11
THE JEWISH COSMOLOGY OF VICTIMHOOD
(Part 1)
"I have frequently had hotheaded romantics assume that our family
fled
Russia to escape persecution. They seem to think that the only way we
got
out was by jumping from ice flow to ice floe across the Dnieper River,
with
bloodhoods and the entire Red Army in hot pursuit. No such thing. We
were not persecuted and we left in a quite legal manner with no more
trouble than one would expect from any bureaucracy, including our own.
If that's disappointing, so be it."
-- Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov. A Memoir. 1994, p. 19
Ask any non-Jewish American what his or
her personal link is to the Roman era, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages,
and other epics of human history and he will tell you: nothing. He knows nothing
about it. And he doesn't care. For such a late twentieth century American
to reflect on his own roots back to, say, medievalism, is to look with the
naked eye for Mars: it is a vague dot, reputed by others to exist, in the
remotest distance. Indistinct. Unfathomable. Something eternally elusive,
lost forever.
Few Americans can trace their family history
more than a few generations, if that. Throughout anyone's own ancestral lineage,
however, going back deeply into time, there obviously exists their own share
of participants -- as both perpetrators and victims -- in great and minor
wars, massacres, invasions, famines, epidemics, and other disasters of every
kind. Presuming five procreative generations per century, exponentially, any
human being alive today can theoretically claim direct genetic lineage to
over a thousand ancestors back to 1800, over 37,000 people to 1700, over a
million back to the year 1600, and over a staggering billion human beings
back to 1400 (thirty generations). Whatever the mathematically realistic number,
(and Jewish history claims 4,000 years) the deeper we go back into history,
the more we must consider the veritable Milky Way of humanity that preceded
us in direct ancestral lineage; people of every imaginable sort, and they
all knew well the melancholic chords of human suffering, sometimes subtly,
sometimes brutally. Every single one of them.
Today's Americans of French, British,
Italian or other European descent find themselves today lumped together in
the generic "white" American community. Their respective ancestries
are stirred together, gone. Their European origins mean little to them; they
are homogenized in the New World, their identities now expressed -- for better
or worse -- in the icons of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Billy the
Kid, Babe Ruth, the hallowed Constitution, even McDonald's hamburgers, or
other superficial national icons that ancestrally have nothing directly to
do with them.
The typical American's alienation, disinterest,
and lack of connection to distant history is not characteristic of modern
Jews. On the contrary. A stone thrown in spite through a Jewish window in
Italy in the fourteenth century is a stone thrown into Jewish hearts today.
The actions against Jews by desperate thugs in Poland in the eighteenth century
are dumped on Gentile doorsteps in our time by Jews who are still grieving,
still embittered, still seeking redress. And when we turn, in more recent
history, to the bestial deeds of Adolf Hitler to conquer the world, we find
that Jews have pulled tightly in a circle to proclaim that everything sinister
in the whole world malevolently labors against them, and them only.
Ultimately, it is a central article
of modern Jewish faith -- reflecting both secular and religious attitudes,
formed and hardened over the ages -- that to be Jewish is to be always maltreated
for innocence by others. Or, perhaps
more correctly to Jewish eyes, as part of this innocence, being Jewish is
to be a victim for the crime of being superior to their persecutors. This
claim to superiority was originally religiously based, as God's "Chosen
People" of Old Testament tradition. And this Jewish preoccupation --
as being victims of their self-presumed superiority -- has been passed down,
religiously, over the ages (traditionally epitomized in Jewish pilgrimage
to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall to bemoan their communal fate, manifest also in
the likes of the volume Sefer Yosifon, anonymously compiled in the
tenth century as a litany of Jewish complaints and miseries). In the aftermath
of Hitler's atrocities against Jews during World War II, this world-view has
come to define, more tightly than any other aspect of Jewish tradition --
and now highly politicized -- modern Jewish self-identity.
But is this true? From the evidence we
have already seen, are Jews correctly depicted as history's consummate, incomparable,
and innocent victims? Have Jews pre-eminently and collectively suffered more
than all other human beings, "victims of centuries of persecution and
bigotry?" [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 378] And for no reason?
Here's a typical view of the Eastern
European Jewish past, by Judith Arcana, who discusses the roots of Jewish
American poet Grace Paley's family to the Jews of Russia:
"One of Isaac's brothers, Russya, was
killed in a workers demonstration
in 1905 ... In the wake of that death, probably
spurred by the retaliatory
wave of pogroms, the family decided to leave
Russia. Knowing the
unpredictability of
royal whim, Natasha Gutseit, Isaac's widowed
mother, sent the young couple to America before
the czar could change
his mind and snatch them back again."
[ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 10]
Here Arcana, who omits the relevance of Jewish
socialist agitation in Russia as a factor in their "persecution"
[Elsewhere she notes that even both Paley's parents were socialists, enemies
of the Tsarist regime -- p. 9], speculates that the Russian czar would have
interest in "snatching" Jews back to Russia.
In the American context, "one commonly
finds a sentence like this in many [Jewish] books or articles," says
Joshua Rothenberg, "... 'Jews came
to the shores of this country from the ghettos of the shtetlekh [Eastern
European Jewish villages] as a result
of the pogroms.' Each phrase in this sentence is untrue or oversimplified
to the point of untruth. There were no ghettos in 19th century Eastern Europe
(except in the metaphysical sense) ... And the pogroms were not the principal
reason for emigration: proportionately more Jews came to the United States
from Austrian-ruled Galicia -- where there were no pogroms -- than from Tsarist
Russia." [ROTHENBERG, p. 3]
"It has been discovered," says
Henry Feingold, "that religious persecution, even its physical manifestations
of pogroms, rarely furnishes sufficient impetus for Jews to uproot themselves.
