12.
The Jewish Dictates
of History
"The rewriting of the past is usually
undertaken to achieve specific
political aims."
--
Bernard
Lewis, Jewish author, 1986, p. 48
"Pseudohistory [is] the rewriting of the
past for personal or political purposes...
If we want to be taken seriously, we must
obey the rules of reason and apply the tools
of science and scholarship."
--
Michael
Shermer and Alex Grobman, 2000, p. 2, 5, in their book about "Holocaust deniers"
"It
may be true that German romanticism furnishes
the sources for much in Zionism, but to know
only this is to know half of the story. The
other half is what Jewish existence makes
of facts, how Jewish stubbornness uses history
for its own purposes."
-- Monford Harris, 1965, p.
97-98]
"To write acceptable history of Jews in
America, it is necessary to
respect their performance, to know and to
love the performers. He who
writes history performs an act of faith. The
historian selects a fact here,
a person there -- seeking to recreate a vanished
scene, to capture a mood,
to clothe a skeleton in flesh and blood. He
breathes upon dead bones of
the past -- and, lo! -- they come to life!
The history of the Jews is unlike
that of any other people. It is distilled
anguish. It is crystallized grief. It is
the dirge of a displaced people. It is the
story of an exiled band of pilgrims
seeking sanctuary." -- Anita Libman Lebeson,
1950, p. 308
"After Christ, the history of the
Jew is in large part the history of anti-Semitism."
--
A. M. Rosenthal/Arthur Gelb,
1967, p. 69
13
THE JEWISH DICTATES OF HISTORY
When digging back
into written records, researchers always retrieve
selected fragments of an immense historical
continuum and carefully shape and edit them,
intent upon lending credibility to their respective
theses of the past. This is the nature of
"history"-- it is always being reviewed, revised,
changed, adjusted, and selectively reedited.
Decades pass. Centuries. Emphases change:
certain facts are accentuated, others are
left out. Relevant historical information
is overlooked, or discovered. Whoever has
the luxury and/or determination to review
and reconstruct history colors it entirely
as they wish.
Christopher Columbus (his journeys
funded in large part by Jewish investors and
claimed by some to be himself of at least
partial Jewish descent) is a good example.
Revered in American folklore for two centuries,
he has become, in the last decade or so, widely
regarded by many as an exploitive, colonialist
villain.
Modern popular
belief and convention is validated by selected evidence from the past. While
the time-rooted "facts" of events can sometimes
be documented, the hows and whys of history
have no such absolute mooring. What was written
in the past is always biased, and that considered
credible today in no lesser manner reflects
the biases of writers and researchers today.
"Sometimes the
past is remembered selectively," notes Alan
Wald, "in accord with the needs of the ideological
outlook one has at a given moment or had at
some significant moment in the past." [WALD,
p. 15]
"[Historical] data and interpretation
of data often becomes inseparable through
consensus," writes Alan Edelstein, one of
the few Jewish scholars who have sought to
reexamine the popular conventions of complete
Jewish victimization. "This is particularly
evident when many scholars share the same
perspective, such as that of Jews as victims,
and Christians as persecutors ...
The direction of inquiry is controlled
by the questions that are posed. Because scholars
are concerned with anti-Semitism, questions
about Jewish-Christian relations are posed
from this perspective." [EDELSTEIN, p. xviii]
In researching Jewish
history, the investigator discovers a wide
variance of written material. Work by authors
expressly critical of Jews (and they include
a surprisingly number of Jewish commentators,
mostly "apostates" of one kind or another,
from the Middle Ages, through the Enlightenment
era and up to World War II and the Holocaust)
is invariably labeled by today's political
conventions to be "anti-Semitic" in nature.
