The Prejudice That Never Passes

         Comments.    Considerations. Questions.

 

                       Some sayings are engraved upon history, century after century, one being the admonition of Jesus that the poor will be with us forever. At times I feel it may well be the same, not for sayings but ideologies, including hateful ones that took root in the most ancient of days, and instead of waning with enlightenment are actually flowering.

      I mean anti-Semitism. It’s been around since the Jewish people entered ancient history. It rises and falls but now is on a rapid rise in many parts of the world. Consider just a handful of current and very disconcerting revelations: about 20,000 people marched this month in France and I mention but one ugly sentence of their very ugly chant: “Jews, get out, France is not for you…” (Little wonder almost 30 percent of France’s Jewish citizens want to flee the country.) Or consider Hungary, where anti Semitism has risen to such a level that a renowned Hungarian scholar – a professor emeritus at the City University of New York – has had his name removed from a major Budapest library after a government decision to memorialize the Nazis. Or take this evidence from freedom-loving Sweden: few Rabbis dare wear a sign of their calling in public lest they be attacked. Given this and a great many more examples, it’s little wonder that two credible Jewish scholars, Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Dr. Harold Brackman reported just a month ago, that well over 100 million Europeans harbor serious anti-Semitism. (They provide the evidence to back it up.) Given 20^th century history, and these current developments it’s not just Europe’s problem.  It’s become the world’s.

        A few months ago, a new book came from one of the most insightful, if somewhat heated authors, Daniel Goldhagen whose scholarly credentials are quite credible: many years as a Harvard political scientist, and subsequently an essayist in most of the seriously minded journals including in particular, The New Republic. His new book is “The Devil that Never Dies,” an exploration of the rising tides of global anti-Semitism, a fact which is built on other facts. A word to the immediately dismissive: Goldhagen is  (a) entitled to his perspective and (b) his perspective is in turn justified (or not justified) on merit, not on predetermined bias one way or the other. As has been said for many years, “wisdom is sustained by wisdom’s value” not by a predisposed attitude. That said, it’s time to examine the content of his recent and very provocative book.

         Its thesis, reflected in his title and backed up by voluminous evidence is that much of the world — with the major exceptions of the United States and maybe Canada — has embarked on a point of view he expressed in a 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. (It alleges German citizenry sympathy for Hitler’s objective.) Goldhagen calls it: “Eliminationist Anti-Semitism.” Obviously, it’s a most volatile allegation, and while the early book was the proverbial runaway bestseller, it was also criticized for being overblown. Nonetheless his new book, returns to his early thesis and is supported from front to back with supportive evidence of utterance and statistics.

      For example, he draws upon numerous political leaders whose word leave little doubt about their personal objectives, the most telling of many, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, before the 2012 UN General Assembly (and thereby the world) who predicted Israel’s demise: “Speaking the explicit language of eliminationism,” writes Goldhagen, “Ahmadinejad reaffirmed what Iranian leaders had already often proclaimed. In the quest to destroy Israel, Iran would be willing to suffer damages because as mentioned earlier, political Islamic leaders, ordinary political Islamists, and even children preaching to the masses often say to characterize the critical differences between their people and the Jews in Israel: we love death and they love life. The lovers of death can hold out for only so long against people willing to die and to kill for the ultimate goal:  Israel and its people’s destruction.” That, in my view, is an accurate depiction of the culture, for which and out of which, Ahmadinejad spoke. (Not to mention that, in their ongoing demagoguery, such Israel haters, include the denial of a universal Christian truth: that Jesus was Jewish.)

     When a book with the serious contention of this one reports what the public opinion surveys reflect, they are disconcerting indeed.  In a chapter called, Millions Upon Millions of anti-Semites  — I see it as the most important chapter — Goldhagen  provides ample evidence, based on professional data, that we should at the very least acknowledge. “Existing surveys,” he writes, “reveal that anti-Semitism in Europe, in the Arab and Islamic world, and elsewhere is rampant.”  He backs it up with revelations that are appalling. They reveal for example, that in Europe, which for the most part is indifferent to Christian faith, enormous numbers believe that most damaging of all anti-Semitic canards, that Jews crucified Jesus. Absolute nonsense. (History records he was executed by Romans, above him the words:  “The King of the Jews.”) Yet, after examining all the polls, and factoring in EU population numbers, Goldhagen deducts that in the European Union alone, the number of people believing this utter falsehood is “around one hundred million.”  Sorry to say it gets worse, much worse, when he turns to professional research and public professional polls in South Korea, China, South Africa and several other countries. When all is tallied, the total of anti-Semites, who are what they are for whatever reason, the total is terrifying: over a billion. (A good natured critic has made a wry response to some of these numbers, saying, more or less, that a billion idiots do not translate into a billion anti-Semites.) Maybe. But maybe not.  

     Daniel Goldhagen’s conclusion for this grim chapter is ominous, perhaps we all hope, overly ominously: “Jews are in play. Everywhere. Problematized everywhere. Seemingly disliked or hated everywhere. And this is from millions and billions of people who have never met Jews and know only that figmental creature, grounded in the foundational anti-Semitic paradigm, grounded in various anti-Semitic discourses, known as the Jew, whose essential quality of Jewness is something better steered clear of or better still, in the eyes of many, something best combated or eliminated…”

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