Moreover, it cannot account for the thousands of Jews who chose to leave areas
relatively free of religious persecution ... [FEINGOLD, p. 60] ... Historians
have taken a closer look at the early acculturation process and have discovered
that the highly touted ability of the Jewish family to withstand the stresses
of transplantation have been overstated. New studies on Jewish vice and crime
and criminality and the discovery of a relatively high divorce and desertion
rate among immigrant Jews present a picture of a community paying a dear price
for establishing itself." [FEINGOLD, p. 61]
"The lachrymorose recollection of the
shtetl, which are still with us,"
says Daniel Bell, "fail to recall its narrowness of mind, its cruelty,
especially to schoolchildren (to whom a whole series of memoirs, such as Solomon
Ben Maimon's, testify), and its invidious stratification." [BELL, Reflections,
p. 318] Little remembered is this oppression of Jews by Jews. "Prior
to World War I," adds Rothenburg, "the Kehilah
[Jewish governing bodies] were ruled, in most cases, by an oligarchy
of the rich and the [Jewish] clergy. Their excesses, especially in the area
of indirect taxation (kosher meat, etc.) and the silencing of the protesting
voices of the poor, are well-known and documented. The Kehilahs remained a
source of bitter complaint for the majority of the Jewish population, which
had no say in the conduct of their own community affairs." [ROTHENBURG,
p. 5]
American Jews today hold dear many nostalgic
"Fiddler on the Roof"-type myths about their Eastern European ancestors.
As, however, Jewish author Ivan Kalmar notes
"A stalwart Jewish peasant, with a native
wit and a naive religiosity,
ever sturdy in the face of unending adversity,
he is the epitome of
Jewish nostalgia ... The Fiddler is so much
part of the way we
think of our Jewish background ... The Fiddler
image has some
basis in reality, but it is also very much
part of a nostalgic
reconstruction of our past, an example of
what anthropologists
call 'invention of tradition' ... Jewish
authors [like Sholem
Aleichem, creator of Fiddler on the Roof] tried to create
stereotypes of the Jews that would identity
them with less
wealthy groups who were looked at more favourably
by the
greater society. Sholom Aleichem's Tevye
[hero of Fiddler
on the Roof] is very much a Ukrainian peasant.
To counter
the idea of the Jew as a 'parasite,' Sholom
Aleichem presents
Tevye as a dairy farmer, who sells not the
Gentile peasant's
products but his own. North American Jews
have
enthusiastically accepted the validity of
Sholom Aleichem's
Tevye as a metaphor for the Eastern European
Jew of old ...
Where finally Tevye finally shows unique
character, he
turns out to be a modern Jew. Where he is
being a 'typical,'
folksy, traditional East European Jew, he
resembles the
romanticized Ukrainian peasant ... Of course,
there were
in reality Jewish peasants like Tevye, but
compared to the
Slavs, the percentage of Jews who farmed
was miniscule."
[KALMER, I., quoted by PRYTULAK, L., UKRAINIAN
ARCHIVES]
"Having ... turned their backs on Poland,"
notes Jewish scholar Victor Seidler about modern Jewish perceptions of Eastern
European heritage, "it can be difficult for the second generation [of
Jews in America] to recognize just how Polish their parents were. Things we
learned to think of as 'Jewish' turn out to be Polish." [SEIDLER, V.J.,
2000, p. 74] "Indeed," notes
George Mosse, "when the first German-Jewish painter, Mortiz Oppenheim,
painted scenes from the ghetto shortly after emancipation, it was transformed,
as we have seen, into a community permeated with German middle-class values."
[MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 80]
Jewish author Howard Jacobson notes Jewish
historic myth-making at an exhibition of photographs of Eastern European Jews
at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Particularly troubling to him
was the depiction of the stereotypically "studious Jew":
"Something is wrong with this exhibition.
Something is wrong with
the way we modern Jews idealize a past we
wouldn't touch with a
barge-pole if it were offered us again ...
Why is Jewish study always
made to look so soulful in these sorts of
photographs, so unrelieved,
so unvarious, so fucking miserable and desolating?
What is it about
Jewish
books that make absorption in them such an invariably
heart-rendering business? What a sell! How
have the Jews done it,
how have we persuaded ourselves, but gentiles
as well, that anguish
and lamentation and self-abnegation and
bodilessness and pathos
attach inalterably and exclusively to our
studies? You don't see
[St. Thomas] Aquinas looking into a book
like that." [JACOBSON, H.,
1995, p. 192-193]
The distinguished Jewish historian, Salo
Baron, of Columbia University, whose twelve-volume Social and Religious
History of the Jews is the most extensive Jewish history by a single author
in existence, argued a view that, post-Holocaust, has been swept to the wayside
by modern Jewish discourse. His view was that Jewish suffering in the European
Middle Ages, and throughout history, has been exaggerated. That is, that the
Jews of Europe, as a group, in comparison to their Christian neighbors, actually
had a better life in the Middle Ages, to the 20th century. For all the claims of massacres and pogroms,
according to surviving documents, the Jewish population actually grew more
rapidly than the Gentiles around them. [LIBERLES, p. 42] This accelerated in later centuries. "The two and a half centuries from 1660
to 1914," says Baron, "the Jewish population grew numerically some
fifteen times ... while mankind at-large increased by only 250 per cent, Europe
by 350 per cent ..." [BARON, H and J.H., p. 50] This thesis, addressing
later years, is supported by a non-Jewish scholar of the Ukraine, Orest Subtleny:
"Throughout the nineteenth century,
especially in its latter part, the
Jews experienced a tremendous population
rise. Between 1820 and
1880, while the general population
of the [Russian] empire rose by
87%, the number of Jews increased
by 150%. On the Right Bank,
this rise was even more dramatic:
between 1844 and 1913 the number
of its inhabitants rose by 265% while
the Jewish population increased
by 844%! Religious sanctions of large families, less exposure
to
famines, war, and epidemics, and a
low mortality rate because of
communal self-help and the availability
of doctors largely accounted
for this extraordinary increase."