There is a large body of such material extending
throughout history, written by critics wherever
Jews were to be found, ranging from legitimate
scholarship to Nazi fantasy material. Some
of the criticism is ridiculous; the accusations
of Hitler are absurdly exaggerated. But other
observations about Jewish life by non-Jews
is startlingly consistent over two thousand
years. Consistently credible Gentile themes
in attacks against Jews include Jewish elitism,
their insularity and clannishness, their disdain
for non-Jews, their exploitive and deceptive
behavior towards those not their own, the
suspicion of Jewish national loyalties and
allegiance to the lands they lived in, excessive
Jewish proclivity to money and economic control,
and an economic "parasitism" (the concentration
of Jews in lucrative 'non-productive' fields
of finance -- usury, money lending, etc. --
at the expense of non-Jewish communities).
"Anti-Semitism," remarks
Oliver Cox, "is an ancient social attitude
probably coeval with the rise of Jewish tribalism.
It is thus an immemorial trait identified
with Jewish culture ... Jewish communities,
historical or current, must expect to incur
such responses as ethnocentrism, nationalism,
and group discrimination. Anti-Semitism has
been identified with Jewish behavior in the
sense that it is a reaction of other groups
to the Jews' determination to assert and perpetuate
their identity ... Unlike race prejudice ...
anti-Semitism or intolerance is essentially
an inherent social response -- a retaliation
from a normal Jewish determination to resist
merger of their civilization with that of
a host peoples." [COX, p. 183-184]
"The Jews," said J.
O. Hertzler, "... have been a supernation
rather than members of a nation. More than
any other people, certainly up to the time
of the emancipation, they were innocent and
irresponsible toward the national traditions
and aspirations of the people among whom they
lived." [HERTZLER, p. 76] "The vast majority of Jews [in Russia],"
notes Michael Aronson, "... maintained a traditional
way of life, tenaciously holding on to age-old
Jewish practices ... Partly by choice and
partly because of the circumstances created
by anti-Jewish legislation, the Jews tended
to keep aloof from the surrounding population."
[ARONSON, p. 34]
In 1927 Jewish
commentator Maurice Hindus noted the gigantic
gulf traditionally set between Jews and Gentiles:
"For the old Jewish civilization, with its
rigid orthodoxy and its emphasis on Jewish
superiority, compelled aloofness from worldly
intellectual intercourse even as it compelled
social isolation ... There are thousands of
Jewish immigrants in [America] who remember
only too vividly how horrified their parents
were when they first discovered their children
in possession of Gentile books and interested
in Gentile studies." [HINDUS, p. 370] Meri-Jane
Rochelson notes that even secular Jewish literature
in Eastern Europe rarely addressed the Jews
around them: "The absence of non-Jews in [Israel
Zangwill's] Children of the Ghetto may
be related to what Dan Miron has shown to
be an even more severe omission of Christian
neighbors in East European shtetl
[Jewish village] fiction of the early
twentieth century. According to Miron, the
impression of insularity that results is part
of a larger visionary shtetl myth." [ZANGWILL, I., 1998, p.
28]
Likewise, notes Ivan Kalmar, Sholem
Asch's Fiddler on the Roof story [and
its later Broadway and Hollywood adaptations]
"largely ignores even the Gentile environment."
[KALMER, I., in PRYTULAK]
As for non-Jewish
perceptions of their Jewish neighbors, "hatred
for the Jews," says Abram Leon, "does not
date solely from the birth of Christianity.
Seneca treated the Jews as a criminal race.
Juvenal believed that the Jews only existed
to cause evil for other peoples. Quintilian
said that Jews were a curse for other people."
[LEON, p. 71]
In 59 BCE the Roman
statesman Cicero noted Jewish "clannishness"
and "influence in the assemblies." In the
second century AD Celsus, one of Rome's great
medical writers, wrote that Jews "pride themselves
in possessing superior wisdom and disdain
for the company of other men."
Philostratus, an ancient Greek author,
believed that Jews "have long since risen
against humanity itself. They are men who
have devised a misanthropic life, who share
neither food nor drink with others." Tacitus
(56-120 A.D.) a Roman public official, declared
that "the Jews are extremely loyal toward
one another, and are always ready to show
compassion, but toward other people they feel
only hate and enmity." [MORAIS, p. 46]
A brief sampling of the
critical commentary and animosity towards
Jews from a variety of sources through history
includes the following:
"The
Jewish nation dares to display an irreconcilable
hatred toward all
nations,
and revolts against all masters; always superstitious,
always
greedy
for the well-being enjoyed by others, always
barbarous --
cringing
in misfortune and insolent in prosperity."
