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WHEN VICTIMS RULE,
A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America
Source: JTR Website


17. [Part 1]
THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE



                 "Instead of learning about the Holocaust through the large lens of
                  Jewish history, many Jews and non-Jews in America
                  now learn the whole of Jewish history through the lens of the                   Holocaust."                          -- James Young, p. 304

                 "The myth of the Holocaust teaches that throughout their
                  history of persecution the Jews have been blameless, their
                  oppressors irrational."  -- Liebman and Cohen p. 33
 
                 
                  "It isn't the truth [about Jews in the Holocaust era] that
                   frightens me but the suppression of free speech in order to
                   protect communal myths that are not lies but truths rendered
                   so sacrosanct and undiscussed that they start to smell fishy."
                                                      -- Carol Oppenheim, Jewish author,
                                                          p. 39
 
                    "Many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the six million
                    by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots -- or
                    in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry.
                    It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be
                    exploiting you that he cannot be doing what you know he
                    is doing because he is a Jew."
                                                        -- James Baldwin, Black novelist,
                                                                 p. 34
 
                    "Related to the film's box-office success is the fact that
                     precisely because Schindler's List has been watched
                     by large numbers of people who had very little previous
                     knowledge of the Holocaust, and cannot be expected to
                     gain much more knowledge in the future. This specific
                     version of the event may remain the only source of
                     information about it for many of its viewers."
                                                        -- Omer Bartov, p. 46
 
                    "It is doubtful that history is the genre for writers who are
                    so overwhelmed by the Holocaust and yet want to describe
                    it. It seems that some fictional form of expression may be
                    more suitable than history for those who want to respond
                    emotionally rather than historically to that great tragedy."
                                                        --Richard Lucas, p. 222
 
                  "[Jewish] manufactured claims of uniqueness for their own
                  people are, after all, synonymous with dismissal and denial of
                  the experience of others ... Narcissistic false claims of
                  uniqueness are joined with brutal, racist denials of the
                  sufferings of others, becoming two sides of the same coin."
                                                      -- David Stannard, p. 198
 
                       
                 "I would be the last to minimize the atrocity of Auschwitz,
                  where my father and mother perished. But don't the tears
                  of others count? "         -- Maxime Rodinson, p. 9

        "[The Holocaust had been] hardly talked about for the first twenty years or so
        after World War II; then, from the 1970s on, [it became] ever more central in
        American public discourse -- particularly, of course, among Jews, but also in the
        culture at large. What accounts for this unusual chronology?"
                                                       -- Peter Novick, 1999, p. 2
 
      
                 "The actual historical subject [of the Holocaust] itself has
                 become almost unimportant compared with its contemporary
                 political function in the hands of some Jews."
                                                     -- John Fox, non-Jewish faculty member
                                             in Jewish history and Holocaust studies at both
                                             University College and Jews College, London,
                                             [3-19-2000, p. 47-48]
 
  
 
 
     It is the profoundest of ironies that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis may have saved worldwide Jewry from extinction. (In the case of Jewish Hassids, Menachem Friedman notes that "paradoxically, it was the destruction of Eastern European Jewry in the twentieth century that created the conditions which enabled the spread of ultra-orthodoxy.") [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 31] At the very least, judging by common Jewish commentary about their fate in Europe over fifty years ago, Hitler is responsible for a dramatic Jewish revival. Before World War II many Jews were on a slow but steady path of assimilation wherever they resided in their diaspora, particularly in Western Europe, each generation inched further away from the separatist myths of the Jewish past. Religion of all kinds continued in retreat and the rationale for being Jewish was -- at least in some parts of the Jewish community -- steadily weakening.  As the Nazi regime came to power, however, many German Jews (if we take what they say at face value) had strayed from a specifically Jewish connection in their lives and were forced to re-examine their identities. In 1935, for instance, the German literary critic Jean Amery (Hans Mayer) supposedly discovered himself a Jew in a Viennese cafe when reading a newspaper about new Nazi laws on the subject. Likewise, in 1938, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein connected to his long lost Jewish identity as a consequence of Nazi dictates. They were both suddenly Jews because Hitler said so. [TRAVERSO, p. 39]  Even Albert Einstein found his identity as a Jew in the context of rising political anti-Semitism in Germany in 1914. There had been nothing in Switzerland, he said, "that called forth any Jewish sentiments in me. When I moved to Berlin all that changed." [CLARK, p. 377] (He was helping to raise "funds for the Zionist cause of a Hebrew university" by 1921.) [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 173] "The composer Arnold Schoenberg and many other baptized Jews," notes Nachum Gidal, "now publicly declared their return to Judaism." [GIDAL, p. 425]
 
     Sigmund Freud reflected, at least publicly, the same experience:
 
     "My language is German. My culture, my attainments, are German. I
      could identify myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of
      anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that
      time, I prefer to call myself a Jew." [GAY, MOMENT, p. 50]
 
     In 1937, an American Jew, Alfred Siegel, wrote in the American Israelite that
 
      "Hitler has been a life-giving stimulant for me. In times when there is no
       Jewish flame left in me and I am feeling very cold, I get warm again on
       account of Hitler ... I know I shouldn't say this, but ... Hitler [is] helping
       me to fulfill my status as an immortal man ... What will become of me
       when there is no more Hitler and there is no one to set flames under me
       to keep me warm? What if we come at last to a world in which no
       anti-Semite is left and everybody loves me? What of my poor Jewish
       bones which set so quickly cold without stimulation? Who and what
       will keep me warm then?  -- May 27, 1937  [in GOLDSTEIN, p. 115]
 
       For today's many Jewish "ideologists," wrote Jacob Neusner, decades after Hitler, "there is no real choice about 'being Jewish' if born one. The Holocaust dictates that there is no escape from it. Hitler knew you were one." [NEUSNER, Holo, p. 978] "The gas chambers at Auschwitz," notes Jonathan Sacks, "made no distinction between [Jewish] assimilators and traditionalists, believers and heretics, atheists and Jews of faith." [SACKS, J., p.6]  Such comments are terribly true, but always left unstated is the disturbing fact that the same all-encompassing view that "born Jews" (whatever they choose to believe) are inescapably Jewish is a concept intrinsic to classic Jewish identity itself. Hitler did not invent the idea that being Jewish is a racial pedigree, often these days euphemistically referred to as a "community of fate." Was not Hitler following the same path as this 1970s observation by a Jewish theologian, Eugene Borowitz? : "To be a Jew means to have a bond with every other Jew -- and somehow know how to find him." [in SILBERMAN, C., p. 76]
 
     Whatever the case, in attempting to racially define and annihilate the Jewish people, Hitler rejuvenated them. This is exemplified in the famous plea by the Jewish theologian, Emil Fackenheim, who implored his fellow Jews to renew with vigor their sense of Jewishness. To allow it to wane -- post-Holocaust -- was now equated to be a posthumous victory for Hitler. (Even for Jews married to non-Jews, distinctive Jewish progeny is often a burning issue. A liberal feminist professor, Amy Sheldon, notes that "although I had many mixed feelings towards traditional Judaism, there was never any doubt in my mind that our children would be raised as Jews. 'I can't finish what Hitler started,' I told my [non-Jewish] husband before we were married." [SHELDON, p. 82])
 
      We see in Hitler's last breath in 1945 the birth of Israel in 1948, and the conjoining of the Holocaust and the modern state of Israel as the sacred pillars of a renewed Jewish identity rooted in guilt, fear, resentment, hostility, and rage. It was, however, not an identity that took immediate shape after Hitler's persecution of Jewry. The martyr status of concentration camp victims, the heroizing of survivors no matter what they had to do to live, the stress upon exaggerated Jewish resistance to the Nazis, a deeper embracement of Jewish tribalism, and the political exploitation of the Holocaust for Jewish and Israeli myths and manipulations came later. What came to be known as "the Holocaust," says Edward Lilenthal, "was often indistinguishable, in the immediate postwar years, from the millions of noncombatant casualties due to terror bombings of civilian populations, epidemic illness, or starvation. It was considered by most as simply part of the horror of war." [LILENTHAL, p. 5]
 
      In Israel, in the early years after the Holocaust, Jewish survivors were even scorned with contempt by Israeli Jews as "soap" (i.e., feebly passive Jews who were passively turned into bars of soap by Nazi tormentors,  [GOREN, p. 159] the fulfillment of demeaning stereotypes about fellow Jews.  "With what scorn," noted Georges Tamarin in 1973, "Israeli youth reacts to the alleged faint-heartedness of the six million victims of Nazis!" [TAMARIN, p. 115] The Holocaust was an emblem of shame to Jewry, little discussed, more often avoided. "Even in their extraordinary death agony," notes Haim Breseeth, "the millions of European Jews had not attracted sympathy [in Israel] -- a minimum expectation from an important Jewish community."  [BRESEETH, p. 196]  "In retrospect," says Arye Carmon," it appears that a disturbing conjunction evolved between the incomprehensible magnitude of evil of the Nazis and the victims who conscientiously were presented as an ideological object to be disassociated from. This conjunction may explain the duality of guilt and shame that has portrayed mourning in Israel." [CARMON, p. 76]  A daughter of Holocaust survivors who was raised in Israel remarked at a conference there that
 
           "What I hated and dreaded most when I was a child was summertime.
            It was a time when the [tattooed concentration camp] numbers on my
            mother's arm would be there for all to see and people would know
            that she was a survivor and was one of the despised people. People
            like my parents were despised in Israel, and I was ashamed of
            them." [EMMETT, p. 147]
 
      "In 1947 a Jewish concentration camp survivor, Primo Levy, could only interest a small, obscure press to publish an account of his experiences and the volume was little noticed. [TRAVERSO, p. 104] Even Eli Wiesel's ultimately influential work about the Holocaust, Night, did not appear in English until 1960, after twenty publishers had rejected it. [WHITFIELD p. 74]  "We would look in vain in the 1950s," says Jacob Neusner, "for what some call 'Holocaustomania.'" [NEUSNER, STRANGER, p. 84]
 
     "Many Jews raised in the United States in the wake of the Holocaust," notes Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, "experienced it like a family secret -- hovering, controlling, but barely mentioned except in code or casual reference." [BRODKIN, K., p. 141]
 
     In 1961 only two of 31 discussants in a major Jewish magazine's symposium on "Jewishness and Younger Intellectuals" put any emphasis on the Holocaust effecting their lives. In that same year, another important Jewish magazine's theme of "My Jewish Affirmation" overlooked the Holocaust almost completely. [LINENTHAL, p. 8] Even as late as 1966, when Commentary published a forum on "Jewish belief" in its pages, "the Holocaust," notes Nathan Glazer,  "did not figure in any of the questions, nor, it must be said, did it figure in the answers." [GLAZER, American, p. 172]  In a collection of 1960s-era interviews with Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion "the word Holocaust never appears." [STERNBERGER, I., 8-15-95]
 
      The book that first attracted, and furthered, widespread interest in the particularly Jewish experiences of World War II was the diary of Ann Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl), a volume that a Jewish novelist, Meyer Levin, almost single-handedly pushed to fame. Levin urged the diary's publication in the American Jewish Congress Weekly; it was serialized in the Jewish magazine, Commentary. Doubleday eventually published it and Levin himself heralded its importance on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, his editors not informed about his own "vested interest" -- commercially and politically -- in the story. [BLAIR, p. 3] The volume has since sold over sixty million copies in fifty-one languages. [WHITFIELD, p. 72] (There appeared with such revelations a corresponding shame and guilt among diaspora Jews and a rising need to atone for their own sin of doing so little to help European Jewry during the Hitler era. [RUBENSTEIN, p. 24]) The diary of Ann Frank is so well publicized internationally that, note David Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa,
 
       "Ann Frank's Diary of a Young Girl has sold over a four million copies
       in Japan, more than any other country except the United States. So
       beloved is Ann Frank in Japan that the first Japanese company to market
       sanitary napkins designed especially for Japanese women called itself
       Anne Co., Ltd., and sold its product under the brand name 'Anne's
       Day' (Anne no hi), which quickly became a euphemism for menstruation
       in Japan." [GOODMAN, p. 6]

     The Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted continued popular promotion of Anne Frank in 2001, half a century after her death:

     "A four hour miniseries, following Anne's life from her happy school days
     through her two years in hiding in Amsterdam and to her final days in the
     concentration camp, air nationally over ABC TV on May 20 and May 21.
        The 20th Century Fox studio is developing a feature move based on
    'The Diary of Anne Frank.'
        A new edition of the diary, including five previously unpublished pages
     describing her parents' difficult marriage, was released in March.
       The Helos Dance Theatre premiered 'About Anne: A Diary in Dance'
     in Los Angeles last month.
        An interactive CDROM titled 'Anne Frank House: A House with a Story'
     was released earlier this year, offering a virtual tour of the building and
     the 'secret annex' where the Frank family hid.
        In Boise, Idaho, ground has been broken on a $1.6 million Anne
     Frank Human Rights Memorial Park." [TUGEND, T., 5-13-01]

      In formal literature, "apart from the notable exception of [Saul] Bellow's The Dangling Man," says Theodore Ziolkowski, "it was not until the 60s with Edward Wallant's The Pawnbroker, Norma Rosen's Touching Evil, Susan Schaeffer's Anya, Arthur Cohen's In the Days of Simon Stern, and later works by Cynthia Ozick and Saul Bellow -- that the Holocaust became a genuine theme." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 599]  By 1998, however, Sheila Schimpf noted that
 
     "For 10 years Barry Gross has asked Michigan State University students
      in his English classes how many have read or seen 'The Diary of Anne
      Frank.' Almost every hand goes up. 'It has become almost the common
      text for this generation of students,' Gross says."  [SCHIMPF, p. E1]
 
      In  1967, with the multiple-nation Arab war against Israel, worldwide Jewry snapped to a new kind of attention and consciousness, one that has since accelerated to our own day into deeply politicized Jewish obsessions with anti-Semitism, the hallowed specialness of the Holocaust, and the absolute sanctity of Israel. During the 1967 Arab war, Jews everywhere (as it is told and retold in Jewish scholarship) imagined the prospect for another Holocaust.  "It would be impossible to understand the present Israeli stance toward the Arabs without taking full account of the Holocaust," says Jay Gonen. [GONEN, p. 151] In the Arab armies Jews saw Nazi storm troopers. In the PLO leadership of Yassar Arafat, they stamped the face of Hitler. "Israel," says Melvin Urofsky, "made it possible [for Jews worldwide] to endure the memory of Auschwitz. Were Israel to be destroyed [by Arabs], then Hitler would be alive again, the final victory would be his." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 351]
 
     The old Jewish self-identity of weakness and victimization -- based on the Jewish martyrological tradition of death, destruction, and terror -- became now a conviction of armor, militantly wielded, shaped with the very shame and horror of the Holocaust. The resultant Israeli victory over the Arabs meant a symbolic return to physical power, along biblical lines even, for many Jews, redemption. It also meant the springboard for a new Holocaust-centeredness, aggressive in its character, hostile and embittered to non-Jews everywhere around them.  And it was adept in milking communal guilt from comfortable Jews in America who experienced nothing of the risks of 1967 Israel nor the European Holocaust years. A victorious Israel rising up out of ashes of the Holocaust became the cornerstone of Jewish self-conception. The Holocaust was no longer shamefully harmful to the Jewish self-image. It was now a much-heralded building block for the state of Israel and impassioned Jewish vigor, everywhere discussed, everywhere publicized.
 
      Jews who paid little attention to the Jewish annihilation during World War II, and in the early years after, two decades later were increasingly consumed with it. "A profound sense of their status as survivors seized world Jewry," notes Jacob Neusner. [NEUSNER, Holo, p. 976] "The question," adds Hanno Loewy, "which constantly recurs is, 'Why did I of all people survive?' -- a question which pursues the survivor and to which there is no answer." [LOWEY, p. 240] "Every time I attend a gathering of Jewish children," wrote well-known lawyer Alan Dershowitz in 1991, "at a family event, at a Bar Mitzvah, at Simchath Torah -- I imagine SS guards lining up these children for the gas chambers." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 178]
 
     "To some extent," says Jacob Petuchowski, "this preoccupation [with the Holocaust] represents a repercussion of the guilt-complex of the survivors (and perhaps more so of those who survived at a safe trans-Atlantic distance than of the actual survivors of the camp.)" [PETUCHOWSKI, p. 6] The Jew, says James Yaffe, "feels guilty over the six million Jews who were killed by Hitler. What more could he have done to help them? Perhaps nothing, but his guilt stems from his sense that he might so easily have died instead of them." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 59] "The notion of survivor guilt and of resurrecting the dead to greater power than they had in life," suggests Samuel Heilman, "is of course an old one, most dramatically elaborated in Freud's famous essay Totem and Taboo." [HEILMAN, S, 1992, p. 370] It is important for many Jews to diffuse their own guilt by dumping much of it into the laps of others: "I am burdened with collective guilt," said Hans Meyer, "I say; not they. The world, which forgives and forgets, has sentenced me, not those who murdered or allowed the murder to occur." Meyer, Ruth Wisse informs us, "committed suicide, driven 'to the mind's limits' and beyond by the dishonest postwar reimposition of normalcy." [WISSE, p. 48]
 
      "Ironically," says Leon Wieseltier, "for many Jews what remains [of Jewish identity] most vivid and 'ethnically' alive is the Holocaust." [BECHSTEL, p. 118] Rabbi David Novak even argues that today's Holocaust-based Jewish identity (i.e., the peculiar notion that modern Jewish identity is fundamentally defined by its contradistinction from real, and imagined, enemies) ironically owes much of its conception -- in the modern post-Holocaust context -- to the existentialist non-Jew, Jean Paul-Sartre, and his own book about anti-Semitism.  [NOVAK, p. El of Is, p. 20]
 
     With the growing emphasis upon a Jewish identity largely defined by the Holocaust, vacation tours were created for American and other diaspora Jews to visit death camps in Europe as part of an immersion in "the Jewish experience." "At bar and bat mitzvahs, in a growing number of communities," notes Peter Novick,

     "the child is 'twinned' with a young vicitm of the Holocaust who never lived to
      have the ceremony, and by all reports the kids like it a lot. Adolescent Jews
      who go on organized tours to Auschwitz and Treblinka have reported that
      they were 'never so proud to be a Jew' as when, at these sites, they vicariously       experienced the Holocaust. Jewish college students oversubscribe courses on the       Holocaust, and rush to pin yellow stars to their lapels on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust       Remembrance DAy). And it's not just the young. Adult Jews flock to Holocaust
      events as to no others and give millions unstintingly to build yet another Holocaust       memorial." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 8]

      The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, one of the greatest Holocaust centers, built a multi-million dollar high-tech environment to "recreate the Holocaust experience" for Jews who missed it. The director of a Jewish education committee even proposed a high school course about the Holocaust so that all students could be able to understand "what it means to be Jewish." [LIPSTADT, p. 356] By 1986, a quarter of all new books reviewed in Judaica Book News had a Holocaust subject and more college students were taking courses about the Holocaust than any other Jewish concern. [SILVER, p. 460] In 1985, 86% of American Jewry, as evidenced in one survey, believed that "there's no doubt that the Holocaust has deeply affected the way I think and feel about being Jewish." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 33]  "For American Jews," notes David Schnall, "Israel has become vitally important not as a living alternative [as a place to live] but more so as a refuge, a final port in the storm of humanity, should the unthinkable occur once more." [SCHNALL, p. 124]
 
       The horror of the Nazi's mass murder of Jews was not just that so many millions of people were sadistically violated, tortured, and murdered. The human capacity for mass atrocity is as old as humanity itself. History is full of Tamerlanes, Genghis Khans, and Crusaders of every type riding into pillaged villages by ruthless exterminators, entire vistas laid waste in carnage. Tribe, clan, kingdom, and nation have, over the millennia, taken turns in being victim and victimizer.
 
      The REAL horror of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe was that this atrocity was elaborately construed and constructed in modern times by a supposedly "civilized" state, Germany. It was not carried out by a band of head hunters or Neanderthal brutes, but by people who drove cars, went to the grocery store, paid taxes, and lived in familiar-looking homes and apartment buildings. Strangely, they were people quite like us, like anybody, wrapped in nationalist institutions. That is what is most frightening about it.   All the Nazis needed was a national narcissism about themselves, their past, and their destiny which was the precondition necessary to entirely dehumanize, enslave, and exterminate others. Where have we seen these preconditions before?
 
     To the everlasting shame of our sad species, none of this is new. The rudimentary foundation of the Nazi's "Master Race" self-perception and glorification finds a fanatic precursor, among others, in the most ironic of places: the origins of the Judaic faith itself in the Jewish self-conception as the "Chosen People." What is the essential ideological difference, really, between those who envision themselves to have partnership in a superior racial lineage (in the Nazi case, pure Aryans) and those who traditionally understand themselves to be a likewise hereditary lineage of human beings, in the Jewish case supposedly descended from a single man, Abraham, especially graced and privileged by God (Jews)? Both rely, traditionally and fundamentally -- in origin -- upon racist criteria in their respective belief systems. For the Nazis, it is essential to prove pure Germanic lineage to qualify in the Aryan membership. By Nazi standards, if a grandparent was a Jew, a person was considered racially tainted, and Jewish. For Jews, as legally established in today's secular state of Israel, the racial lineage is matrilineal: a Jew is defined as someone who has a Jewish natural mother. If the father was Jewish and the mother not, the child is tainted and is not, by Orthodox standards, Jewish.
 
     Dr. Joseph Mengele, the horrible Nazi medical experimenter and "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz, echoed this racial antithesis -- at least as he saw it -- when he reputedly remarked "that the [Nazi's] Final Solution was the ultimate struggle for the control of the world between the only two peoples superior enough to vie for it, the Jews and the Germans. [LESHEM, p. 63] Or, as Hannah Arendt saw it, "[The Nazi movements'] claim to chosenness could clash seriously only with the Jewish claim ... Leaders [of Nazism] knew quite well that the Jews had divided the world, exactly as they had, into two halves -- themselves and all the others." [ARENDT, p. 240]
 
      In 1937, amidst the rise of German fascism, Charles Clayton Morrison at the liberal Protestant journal, The Christian Century, (which was a well-known crusader against Hitler and anti-Semitism) wrote that "[it is] this obsession with the doctrine of a covenant race that now menaces the whole world, and Jews themselves are the chief sufferers from it. [The Jewish idea] of an integral race, with its own exclusive culture, hallowed and kept unified by a racial religion, is itself the prototype of nazism." [MORRISON, p. 736] "Nazi racism," notes Richard L. Rubenstein, "was an attempt to reestablish a basis for community on shared archaic roots. The exclusion of the alien was intrinsic to its very nature." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 110] This exclusionism, as we have repeatedly seen, is also integral to traditional Judaism.
 
     The Nazis were indeed conscious of themselves as a counter-Chosen People, based upon their racially Aryan-centered ideology which was antithetical and ultimately violent to the Jewish self-assertion of superiority. Adolf Hitler appropriated for his Aryan Master Race the Jewish notion of being a Chosen People, and then twisted it to his own megalomania, saying:
 
          We [Aryans] are chosen ... [and] whoever proclaims his allegiance
          to me is, by this very proclamation and by the manner in which
          it is made, one of the chosen.  [Emphasis in original; KATZ, p. 9]
 
    Feminist Merlin Stone even speculates, from a linguistic perspective, that Hitler and the Nazis may have known something about the ancient Hittites and Hebrews, arguing that if her theories about the "warlike Hebrews" are right,
 
     "We must certainly view the ... atrocities enacted upon the Hebrew
     people of the twentieth century by the self-styled Aryans of Nazi
     Germany not only as tragic but ironic. The researches and excavations
     of the Hittites culture have been carried on primarily by German
     archeologists throughout this century. It was sometimes before and
     directly after the First World War that nasili was slowly beginning
     to be accepted as the real name of the Hittite language and Nesa, or
     Nasa, their first capital ... One cannot help but wonder how much
     Adolf Hitler was affected by reports of these finds ... Strangely enough
     one more connection between the Hittites and Hebrews is the Hebrew
     use of the word nasi for prince." [STONE, M., 1976, p. 127]
 
     Hitler even had a pseudo religious view about Jews as a satanic kind of nemesis. As Steven Katz puts it:
 
          "[In the Nazi view] the struggle between Aryan and Jew is not only
          necessary and inevitable but also a clash of world-historical...
          significance. Though actualized through blood and time, the depth
          of this homicidal encounter is rooted in eternity."
 