[SUBTLENY, p. 276]
Salo Baron argued that his people, the
Jews, were so privileged, relative to non-Jews throughout the European Middle
Ages, that with the coming of the Enlightenment era "emancipation"
and "equality" amounted to "a net loss [to Jews] in status
and lifestyle." [SCHORSCH, p. 383] Elsewhere,
he wrote that "it is likely ... that even the average medieval Jew, compared
to his average Christian contemporary ... was the less unhappy and destitute
creature -- less unhappy and destitute not only by his own consciousness,
but even if measured by such objective criteria as standards of living, cultural
amenities, and protection against individual starvation and disease."
[LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 11]
"Throughout the Middle Ages,"
notes David Biale, "the Jews enjoyed considerable influence in many of
the lands in which they lived ...
In addition to their interest Court politics, these Jews participated in political
life in defense of Jewish interests." [BIALE, POWER p. 69] "The
situation of the Jews in the first half of the Middle Ages," says Abram
Leon, "was ... extremely favorable. The Jews were considered as being
a part of the upper classes in society and their juridicial position was not
perceptibly different from that of the nobility." [LEON, p. 128] "At least some of the Jewish dress of
the Middle Ages," adds Biale, "such as the Jewish hat, originated
out of choice rather than compulsion ... The yellow patch [worn by Jews] ...
was not originally intended as an instrument for segregating and humiliating
the Jews ... but to proclaim publicly that its wearer enjoyed official protection."
[BIALE, POWER, p. 67]
One of the privileges Jews enjoyed throughout
Europe until relatively modern history was that they didn't have to serve
in the local military organizations. "During the continuous wars of the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries," wrote Baron, "
... the Jews were neutral and suffered few losses. If they had been combatants
they might have lost more than in all the pogroms." [LIBERLES, p. 42]
Yet Medieval Jews were allowed the extremely significant privilege of carrying
weapons, a privilege equal to knights and one to which all commoners (the
overwhelming majority of the population) were forbidden. [GOLDBERG, p. 123]
Baron also noted that, while there were certainly Jews who suffered
poverty, the surrounding Christian population was worse off. And if the Jewish
ghettos were, as widely claimed, abject holes of enforced degradation, "is
it not remarkable that the most typical Ghetto in the world, the Frankfurt
Judengasse, produced in the pre-Emancipation period the greatest banking house
in history?" [LIBERLES p. 45]
"The Jews," says Israel Shahak,
"in spite of all the persecution to
which they were subjected, formed
an integral part of the privileged classes
... Jewish historiography,
especially in English, is misleading on
this point inasmuch as it tends
to focus on Jewish poverty and anti-Jewish
discrimination ... The
poorest Jewish craftsman, peddlar, landlord's
steward, or petty cleric
was immeasurably better off than a serf
[most of the non-Jewish
population]. This was especially true in
those European countries
where serfdom persisted until the nineteenth
century, whether in a
partial or extreme form: Prussia, Austria
(including Hungary), Poland,
and the Polan lands taken by Russia. And
it is not without significance
that, prior to the beginning of the great
Jewish migration of modern
times (around 1889), a large majority of
all Jews were living in those
areas and that their most important social
function there was to
mediate the oppression of peasants on behalf
of the nobility and
the Crown." [SHAHAK, p. 52-53]
Jews in Eastern Europe understood the people
around them as, categorically, persecutors. And "the Jews saw their persecutors
as an inferior race," noted World Zionist Organization President Nahum
Goldmann, "Most of my [physician]
grandfather's patients [in Lithuania] were peasants. Every Jew felt ten or
a hundred times the superior of these lowly tillers of the soil; he was cultured,
learned Hebrew, knew the Bible, studied the Talmud -- in other words he knew
that he stood head and shoulders above these illiterates." [GOLDMANN,
1978, p. 13]
"It would never have occurred to us,"
said one Jewish immigrant to the United States, "that the Gentile world
[in Eastern Europe] was happier ... On the contrary, we considered our world
happier and finer." "We thought they were unfortunate," says
another, "We were above them, this was the feeling [towards peasants]."
[MORAWSKA, p. 17] In the face of the commonly cherished belief among modern
Jews that their brethren of Eastern Europe were terribly and uniformly impoverished,
it is a fact that Jews were doing so well (relative to the non-Jews around
them) that non-Jewish servants in Jewish households were common.
Apart from racist folk tales, Zborowski
and Herzog note that most Jewish children in Eastern Europe learned fragments
of the surrounding non-Jewish culture via the Gentile servants in their homes.
"These impressions [of non-Jewish life]," the scholars write, "[were]
available not only to the children of the rich, for [Jewish] women of modest
circumstances who worked in a store or at the market often had the help of
a [non-Jewish] peasant girl in the house." [ZBOROWSKI, p. 155] "[Jewish
life] was certainly better than the life of the Russian peasant," remarks
Howard Sachar. [SACHAR, p. 215]
"We were luckier than most of our fellow-Jews in being able to afford
'servants,' if that is the real name for them," declares Chaim Weizmann,
an immigrant from the "Pale" of Russia, an agitator for how bad
Jews had it in his place of birth, and the first president of modern Israel,
"... [My second servant] who outlived the first and was with us for something
like thirty-five years, was a lovable peasant by the name of Yakim ... He
had learned to sing, after a fashion, the Jewish national anthem, Hatikvah;
and in moments of enthusiasm would cry out: 'Come, little ones, let us sing
Tikvah!'" [WEIZMAN, C., 1949, p. 22]
Elsewhere, Weizman adds:
"The teachers and governing authorities of the schools within the Pale
[an area of Russia] were typical Russian officials, and as such, not free
from corruption. So the rich Jew would use his gold to pave the way for his
boy to enter the school ... There were occasions when a rich Jew would hire
ten non-Jewish candidates (at times rather oddly selected) to sit for the
entrance examination at the local school, and thus make room for one Jewish
pupil -- needless to say his own son or a protege." [WEIZMAN, C., 1949,
p. 31]
"Even when the Jewish common people
were known to be desperately poor," adds Albert Lindemann, "as in
Austrian Galicia or parts of the Jewish Pale of Settlement in tsarist Russia,
their overall per capita wealth still seems to have been greater than that
of non-Jews, mostly peasants, among whom they lived." [LINDEMANN, Esau's,
p. 21] "On the whole," says sociologist Stephen Steinberg, "Eastern
European Jews [prior to immigration to America in the late nineteenth century]
were unquestionably poor, though decidedly better off than the surrounding
peasant population." [STEINBERG, p. 97]
What, one wonders, is to be read between
this relativity of being "poor?"
