Subject: JUICE Holocaust: Lesson #2
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 22:42:38 +0000
To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
From: JUICE Administration <juice@virtual.co.il>
To: holocaust@virtual.co.il
Subject: JUICE Holocaust 2
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World Zionist Organization
Jewish University in CyberspacE
juice@wzo.org.il birnbaum@wzo.org.il
http://www.wzo.org.il
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Course: Meanings of the Holocaust
Lecture: 2/12
Lecturer: Elly Dlin
Was the Holocaust A Predictable Outcome of The Long History of Antisemitism?
The Antisemitism of the Church
a) A Holocaust survivor wrote an open letter in which he painfully recalls:
"Before World War Two as a boy, I was often subjected to abuse and beating
by Christian boys who would call me a 'Christ Killer' and the son of the
devil. Invariably it would take place after a lesson given in the teachings
of the New Testament and the Gospels. Some of the friendlier boys would
tell me that they hate the Jews because of what they learned from these
lessons and, of course, from their parents and grandparents.
"After surviving the Holocaust I...traveled around the world...seeking an
answer to the burning question: 'Why?' Why did they do it to us? Why do
they hate us so much? On my travels I spoke to simple folk...I was appalled
by the virulent hate they felt for us, and in many countries where they have
never even seen a Jew! Invariably, they would admit that their antisemitism
stems from the teaching of the Church..." (Solly Ganor, Herzelia, Israel, 10
January 1997).
b) St. John Chrysostom, a 4th century Church father preached: "The
Jews...are worse than wild beasts...lower than the vilest animals.
Debauchery and drunkenness had brought them to the level of the lusty goat
and the pig. They know only...to satisfy their stomachs, to get drunk, to
kill and beat each other up...I hate the Jews...I hate the Synagogue...it is
the duty of all Christians to hate the Jews" (quoted in Yehuda Bauer, pp.
8-9). Similar hate-filled rantings could also be quoted from Martin Luther
or Louis Farhakan.
The Christian Churches lodged two big accusations against the Jews. The
first was deicide, that the Jews killed the son of God and that the Jews are
ritual murderers. The subtext of this charge was that the Jews were capable
of any and every evil. A despicable lot, they were wholly untrustworthy and
totally unsuited to be granted any more rights than was absolutely necessary
in order to support the interests of Christians. More than that. If they
killed the son of God then they were capable of killing other innocent young
Christian children and that they may even be performing such ritual killings
in secret worship (i.e. the infamous "Blood Libels" that persisted even
after the Holocaust ended, such as in Kielce Poland on 4 July 1946).
The second charge was supersession, that because the Jews had rejected Jesus
Christ the Son then their special bond with the Father, God, was no longer
valid and the Christians were now "the New Israel". The triumph of the
elect (Christians) over the rejected (Jews) justified the inferior status of
the latter and showed them up as the "living witness" to the One and True
Faith (Christianity).
In the 11th and 12th centuries the theological tenets supported the mass
murder of Jews by Crusaders who launched what our generation has come to
know in Bosnia as "ethnic cleansing operations".
The Continuity School Of Antisemitism
Some Jews believe that antisemitism is a structural feature in the world.
It exists, it always existed and, until the Messiah comes to mark the
dawning of a new Era, it will always exist. We say as much each year in the
Pesach Haggadah: "It is this promise which has sustained our fathers and
us. For not just one man has risen up against us to destroy us; in every
generation there are those who rise against us to destroy us. But the Holy
One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands" (in the "vehi she'amda" that
appears shortly before the start of the meal.
Prof. Raul Hilberg has asserted what I would call a "progressive continuity
model". He argues that antisemitism proceeds through 3 stages:
1) You Can't Live Among Us As Jews, i.e. conversion,
2) You Can't Live Among Us, i.e. expulsion, and the final stage
3) You Can't Live, i.e. extermination.. Implied within this word-play is a
chrono-logical development from early Christianity through the Middle Ages,
to the Nazis.