-- Voltaire, (1694-1778), one of the
greatest
French eighteenth century writers,
from Essai
sur
le Moeurs
Ironically, notes Jacob Katz, "Voltaire
did more than any other single man to shape
the rationalist trend that moved European
society toward improving the status of the
Jew." [KATZ, From, p. 34] Still historically remembered (according
to the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1994)
"as a crusader against tyranny and bigotry,"
Voltaire turned repeatedly and angrily against
Jews who he believed to epitomize such "tyranny
and bigotry." Jews, he complained, "are ... the greatest
scoundrels who have ever sullied the face
of the globe ... They are, all of them, born
with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just
as the Bretons and Germans are born with blond
hair. I would not in the least be surprised
if these people would not some day become
deadly to the human race ... You [Jews] have
surpassed all nations in impertinent fables,
in bad conduct, and in barbarism. You deserve
to be punished, for this is your destiny."
[GOULD, p. 91]
On another occasion Voltaire charged
that "the Jew does not belong to any place
except that place which he makes money; would
he not just as easily betray the King on behalf
of the Emperor as he would the Emperor for
the King?" [KATZ, J, Fro, p. 44]
Thirty of 118 of Voltaire's
essays in his Dictionary of Philosophy
address Jews, usually disparagingly. Voltaire
calls Jews "our masters and our enemies ...
whom we detest ... the most abominable people
in the world." [PRAGER, p. 128]
With the coming of
the Enlightenment, notes David Sorkin, "Jews
were roundly condemned for "their ritualistic
religion, national character or economic situation
which, separately or together, prevented them
from being moral. Enlightenment thinkers almost
without exception subscribed to this image
of Jewish inferiority." [SORKIN, p. 85] "The
[Jewish] ghetto, Enlighteners argued," says
Steven Aschheim,
"had produced
an essentially unacceptable culture. Jews
were utter strangers to
Europe. Social
isolation had created traits in need of drastic
transformation: Jews
harbored within
them hatred of the Christian nurtured by centuries
of Talmudic
and rabbinic
indoctrination, they were religious fanatics,
parasitic in their
economics and
dishonest in their dealings." [ASCHHEIM, S.,
1982, p. 6]
Even "enlightened"
Jews disdained their Eastern European "ghetto"
brethren: "The German Jews' attack upon
his own and later upon the East European ghetto
was made easier by the fact that the attack
was in the mainstream of Enlightenment humanism.
Jewish reformers agreed that integration required
emphatic rejection of ghetto traits, traits
which Goethe in his discussion of the traditional
rabbi had summed up as 'fanatic zeal ... repulsive
enthusiasm ... confused murmurings ... piercing
outcries ... effeminate movements ... the
queerness of an ancient nonsense." [ASCHHEIM,
S., 1982, p. 6]
"Know that wherever
there is money," said Montesquieu in his Persian
Letters, "there is the Jew." [KREFETZ,
p. 45]
"The Semites ... must
declare all religious differences from their
own
to be bad. In this
sense, intolerance is really a factor of the
Semitic
race, and a portion
of the good and bad legacy it has left the
world."
-- Ernest Renan, (1823-1892) [RENAN,
E., p. 63] French
philosopher, historian and "one of
the pioneers of Semitic philology"
[LEWIS, B., 1986, p. 44]
"Jews chose voluntarily
and with a profound talent for self-preservation
the side of
all those instincts that makes for decadence, not as if
mastered by
them, but as if detecting in them a power
by which the
world could
be defied. The Jews are the very opposite
of decadents ...
they have put
themselves at the head of all decadent movements."
-- Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900)
[AGUS, p. 295]
"The case against
the Jews is long and damning; it would justify
ten
thousand
times as many pogroms as now go on in the
world."
--
H. L. Mencken, 1920, [in Rogow, A., 1961,
p. 315]
"The Jews remain
what they have been at all times: an elite
people,
self-confident
and domineering." -- Charles DeGaulle, former
President
of the Republic of France (1890-1970);
(Facing heat,
DeGaulle tried later to reframe this
as compliment) [GOULD,
p. 494]
In apartheid
South Africa, in a study of the representation
of the Jews of that society in the fiction
of Black writers, "coloreds," and Indians,
Jews were perceived to be "exploitive and
powerful." [SHAIN, p. 153] Another study,
by Melville Edelstein, suggested that that
the only English-speaking group further than
Jews in "social distance" from Blacks were
the dominant Afrikaners and that it was common
parlance in Black culture to use the term
"stingy like a Jew." [SHAIN, p. 153]
Even prominent
and widely respected Jewish commentators echoed
the same themes about their own people. Benjamin
Disraeli, of Jewish heritage, and the most
famous British prime minister of the nineteenth
century wrote that
"The native
tendency of the Jewish race is against the
doctrine of the
equality of
man. They have also another characteristic
-- the faculty of
acquisition
... Their bias is to religion, property, and
natural
aristocracy."
[FELDMAN, p. 638]
Another Jew, the great
philosopher Baruch Spinoza, was a
bridge between Jewish medievalism and
the Enlightenment. Spinoza noted that:
"At the present
time there is absolutely nothing which the
Jews can
arrogate
to themselves beyond other people ... As to
their continuance
so long
after dispersion, there is nothing marvelous
in it, for they
separated
themselves from every nation as to draw upon
themselves
universal
hate." [LEVY, p. 93]
Similar complaints
reflecting consistently reoccurring charges
against Jews have been echoed continuously
throughout history, in many languages and
in many lands, including -- even in the ancient
past -- "Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians,
Persians, Syrians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs,
and many others." [HERTZLER, p. 62]
But this disdain for Jews by critics
(some of the most learned men of their times,
including Jews and Jewish apostates, across
the spectrum of humanity) is not accepted
as historical evidence for anything in our
own day, except for the strange tenacity of
irrational "anti-Semites” and "self-hating
Jews" to badmouth Jews. Because this century's
Nazi hate machine incorporated anything negative
at all about Jews for their own evil aims,
modern Jewry defensively, and manipulatively,
equates any
criticism about Jews in history (and there
is a ton of it) to prejudicial lies or oversimplifications
that led -- and can lead -- to Nazi fascism.
So what was the real situation in bygone eras?
What were Jews like, in relation to Gentiles?
Popular Jewish dictate has one answer: look
only to the Hebrew texts, ancient rabbis,
and other Jewish chroniclers. They know what
Jews were like. Their texts are reliable.
The rest are all lies and exaggerations.
"How does one understand
-- not even forgive, simply understand!" exhorts
Harvard law professor and well-known Jewish
polemicist Alan Dershowitz,
"the virulently
anti-Jewish statements of intellectuals throughout
history? Their
numbers included H. L. Mencken ('The Jews
could
be put down
very plausibly as the most unpleasant race
ever heard
of'); George
Bernard Shaw ('Stop being Jews and start being
human
beings'); Henry
Adams ('The whole rotten carcass is rotten
with Jew
worms'); H.G.
Wells ('A careful study of anti-Semitism,
prejudice and
accusations
might be of great value to many Jews, who
do not
adequately realize
the irritation they inflict'); Edgar Degas
(characterized
as a 'wild anti-Semite');
Denis Diderot ('Brutish people, vile and vulgar
men'); Theodore
Dreiser (New York is a 'kike’s dream of a
ghetto,'
and Jews are
not 'pure Americans' and 'lack integrity');
T. S. Eliot
(a social as
well as literary anti-Semite, even after the
Holocaust);
Immanuel Kant
('The Jews still cannot claim any true genius,
any
truly great
man. All their talents and skills revolve
around stratagems
and low cunning
... They are a nation of swindlers.') Other
famous
anti-Semites
include Tacitus, Cicero, Aleksander Pushkin,
Pierre Renoir,
Thomas Edison,
Henry Ford, and, of course, Richard Wagner.