How poor could Jews have really been if they were "decidedly better
off" than the non-Jewish peasants (who were most of the Eastern European
population), even hiring Polish servants for their homes?
Another part of Jewish popular mythology
is that the Jews were forced
against their will into ghettos in Europe. The widely-believed accusation
that Jews were forcibly segregated, particularly into ghettos, is a distortion
of historical fact. In the Middle Ages most Christian towns themselves had
walls, gates, and locks for protection from outsiders. The enclosed Jewish
ghetto was, in origin, a Jewish construction, conceived for both protection
and self-segregation from the taint of non-Jewish ways.
"In the thirteenth century," writes
Max Weinrich, "segregated living quarters for Jews were made compulsory.
The fact of the matter is that separate Jewish streets had existed all along
... If the Jews lived together long before segregated living quarters were
imposed upon them, then their segregation must have been voluntary. It was.
Living apart, no matter how bizarre it may appear in the light of present
day concepts and attitudes, was part of the 'privileges' accorded to the Jews
in conforming with their own wishes." [WEINRICH, p. 105]
As president Nachum Goldmann of the World
Zionist Organization notes:
"It is wrong to say that the goyim forced the Jews to separate themselves
themselves from other societies. When the
Christians defined the
ghetto limits, Jews lived there already."
[GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 66]
For centuries Jews isolated themselves
from their surrounding non-Jewish neighbors except, of course, for the necessities
of commerce. "Had the Jews not possessed a deep-rooted conviction of
the truth of their religion," says Jacob Katz, "and had they not
actively sought to maintain their separate identity, the tendencies inherent
in medieval conditions would inevitably have ended by breaking down the social
barrier erected by Jewish ritual." [KATZ, Ex, p. 40] "In Orthodox Judaism," wrote anthropologist
Maurice Fishberg in 1911, "a Jew must not eat at the same table with
a Gentile, nor any food prepared by the latter; must not eat or drink from
dishes, with spoons, forks, knives, etc. which have been used by a Gentile;
must not drink wine with the container of which has been touched by a Christian,
Mohammadan, or heathen ... I know Jews to feel nauseated and even vomit when
told that the food they have consumed was not kosher. ... It was the intense tribal spirit engendered by his religion
which kept the Jew from intimate contact with the Gentiles, more than the
laws promulgated by Christian states for the purpose." [FISHBERG, p. 536]
"We [Jews] formed the ghetto ourselves,"
wrote the Zionist leader Vladamir Zabotinsky, " ... voluntarily, for
the same reason for which Europeans in Shanghai established their separate
quarter, to be able to live their own way." [KORBANSKI, p. 8] "The
Ghetto was rather a privilege than a disability," notes J. O. Hertzler,
"and sometimes was claimed by the Jews as a right when its demolition
was threatened." [HERTZLER, p. 73] Boas Evron cites the work of fellow
Israeli scholar, Yehezkel Kaufmann, in noting that
"the popular assumption that external
anti-Jewish pressures forced
group identify and exclusivity on the
Jews is unconvincing, since
historical evidence shows that Jewish
exclusivity and aloofness
preceded outside hostility and were thus
its cause, not its result ...
Jewish communities were always borne by
host societies ... They
never shared in political, military, administrative,
or technological
responsibilities." [EVRON, p. 53]
In articles in 1928 and 1932, Cecil Roth,
one of the foremost Jewish scholars of his day, set out to debunk the Jewish
myths of incessant persecution by non-Jews through the ages. "In the
first place," wrote Roth, ".... the Jew has always tended to regard
as a martyr all persons who died at Gentile hands ... even if he died in a
drunken brawl ... All those [Jews] who met a violent end, no matter under
what circumstances, were included under the head of martyrs in the Jewish
popular consciousness and recollection." [ROTH, Most, p. 136-137]
This martyr tradition and schema has even
been outrageously used, quite the same, with the identical religious base,
in Orthodox Jewish messianic political quarters in our own day. Baruch Goldberg,
the American-born Orthodox Israeli doctor who murdered 29 Arabs with an automatic
weapon this decade as they prayed in a Hebron mosque, and who was subsequently
beaten to death, was proclaimed by some Jews to be kadosh. (This word is commonly translated
as meaning "holy;" it also has connotations meaning "separate"
or "apart.") "A Jew who is killed because he is a Jew,"
wrote Dov Leor (a rabbi for the messianic Gush Emunim organization) about
Goldberg's violent death, "must certainly be called ... a holy martyr
... without investigating their previous conduct." [LEOR, p. 61] "Baruch
Goldstein was the greatest Jew alive," declared a Jerusalem teacher,
Samuel Hacohen, "not in one way, but in every way ... There are no innocent
Arabs here, and thank God that one Jewish hero reminded us that it had become
almost legal to kill Jews in the street. He is the only one who could do it,
the only one who was 100 percent perfect. He was no crazy ... Killing isn't
nice, but sometimes it is very necessary." Rabbi Yaacov Perin also announced
at Goldberg's funeral that "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish
fingernail." [BROWNFELD, A., 3-99, p. 85]
A 1908 pamphlet, notes Cecil Roth, was widely
circulated in the Jewish community under the title, Jews Hanged or Burned
Alive in Rome.... Because They Refused to Change Their Faith. Of the hanged
Jews listed, all but one were in fact executed for specific crimes, a harshness
rendered no differently to any other people of past eras. "This instance," says Roth, "...
is symptomatic of the attitude which Jewish historiography has consistently
adopted. Any popular attack or any governmental persecution in which Jews
were victims is set down outright as an expression of anti-Semitic sentiment."