     Yoel Taitelbaum, former leader of the Ultra-Orthodox "Guardians of the City" movement, argued that a kind of cosmic struggle inevitably existed between Jews and non-Jews; the Nazis were one such -- particularly brutal -- Jewish nemesis. In this view, "hatred of Jews is inherent in the nations of the world because the choice of God fell upon Israel." [FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308]
 
     A more secular allusion to the Jewish Chosen People/German Master Race parallel is reflected in the work of the popular Israeli poet Uri Greenberg who wrote that Jews were "the race of Abraham, which had started on its way to become master." [FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308] And what of Vladimir Jabotinsky, a seminal Zionist leader, who -- imagining the modern Israeli nation -- poeticized in 1920 that "with blood and sweat / a race will be born to us / proud, magnanimous, and cruel." [FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308]
 
       The Nazi focus in scientifically proving their own racial superiority had respective precedents even in the European Jewish community who were receptive to such confirmation of their own superiority. In the late nineteenth century, Jules Caravallo, an official at the Alliance Israelite Universelle (one of the earliest Jewish lobbying organizations) reported the results of a French study that "Jews constituted a distinct racial type; [and] that the Jewish cranial dimensions were found 'without exception to be superior to the dimensions of the corresponding Christian cranium; and that it seemed to be reasonable to accept a superiority of the Jewish heads over the Christian heads.'"  The Jewish Alliance liked the study so much that they awarded a gold medal to its French author and widely distributed the results of the study. [PATAI]  ("Leaders of the Alliance Israelite Universelle,' says Albert Lindemann,  "warned its members against 'arrogance' yet still implicitly accepted, often in the social-Darwinian language current at the time, the notion of Jewish superiority.") [LINDEMANN, p. 69]
 
       Even in the late 1970's a respected Jewish scholar saw fit to excerpt the following text of a German Nazi, Fritz Lenz, to support his own argument. The new context for this was a discussion by the Jewish author, Raphael Patai, of the possible reasons -- as he saw it -- for Jewish intellectual superiority over other people:
 
                "Jews and Teutons [Germans] are alike distinguished by great
                powers of understanding and by remarkable strength of will. Jews
                and Teutons resemble each other in having a large measure of self-
                confidence, an enterprising spirit, and a strong desire to get their
                own way ... [They each] are inclined to diffuse themselves as a
                ruling caste over foreign populations. They, too, prefer whenever
                they can to have the hard physical toil of life done for them by
                others..." [PATAI, p. 328]
 
      "Lenz's attitude to the 'Jewish race,'" declares Patai, "was unsympathetic but correct." [PATAI, p. 327] 
 
         Incredibly, this kind of thinking continues to have currency for some influential Jews in our own day. In 1994 another Jewish American scholar, Norman Cantor, in one breath discarded the Nazi scientism that claimed Aryan superiority as a Master Race and replaced them with the innate, genetic superiority of Jews:
 
                "... the further we travel from the monstrosity of Nazi misuses of
                the racial concept and the more genetic applications are
                investigated, the more does a scientific sanction for viewing the
                Jews as a distinct genetic group, and furthermore one exhibiting an
                extraordinary creative behavior pattern, come within the
                parameters of legitimate discourse." [CANTOR, p.]
 
      In the realms of Orthodox Judaism, (from which claims of Jewish superiority over others stems), there are Jews today who cite traditional Jewish religious texts to argue profoundly extremist, and shocking, ideas. In the last decade three Hebrew "radical right-wing" anthologies published in Israel, entitled Tzifiya, included recent Jewish writings that were, by any standards, echoes of Nazi ideologues. Charles Liebman remarks about a rabbi we have heard from earlier:
 
           "In the last issue [1988] a rabbi from Merkaz Harav [David Bar Haim]
             writes on the differences between Jews and non-Jews ... After
             bringing proof texts he concludes that ... 'non-Jews are considered
             as animals ... The status of non-Jews in Jewish law resembles the
             status of animals and there is generally no distinction between
             them.' A number of the articles in the anthology are overtly racist,
             some are written by rabbis of some distinction. The most
             depressing aspect is not that there are learned rabbis who hold such
             views but that the religious establishment finds no cause to condemn
             them." [LIEBMAN, p. 318]
 
     In 1988 Rabbi Binyamin Tzvielli, the former Director of the Religious Department of Israel TV and Radio, attacked the principle of democracy:
 
       "The democratic psychosis ... has taken control of us for no substantial
       and visible reason ... Democracy is part of the culture of the West and
       together with this culture it goes down and disappears before our eyes."
       [SPRINZAK, p. 273]
 
    In 1985, says Ehud Sprinzak, "Relying on Maimonides and other distinguished Halakhic sources [Rabbi Israel] Ariel maintained that the famous commandment ["Thou Shalt Not Kill"] was never meant to be universal, that only the killing of a Jew qualifies as murder and is punished accordingly. Killing of a non-Jew is not punishable by society." [SPRINZAK, p. 270] Rabbi Ariel even wrote that the Jewish Promised Land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile and sooner or later a war would have to be undertaken against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, "with the expressed purpose of their elimination." [SPRINZAK, p. 270] "Although [Ariel] writes in a scholarly manner and eschews policy recommendations," notes Ehud Sprinzak, "any reader familiar with his very dogmatic fundamentalism is left with no doubt: neither Muslims nor Christians qualify as alien residents [in Israel]; both should be expelled from the Holy Land." [SPRINZAK, p. 22]
 
     In 1994, Israeli rabbi Yitzhak (Joseph) Ginsburg produced a treatise "glorifying Baruch Goldstein's murder of 29 Muslims in a Hebron mosque," selling 1,000 copies in its first two days of publication. The author proclaimed that "the crowning glory of [Goldstein's] act is the sanctification of God" and that "God looks more fondly on Jewish blood and therefore it is redder and its life has priority." A second edition of Ginsburg's publication was printed in 1995. Another volume, entitled "Baruch Hagever: A Memorial Volume for the Holy Person Baruch Goldstein," was published by Michael Ben-Horin, Netanel Uzari, Yoel Lerner, and Yosef Dayan. Another rabbi, Ido Elba, faced Israeli charges of incitement to violence in his work entitled, "Clarification of Religious Precepts on Killing Gentiles." [ALON, G., HA'ARETZ]
 
     Rabbi Elba faced Israeli court action for his dangerous views but, as Orit Shochat noted in 1998 in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz,
 
       "Elba expounded on the halacha [Jewish religious law], as many others
        do. True, he did so at a rather inconvenient time shortly after the
        massacre of dozens of Palestinians by Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein
        but the halacha itself (which is, after all, immune to charges of
        incitement) contains some racist and sinister statements for which 
        Rabbi Elba is not responsible. Why is there no ban on Sefer Hinuch,
        which is given as a bar mitzvah gift to Jewish boys throughout the
        country, although it also contains interpretations of these matters, in the
        very spirit of Rabbi Ido Elba?" [SHOCHAT]
 
      It must be emphasized that all such commentators as those above are not just aberrant Jews who drag up racist and totalitarian dogma out of the blue: such people, often "learned rabbis," are citing Jewish religious sources to today argue their theses. The crucial questions here, of course, involve how seminal Jewish religious texts can be used to sanction such monstrous material, to what degree it always has been used in this way, and how others -- like the Nazis, reacting to Jewish fanaticism and racial claims -- have built and expanded upon it for their own purposes. And lastly, of course: How widespread is Jewish interest in such religious sources now? Charles Liebman even notes another disturbing example in a more mainstream, and respectable, Orthodox Jewish journal in Israel:
 
             An article in Tkhumin, the most distinguished annual [in Israel]
             dealing with matters of Jewish law and public issues from an
             orthodox perspective, published a learned essay on the status
             of Muslims, according to Jewish law. The author seems to phrase
             himself carefully and there is no trace of polemic in the tone of
             the article, a fact that makes the conclusions all the more striking.
             According to the writer, under the ideal conditions envisioned
             by Jewish law, non-Jews in the land of Israel ought to live in
             servitude to Jews. In fact, their very right to live in the Land of
             Israel is problematic. It is permitted though not required to save
             their lives when they are endangered. [LIEBMAN, p. 311]
 
     Overtly racist and fascist-like dogma from Jewish religious texts are finding new receptivity in modern Israel's "religious Zionist" schools. Students are instructed that non-Jews have "inferior biological characteristics." Charles Liebman and Stephen Cohen note that students "learn that the first two [Jewish] patriarchs, Abraham and Isaac, each had two sons so that the Jewish son might inherit pure genes whereas the corrupt, impure genes that Abraham inherited from his idolatrous ancestors could be passed on to the non-Jewish son. Only Jacob's son -- those of the third generation -- inherited pure genes and were worthy of being Jewish ... That there is no outcry against [this] being made part of the religious Zionist high school curriculum suggests the level that Jewish ethnocentrism has reached in some quarters." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 60] Which is to say, a level it has been for many for most of Jewish history. (If such material is given credence in some Jewish circles in our own day, what, one imagines, was the Jewish community thinking in the medieval era?)
 
      "There is a strain in Jewish thought," laments London rabbi Mark Solomon, "that says there is a special Godly something or other that is passed down in a certain genetic line which confers a special quality on people and Jewishness is a special quality. I call that metaphysical racism." [KLEIN, E., p. 58]
 
      It is not difficult to find instances where texts can be mined for religious justification of divinely-sanctioned Jewish chauvinism, racism, and dominance over others. Some Jewish religious texts centered on the Chosen People ethos underscore this attitude of Jewish preeminence and control over non-Jews:
 
        "Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I will lift up mine hand to the
         Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people: and they shall bring thy
         sons in their arms and thy daughters shall be carried upon their
         shoulders. And kings shall be thy nursing fathers and their queens thy
         nursing mothers; they shall bow down to thee with their face towards
         the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet."   ISAIAH, 49:22-23
 
         "Kings shall come from you [Israelites] and shall rule wherever
          the foot of the sons of man has trodden. I [God] shall give to your
          seed all the earth which is under heaven, and they shall rule over
          all the nations according to their desire; and afterward they shall
          draw the whole earth to themselves, and shall inherit it forever."
                         -- Book of Jubilees 32:18-19 [MACDONALD]
 
     This kind of thinking even has credibility in some quarters of American Jewish academe. In 1993, in a book published by SUNY (State University of New York Press), David Novak examined various Jewish religious perspectives, including the idea of Jewish domination over others, and finds that such a notion is irrefutably part of Orthodox Judaism:
 
     "If the Torah is only for the sake of Israel's election, then it appears to be
      [in] the interest of her nationalist self-interest ... The practical
      implications of assuming that the Torah is solely for the sake of affirming
      the election of Israel [by God] is to see no transcendental standard
      governing Israel's relationships with the nations [other people] of the
      world. The only relationship possible, then, is one where Gentiles accept
      Jewish sovereignty and dominance, be it political or only "religious" -- in
      the usual western sense of that distinction ... Such a theology can all too
      easily lend itself to such a practical program of dominance. Indeed, a
      consistent proponent of it would have no theological arguments with
      which to argue against such programs, however much he or she might
      be morally offended by them." [NOVAK, Elec of Is, p. 25-26]
 
      With the military empowerment of modern Israel and Jewish religious texts in mind, Shalom Carmy notes that
 
       "A decade before the Balfour declaration [the 1917 British decree that
       helped to establish the modern state of Israel]," Isaac Breuer had warned
       that the power conferred by halaka on male Jews over women, slaves,
       and aliens, imposed an awesome responsibility, and that only the most
       rigorous discipline would prevent its abuse."  [CARMY, Rel Zio, p. 19]
 
         With the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1996, most Jews were shocked that his killer, Yigal Amir, was Jewish  -- a man who felt that the myths of historic Israel and Jewish religious laws were being betrayed by Rabin's peace accords with Arabs. Many were also disturbed to find out that Amir was so deeply and passionately trained in traditional Jewish religious doctrine. Earlier, Baruch Goldstein, another devout Orthodox Jew and a doctor, had machine-gunned to death 29 Arabs as they prayed in a Hebron mosque. Meir Lockshin, a Canadian professor and himself an Orthodox Jew, was so disturbed by the killings that he wrote
 