Yet the continuity argument has some serious problems. If it were really
true that each of the stages are linked together, then wouldn't we expect
the Holocaust to have been "deadlier" in a more antisemitic country such as
Romania than it was in a relatively more liberal and tolerant country such
as the Netherlands? Yet that is not the case. Over 70% of Dutch Jews were
murdered while in Romania the figure is much lower, 45%.
And how does the continuity school explain antisemites who save Jews? We
know of priests and nuns who accepted the theologically-based antisemitism
of the Church yet rejected the racial antisemitism of the Nazis. These
people believed that the Jews had indeed killed Christ and that they
deserved to be punished for it but they also believed that the Jews had
souls that could and should be saved. Christianity was permeated with
antisemitic elements but it also taught the 10 Commandments. Anyone who
believed that you should "love thy neighbour as thyself" could not have been
"Hitler's willing executioner" to borrow Goldhagen's phrase.
Cardinal Szeptyckij from Lvov protected the family of the city's Chief Rabbi
in his own home and he urged the Church people under his authority to save
Jewish lives. Yet in the 1930s the Cardinal had actively preached, wrote
and rallied against the Jews as a full-fledged antisemite. Dietrich
Bonhoffer and Martin Niemoller both held Church-inspired antisemitic
positions in the 1930's but instead of progressing to the next stage along
the antisemitic continuum they risked their lives during the Holocaust to
defend Jews and they courageously and actively opposed Nazism. Some rural
French people, steeped in antisemitic traditions, organized underground
networks to save Jews and we don't know of a single instance of any of them
informing to the Germans, whereas Anne Frank's family was turned in by her
Dutch neighbours and there were no organized attempts to rescue Jews in the
democratic, enlightened and largely secular Czech Lands.
And what about the presence of antisemitism in societies that fervently
rejected Christianity, such as in Bolshevik Russia or in countries in the
Third World were Christianity has little or no presence? There are no
irresistible forces at work here nor is there an inevitable link between the
charges of Christ-Killer to the crematorium of Auschwitz.
The Discontinuity School Of Antisemitism
This school emphasizes the breaks in the past. The assembly of deputies in
the French Revolution promised all rights to Jews as individuals and no
rights to them as a group. Modern, secular, liberal European antisemitism
opposed all religious beliefs, Christian as well as Jewish. They accepted
Judaism as a religion alone and were unwilling to accept any "special-ness",
for example, the peoplehood aspect of Judaism. Modern, Western liberals
suspected the Jews of trying to gain full rights as citizens while at the
same time maintaining "extra rights" in their special relationship with
other Jews. This is the basis for the accusations of treason (Captain
Alfred Dreyfus) or having a second set of loyalties (Jonathan Pollard).
Of course it is even harder to see Communist Russia, which for decades was
the virulent center of antisemitism around the world, as the continuation of
the Church fathers.
Nor is it possible to see National Socialism as a direct outgrowth of
Christianity. Nazism clearly rejected the 10 Commandments just as it
rejected most other key theological concepts, such as the notion of
salvation. It was as anti-Christian as it was anti-Jewish.. If the Jews
were erring humans, then they could be reformed. But if they were dangerous
genetic beings, then they had to be eliminated.
The clear separation between Hitler's antisemitism and Luther's was the
element of race. "Despise the Jews," a prominent racist wrote 50 years
before Auschwitz while using words that echoed the 4th century Church
fathers, but he added a totally new, modern and scientific element: "With
bacteria one does not negotiate, nor can parasites be educated; they are to
be exterminated as quickly and thoroughly as possible".
Nazis believed that race determined one's exterior features (such as hair
colour, bone structure and the shape of one's nose) but that race also
determined one's internal attributes (honesty, loyalty, intelligence, greed
and corruption).
Or, in the widely quoted words of Hermann Alwardt, an elected member of the
German Parliament who said in a debate in 1895: "A horse born in a cow barn
does not turn into a cow and a Jew born in Germany is no German; he remains
a Jew".