In another example, in 1278, on charges
of money clipping [skimming gold or silver content from coinage], 267 Jews
were hanged in London. This punishment was not merited out to Jews as Jews,
but to those who were disproportiontely "in possession of the greater
amount of ready money." Those who accumulated money in the Jewish money-lending
and usury era happened to be overwhelmingly Jews, but also included a lesser
number of Christian goldsmiths and such who were similarly arrested and executed.
"What seems at first blush," says Roth, "[to be] an act of
sheer persecution appears in a closer examination one of primitively sharp
justice." [ROTH, p. 137]
In the early years of Christianity, in Alexandria
(of today's Egypt), attacks upon Jews rendered in Jewish historical consciousness
as acts of anti-Semitism were really what Roth says today would be called
"an interracial riot." [ROTH, p. 138]
Roth underscored the precarious existence
of all peoples' lives in the Middle Ages:
"The modern reader frequently fails
to realize that, generally speaking,
life in the Middle Ages was not secure.
For every section of the
population the probabilities of meeting
a violent death were high, even
in times of comparative peace. Country
people were continually subject
to the onslaught of bandits or of lawless
barons, as well as the
marchings and counter marchings of armed
forces. [Even] city dwellers
... [ran] the risk of sack and wholesale
murder. The whole of medieval,
and a great part of modern, history is
studded with instance of the sort:
the devastation of Attila, the Scourge
of God; the ravaging of the Vexin
by William the Conqueror; the sack of
a score of German cities during
the Thirty Years War. There were frequently
cases when only a minority
of the population survived, the vast majority
being piteously massacred.
These events and their like should be
borne in mind when one considers
the vicissitudes of any particular racial
or religious minority. The scarlet
of Jewish persecution does not stand out
on a ground of virginal white.
[ROTH, p. 138]
In medieval Poland, says Bernard Weinyrb,
"In an epoch and a country where most of the time people were in danger
of attacks by Tatars and Turks, of wars, soldiers, and robber gangs on the
roads, insecurity became the normal way of life for people who had never known
anything different." [WEINRYB, p. 159]
The miseries caused by the sack of Rome
in 1527, Christian crusades against Muslim-controlled Jerusalem in 1096, Leon
in 1197, Malaga in 1487, Naples in 1494, Padua in 1509, Tunis in 1535, or
"a hundred other occasions" were at least equivalent tragedies to
Jewish descriptions of "Jewish martyrdom." [ROTH, p. 138]
"It is probably the fact," says
Roth, "that in the course of the medieval wars and disorders, the Jews
normally suffered more than any other section of the population. This was
not necessarily, however, because they were Jews, but simply because they
belonged to the more opulent class ... on the capture of a town (by an army),
the first objective of the assailants would naturally be the streets of the
goldsmiths and the street of the Jews." [ROTH, p. 139]
Likewise, Jews -- perceived as affluent and exploitive outsiders to native populaces
--suffered the same way at the hands of mobs as did Italian traders in London
in 1439 and 1455, and at the "Hansa Steelyard" in 1494. Jews were
also subject to random "acts of rapine," like any Christian -- or
other community -- of the Middle Ages, as happened in the Jewish part of Asolo,
in northern Italy, in 1547. Perpetrators in that case were punished by the
central government.
While Jews were sometimes required to wear
special badges of identification in the European Middle Ages, it was a norm
of discrimination for the era. Muslims also had to wear such marks of "outsider"
distinction in Christian societies. Conversely, in the Muslim world, Christian
communities were also faced with such laws and legislation of discrimination,
sometimes even in clothing. And of course Jewish law itself has various nomenclature
and attendant rules for treatment of various categories of non-Jews as second-class,
or worse, people. (Even in modern Israel, Arabs are discriminatorily noted
as such on national identity cards).
"Some current histories," said
Roth in 1932, "appear to assume the Jews were sole victims of the Spanish
Inquisition ... Strictly, this is
so far from the truth that a precisian might retort that [the Jews] never
came under the [Inquisition's] scope, save in exceptional cases, since the
activities were essentially confined to [Christian] apostates and renegades."
[ROTH, p. 141] Those "Jews" who risked trouble were those among
the Marranos/Conversos, who disingenuously represented themselves as Christians
and were thereby subject to the same scrutinization for religious conformance
as that directed upon any other Christian. Widely targeted were Christian
heretics, not the Judaic faith. As M. Hirsh Goldberg notes,
"Contrary to popular belief, Jews who
openly remained Jews were
not tortured or killed as part of the inquisition
proceedings. The
Inquisition was specifically authorized
by the Church to root out
heresy among Catholics, so only heretical
Christians and Jewish
converts to Christianity accused of secretly
reverting to Judaism
were prosecuted." [GOLDBERG, M. H.,
1979, p. 16]
"[T]he Holy
Inquistion in Portugal," notes Arnold Wiznitzer, "did not persecute
Jews who never had been Catholics. Only persons of Jewish origin who had been
born Catholic, or those, born Jews and baptised later, who had deserted Catholicism
openly or secretly were subject to the Inquisition since they were considered
as being apostates." [WIZNITZER, A., 1957, p. 64]
"The Inquistion," notes Joachim Prinz,
"is considered one of the many traumatic
experiences of Jewish history, and as
such, it is always spoken of with dread. But,
of course, the Inquistion had no
power over Jews at all. It was established for
the purpose of dealing with
Christians who had deviated from their faith.