      "One just can't ignore the fact that Amir and the other famous Orthodox
        murderer of the nineties, Baruch Goldstein, attended the finest modern
        Orthodox schools and excelled in their studies. They were not
        sociopaths. They were well-integrated and respected members of
        their communities; it was impossible to tell them apart from their
        colleagues and friends. As Rabbi Lichenstein said on the day before
        the assassination, the nationalist Orthodox community in Israel would
        have gladly shown off Yigal Amir as one of the great successes of its
        educational system. It is absurd then for the Orthodox community to
        say that he and Goldstein are not representative."  [LOCKSHIN]
 
     Within a year of Rabin's death, his imprisoned assassin had "attracted marriage proposals from dozens of young women at home and abroad, including some from wealthy American families." [AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, 8-18-97]
 
     Baruch Goldstein's terrorist act against random Arabs was not the first such attack in Israel. In 1982 a Jewish American in Jerusalem, Alan Harry Goodman, a veteran of the Israeli army, "shot his way into the Dome of the Rock [the third holiest shrine/mosque in worldwide Islam] with an M-16 rifle, killing one man and seriously wounding three others."  "Since Goodman's trial in 1982," noted Amos Elon nine years later, "more than twenty religious fanatics have been caught in the act of preparing one or another violent outrage on the Temple Mount. Many more suspects were charged but released for lack of sufficient evidence." [ELON, 1991, p. 100]
 
     In 1984, 16 Jewish religiously-obsessed men were arrested for their plans to blow up the Dome of the Rock. A few months later, 28 "young yeshiva students from mainstream rabbinical colleges in Jerusalem were arrested one night at the foot of the Temple Mount with ladders and ropes in their hands. Some were armed. The presiding judge in their case allowed them all to go free."  Not long after this incident, yet another set of 28 religiously-driven criminals were apprehended "as they were plotting to blow up Moslem shrines on the Temple Mount. Some members were caught in the act of connecting explosives to Arab buses." "Some of the plotters," notes Amos Elon, "had distinguished service records in the army. A few were public figures ... All were devoutly Orthodox. Most were graduates of prominent religious seminaries. They included ranking officers in the army and a veteran air-force pilot." [ELON, 1991, p. 100-102]
 
     Funds for their legal defense came from "hundreds of synagogues throughout the country," "nearly a million" Israeli signed petitions requesting amnesty. "Given the gravity of the charges against them," notes Amos Elon, "most of the defendants came away with relatively light sentences." [ELON, 1991, p. 105] Some of the convicted eventually had their sentences dismissed by the president of Israel.
 
     In view of such events, a troubled Israeli rabbi, Tzvi Marx, worries that "the unwillingness of the yeshiva [Orthodox training] world to allow for moral criticism, on the simplistic religious assumption of the [Jewish Orthodox] tradition's inherent perfection, has spawned an exaggerated, unholy triumphalism as well as racism which bore fruits in the violence of the Jewish Defense League, the [Meir Kahane's] Kach movement, the [Jewish terrorist underground] Machteret, and finally in Hebron." [MARX, p. 95] Such a dangerous Orthodox attitude has counterparts in the United States, as evidenced by Brooklyn's Rabbi Abraham Hecht's religious sanctioning of the Rabin assassination. [GOLDBERG, JJ, p. 260] (Rabin was purportedly murdered for transgressions against Jewish religious law, particularly in his willingness to relinquish conquered land back to Arabs).
 
       In the first half of the twentieth century, a prominent American rabbi, Mordecai Kaplan, found the implications of traditional Jewish views of themselves as a Chosen People so ominous and out of sync with modern universalistic, egalitarian, and democratic values that he founded an entire movement, Reconstructionism, that rejected many of the tenets of Orthodox Judaism. (Members of Orthodox Judaism in turn of course rejected his views; some groups excommunicated him). Kaplan had this to say about the Jews as the Chosen People:
 
     "We cannot fail to recognize in the claim of Jewish superiority a kinship
      and resemblance to the similar claims of other national and racial groups
      which have been used in defense of the imperialist exploitation of the
      yellow and black man by the whites on the grounds that they were the
      'white man's burden.' They are the grounds for the German persecution
      of Jewry, in accord with the Aryan clause of the Third Reich's
      fundamental law. They were in the past the grounds in which our own
      people rationalized their conquest and expropriation of the Canaanites...
      All such claims to superiority of one race, nation, or caste [are]
      detrimental to the interests of humanity, and [are] essentially vicious."
      [KAPLAN, p. 94-95]
 
      As Jacob Wasserman, a German-Jewish novelist wrote in 1929:
 
      "It is clear to me that no people can continue being chosen, nor
      unceasingly designate itself as such, without upsetting in the eyes
      of other peoples the normal order of things. The whole idea is plainly
      absurd and immoral." [in BARON, J., 1956, p. 209]
 
     This "immoral" and racist "viciousness" is directed by traditional Jewish teachings at any non-Jew. In the particular case of the people of African descent, Jewish racism is well evidenced in the writings of the influential and revered medieval Jewish sage, Moses Maimonides, whose work is so well regarded by orthodox Jews that some of it has become part of Orthodox liturgy. Maimonides said this about Africans:
 
      "The Negroes found in the remote South, and those who resemble them
      from among them that are with us in these climes ... the status of those is
      like that of irrational animals. To my mind they have not the rank of men,
      but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher
      than the rank of apes." [GUIDE TO THE PERPLEXED]
 
     (While pious Jews are supposed to follow 613 commandments in the Torah, Maimonides even "spoke about forcing" Gentiles to follow seven laws that the Talmud deems anyone must follow, if Jews have the power to enforce them.) [NOVAK, p. 48, E of I]
 
     In recent years African-American scholars in particular have been speculating on the origins of racism as it affected their ancestors and the resultant moral climate that permitted the dehumanization of Africans for exploitation in the New World slave trade. Many believe that the seminal equation of Blacks and slavery is to be located in Jewish tradition, in the so-called "Hamitic" myth. In the Old Testament Noah (of "Ark" fame) had three sons, each brother the patriarch of different racial and social lines of humanity. One of them, Ham, had a son who was eventually cursed by Noah (Genesis 9:25) to be a "servant of servants" (i.e., slave). Jewish tradition links Africans as descendants of this grandson of Noah, Canaan:
 
          "[Canaan's] children shall be born ugly and black! ... Your
          grandchildren's hair shall be twisted into kinks ... they shall go naked,
          and their male members shamefully elongated. Men of this race are
          called Negroes; their father Canaan commanded them to love theft and
          fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their masters and never
          tell the truth." [GRAVES, p. 121]
 
      "The association of Ham with the African race," writes Tony Martin, an African-American professor at Wellesley College, "made this myth a major rationalization for the European enslavement of Africans ... Christians have customarily borne the brunt of blame for the Hamitic myth and they certainly are not without sin in this regard. Yet, the Hamitic myth (that is, the association of the African with the supposed curse of Noah) was invented by Jewish talmudic scholars over a thousand years before the transatlantic slave trade." [MARTIN, p. 33]
 
     "Since early times," notes Judah Rosenthal, "Noah's curse of Canaan was utilized by the defenders of slavery.... [Jewish] legend was that some Canaanite tribes left Canaan during Joshua's conquest and settled in Africa ... In the Talmud Africans are called Canaanites." [ROSENTHAL, p. 74] Some Jewish religious literature (the Midrash) opines that all descendants of Ham were cursed to be slaves. [ROSENTHAL, p. 76]
 
     This version of the Ham tradition is noted in the Jewish Encyclopedia:
 
      "Ham is represented by the Talmudist as one of the three who had
       intercourse with their wives in the Ark, being punished therefore in that
       his descendants, the Ethiopians, are black ... Ham was punished by
       having his descendants led into captivity with their buttocks
       uncovered." [JEW ENCY, v. VI, p. 186]
 
     The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion notes: "The Canaanites are believed to have been descended from Canaan, youngest son of Ham ... Noah cursed Canaan for the depravity of Ham upon his father, destining him to be subjugated by Shem -- thereby foretelling the eventual displacement of the Canaanites by the Israelites (descended from Shem), consistently justified by the Bible as the inevitable outcome of the sexual licentiousness practiced by the Canaanites." [WERBLOWSKY, p. 149]
 
     In modern history, few expressions of Jewish racism towards Blacks were as boldly proclaimed as Norman Podhoretz's infamous article in the 1960's in the American Jewish Congress' magazine Commentary, of which he was editor. Podhoretz, once self-described as a liberal, readjusted Commentary down an increasingly neoconservative path:
 
           "The hatred I feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to
             face or admit, and it is the most hidden and most overloaded...
             It no longer ... has any cause or justification ... I know it from insane
             rage that can stir me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism, I know it
             from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a
             mixed couple." [LINCOLN, p. 179]
 
     Traditional Jewish racism, based on religious principles, has taken new forms with newer secular Jewish ideologies. Boas Evron, an Israeli writer, traces traditional Chosen People attitudes into its newly secularized mode: Zionism, through the "Revisionist" Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky, says Evron, "poeticized about 'hidden glory,' declaring that every Jew is a potential 'prince' -- in other words, that Jews are noble by their very nature (just as the Germans imagined themselves to be innately superior) ... Indeed, this belief in innate superiority is the basis of racism and of all the varieties of fascism, which is also a reason for classifying revisionist Zionism within the general category of fascist psychology." [EVRON, p. 112]
 
     Even in the years leading up to the Holocaust in Germany, Daniel Niewyk recognizes some world-view parallels between German fascism and the growing Zionist movement among German Jewry:
 
      "At the heart of the Zionist critique of liberal [Jewish] assimilation [into
       German society] lay the conviction that Jews constituted a unique race
        ... That [Jewish marriage to non-Jews] might become a serious problem
       for the Jews prompted Zionist leaders in the Berlin Jewish community to
       authorize a report identifying intermarriage as a threat to the 'racial
       purity of the stock.'" [NIEWYK, p. 129]
 
      Niewyk overlooks what he calls "this [Jewish] racial arrogance" as having roots in the Chosen People ethos; he chooses to frame it as a mirror-like reaction to German fascism: "[it is] nothing other than the photographic negative of anti-Semitism." [NIEWYK, p. 131]
 
     But the former head of the Israel Civil Rights Association, Israel Shahak, does see the connection between traditional Orthodox Jewish racism and its capacity nowadays to violently implement such views in nationalist form, via the modern state of Israel. "Many people," says Shahak, "do not realize where Zionism ... is tending: to a combination of all the old hates of classical Judaism towards Gentiles." [SHAHAK, p. 72]  "It is true," notes professor Georges Tamarin, an immigrant to Israel, "that the Bible is one of the greatest creations of human cultures. But it is equally true that it is full of inhuman motives and that, as [Jewish author Arthur] Koestler (who surely cannot be accused of being an anti-Semite) stated, all the bases of the [Nazi discriminatory] Nuremberg Laws can be found in it ... If the segregatory laws of the Herrenrasse were barbarous, the segregatory laws of the Chosen People are equally barbarous." [TAMARIN, p. 24]
 
      Even the German-Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, of "I-Thou" fame, beloved by many American Jews as a benevolent proponent of Jewish mysticism, called Jews "a community of blood [Gemeinschaft seines Blutes] ... the deepest, most potent stratum of our being." Many Jewish authors nowadays have busied themselves with diffusing the most troubling implications of Buber's ideas. "This language," remarks apologist Enzo Traverso, "so surprising today, signifies for him an essentially cultural strategy which ... led inevitably to a reactionary or racist political standpoint." [TRAVERSO, p. 30] 
 
     "Of all the doctrines that Buber ever enunciated," notes Maurice Friedman, "this one of the 'blood' is perhaps the most problematic and the most difficult to comprehend ... Buber would have seen no contradiction here, however, for his call to inner decision was a call to the realization of one's uniqueness through the uniqueness of one's people." [FRIEDMAN, M., 1981, p. 132]
 
     Jewish identity, wrote Buber, is not
 
    "just the mere continuity with the past. [It] has deposited something
    in us that can never leave us in any hour of our life, that determines
    every tone and hue of our lives, whatever we do and whatever befalls
    us -- namely blood, the deepest, [most] potent level of the soul."
    [POPPEL, S., 1976, p. 129-130]
 
     As Israel Shahak notes, during the rise of Nazism Buber was "actually teaching doctrines about non-Jews not unlike the Nazi doctrines about Jews." [SHAHAK, p. 28] Buber's (Jewish) friend and influence, Gustav Landauer, had addressed the idea of the Jewish community of "blood" earlier:
 
     "What man is by birth, what is his innermost and most secret,
     his inviolable uniqueness, that is the great community of the
     living in him, that is his blood and his community of blood.
     Blood is thicker than water; the community which the individual
     discovers himself to be is mightier and nobler and more ancient
     than the thin influences of state and society. What is most
     individual in us is what is most common in us." [FRIEDMAN, M.,
     1981, p. 133]
 
     A British Jew, Emma Klein, in a 1996 book about Jewish identity, led a section called What Is It to Be Jewish? with answers to the question by four young Jews who were grappling with the issue.
 