This
honor roll of
anti-Jewish bigotry goes on, and included
people of every
race, religion,
and geographic area, political leaning, gender,
and age.
The answer to
the question why? probably lies more in the
realm of
abnormal psychology
than in any rational attempts to find understandable
cause in history,
or economics. Anti-Semitism is a disease of
the soul,
and diseases
are best diagnosed by examing those infected
with them."
[DERSHOWITZ,
A., p. 113]
Nicholas de
Lange, a Jewish scholar, joins Dershowitz
in reflecting a virtually generic Jewish response
about the constant complaint about their people
throughout history and culture, saying:
"Much of the ancient literature on
the Jews ... is devoted to
explaining why the Jews have incurred
the justifiable anger or
hatred of ordinary peace-loving, law-abiding
people ... But no
critical historian would consider taking
their arguments at face
value, and in fact they are likely
to tell us more about their
authors than their victims." [De Lange,
p. 28]
A Jewish-Polish professor
in Warsaw, Pawel Spiewak, adds this about
the same theme:
"We find the representatives
of almost every ideological orientation
[who were anti-Semites]
... Enlightenment thinkers (Voltaire), arch-
conservatives (de
Masitre, de Bonald), socialists and communists
(Fourier, Proudhon,
Marx, Sobel), and the great Romantics (Goethe).
These writers seem
to differ in everything -- their relation
to religion,
the idea of progress,
authority, feudalism, and capitalism, the
concept
of knowledge and human
nature -- but they are united in a spirit
of
dislike and hostility
towards that strange tribe, the Jews." [SPIEWAK,
P.,
p. 51]
While fascists
on the political right like Hitler decried
the Jews, polar political 18th and 19th century
leftists like socialists Charles Fourier,
Alphonse Tousenel, Pierre Le Roux, Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon and Johann Gottlieb Fichte were,
to today's Jewish analysis, also vehemently
irrational anti-Semites. These men wrote tracts
like this, by Proudhon:
"The Jew is by temperament
an anti-producer, neither a farmer nor
an industrialist nor
even a true merchant. He is an intermediary,
always
fraudulent and parasitic,
who operates, in trade as in philosophy, by
means of falsification,
counterfeiting, and horse-trading." [LEWIS,
B.,
1986, p. 111]
"I see no other means of
protecting ourselves against them," wrote
Fichte, "than by conquering their Promised
Land and sending them all there." [LEWIS,
B., 1986, p. 111-112] Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin declared
that Jews were
"one exploiting sect,
one people of leeches, one single devouring
parasite closely and
intimately bound together not only across
national
boundaries, but also
across all divergences of political opinion
... [Jews
have] that mercantile
passion which constitutes one of the principle
traits
of their national
character."
[LEWIS, B., 1986, p. 113]
"For one [reason] or another,"
notes Daniel Pipes, "virtually every major
figure in the early history of socialism --
including Friedrich Engels, Charles Fourier,
Ferdinand Lasalle, Marx, and Joseph Proudhon
-- showed a marked antipathy to Jews." [PIPES,
D., 1997, p. 88]
Jewish author William
Korey notes the same mystifying anti-Jewish
omnipresence among disparate peoples in interviews
(at a Harvard archive) with 329 refugees from
the Soviet Union in the early 1950s: "A detailed
examination of the background information
of those who registered hostile attitudes
to Jews reveals that they were of various
age, national, educational, and status groups,
and that they left the USSR at different periods."
[KOREY, W., 1973, p. 11] The top six "anti-Semitic"
assertions by this diverse group of people
included assertions that
1) Jews occupy a privileged
and favored position in Soviet society.
2) Jews are business-
and money-minded.
3) Jews are clannish
and help each other.