The Marranos who were called
into account for their secret practices appeared
not as Jews but as allegedly
heretical Chrisitans ... No unconverted Jews
were ever called to the tribunals."
[PRINZ, J., 1973, p. 44]
"Living under the Inquisition,"
adds Goldberg in another volume,
"caused Jews to make some curious adjustments,
as can be seen
in the family of Manoel Pereira Coutinho,
who had five daughters --
all nuns in a convent in Lisbon -- while
in Hamburg his sons were
living openly as Jews." [GOLDBERG,
M. H., 1976, p. 109]
"All Jews know about the Inquisition,"
wrote David Goldstein, a Jewish apostate, "but of Jewish [-perpetrated]
injustices they know hardly anything." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 117]
"The name of Torquemada," wrote Jewish author John Cournos
in 1937, "the loathsome Grand Inquisitor, was a byword among us children,
as it was in other Jewish households." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 117] This view
that the Inquisition somehow centered on Jews still remains widespread in
the community today, as proclaimed in a 1990 issue of the American Jewish
Congress magazine devoted to the subject of Jewish identity.
Ignoring the Christian target groups of the heresy trials, Zvi Bekarman
remarked that "The Inquisition is brought to us as one more proof of
the suffering of the Jews." [BEKERMAN, p. 14]
Despite all the Jewish lamenting of pogroms
and massacres upon their ancestors, the Catholic-Protestant massacre of St.
Bartholomew's Day in the 1500's was as spectacularly horrible as any Jewish
medieval misfortune to that time. Nor, adds Roth, "was persecution of
the Jews in its acutest form [ever] systematic." (The later World War
II Holocaust scenario, which of course was systematic, will be addressed
later at length in its own chapter).
Jews were often blamed for the epidemic
of the Plague and the Black Death that swept Europe in the Middle Ages (while
Jewish communities were relatively free from the disease, [HERTZLER, p. 95]
but such causal connection to medieval minds was not to the detriment of Jews
only. Non-Jews were also accused of, and murdered for, causing the Plague
in Palermo in 1526, in Germany in 1530, 1545, and 1574, at Casale Monferrat
in 1536, and other places throughout Europe. In Breslau, in 1349 sixty Jews
were executed for having caused a town fire, "but," says Roth, "when
one recalls that 300 years afterwards the Great Fire of London was [blamed
upon] the Papists, one realizes that the Jews had no monopoly on unjust accusations."
[ROTH, p. 144]
Jewish communities themselves had irrational
superstitions to scapegoat others and to explain disease and other misfortunes.
Says Zborowski and Herzog:
"If an epidemic strikes the shtetl, prayers are, of course, offered
up.
Other steps consist chiefly in marrying
off two orphans or cripples,
so that God will be mollified by the good
deeds of the worshippers...
Whenever there was an epidemic in the
shtetl they used to blame it
on peoples' sins. They tried to find the
guilty ones and expose them
to the public ... Another method for getting
rid of an epidemic was
to get two orphans if possible and to
marry them off on the cemetery
..." [ZBOROWSKI, p. 224]
Throughout Europe, "it was.... dangerous
to be an old woman in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries"' when
witch hunts put 100,000 unfortunates on trial for sorcery in Germany alone.
[ROTH, p. 145] Some 30,000 such victims are reputed to have been burned alive
or torn to pieces in England, and over a two hundred year period in Scotland,
an average of two hundred "witches" were burned at the stake each
year. Throughout Europe gypsies were sporadically singled out for persecution
and blame, and various Christians and other non-Jews from time to time were
executed for the charge of cannibalism.
Lest modern Jews feel too smug in the brutal
superstitions of the ancient Gentiles, the Talmud itself notes an instance
when eighty Jewish women were hung at one time at the instigation of a fellow
Jew, "Simeon the Son of Shetach," in Ashkelon for the crime of being
witches. [HARRIS, p. 174] When coming
across a witch, the Talmud recommends that the passerby "should mutter
thus, 'May a potsherd of boiling dung be stuffed in your mouths, you ugly
witches!'" [HARRIS, p.189] Some rabbis even opined that a witch may be
either male or female, but "most women are witches." [HARRIS, p.
190] Even "the best among women," said Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai,
"is a witch." [HARRIS, p. 191]
The Talmud also details the various manners
of stoning, strangling or beheading Jewish "blasphemers and idolaters."
Such criminals were also buried up to their knees in manure, and their mouths
forced open by strangling. Molten lead could then be poured "into his
bowels." [HARRIS, p. 170]
The persistence of the Jewish mythology
of unique persecution, says Roth, has much to do with their longevity and
communal dispersal throughout Europe and the world. The persecution of the
Albigensians of France, for instance, is known by hardly anyone today because
their destruction was singularly localized, they were completely wiped out,
and there is no one interested in heralding their suffering. Likewise the
Waldenses of France, and various others. "The Jews," notes Roth,
"are an inseparable element in the history of every country in Europe
... and thus have an advantage, as it were, of a superior publicity service;
and no historian, even a Gentile, could fail to be impressed by this insistent,
pathetic, unique record." [ROTH, p. 147]
Roth goes to the essence of the Jewish mythos
of communal agony:
"In the classical period ... with its
holocausts and heroes, the lot of
the Jewish people was much the same as that
of the ancient Britons,
the Iberians, and the Gauls; and the leaders
of those peoples' struggles
for freedom deserve to be remembered as
much as the Jewish martyrs
who are commemorated each year on the ninth
of Ab. But this is far
from the case. Generally, they are forgotten,
save by a few industrious
antiquarians; and they have no place today
in the proud memories of
any people. The reason is very plain. The
races for which they fought
are long since dead. The Jews are still
alive." [ROTH, p. 147]
These insightful observations were written
by Roth in 1932. The rise of German fascism and its institutionalized inhumanity
was still only rising. Yet we can see here in Roth's unusually honest overview
of Jewish history the broader, foundational context for current Jewish thinking
about themselves to this day. Of course the so-called Holocaust of World War
II has completely solidified the traditional view of the persecution of Jewry
and obliterated Roth's broadly realistic brand of Jewish historiography.