                 "It's two things," said Nichola, "It's a family thing and a thing
                  that has been imposed on me through blood. It's a genetic
                  thing, if you like."
 
                 "It's something that has been imposed on me," said Claire,
                 "It's a blood thing. I can't escape it."
 
                 "I feel Jewish," said Sophia, "out of history, my blood, and
                  it's just like a nationality.'
 
                  [A young man named Guy summed up the common theme more
                  ominously]: "Entertaining any idea about racial purity just stinks
                  of Hitler but it is an issue. I feel all sorts of people have some
                  pride in their roots and they feel racial mixing dilutes your
                  heritage. I think I might feel that. It frightens me." [KLEIN, E., p.
                  191]
 
      Even under Soviet communism and the emphatic destruction of religious roots, this familiar Jewish identity endured. Sylvia Rothchild notes the results of American Jewish Committee interviews (1978-80) with Russian Jews now living in America:
 
     "Many émigrés spoke of their Jewishness as 'a matter of blood,'
     out of their control. They felt it as something 'mysterious ...
     unfathomable," a wellspring of feelings that inundated them from
     time to time. [Some] experience 'inexplicable' Jewish loyalty in
     spite of the fact that they were not religious, knew no Yiddish and
     had no Jewish education." [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 34]
 
     When Jewish author Ann Roiphe read some scientific evidence that suggested that "not much admixture has taken place between the Ashkenazi Jews and their gentile neighbors [in Europe] during the last 700 years," she was pleased. "It is actually comforting," she wrote, "to think of the scientist looking through a powerful lens and finding [Biblical heroines] Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and the unfortunate, unwanted Leah sending their chemical matter into the future." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 37]
 
     In 1973 Rabbi A. Avidan provided the following religious "guidance" for Israeli soldiers. It was published by the Central Regional Command of the Israeli Army. No other rabbi ever challenged its contents. It was eventually taken out of circulation, presumably because it could undermine military commanders' own orders:
 
      "When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or
       in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that these civilians are incapable
       of harming our forces, then according to the Halakhah [Jewish religious
       law] they may and even should be killed ... In a war, when our forces
       storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to
       kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good."
       [SHAHAK, p. 76]
 
       For an outside observer to both groups, traditional Judaism and German Nazism, the the original intention of the two belief systems seems similar: each seeks to maintain group privilege and exclusivity through racial lines of its own.  (The likes of Patai, Cantor, Kahane and others extend racist self-glory, one way or the other, to our own day). Each anticipates in-group domination over others.  And each ideology -- in origin -- aims to clear their respective land claims of foreign elements. By any means necessary. The Nazi's idea of Aryan supermen stems from a secular, pre-Judaeo-Christian pseudo-pagan revival, tinged with nihilism; the Jews special grace is religiously sanctioned from God, who was originally conceived as a brutal and vengeful Lord of a Kingdom. Each group envisions a special destiny, above all other people.
 
     "The fact remains," says Harold Cruse, "that the European experience shows that when it comes to playing the role of the Chosen People in history, the danger is that two can play this game as well as one. When that happens, woe be to the side that is short on numbers." [CRUSE, p. 483]
 
      For those who might decry with indignation a comparison of oppressed and oppressor as being ridiculously unwarranted, largely due to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust epoch, we need only turn to history to confirm where the atrocious deeds of the Nazis and Jews, in both action and attitude, merge:
 
           When the Lord your God gives them [the Hittites, the Girgashites,
           the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the
           Jebusites -- all contestant tribes against the Jews for parts of the
           ancient land of Israel] to you and you defeat them; then you must
           utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them and
           show them no mercy ... [Deuteronomy 7:1-6]
 
     This, of course, is from the Jewish Torah, known in Christian tradition as the Old Testament. This is not just ancient history, or legend about ancient history, but part of the most sacred of Jewish religious texts.  It is the origin of Judaic belief per their claims to the land of Israel. Many Jews to this day believe such material to be the infallibly dictatorial Word of God, as do many Christians who accept the Old Testament as part of their own religious foundation.
 
      For anyone who takes the time to wade through the avalanche of esoteric minutia in the Old Testament, examples of religiously sanctioned cruelty and atrocity by the Israelites are found to be core to their dogma of "specialhood" and land conquest. The eminent and popular scholar Joseph Campbell (who, of course, is vilified by some indignant Jews as just another in the endless parade of anti-Semites; Jewish scholar Sander Gilman, for example, calls Campbell's work "tainted with the rhetoric of anti-Semitism."  [GILMAN, Psycho and, p. 101] spent a lifetime studying world myths and belief systems and calls the Torah tradition "one of the most brutal war mythologies of all time." [CAMPBELL, P. 181] Slave labor, rape, and genocide are, for example, encouraged in the following Old Testament passage:
 
                 When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms
                 of peace to it. And if its answer to you is yes, then all the people
                 who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall
                 serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war
                 against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your
                 God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the
                 sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and
                 everything else in the city, all its spoils, you shall take as booty
                 for yourself.  [Deuteronomy 20:10-14]
 
    When God reputedly gave the land of Israel to the Jews, there were, of course, people already living there. And what, according to the most sacred of Jewish texts, was deemed necessary to clear the place of non-Jews?  The text from the Torah quoted above continues:
 
                  Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you,
                  which are not cities here. But in the cities of the people that the
                  Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save
                  nothing alive that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them,
                  the Hittites and Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites,
                  the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has commanded.
                                             [Deuteronomy 20:14-18]
 
      Could Hitler and his henchmen improve much on this?
 
      The violent wresting of the Holy Land from others is led by Joshua and begins with carnage at the city of Jericho:
 
         "And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both men
          and women, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass,
          with the edge of the sword ... "    [JOSHUA, 6-21]
 
         The genocide continued:
 
         "So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of
          the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings; he left none
          remaining but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God
          of Israel commanded."   [JOSHUA 10:40]
 
     The parallel between the Israelites' scapegoating of their archrivals, the Canaanites, as prelude to their extermination, and the Nazis' contempt for, and mass murderer of, Jews is striking. "Canaan," says Eric Friedland, "is transformed [by Jews] into a cipher for the worst elements of Israel's social and religious life, a major contributing cause of its degeneration and downfall. A finishing touch is furnished by Isiaiah (23:8) and Zechariah (14:21) when they debase the term 'Canaanite' into a synonym for a merchant or trafficker. Haven't we heard this canard before?" [FRIEDLAND, p. 79]
 
      Modern Jewish reflection upon, and moral reckoning for, their own genocide of the Canaanites, Friedland concludes, has not been forthcoming:
 
             "The ... difficult task is to come to terms from a religious
             perspective with that part of our past that, under a less developed
             moral standard, was for a long time condoned but in the present
             age raises serious ethical questions with profound repercussions."
             [FRIEDLAND, p. 81]
 
    As Robert Carroll notes:
 
           "Total war can make sense from a strategic point of view, but it
            raises serious moral problems; and the genocidal war against
            the Canaanites in the Bible has bothered sensitive readers of a book
            often thought to express perfect, divinely ordained morality."
            [CARROLL, R., 1989, p. 159]
 
     "I remember," notes Joshua Cohen, "[in fifth grade] asking my [Jewish religion] teacher how it was possible for Jews to have behaved like Nazis, and being told that the attempted genocide in [Torah chapter] 1 Samuel was different in that the Israelites were carrying out a holy command ... [This] is itself an example of the appalling bigotry that can subsist in canonized texts. The biblical paradigm, moreover, confirms our fear that canonization of texts might confer a moral authority on bigotry. For many Jews, the text of the Bible and particularly of the Torah is sacred ... My fifth-grade teacher is hardly alone in regarding the Command to exterminate Amalek as the word of God." [COHEN, J. p. 293]
 
       Although Aryan Nazism was an expressly stated anti-Christian creed, (restructuring German culture in terms of a pre-Christian and pre-Judaic neo-pagan revival, i.e., erasing Jewish and Christian world views), many Jews today ignore a myriad of other variables and stretch medieval Christian antipathy for the "Jews who killed Christ” into a psycho-social basis in the formation of the Third Reich. In this view, a key to understanding Hitler's hatred of Jews was Christianity. Richard Libowitz, for example, states that "the fact that the vast majority of perpetrators of and bystanders to the Holocaust were baptized in good standing of traditional churches, none of whom has ever been formally rebuked by his or her particular denomination, suggests one of the primary non-Jewish challenges of Holocaust study demanding evaluation. Elie Wiesel has confronted the most disturbing facet of that realm with his reminder that 'not every Christian was a killer, but every killer was a Christian.'" [LIBOWITZ, Asking, p. 65]  "It [The Holocaust] was Christians who perpetrated it," declares David Wyman,  "-- the Nazis who were the products of western Christian civilization." [WILSON, M., p. 30]
 
     Richard L. Rubenstein proclaims that German Nazi
 
      "National Socialism was an anti-clerical movement. It was nevertheless
      dialectically related to Christianity. It was the negation of Christianity as
      negation was understood by Hegel and Freud. It could have as little
      existed without Christianity as the Black Mass of medieval Satanism
      could have existed without the mass of Roman Catholicism. The classic
      villains of Christianity, the Jews, became the primal object of
      extermination of the anti-Christian Christians, the Nazis. Studying the
      classical utterances on Jews and Judaism, and at the same time reviewing
      the terrible history of the Nazi period, prompts one to ask whether there
      is something in the logic of Christian theology that, when pushed to the
      extreme, justifies, if it does not incite to, the murder of Jews."
      [RUBENSTEIN, p. 5]
 
     Such a libel is profoundly short-sighted, preposterously convoluted, and loaded with Orwellian doublethink. It asserts that the Nazis' emphatic break with Christianity was really an affirmation of fundamental Christian religious tenets and it ridiculously equates Satanism with the Catholic Church by virtue of the devil cult's very rejection of the latter. (Was Godless communism, Aryan fascism's opposite, an expression of Christianity too -- at the same time! -- because it also took hold in a Christian milieu?) Rubenstein's logic, and so many others' like him, insist that the very assertion of negation is really its opposite, an expression of affirmation. More profoundly, the insistence that Christianity presumed murderous antipathy towards Jews (fulfilled in German Nazism) and is somehow rooted in Christian universalistic teachings, completely overlooks the origins of such institutionalized hatred in western religious tradition. By Rubenstein's own logic (or by any more reasoned analysis), even if we accept the scurrilous premise that the Christian world view is somehow murderous, it did not evolve out of thin air but was itself an outgrowth of Judaism. Even by Rubenstein's own logic, it must be underscored that the initial Christians were themselves Jews who rejected (negated -- by Hegel's, Freud's, or anybody's definition) Judaism. Then, following Rubenstein's own argument, Christianity's negation of Judaism was really its affirmation, and the worst of "Chosen People" Judaism was passed down from its ideological parent from Jewry to Christianity to Nazism.
 