4) Jews are aggressive
and 'pushy.'
5) Jews are sly, calculating,
and manipulative, and know how to 'use a
situation.'
6) Jews are deceitful,
dishonest, unprincipled, insolent, and impudent.
[KOREY,
W., 1973, p. 5]
When
investigating the history of Jewish relations
with Gentiles across history, there are obviously
only two possible sources for information:
Jews and non-Jews. There were no unbiased
Martian observers watching with telescopes,
none -- in any case -- that left us records.
So why, one might wonder per the aforementioned
professor De Lange and millions like him,
must a "critical historian" consider Jewish
accounts categorically more reliable than historical
accounts by non-Jews, when
all varieties of critical commentators about
Jews across history, class, language, and
culture basically said the same thing? "However
uncomfortable it is to recognize," says Albert
Lindemann, "not all those whom historians
have classified as anti-Semites were narrow
bigots, irrational, or otherwise incapable
of acts of altruism and moral courage. They
represented a bewildering range of opinion
and personality types." [LINDEMANN, p. 13]
And why is this "uncomfortable [for Jews]
to recognize?" Because, by even a child's
exercise of logic and common sense, the perceptual
common denominator of all such disparate people
can only be the enduring truths about Jews
as each observer experienced them in varying
historical and cultural circumstances.
The French Jewish
intellectual (and eventual Zionist), Bernard
Lazare, among many others in history, noted
this obvious fact in 1894, long before the
Nazi persecutions of Jews and resultant institutionalized
Jewish efforts to deny, or obfuscate, crucial
-- and central -- aspects of their history:
"Wherever the Jews
settled [in their Diaspora] one observes the
development
of anti-Semitism, or rather anti-Judaism ...
If this hostility,
this repugnance
had been shown towards the Jews at one time
or in
one country
only, it would be easy to account for the
local cause of
this sentiment.
But this race has been the object of hatred
with all nations
amidst whom
it settled. Inasmuch as the enemies of Jews
belonged to
diverse races,
as they dwelled far apart from one another,
were ruled by
different laws
and governed by opposite principles; as they
had not the
same customs
and differed in spirit from one another, so
that they could
not possibly
judge alike of any subject, it must needs
be that the general
causes of anti-Semitism
have always resided in [the people of] Israel
itself, and
not in those who antagonized it." [LAZARE,
p. 8]
Since the institutionalized
persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, leading
up to, and during, World War II, there has
been a militantly enforced moratorium on critical
commentary by Gentiles about Jewry. (Exceptions
to this include a relatively small amount
of material produced by major publishing houses
that is critical in some aspect of the modern
state of Israel and rare, obscure, usually
self-published books with little circulation
by individuals highlighting "world Jewish
conspiracy" or "the Holocaust never existed"
themes. Such works are automatically considered
by popular culture to be part of an unreadable,
fiction-oriented "lunatic fringe.")
While most literature
about Jews by non-Jews throughout history
is considered to be "anti-Semitic," there
is also a historical perspective about Jews
that is "philo-Semitic" in nature. This term
refers to a friendly, generous, or sympathetic
depiction of Jewish history by non-Jewish
writers. It is a pro-Jewish bias. This has
often taken the form of Christian writers
feeling some kind of link to Judaism, as Christianity's
own origin. There are also those who benefit
by allegiance to Jewish powers. With the rise
of the Nazis and their vicious treatment of
European Jews, a corresponding increase in
philo-Semitic literature and apologetics also
made the scene. The Nazi epoch, in this view,
emphatically confirms as horrific fulfillment
Jewish perceptions of their own prior history
as perpetual victims.
Almost
all scholarship and other commentary in modern
times about Jewish history, however, (and
considerable amounts of non-Jewish history) is provided by Jewish
academics and popularists, most of whom are,
in varying degrees, entranced and enthralled
by legends of their own heritage. In fact, most of the massive amount
of material being published these days about
Jews is written by Jews for Jews; it is then popularized
in elemental forms throughout the mass media
for unquestioned digestion by the general
public.