The discontinuity argument is strengthened by the fact that the term
"antisemitism" was first coined by a journalist, Wilhelm Marr, in 1889. The
word did not exist previously. Marr wanted to distinguish his theory
regarding the Jews with traditional "Judenhasse" or hatred of Jews. In his
view, traditional antipathies against Jews were emotionally and\or
theologically based while his anitsemitism was detached and objective. It
was rooted in the cutting edges of the sciences of anthropology,
linguistics, sociology, history and biology.
Was The Holocaust Predictable?
In a classic article by the historian Jacob Katz each of the possible
theories regarding predictability are carefully investigated and rejected.
If Stalin, with all of his advisers and all of his intelligence-gathering
abilities could not predict the Nazi invasion of June 22, 1941 and if the
Americans could have been taken totally by surprise at Pearl Harbour then it
is clear that predictability is best left to the clairvoyants, whose success
rate is far from impressive.
Still, To What Extent Is Hitler's Antisemitism A Continuation Of Past
Antisemitism?
Prof. Shmuel Ettinger used to answer this question with a story. He would
tell of the rich Texan who was enchanted by the gorgeous lawns of Oxford.
The visitor asked the chief gardener to advise him as to how to duplicate
those lush lawns back on his ranch. He bought the seed and the fertilizer,
he watered and weeded exactly according to instructions but the results were
far from satisfactory. So he phoned the Brit for further advise. "Do
everything just as you are doing it," replied the gardener. "And keep it up
for another 500 years!"
Part of the explanation for antisemitism is that it has been kept up for so
many years. It has been called "the longest hatred" and it has been
described as the greatest scavenger ideology of all time. It possesses an
enduring core and the ability to constantly incorporate new elements into it.
Is that strict continuity? No. But it's not exactly discontinuity either.
For example, look at the Blood Libel accusations. Christians charge Jews
with using blood in their religious rituals. Yet who really uses blood in
their services? All Christians before the Reformation and all Catholics
until today believe that during the communion ceremony the wine and the
wafer turn, through the miracle of transubstantiation, into the blood and
body of Jesus Christ. And what about Jews and blood? Judaism proscribes
that animals must be slaughtered by slitting their throats so as to remove
the maximum amount of blood. After that the meat is salted and washed to
remove more blood and those parts of the animal where not enough blood can
be extricated cannot be eaten.
So in every service millions of believing Christians are eating human flesh
and drinking human blood while Jews are doing everything that they can to
avoid ingesting any blood. And they accuse us of using human blood in
religious ritual practice? It is more than absurd; it is a classic example
of projection. Projection is a human defense mechanism that usually acts
unconsciously, whereby the individual, uncomfortable with something
disturbing or evil within him\herself, projects that thing on to an
external object and then hates or attacks that object because it possesses
that evil.
On 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler spoke in the German Reichstag (Parliament)
on the 6th anniversary of his rise to power. He said: "One thing I should
like to say on this day which may be memorable for others as well as for us
Germans: In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have
usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it
was in the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies
with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of
the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then,
among many other things, settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was
uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on
the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: If the
international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in
plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be
the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the
annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!" (DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST, pp.
134-5).
In January 1939 who wanted "to plunge the nations once more into a world
war"? Who was planning the invasion of his neighbours? The Germans or the
Jews? Yet in an absurd projection that strikes me as being very similar to
the Blood Libels, Hitler accuses the Jews of plotting a war of annihilation
and warns that the Third Reich will have to react to defend itself from that
danger...by murdering Jews. That is where important elements of the
continuity lies.
But on the point of predictability, I concede that Hitler was essentially
correct. As a prophet he was often ridiculed and in January 1939 he once
again was not believed. For who could have thought then that he was
predicting the future?
REFERENCES:
Bauer, Yehuda, HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST, New York: Franklin Watts, 1982.
DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST, Israel Gutman and Yitzhak Arad, pp. 134-5.
Hilberg, Raul, THE DESTRUCTION OF EUROPEAN JEWRY, Chicago: Quadrangle Press,
1961.
Katz, Jacob, "Was the Holocaust Predictable," in JERUSALEM QUARTERLY, 1982.
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