     However one views this scenario, if we are going to seek out, in ancient origins, the presumed roots of Nazism, it is obviously more viable to locate examples of -- and role models for -- "nationalist" violent hate behavior even back further in the religious past, not in Christian universalism that invited others to join their fold, but in the "particularist," exclusionist beliefs and brutally merciless actions of the ancient Jews themselves. Many today will steadfastly deny, and be outraged by, such disturbing Nazi/Israelite parallels. How can one compare the relatively "primitive" actions of a group of people thousands of years ago to those of a supposedly "civilized” group in the 1940's: the Nazis, the consummate, scientific dehumanizers?  After all, times have changed; the Jews of the late twentieth century understand their heritage to represent a "beacon of light to the rest of humanity." "The origins of democracy are to be found in the Mosaic code,” so it is claimed by so many Jewish apologists and propagandists, and all the rest of it.  But the bottom line is this:  If Jewish-instigated genocide is routinely disregarded or trivialized from the ancient past, then why should any of the Jewish myths of that era be taken seriously? To deny the genocidal origins of the Jewish covenant with God as central to the faith is to deny the whole of the Old Testament, the origins of Jewish identity itself, and their link to the land of Israel. Ironically, for all the modern Jewish bitterness against Christianity for its alleged endemic anti-Semitism, the fact that Christianity also accepts the events of the Old Testament as the incontestable "will of God" spares Jews regular inquiries into the moral and ethical responsibility for the Nazi-like misdeeds of their ancient ancestors, a religious foundation that has led in more than one direction to the socio-political dogmas today. Christianity is in fact largely protective of Jewish tradition.  To both Jew and Christian alike (and Muslims, for that matter, who also accept the Old Testament) God sanctioned the Israelite's massacres and they are, hence, acceptable and morally unchallenged. The Nazis never made claims that God was on their side. As such, they are everyone's monsters.
 
      (Christianity is responsible for the attempted extinction of the Jewish people? Some have argued the exactly opposite case. As Marcus Arkin notes about the writings of Jewish British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, "[He] reminds the Jews that Jesus Christ has done more for them than anybody else and that had the Church not flourished and Christianity had not become widespread, Judaism may have been forgotten completely." [ARKIN, 1989]   Because Jesus was a Jew, and based his teachings on the Old Testament, Christianity is not free in categorically dismissing the Jewish religion. Nor destroying it. As Jewish scholar Samuel Sandmel once even argued, Jesus "was ... a Jewish loyalist ... He was a martyr to his Jewish patriotism.") [JACOB, W., 1974, p. 205]
 
     In the case of yet another ancient Israelite genocide (this one more successful) against the Amalekites, even one of the foremost modern scholars on the Old Testament, Bernard Anderson, turns apologist -- in apparent deference to the all-pervasiveness of Judeo-Christian thinking in Western culture -- when he argues that the modern viewer should suspend moral judgment about Jewish-inspired genocide in their religio-historical origins:
 
        "Through the [Israelite] prophet Samuel, [King] Saul was given a divine
         command to utterly destroy [the Amalekites] -- man, woman, child,
         cattle, and goods ... According to modern ethical standards, this act of
         total extermination was a barbarous thing (though it was scarcely less
         refined than modern warfare!) But instead of making a value judgment
         from our standpoint, let us try to understand the act within the religious
         perspective of ancient Israel." [ANDERSON, p. 172]
 
     As the Torah/Old Testament commands: "Now go and smite Amalek, and exterminate everything that is his. Don't pity him, but kill man, woman, infant and nursling, ox, sheep, camel and ass." [SAMUEL 15:2-3]
 
         Saul in fact initially spared the King of the Amalekites, Agag, and confiscated some prime livestock. For Saul's reluctance to blindly obey the word of the Israelite God and exterminate every living thing, he was considered to have "sinned" and was severely reprimanded by the prophet Samuel. Eventually Saul attempted to make amends by personally hacking Agag "in pieces." [I SAMUEL 15. 1-33] "So decisively did [Saul] defeat [the Amalekites]," says scholar Bernhard Anderson, "that they vanished from the historical scene shortly afterwards." [ANDERSON, p. 172]
 
     "Heretics, false prophets, witches, communities harboring apostates, and the six Amorite nations that occupied Canaan at the time of the Israelite conquest," notes Joshua Cohen, "are all sentenced to extermination in the book of Deuteronomy. But the cherem [the sentence of "extermination"] on Amalek, is the most renowned ban in all of Jewish tradition. It is pronounced twice: in Exodus, Chapter 17, and again in Deuteronomy, Chapter 25." [COHEN, J. p. 290]
 
     Even more troubling, the Old Testament asserts that "the Lord will be at war with Amalek throughout the ages." [EXODUS 17:16] "Amalekites," notes the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, "were regarded as Israel's inveterate foes, whose annihilation became a sacred obligation ... Only after the final destruction of the Amalekites will God and his throne be complete." [WERBLOWSKY, R., p. 41]  The Old Testament commands Jews to literally "blot out the memory of Amalek," an order that, as part of continuous religious review, ironically ensures that it can never be forgotten. On the contrary, such a religious sanction secures, notes Joshua Cohen, "the enduring presence of bigotry in [Jewish] sacred teachings." [COHEN, p. 299]
 
     A disturbing modern perspective on the Amalekites is their reinvention in some Orthodox and Zionist Jewish minds as Arabs (and any other non-Jews, or even Jews, that are understood to want to "destroy" Israel. Michael Asheri's Amalek, for instance, is generic Germans.) [ASHERI, M., 1983, p. 340]
 
     Rabbi Avraham Weiss (who we will meet again later in this chapter assaulting a convent in Poland) explains that:
 
       "The affirmative Torah commandment is to destroy those who bear the
        seed of Amalek. Since the halakha has ruled that Amalek does not
        exist today, the commandment cannot be carried out. Rav [Rabbi]
        Haim Soloveitchik, however, maintained that there are two forms of
        Amalek. There is the genetic Amalek, and there is the figurative
        Amalek, which constitutes any nation willing to destroy Israel. Basing
        themselves on this position, Kahanists [the followers of Rabbi Meir
        Kahane] argue that Arabs are figurative Amalek. Thus, when Arabs
        were indiscriminately killed, the classic Kahanist response was, "We
        were not involved, but we applaud the action." Thus, after Ami Popper
        murdered seven Arabs, Rabbi Kahane suggested that a street be named
        after him. Thus, the Hevron massacre [Baruch Goldstein's murder of 29
        Arabs at prayer in a mosque] has been defended in some circles not on
        rounds of national warfare, but on the grounds of fighting against
        Amalek. Rav Joseph B. Soloveitch [says that] every individual who
        bears the genes of Amalek must be wiped out. With regard to the
        figurative Amalek, on the other hand, one is mandated to engage in
        warfare against any nation that attempts to destroy the Jewish people."
        [WEISS,  p. 50]
 
     Who then, one must inevitably be drawn to wonder, might be included as the (figurative) enemies of (figurative) Israel who seeks to (figuratively) destroy it?  "The name Amalek," observes Joshua Cohen, "has taken on a symbolic meaning in Jewish tradition ... To most Jews, Amalek represents the malign genius of anti-Semitism." [COHEN, J., p. 291] Amalek can hence be creatively interpreted to mean virtually anybody. "Anyone who acts to deliberately provoke hatred of God or Torah-fearing Jews," decried an ultra-Orthodox newspaper in Israel, "can be considered 'children of Amalek.'" [JERUSALEM POST, 3-15-92] "Amalek is also an ideology that denies Israel's unique mission in perfecting the world," wrote Shlomo Riskin in 1996, "The spiritual heirs of Amalek include the Nazis, the Soviet Communists and Moslem fundamentalists." [RISKIN, S., 3-1-96]
 
     The immediate modern Amalek nearest at hand in Israel was addressed by Rabbi Israel Hess in a 1980 issue of the campus magazine at one of Israel's pre-eminent colleges, Bar-Ilan University (religiously Orthodox in orientation). Hess was formerly its campus rabbi. The title of his piece was Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah. "Hess," says professor Ehud Sprinzak, "likened the Arabs to the biblical Amalekites, who were deservedly annihilated. The Amalekites, according to Hess, were born socially and militarily treacherous and cruel. Their relation to Jews was like the relation of darkness to light -- one of total contradiction. The Arabs, who live today in the land of Israel and who are constantly waging a treacherous terrorist war against the Jews, are direct descendants of the Amalekites and the correct solution to the problem is extermination." [SPRINZAK, p. 123]
 
     Israeli Knesset member Amnon Rubenstein noted this articles, saying, "Rabbi Hess explains the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek and says that there is no mercy in this commandment: the commandment is to kill and destroy even children and infants. Amalek is whoever declares war against the people of God." [HARKABI, p. 150] "Hess implies that those who have a quarrel with the Jews instantly become Amalek and ought to be destroyed," says Yehoshafat Harkabi, "children and all ... Amalek is not an ancient extinct tribe but a generic enemy that each generation may identify for itself." [HARKABI, p. 150] "It's not just a lunatic fringe," says Rabbi David Hartman, about this kind of thinking in the Jewish community, "It is a diseased element that is capable of infiltrating into the Jewish self-understanding.' [DORFNER, p. 50]
 
     In 1992 Moshe Kohn was mailed a pamphlet in Israel. It's message was, he says,
 
     "Now that we Jews are again enjoying national sovereignty in our
     homeland, we at long last again have the opportunity -- and the
     duty -- to fulfill the Biblical commandment to exterminate Amalek.
     Moreover, only after we have done so will God's Kingdom prevail
     over all creation. And who exactly is today's Amalek? According
     to our pamphleteer, it is 'the Palestinians.'" [KOHN, M., 3-27-92]
    
     Jewish religious injunctions to mass slaughter are even part of traditional yearly Purim commemorations, particularly on Shabbat Zachor ("the Saturday of Remembrance") -- "the Sabbath on which Jews are commanded to obliterate the enemy of Amalek, the arch enemy of the Jewish people." [FEILER, p. 14]   In the wake of the mass murder of Arabs at prayer by Baruch Goldstein, "some Jews," noted the Jewish Bulletin, "say Goldstein was inspired by Purim passages that condone wanton killing." [KATZ, p. 1] Such passages from the biblical Book of Esther celebrate how Jews rose up to kill thousands of Persians who plotted against them, recited twice by observant Jews during Purim. "The tone [of these passages] is not self-defense," complains Rivkah Walton, "but of slaughter, slaughter, slaughter." [KATZ, p. 1]  "The concluding chapters of the Book of Esther," adds Peter Novick, "tell of the [Jewish] queen's soliciting permission to slaughter not just the Jews' armed enemies but the enemies' wives and children -- with a final death toll of seventy-five thousand. These 'memories' provided gratifying revenge fantasies to the Jews of medieval Europe." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 5] In the 1960s the Israelis kidnapped former Nazi official Adolph Eichmann from Argentina, and sentenced him to death in the Jewish state. One staff member at the American Jewish Committee worried that, because of the trial, "gentiles might learn that 'for over 2,000 years Jews have cheered joyously in the synagogues when the Megillah readers annually told of the hanging of [Queen Esther's arch-rival] Haman and his ten sons with him.'" [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 1323]
 
     "Objections to the Purim passages don't stop there, however," notes the Jewish Bulletin, "some people oppose the way biblical citations in Exodus (17:8-18) and Deuteronomy (25:17-19) are read on Shabbat Zachor before Purim. These call for the annihilation of the descendants of Amalek, the biblical enemy of the Israelites." [KATZ, p 1] Another Jewish commentator, Ismar Elbogen, noted the traditional emotional climate of such public Purim recitals:
 
      "Often the reading of the scroll [of Esther], was accompanied by
      customs intended to release the overwhelming feelings of joy,
      and these not infrequently took on wild form ... The noisy
      disturbances have been eliminated in every civilized country."
      [ELBOGEN, p. 110]
 
     In this Amalek context, what are we to make of the words of Philip Graubart in a 1996 issue of the Jewish Exponent? :
 
       "Baruch Goldstein examined the story of Esther and the biblical
       passages regarding Amalek and discovered it was permissible to
       murder 40 Muslims at prayer. And we all know in Judaism's vast
       corpus of sacred writings, there are a few other texts and ideas that,
       in the wrong hands, could lead to further atrocities.... Only Jews
       passionately committed to Jewish texts can fall victim to Judaism's
       dark side. Only Jews who absolutely revere the Torah as God's word
       could accept the biblical injunction to slaughter Amalek as a call to arms,
       or take God's genocidal commandments to Joshua to be currently
       relevant ... [but] I'm not afraid of passion, I'm terrified of the absence
       of passion in my own Jewish culture ... On a day to day basis
       I feel a lot more threatened by apathy than by zealotry. And so do most
       rabbis." [GRAUBART, p. 5]
 
       Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, an elected member of the Israeli Knesset, and a man even many Jews concede to have clearly fascist tendencies (Hebrew University professor Ehud Sprinzak calls Kahane's political party, Kach, "quasi-fascist," [SPRINZAK, p. 233] Lesley Hazelton calls Kahane himself "openly fascistic") [HAZELETON, L., 1987, p. 19] quotes the following two Old Testament citations to begin one of his books, Our Challenge:
 
      "For thou art a holy people unto the L-rd they G-d: the L-rd thy G-d hath
       chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that
       are on the face of the earth." [DEUTERONOMY, 7:6]
 
       "Every place wherever the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours:
        from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates
        even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be. There shall be no man
        able to stand before you: for the L-rd your G-d shall lay the fear of
        you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon,
        as he hath said unto you." [DEUTERONOMY, 11:24:25]
 
     Kahane then uses such religious 'authentication' to claim that "we [Jews] are not simply one more little superfluous nation but the heart and the reason for the world." [KAHANE, p. 173] As an Israeli Knesset member, he even submitted a bill that sought to physically separate Israeli Jews from Gentiles; fellow Knesset member Michael Eitan compared his proposals to "the Nazi's racist Nuremberg Laws." [SPRINZAK, p. 239] In 1987, a Van Leer Institute survey of Israeli youth found that "42 percent said they supported Kahane. Among religious youth, the support shot up to 60 percent." [HAZELETON, L., 1987, p. 132] (Kahane was assassinated by an Arab in New York City in 1990).
 