To a now militant Jewish polemic, their
community's European experience in World War II merely confirms the Jewish
mythos of unique and eternal victimization and martrydom. It is monolithic,
irrefutable, immutable, and immoveable: Jews
argue they were uniquely "singled out." There will be a great deal
more about the Holocaust and its part in Jewish identity in its own chapter.
For immediate purposes, it is enough here to recognize the historical context
for modern Jewry's fundamental self-conception: that of humankind's foremost
-- and superlative -- victims, passed along as part of religious faith century
after century, reified in Jewish cosmology at every turn.
Roth's early 1930's view, in the context
of rising Nazi fascism and worry about anti-Semitism spreading in America,
has been completely muted in our own day, and Jewish apologetics about Jewish
identity and history began rising in direct proportion to the gravity of the
growing German threat. By 1941, a Jewish author, Oscar Janowsky, reviewed
-- in the same Jewish journal that earlier published Roth's critiques of the
Jewish victimization cosmology -- two new books that championed Jewish history.
Each book was authored by well-respected Jewish scholars. One of them was
Cecil Roth. Janowsky's title for his article was "Apologetics for Our
Time." In the context of German Nazism, even Roth was swallowed by the
demands for Jewish positive image-making against all and any self-critical
Jewish commentary. "Both authors," wrote Janowsky, "would readily
concede that the purpose [of these books] was not to write 'history' of the
accepted variety. Our age requires apologetics, and this sad need has been
filled by the authors." [JANOWSKY, p. 225] This "sad need"
was so great that a 1951 volume entitled The Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization
even stated bluntly in its very first sentence: "This book is a book
of propaganda." [RUNES, D., p. vii]
In 1947, Milton Steinberg wrote a volume,
Basic Judaism, explaining the faith for both Jews and "those many
non-Jews who happen to be curious about Judaism." [STEINBERG, p. viii]
Here Steinberg's apologetic, in doing his part to engender a positive Jewish
public image (like so many others to our own day), was grossly untrue: "Judaism
is totally unaware of race. Though the Tradition loves to trace the House
of Israel to the Patriarchs, blood descent is no factor in its calculations."
[STEINBERG, M., p. 99]
With World War II and the disaster that
befell humanity -- and the Jews within it -- looming soon over Europe, this
apologetic methodology (as well as a resultant Jewish militancy) about Jewish
history has continued in a rarely interrupted straight line to the present
day. (Examine, for example, the gushingly laudatory content of the popular
1999 bestseller by a non-Jewish author: The Gifts of the Jews). In
fact, the mythology of perpetual Jewish victimhood was well along as an exploitable
tool by American Jews and Zionists as a political devise at the beginning
of the Twentieth Century, where Jewish woe centered upon anti-Jewish riots
and attacks in Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia. "Some of the atrocities
[against Jews] initially reported," writes Albert Lindemann, "were
exaggerated or simply did not occur, and some Jews made false claims in the
hope of getting relief money from Western Europe and America." [LINDEMANN,
p. 154]
Many of the exaggerations were also created
to enhance Zionist propaganda to garner sympathy and support for a Jewish
state in Israel. An important target
of Zionist propaganda and historical exaggeration was American Jews. "You
have to speak to American Jews in superlatives," remarked Nachum Goldmann,
for many years the president of both the World Zionist Organization and World
Jewish Congress, "Cool, balanced, analysis makes no impression on them,
and exaggeration is almost indispensable." [GROSE, p. 162] Elsewhere,
in 1978 he noted that his Zionist group alone had spent "millions of
dollars on propaganda." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 63]
A pioneer strategist in the use of the accusation
of anti-Semitism as a propaganda device was Theodore Herzl, a Viennese journalist
and playwright, the man most credited for the successful promotion of the
Jewish "return to Israel" Zionist ideology. Herzl "understood
the true nature of propaganda," notes former Israeli diplomat, Moshe
Leshem," of the emotional appeal." "In truth ... noise amounts
to a great deal," Herzl noted in his diary, "A sustained noise is
in itself a noteworthy fact, world history is nothing but noise." [LESHEM,
p. 85]
Among the most reported Russian anti-Jewish
pogrom sites at the turn of the century was Kishinev. (This incident led to
the creation of the Jewish lobbying agency, the American Jewish Committee
in 1903). [HALKIN, p. 54] Chaim Weitzmann, another Zionist activist and the
first President of the state of Israel, wrote to a member of the wealthy Jewish
Rothschild family (instrumental in funding early Jewish settlements in pre-Israel
Palestine):
"Eleven years ago ... I happened
to be in the cursed town of Kishinev
... In a group of about 100 Jews we
defended the Jewish quarter with
revolvers in our hand, defended women
and girls ... We slept in the
cemetery -- the only safe place and we
saw 80 corpses brought in,
mutilated dead...”
"Thus Weizmann," says Albert
Lindemann, "reports that he personally saw eighty mutilated corpses in
a single place, when the death toll for the entire city was later generally
recognized to be forty-five. But there is another problem with the account
he provides. It is pure fantasy. Weizmann was in Warsaw at the time."
