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,