      The problem of racism in Jewish tradition, says professor Moshe Greenberg, "has its roots in the policy of the Bible and the [Talmudic] sages to separate Israel from the [other] nations; it is full blown in the Kabbalistic denial that the Gentile is in the image of God and reaches horrific proportions in the genocidal biblical command to wipe out Amalek and the seven nations of Canaan." [GREENBERG, p. 24]  One (secular) Jewish apologetic strategy for this is to argue that the genocides recorded in the Old Testament never really happened. But, as Greenberg worries, "A historical critique of the biblical texts [about genocide] indicates ... [that they] belong to the realm of theory rather than to historical reality. This may salve our conscience, but only aggravates the problem -- that, under no pressure of facts, the biblical authors found compatible with their faith a divine command to commit genocide." [GREENBERG, p. 30]
 
      So how should Jews of moral conscience teach this key part of their religious tradition? They should, says Greenberg, tip-toe around it. "When we teach the [genocide] passages in school (and given the pivotal nature of the book of Joshua we cannot avoid teaching them) we must explicitly neutralize them (e.g., by stressing the ancient context, their obsolete motivation, and the annulling precedent set up by the sages) ...  It must be made clear to pupils that our general regard for the Bible as a treasure of enduring values does not extend to these passages. The urgency of such a repudiation corresponds to the evidence that the new empowerment of Israel stirs atavistic longings to act out what existed throughout all of Jewish history ... only in the imagination." [GREENBERG, p. 31]
 
     Meanwhile, the truth about Jewish history and tradition is systematically ignored and distorted by popular Jewish folk mythology about an idealized past and morality. As parroted very typically by Mannie Sher, a Jew and former Chairman of the British Association of Psychotherapists, modern Jewish reification of their tradition of victimhood blames their alleged noble, peaceful morals for anti-Jewish hostility throughout history. Knowing the facts, this posturing reads like an insidious fairy tale:
 
        "The world to which the Jews introduced God and their new ideals of
         universal morality, justice, peace, and individual responsibility has
         never been appreciative. Jewish ideals, like those of psychoanalysis,
         have generally been alien and threatening to the prevailing order.
         Judaism gave a vision that 'nation should not lift sword against nation'
         to a world in which war and warriors rather than peace or prophets
         were glorified. Like psychoanalysis, Judaism sees every individual as
         both responsible for himself and answerable. It is little wonder then
         why hatred of the Jew developed and ultimately became the greatest
         hatred in human history." [SHER, p. 38]
 
     There are others who admit a vast tradition of "hatred" in Jewish religious sources, but seek to dismiss its gravity. David Wolpe, for example, asks his readers in a popular Jewish newspaper:
 
     "Is it good to hate? ... Our tradition does not teach us that all hatred is
      bad. The Bible is unambiguous on this point: We are clearly intended to
      hate Amalek, whose memory we are instructed to wipe out ... The
      subject is raised each year in the middle of the Passover seder ... In
      fact there are few things that can be healthier than merited hatred ...
      Sitting in a comfortable home today, it is easy to see barbarity in the
      words of the Haggadah. When we do, we betray our history." [WOLPE,
      p. 8]
 
       Of course all the above emphasis on ancient Israelite savagery is not to assert that Jews and Nazis hold a monopoly on atrocity or were locked in an inevitably trans-historical death embrace.  Far from it. History is over-laden with atrocious crimes by one people against another throughout the centuries, exercising respective violent versions of what anthropologists today call ethnocentrism. The idea that "We are the People and everyone else is not" is endemic to world cultures and religions.  But the extreme "Kill every thing that breathes" injunction as moral (and religious) policy is rare; after all, for even the most ruthless victor that which is taken alive has at least some economic, pleasure or productive value to the conqueror. The spiteful vanquishing of everything and everybody, repeatedly, in a holy book of all places, and one that is the foundation of Judeo-Christian heritage, cannot be completely overlooked -- as it always is -- in the development of future peoples, world views, and civilizations that stemmed from it.
 
      Arnold Toynbee, the well-known British historian, in arguing that religious "fanaticism" in Judaism has been inevitably passed to Christianity (and its notorious Crusades) and Islam (like its Holy Wars), had the audacity to openly attribute the ultimate cause of discriminatory suffering experienced by Jews throughout history upon their own heads. "The first 'bigots' in history that I know of," said Toynbee, "are ... the Maccabees [a group of rebellious Jews who overthrew Greek rule], if 'bigot' means, as I believe it does, not just any persecutor, but one who persecutes people of another religion on account of his differences from them to religious practice and belief. The Maccabees forcibly converted Idumea and Galilee to Judaism and they brought it about that Herod and Jesus were Jews, not gentiles."  [SYRKIN, Toynbee]
 
    Old Testament scholar John Allegro also notes the Maccabean era:
 
     "In the conception of the New Israel, dreamt of by the Jews of the
     Exile, propounded by their prophets, and hammered out in Judea by
     administrators from Babylon Jewry, there existed a fundamental
     conflict between the religious ideal of a world state governed by Jews
     and freely accepted by all men, and the practical reality that people
     are tenaciously conservative about their religions and take unkindly
     to having their gods chosen for them. When this removal of their
     freedom of worship is coupled with a particularly uncompromising
     racialist domination and tight political control, resistance to the
     alien regime stiffens even further, and will yield to naught but the
     severest military pressures. From the outset, then, the glorious
     New Israel was only likely to be achieved by force of arms, and
     maintained by brute force. The Maccabeans were at least realists,
     and played the military and political games as shrewdly and
     ruthlessly as any other tyrants of the ancient world. When it came
     to converting the gentile to the faith, to fulfill the spiritual promise
     of the kingdom of God, they simply offered the choice between
     circumcision and slavery." [ALLEGRO, J., 1971, p. 116-117]
    
      Arnold Toynbee takes such history further, leveling to modern Jewish eyes and ears the most profound of blasphemies: "The irony of Jewish history surely is that the Jews have been the chief sufferers from a spirit which they themselves originally kindled." [SYRKIN, p. 177] Elsewhere he argues that, "[Hitler's] main idea -- the fanatical worship of a jealous tribal god, at the bidding of a prophetic leader -- is the original (though not ultimate) Leitmotiv of the Old Testament." [GOULD, p. 454]
 
     "Toynbee," says Jacob Agus,
 
      "regards the biblical notion of a people, set apart from the rest of
      mankind, as the source of self-aggrandizement of Christian nations
      in the modern world. Ultimately, this narcissistic belief of the ancient
      Israelites took root in the minds of anti-Christian Germans, emerging
      as the Nazi madness of our own generation ... [AGUS, p. 385]  ...
      Jews were accustomed to attacks from demagogues, chauvinists,
      purveyors of 'mystiques' of one kind or another. But, to be the target
      of criticism at the hands of a superintellectual [Toynbee] and a champion
      of humanism -- this was a different matter all together ... [AGUS, p. 373] 
      ...  Largely because of a 1917 Toynbee article that was a major
      contribution to shaping and propagating the pro-Zionist policy in
      Britain ... [AGUS, p. 382]  .... his views were resented all the more
      because he wrote as one who belonged to the traditional friends of
      Israel." [AGUS, p. 373]
 
     Needless to say, most Jewish readers -- fixated on their communal identity as victims, and victims only -- typically react with indignant outrage to Toynbee's "anti-Semitic" suggestion. "At the bar of history," complains Marie Syrkin, former editor at the Zionist-oriented magazine, Midstream, "[Toynbee accuses that] the Jewish sufferer is not innocent." Her line of argument against him then notes Toynbee's only historical evidence for this accusation against the Maccabees to be Flavius Josephus (a Jewish apostate to the Romans), who is a standard source for much information about Jews in the Roman-ruled era. Josephus is afforded a lot of credibility by Jews on other subjects; he is in fact a major reference for some of today's Jewish polemical argument. His detailed accounts of the desert fortress of Massada, for example, and the 900 Jews who committed suicide rather than surrender to a Roman siege is considered to be a factual account and has become a beacon of pride for many modern Jews. The Massada story has become an important symbol in Zionist nationalist folklore.
 
     The Jewish historian, Hannah Arendt, sides with Toynbee and takes his thesis of Jewish fanaticism even further:
 
            "There is some truth in 'enlightened' assertions from Voltaire to
             Renan to Taine that the Jews concept of chosenness, their
             identification of religion and nationality, their claim to an absolute
             position in history and a singled-out relationship with God, brought
             into Western civilization an otherwise unknown element of
             fanaticism (inherited by Christianity with its claim to exclusive
             possession of Truth) on one side, and on the other an element
             of pride that was 'dangerously close to its racial perversion."
             [ARENDT, p. 242]
 
     The Chosen People tradition "so close to" that of "racial perversion" in dehumanizing others has been consciously usurped by others in recent centuries. As David Stannard notes:
 
      "[In South Africa] the Afrikaner's self-identification with the ancient
       Hebrews -- with their own Great Trek regarded by them as a second
       Exodus, combines with their own explication of the biblical story of
       Ham as meaning that black Africans were divinely ordained to be their
       servants -- formed the theologically legitimizing core of the reprehensible
       doctrine of apartheid. Thus, the covenantal belief of the Ulster-Scots in
       their self-defined status as one of God's predestined 'elect' peoples has
       served to justify their occupation of the promised land of Northern
       Ireland along with their historical persecutions of that land's native Irish
       people. And thus, on one occasion (among many) that the Puritan
       settlers of New England laid waste an entire neighboring nation with
       barely a pretext of provocation --shooting and stabbing to death every
       man, woman, and child that they could find -- they wrote in justification
       that 'sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish
       with their parents,' and notes that as Chosen People (alluding to
       Deuteronomy 20:16) the Lord had given them the Indian's "land for
       an inheritance.'" [STANNARD, p. 194]
 
     "Oliver Cromwell's Joshua-like campaign against the Catholics of Ireland in the seventeenth century," adds Scottish scholar Robert Carroll, "which led to bloody massacres of civilians, was inspired by the Bible." [CARROLL, R., 1989, p. 159]
 
      "In the ancient world," says Robert Pfeiffer, "the Jews alone claimed theirs was the only true religion and that eventually it would conquer the world ... the Jewish claim to practice the only true religion, which would be inherited by both Christians and Muslims and then turned against the Jews themselves, was entirely opposed ... to the current attitudes of Greeks, Romans, and Eastern peoples. None of them would condemn the others for worshipping  ... false and deceitful gods." [MORAIS, p. 46-47]
 
      A typical Jewish reaction to the likes of Toynbee and his criticism of Judaism's fanaticism and the modern state of Israel, and certainly the disturbing evidence cited herein, is reflected in Oskar Rabinowicz's entire volume against the British scholar, entitled Arnold Toynbee on Judaism and Zionism: A Critique. The author's defensive tirade begins, from his very first sentence, with a justification of Zionism, but the core of his argument originates in the ethnocentric and exclusionist notion that it is absolutely forbidden for non-Jews to speak critically about Jews:
 