[LINDEMANN, p. 164]
The long -- and continuing -- Jewish defamation
of Poles and Poland, as part of a broad Zionist propaganda policy and secular
Jewish victimization theology, has been going on for a long time. For all
western Jewry's complaints about massive Polish violence against Polish Jewry,
in 1919 Hugh Gibson, the United states minister to Warsaw, wrote that, "It
is ridiculous as we are told about every incident where the Jew gets the worst
of it and a great many incidents that never happened at all. These yarns are
exclusively of foreign manufacture for anti-Polish purposes." Two prominent
and powerful American Zionists -- Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter (both
United States Supreme Court justices) -- confronted Gibson to complain about
his dispatches to Washington. "They complained that my reports on the
Jewish question had gone round the world and undone their work [in proclaiming
enormous violent Polish anti-Semitism]," said Gibson,
"... They finally said that I had
stated that the stories of excesses against
the Jews were exaggerated, to which I
replied that they certainly were
and I should think any Jew would be glad
to know it ... [They] seemed
to be interested in agitation for its
own sake rather than in learning the
situation ... Their efforts were concentrated
on an attempt to bully me
into accepting the mixture of information
and misinformation which
they have adopted as the basis of their
propaganda ... Felix handed
me a scarcely veiled threat that the Jews
would try to prevent my
confirmation by the Senate [then pending]
... They made it clear to
me that they do not care to have any diagnosis
made that is not based
entirely on Jewish statements as to conditions
and events and doesn't
accept them at face value. If they are
not ready to go into the question
honestly I don't see how they can hope
to accomplish anything for their
people... [American Jews have embarked
upon] a conscienceless and
cold-blooded plan to make the condition
of the Jews in Poland so bad
they must turn to Zionism for relief."
[GROSE, p. 94-95]
In 1923 the United States Vice Consul to
Warsaw, Monroe Kline, added that "It is true that the Pole hates the
Jew ... The Jew in business oppresses the Pole to a far greater extent than
does the Pole oppress the Jew in a political way." [GROSE, p. 95]
More recently, Leonard Fein notes Jewish
fears of assimilation that could erase them as a people, and the emotional
cloud that informs Jewish perception of the facts of history:
"Deep down -- and sometimes not so
very deep -- we [Jews] still
believe that we depended on the pogroms
and persecutions to
keep us a people, and that we have not
the fibre to withstand
the lures of a genuine open society. It
is seduction, not rape,
that we fear the most, and nowhere is the
seducer more blatant,
less devious, than here in America."
[in SILBERMAN, p. 165]
The Jewish limited historical memory (and
corresponding embracement of legend) and its singular focus on its martyrological
tradition has also been systematically exploited to buttress Zionist reasoning
for the necessity of the modern state of Israel: a home for Jews from worldwide
anti-Semitic persecution. The lengths some Jews will go to enforce -- and
create -- the martyrological/persecution
tradition for political purposes was noted by Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former
CIA agent stationed in Iraq in the early years after the foundation (1948)
of today's Israel. A few months before his arrival to that country in 1950,
a bomb went off "outside a Passover gathering," underscoring Arab
hostility to Jews and encouraging 10,000 to move to the new Israeli state.
Eveland wrote that
"Just after I arrived in Baghdad,
an Israeli citizen had been recognized
in the city's largest department store:
his interrogation led to the
discovery of fifteen arms caches brought
into Iraq by an underground
Zionist movement. In attempts to portray
the Iraqis as anti-American
and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists
planted bombs in the United
States Information Service Library and
in synagogues. Soon
leaflets began to appear urging Jews
to flee to Israel ... Although
the Iraqi police later provided our embassy
with evidence to show that
the synagogue and library bombings, as
well as the anti-Jewish and anti-
American leaflet campaigns, had been
the work of an underground
Zionist organization, most of the world
believed reports that Arab
terrorism had motivated the flight of
the Iraqi Jews whom the
Zionists had 'rescued' really just in
order to increase Israel's Jewish
population." [FEURLICHT, p. 231]
Aware from personal experience about the
facts in such matters, in 1998, an Iraqi-born Jew and former Zionist activist,
Naeim Giladi, wrote that he wanted "to tell the American people, and
especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly
to Israel; that to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews." [GILADI, p.
1]
In 1975 Jewish CBS reporter Mike Wallace
journeyed to another Arab nation, Syria, to do a 60 Minutes program
on the country. Years later, he noted his own biases (about alleged Syrian
anti-Semitism) that were destroyed when he actually went to Damascus:
"[Before I went to Syria] I had a strong
impression of what life was
like for [Jews] there. From Jewish friends
in America, I had heard
the same stories over and over again: The
Jews in Syria were confined
to ghettos and were constant victims of
persecution. A tight curfew was
imposed on them and they were not allowed
to have telephones or
drives automobiles. Nor were they permitted
to worship in synagogues
of study in their traditional language,
Hebrew. In short, the Syrian Jews
were forced to live as prisoners within
their own country." [WALLACE/
GATES, 1984, p. 282]
All this, as Wallace soon learned upon
visiting Syria, was complete nonsense. Jews owned cars; Jews had classes in
Hebrew. Although the Jewish community was under close surveillance by the
Assad regime, Wallace is careful to note that so was everyone in that police state. The CBS reporter interviewed a variety
of Jews in the Arab country. Speaking to a Jewish teacher, Wallace notes his
surprise to her response about the myths he had heard about Syrian anti-Semitism
:
"Then I mentioned all the stories I
had heard about how badly the
Jews were treated in Syria, and when I asked
her where she thought
they came from, she replied in an almost
malevolent tone: 'I think
that it's Zionist propaganda.'" [WALLACE,
M., 1984, pl. 285]
Cecil Roth, in his overviews of Jewish history
with its attendant polemics and apologetics (let alone some of the fraudulent
escapades of modern Zionism), argued that the continued suppression of an
honest evaluation of the Jewish past could come back to haunt them:
"By suppression we play into the
hand of the anti-Semite, who may one
day make capital out of the innocent
humanity we have chosen to
ignore. But, above all, by repression we are faithless to the most
sacred
charge of history, which is the pursuit
of truth." [ROTH, p. 423]