"Jewish studies [on
North American campuses]," notes Jacob Neusner,
"[are not] treated in accord with academic
disciplines but as an arena for Jews to explore
their roots, Jews teaching (self-evidently
valid) facts to other Jews." [NEUSNER, p.
9] "All modern studies on Judaism, particularly
by Jews," notes Israel Shahak, ... "to this
day ... bear the unmistakable marks of their
origin: deception, apologetics, or hostile
polemics, indifference or even active hostility
to the pursuit of truth. Jewish studies in
Judaism ... to this very day, are polemics
against an external enemy [non-Jews] rather
than an internal debate." [SHAHAK, p. 22]
"In popular [Jewish]
history," notes non-Jewish scholar Albert
Lindemann,
"a strange tendency
exists to favor an emotionally laden description
and narrative, especially
of colorful, dramatic, or violent episodes
over explanation that
employs calm analysis or a searching attention
to historical context.
Pogroms, famous anti-Semitic affairs and
descriptions of the
ideas of anti-Semitic authors and agitators
are
described with a moral
fervor, rhetorical flair, and considerable
attention to the details
of murder, arson, and rape. Background,
context, and motives
are often slighted or dealt with in a remarkably
thin and tendentious
fashion. In such histories the antagonists
of the
Jews emerge as stick
figures ... Violent episodes against Jews
burst
forth like natural
calamities or acts of God, incomprehensible
disasters having nothing
to do with Jewish action or developments
within the Jewish
world but only with the corrupt characters
of the
enemies of the Jew."
[LINDEMANN, A., Esau's, p. 12]
In 1990 Michael
Aronson, a Jewish scholar, wrote an entire
volume debunking the conventional Jewish view
that the Russian government sponsored pogroms
in a national anti-Semitic "conspiracy," organizing
attacks against Jews in 1881 throughout that
country. "The interested student," he wrote,
"may choose at random any recent text, whether
devoted to Russian Jews in particular, or
modern Jewish history more broadly, or late
imperial Russia in general, and it is almost
certain that, if the pogroms of 1881 are mentioned,
they are interpreted according to a conspiracy
theory. This study rejects the conspiracy
explanation ... [The] scholarly literature
devoted to Russian Jewish history dates to
the pre-Revolutionary period and is largely
the creation of Russian Jewish historians."
[ARONSON, p. 7-8] Seminal among these historians
were Emmanuel B. Levin and Simon M. Dubnov.
Levin's bias was explicit. "Levin's patron,"
says Aronson, "was Baron H.O. Guenzburg, who
commissioned him to write a number of works
on Russian discriminatory and restrictive
Jewish legislation." [ARONSON, p. 11]
In 1998, Elliott Horowitz
wrote an unusually honest article in Jewish
Social Studies about the way Jewish history
is reframed by modern Jewish apologetics and
polemics. His particular subject in the piece
was the Persian invasion of Jerusalem in 614
and the attendant Jewish massacres of tens
of thousands of local Christians (low estimate
30,000 people; high estimate 90,000). Horowitz
quotes, for example, the 1840s work of Reverend
George Williams who wrote that the Jews "had
followed the Persians from Galilee, to gratify
their vengeance by the massacre of the [Christian]
believers, and the demolition of the of their
most sacred churches. They were amply gutted
with blood. In a few days 90,000 Christians
of both sexes, and of all ages and conditions,
fell victims to their indiscriminating hatred."
[HOROWITZ, 1998]
"As we shall see,"
notes Horowitz about the preceding quote,
"Jewish
contemporaries of Williams described the events
of 614
rather
similarly. A century later, however, in the
years following
the Holocaust,
memories of Jews gratifying their vengeance
and
giving
vent to their 'indiscriminating hatred' began
to fade, being
displaced
increasingly by the Sartrean [Jean Paul Sartre]
Jew,
'passionately
hostile to violence' ... Although the Jews
of Palestine
undoubtedly
participated in the wide-scale violence against
Christians