             "Judaism rejects racial discrimination, exclusiveness, personal
             superiority claims, or earthly uniqueness ... No outsider [to Jewry]
             has the right to tell the Jews  ... what they do or do not ... believe
             in."  [RABINOWICZ, p. 66]
                                                             
                               *********************************
 
      Modern Jewish American discourse about the Holocaust typically remains myopic, self-obsessed, and one-sided. It is what Jewish scholar Peter Novick calls "collective memory" (i.e., a kind of legend). "Collective memory ...," writes Novick, "is not just historical knowledge shared by a group. Indeed, collective memory is in crucial senses ahistorical, even anti-historical. To undersand something historically is to be aware of its complexity, to have sufficient detachment to see it from multiplle perspectives, to accept the ambiguities, including moral ambiguities of protaganists' motives and behaviors. Collective memory simplifies; sees events from a single, comitted perspective; is impatient with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 3-4]

      Because so much of the Jewish disaster occurred in Poland, this country is especially singled out for attack in Jewish polemic. "Over the last thirty years," notes Lawrence Weinbaum,
 
       "much of world Jewry has displayed a keener sense of hostility to
       Poland than to Germany itself. Poland, not Germany, is often seen as
       the ultimate place of evil ... Part of the hostility to Poland is based on
       the entirely false impression that Germans chose occupied Poland as
       the venue for the death camps because they could court Polish
       cooperation in carrying out the Final Solution. Although there is
       no historical evidence to support this contention, it has gained very
       wide currency and credence ... Careless references to 'Polish
       extermination camps,' rather than German or Nazi camps, also played
       a part in fostering this perception ... Popular literature, not always
       based on objective scholarship, has also played a leading role in
       shaping the popular image of Poland. Novels (and subsequent film
       adaptations) by popular writers such as Leon Uris (Exodus, Mila 18,
       QBVII), Gerald Green (Holocaust), and others have done much to
       influence the way we think about Poland, and the impression gained
       from these books has generally been negative. In such works Poles
       are often portrayed in a worse light than the Germans and it sometimes
       seems that the burden of guilt for the Holocaust has been shifted to the
       shoulders of the Poles." [WEINBAUM, p. 7]
 
       In 1982, Jewish American author Laurence Weschler noted that "over and over, prior to my Polish trip, I encountered sheer hatred [by Jews] of the country and its people, cold fury in reminiscences of the anti-Semitism that, it was claimed, pervaded Polish society in the years before and during the war." [WESCHLER, p. 28]  Thus prepared, Weschler was stunned to find that the Jews who actually live in Poland do not share Jewish-American mythologies about the place. As Weschler says, after a series of interviews with Jews in Poland:
 
     "Over and over, I hear the same assertion from this man and his
     young Jewish friends, and they all give me substantially the same
     reasons for making it. What follows is, in all fairness, a simplification,
     but the basic premise is consistent: that the Poles have never been
     anti-Semitic at heart. They have always been highly nationalistic,
     a proud, suffering people deprived of and longing for their state.
     In the past, they were faced with a large Jewish population -- a
     population whose very size proves the prior openness of the Polish
     people, and particularly of Polish nobility, to Jewish immigration.
     The Jews tended to keep to themselves, in ghettos of their own
     choosing. It is easy to understand how during the eighteenth and
     nineteenth centuries the highly nationalistic Poles might have
     conceived of these self-possessed Jews as aliens in their midst...
     During the late nineteenth century, according to this view,
     capitalism, a foreign import, came to Poland by way of the Germans
     and native Jews. Many of the most visible and most brutal large-
     scale enterprises -- especially textile plants -- were owned by Jews.
     'Polish resentment is understandable,' I am told. During the twenties,
     this explanation goes on, the Poles finally achieved their state,
     but ten percent of the population was Jewish, and the Jews were
     still largely concentrated in self-contained communities in urban
     centers. Many people -- both Poles and Jews -- felt this presence
     to be troubling, at once alien and too large. Zionists had their
     Polish supporters. Other Jews, meanwhile, were active in the
     Communist Party and were devoted to the Soviet example --
     this in a country and among a people who had only recently
     thrown off Russian imperialist yoke." [WESCHLER, p. 31-32]
 
     Richard L. Rubenstein also notes that the
 
      "Post-Holocaust awareness of the genocidal potential of anti-Semitism
      has also effected historical investigations often with distorting effect.
      Because of the objective innocence of the victims, Holocaust studies
      have tended to emphasize what was done to the Jews rather than those
      elements of conflict and competition between Jews and non-Jews that
      could have contributed to the tragedy ... There has been a persistent
      tendency to treat hatred of Jews and Judaism as a form of moral and
      psychological pathology ... Regrettably, the interactions, economic,
      political and social between the two communities, as distinct from the
      actions against Jews by Christians, are seldom dealt with in retrospective
      inquiries into the evolution of anti-Jewish ideas and policies."
      [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 87]
 
      Many Jews, like prominent polemicist Alan Dershowitz, completely overlook the suffering of the Polish people, their own history, their own culture, and their own nationality to obnoxiously proclaim that Poland (the site of most of the Nazi concentration camps) "can only  [my emphasis] be a Jewish cemetery with no tombstone." [DERSHOWITZ] What was the wider story of the sufferings in Europe during World War II? What was the context of the Holocaust? We all know what happened to the Jews; it is heralded everywhere. But what was happening to other people?
 
     In the first two years of the German invasion of Poland, the ill-treatment of Poles was worse than Jews, so much that Poles would sometimes don the Nazi-enforced "Yellow star" marker for Jews to blend in with them. [LUCAS, p. 34-35] On August 22, 1939, Hitler declared the necessary killing "without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need." [GUMBOWSKI, p. 59] Hitler also planned that "the destruction of Poland is our primary task. The aim is not the arrival at a certain line but the annihilation of living forces ... Be merciless! Be brutal! ... The war is to be a war of annihilation." [LUCAS, p. 4]
 
       William Shirer writes that:
 
               "Hitler ... wanted ... a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources
               would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people
               would be made slaves of the German master race and whose
               'undesirable' elements' -- above all, the Jews, but also many
               Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them --
               would be exterminated. .. The Jews and the Slavic peoples
               were the Untermenschen -- subhumans. To Hitler they had
               no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs,
               might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves
               of their German masters. Not only were the great cities of
               the East, Moscow, Leningrad, and Warsaw, to be permanently
               erased but the culture of the Russians and Poles and other
               Slavs was to be stamped out and formal education denied
               them ... As early as September 18, 1941, Hitler had specifically
               ordered that Leningrad was to be 'wiped off the face of the
               earth.' After being surrounded it was to be 'razed to the
               ground' by bombardment and bombing. Its population
               (three million) was to be destroyed with it. [SHIRER, p. 937]
 
     As Charles Sydnor notes about the Nazi invasion of Russia, beginning on June 22, 1941:
 
    "A three mile-wide strip of territory stretching the length of Eastern
    Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains erupted in
    a torrent of fire and flying steel as German aircraft, artillery, and
    armor blasted across the Soviet frontier. In the violence of its initial
    collision, the immensity and ferocity of its subsequent development,
    and the profligacy of its destruction of human life and resources, the
    German-Russian conflict transcended anything then in the human
    experience. To the men of the SS Totenkopfdivision, who were
    to fight exclusively against the Russians until the end of the war,
    the campaign became a grim crusade of extermination." [SYDNOR,
    C., 1977, p. 138-139]
 
     "The Poles," concedes a rare Jewish author, Eva Hoffman,” in the Nazi hierarchy, were next only to Jews and Gypsies in the order of inferior races -- slated for complete subjugation and, in the more visionary Nazi plans, for eventual extermination." [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 6] "The Nazi leaders," noted Jewish author Raphael Lemkin (the inventor of the term genocide,"), "had stated very bluntly their intent to wipe out the Poles, the Russians; to destroy demographically and culturally the French element in Alsace-Lorraine, The Slavonians in Carniola and Carinthia. They almost achieved their goal in exterminating the Jews and gypsies in Europe." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 100]
 
      And as Richard Lukas notes about conquered Poland: "The genocidal policies of the Nazis resulted in the deaths of about as many Polish Gentiles as Polish Jews.... this [Polish Gentile] holocaust has been largely ignored because historians who have written on the subject of the Holocaust have chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivist terms -- namely, the as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them, the Holocaust was unique to Jews, and they therefore have had little or nothing to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million Poles, who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever known." [LUKAS, p. ix] (In nearby Ukraine, notes Myron Kuropas, an estimated 14.5 million Ukrainians, including 600,000 Jews were lost... through deaths, deportations and evacuations. The war also destroyed over 700 Ukrainian cities and towns and some 28,000 villages.") [KUROPAS, M., 1995]
     
      Twenty million tablets of cyanide for the gas chambers were discovered after the war in Nazi storehouses, many times the numbers necessary to exterminate Jews only.  At one gas chamber site -- Kulmhof (Chelmo) -- a group of 5,000 gypsies were among the first to be murdered. Others exterminated there included convoys of non-Jewish children from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia ("These children were killed just as the Jews were") and even a busload of nuns. [GAS, p. 91-92]  At Buchenwald, 250 Gypsy children were the first to be gassed. [HANCOCK, p.55] Throughout the territory of German occupation, people of all nationalities, and specifically invalids, the sick, and homosexuals, were subject to institutionalized murder, by gas or otherwise. The last gas chamber murders at the Mauthausen site were 181 Austrians who were against the Nazi regime.
 
      Nazi Germany had clearly stated policies concerning surrounding European countries and their inhabitants of Slavic descent:
 
       "By October 15, 1940, Hitler had decided on the future of the Czechs, the first Slavic people he had conquered. One half of them were to be 'assimilated,' mostly by shipping them as slave laborers to Germany. The other half, 'particularly' the intelligentsia, were simply to be, in the words of a secret report on the subject, 'eliminated.'" [SHIRER, p. 938]
 
      Nazi mistreatment of prisoners of war, particularly Russian Slavs, was notorious:
 
     "Dr. Otto Brautigam, deputy leader of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories wrote  ... It is no longer a secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war have died of hunger or cold in our camps..."
 
     The conceptual dehumanization of the Slavic people by the Nazis was not far behind the portrayal of Jews. Jews, however, were believed to pose a greater immediate threat, an innately alien and antagonistic element within German society, dimensionally international, conceived to be far more powerful in influence than Poles. Jews were to be exterminated first in a "Final Solution," the Slavs later, except those to be used as slaves.
 
      "Martin Boorman, Hitler's party secretary ... wrote a long letter to Rosenberg [another Nazi official] ... 'The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don't need them, they may die ... The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable.... Education is dangerous... [SHIRER, p. 939]  Chaim Kaplan, eventually murdered by the Nazis, noted the conditions for his maid after the German invasion: "When the Nazis confiscated our apartment, they permitted our Christian maid to remain. She is exempt from the Nazi Nuremberg laws, they raped her. After that they beat her so that she would reveal where I hid my money." [KAPLAN, C., p. 46]
 
     The Nazi occupation of Poland was intended to de-Polonize the entire country and reconstruct it in a Germanic image. Polish names of towns and places were torn down and replaced by German ones (exactly as the Jews of Israel have done in replacing Arabic geographical names with Hebrew ones). "Property in Poland belonging not only to Jews but to Poles was subject to confiscation without compensation." [SHIRER, p. 944] "The planned deportation [of Poles to the Auschwitz concentration] camp," says Franciszek Piper, head of the Historical Research Department of the Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, "of tens of thousands of men, women, and children from the Zamosc region -- foreseen as one of the first bridgeheads for Germanization in eastern Poland -- demonstrated the Nazis' goal of exterminating the Poles, which they only achieved to a small degree." [PIPER, F., Political, p. 15]
 
         Hideously monstrous medical experiments on Jews by sadistic Nazis is well known. But  "Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans... At the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates -- the 'rabbit girls' they were called -- were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to 'experiments' in bone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water." [SHIRER, p. 979]  Priests were also tortured and experimented upon at Dachau. [GOLDBERG, M., H., 1979, p. 223]
 
       There were grandiose medical visions for others who were not Jews: "An S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote Himmler ... that ... the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity should be sterilized." [SHIRER,