’s vilification of the Jews. According to the Church Fathers, the Jewish people are lawless and dissolute. Because of their rejection of Christ, the Jewish nation has been excluded from God’s grace and is subject to his wrath. This Adversos Judaeos teaching of the early Church Fathers continued into the medieval period. During the Crusades Christian mobs massacred Jewish communities. Jews were charged with killing Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes, blaspheming Christ and Christianity in their sacred literature, and causing the Black Death by poisoning wells. Throughout the Middle Ages Jews were detested, and the image of the satanic Jew became a central feature of Western iconography. Repeatedly, Jews were accused of satanic activities and viewed as a sub-species of the human race.
In the post-medieval period such negative stereotypes of the Jews became a central feature of Western European culture. In France Jews were depicted in the most terrible fashion. In England Jews were as detested as they were in Germany. Such Christian anti-Semitism was most forcibly expressed in Martin Luther’s diatribes against German Jews. Elsewhere Jewish converts to Christianity became subject to the Inquisition. Initially tribunals were established in Spain to seek to those converts suspected of practising Judaism in secret. Later the Inquisition spread to Portugal.
Jews living in Poland were also subject to assault. In the mid-seventeenth century a Cossack pogrom led by Bogdan Chmielnicki led to the death of thousands of Jews. When Polish territories were annexed to Russia in the nineteenth century the Christian population viewed their Jewish inhabitants with contempt, and eventually Jews were expelled from the villages where they lived. Such attitudes continued into the modern period, where traditional Christian prejudice was coupled with commercial interests. In Germany merchants alleged that Jewish trade would pollute the nation and undermine the economic vitality of the country while in France the French bourgeoisie resisted Jewish settlement, as did the British.
Even though eighteenth-century champions of the Enlightenment sought to ameliorate the conditions under which Jews lived, others attacked Jews on the basis of misconceived rationalist and scientific assumptions. In France Protestants influenced by Enlightenment ideas sought to counter such charges, but even the were unable to free themselves from traditional prejudice. In Germany the rise of a sense of national identity and self-confidence fuelled anti-Semitic feelings among various writers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Napoleon’s summoning of the Sanhedrin was an attempt to improve Jewish life, but such steps were opposed by reactionaries who feared the consequences of such a policy.
During the twentieth century Jews were attacked for a number of reasons. In Germany Jews were denigrated in various racist publications; such an atmosphere led to the creation of political parties that were anti-Semitic in orientation. In France too anti-Jewish views were expressed by various writers, providing the background to the Dreyfus Affair. During this period vicious persecution in Russia drove many Jews to emigrate, while others sought to improve their position in society through revolutionary activities. In the years prior to the First World War Jews became scapegoats for the ills afflicting European countries. In Germany polemicists protested against the malevolent influence of Jews. In Russia, anti-Semites accused Jews of espionage and collaboration with the enemy. With the onset of revolution, Jews were also charged with fermenting insurrection against authority. In Britain Jews were accused of international conspiracy. Across the Atlantic, in the United States, a number of writers criticized Jews for their revolutionary attitudes, as well as their alleged quest to dominate world affairs.
Such Judaeophobia serves as the background to the rise of Nazism. According to Hitler, the Jews constitute a vile race intent on seizing control of political, social and economic affairs. On the basis of Nazi racism, grounded in the writings of German thinkers, the Jewish community was subject to a series of restrictive measures and eventual plans for its extermination. Throughout this period the Nazis sought to bring about the total destruction of the Jewish nation. This terrible mission having failed to quench the flame of Judaism, in the post-Holocaust world Jews became intent on protecting themselves from future forms of violence by creating a homeland in Palestine. While, contrary to Zionist aspirations, the creation of the State of Israel has fuelled Arab hatred of Jewry, Israel has served as a bulwark against modern manifestations of anti-Semitism that continue to threaten Jewish survival in the contemporary world.
Thus, for nearly 4,000 years the Jewish people have been subject to prejudice, persecution and murder. The motives for such antipathy have been religious, economic, political and social. Even though numerous attempts have been made to curtail such Judaeophobia, anti-Semitism continues to exist in new forms. Is there no end to humanity’s longest hatred? Arguably this grim and unrelenting chronicle of Jewish misery confirms the biblical prophecy that Israel has been and will continue to be God’s suffering servant, subject to the fury of Jew hatred, afflicted and led to the slaughter.
Dan Cohn-Sherbok, 2009