12
THE JEWISH COSMOLOGY OF VICTIMHOOD (Part 2)
"I also tried to avoid becoming
uncomfortably hooked on anti-Semitism
as the main problem in the world. Many Jews I knew divided the world into
Jews and anti-Semites, nothing else. Many Jews I knew recognized no problem
anywhere, at any time, but that of anti-Semitism ... Such is the blindness
of
people that I have known Jews who, having deplored anti-Semitism in unmeasured
tones, would, with scarcely a breath in between, get on the subject of
African-Americans and promptly begin to sound like a group of petty Hitlers.
And when I pointed this out and objected to it strenuously, they turned
on me
in anger. They simply could not see what they were doing. I once listened
to a
woman grow eloquent over the terrible way in which Gentiles did nothing
to
save the Jews of Europe. 'You can't trust Gentiles,' she said. I let some
time elapse and then asked suddenly, 'What are you doing to help the blacks
in their fight for civil rights?' 'Listen,' she said, 'I have my own troubles.'
And I said, 'So did the Gentiles.' But she only stared at me blankly. She
didn't get the point at all."
-- Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov. A Memoir, 1994, p. 20, 21
For nearly fifteen centuries in their diaspora,
after the Jewish/Roman historian Josephus, the Jewish community taught and
re-taught only its religious dogma and martyrological mythos to define its
past, present, and future. Until the Enlightenment in the late 18th century,
the Jewish ghettos were filled with people cloistered away under rabbinical
blinders. Jewish "history" was all history, and it was entirely framed in the religiously-based
conventional framework for understanding the world: Jewish exceptionality,
Jewish martyrology, and an apocalyptic vision entwined in Jewish suffering
in search of atonement. [LOPATE, p. 306] As Jacob Neusner notes:
"What strikingly characterizes the
imagination of the archaic Jew is the centrality
of Israel, the Jewish people in human history, the certainty that being Jewish is the
most important thing about
oneself,
and that Jewishness, meaning Judaism, was
the
dominant aspect of one's consciousness." [NEUSNER,
J., 1972, p. 62]
Simon Dubnov, a prominent and well-respected
Jewish historian, notes that Jews were so self-isolated from the non-Jews
around them that for centuries their own history was merely the recycled metacommentaries
about their seminal myths of Chosen People victimhood:
"Talmudic literature (including the
Midrashim) ... hardly contained any
material concerning social dynamics which
is necessary for history in
the true sense. The leaders of the nation
that was deprived of its
kingdom seemed to have lost interest in
the events of the world
around them ... The historian is greatly
distressed when, in the scores
of volumes of talmudical literature, he
finds merely vague hints at events
of the first five centuries of the Christian
era, and searches in vain for
chronological data. He has a sense of
shame for the nation ... which...
lost its ability to perpetuate its experiences,
even in simple chronicles...
The one-sidedness of the Jewish sources,
which illuminated only the
spiritual side of life, created a false
historical perspective." [DUBNOV,
p. 436-438]
Robert Goldenberg notes that, in Jewish
tradition,
"great rabbinic leaders ... became
both disembodied bearers of a
an elaborate legal tradition and also heroes
of a marvelously rich
tradition of legend ... From the historian's
point of view, the Talmud
thus becomes a terribly frustrating book.
It is rich with stories that
may -- or may not -- reflect the way certain
events happened, and it
is full of legal discussions that may --
or may not -- report the actual
content of early rabbinic scholarly activity.
Everything is fascinating,
everything is potentially an open window
on the past, but nothing
can be trusted." [GOLDENBERG, R.,
1984, p. 157]
"Jews have suffered and Christians
have suffered [throughout history]," wrote Rabbi Richard Singer, "Mankind
has suffered. There is no group with a monopoly on suffering and no human
beings which have experienced hate and hostility more than any other. I must
say, however, that it is my impression that Jewish history has been taught
with a whine and a whimper rather than a straightforward acknowledgement that
man practices his inhumanity on his fellow human beings." [ZUKERMAN,
p. 66]
"[A] disability for the Jews in modern
times," says Barnet Litvinoff, "has been their own obscurantism.
If all the questions of how to live were to be answered only in the wisdom
of the Talmud, there could be no intellectual explorations, and therefore
no progress." [LITVINOFF, p. 10] "[Rabbis] had cut off [the Jewish community] from the community
of nations," wrote Bernard Lazare in 1894 about the Jewish ghetto mentality,
"They had made of it a sullen recluse, a rebel against all laws, foreign
to all feeling fraternity [with others], closed to all beautiful, noble, and
generous ideas; they had made of it a small and miserable nation, soured by
isolation, brutalized by a narrower education, demoralized and corrupted by
an unjustifiable pride." [LAZARE, p. 14] "The Eastern European Jews,"
notes Raphael Patai, "(with a few very notable exceptions) considered
interest in all realms of non-Jewish intellectual endeavor as un-Jewish and
therefore prohibited. Even the readings of books other than the Bible, the
Talmud, the codes, and the Midrashim was strictly forbidden, and has remained
so to this day in those circles in which the Eastern European Yeshiva tradition
survives." [PATIA, R., 1971, p. 294]
"Jews lived with memory, so that redemption
might be hastened," adds Stephen Whitfield, "but they did not live
with history. The rabbis ... made little effort to record the history of their
own post-Biblical era ... The first post-medieval attempt at a history of
the Jews was written by a gentile, Jacques Basnage ... Only ... under the
impact of modernization … could Jews ... wrest meaning from Jewish life and
identity. [WHITFIELD, p. 29-30]
Basnage's 17-volume work, published between
1706 and 1711, has been called by one twentieth-century Jewish reviewer "the
basis for the science of Jewish history; and though his work was far from
perfect, it remained the best for a century to come." [GOLDBERG, M. H.,
1976, p. 212]
Although Jewish history usually highlights
Christian intolerance and the periodic burnings of the Talmud, the earliest
printings of even this religious tract were accomplished with substantial
Christian support. As M. Hersch Goldberg notes:
"Pope Leo X, who reigned from 1513
to 1521, encouraged the printing
of the first complete edition of the Talmud.
Under his patronage, fifteen
volumes of the Babylonian Talmud were printed
in Venice beginning in
1519 ... Another Christian played an important
part in preparing that
historic edition of the Talmud. The printer
Daniel Bomberg (whose name
may sound Jewish, but who was a Christian)
had set up his press in
Venice in 1516. He devoted great care and
attention in printing the
Talmud ... Seemingly fascinated with Jewish
literature, Bomberg is
said to have done more to spread Jewish
learning than any other
printer of his time ... Over the years,
Bomberg printed approximately
two hundred books of Jewish interest."
[GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976,
p. 210-211]
The Talmud itself, of course, is not history,
but religious polemic. "Memory of the past," says Yosef Yerushalmi,
"was always a central component of Jewish experience; the historian was
not its primary custodian." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 30] "The [Israelite]
prophet," notes Old Testament scholar John Allegro, "saw Yahweh
[the Israelite God] as a cosmic deity, lord of the heavenly hosts and forces
of nature, but at the same time still the special god of Israel, a tribal
deity whose main interest was the welfare of his Chosen People. Thus it followed
that whatever the grand strategy in the Creator's mind, it involved the destiny
of the Jews, and all history was directed to their glorification." [ALLEGRO,
J., 1971, p. 58]
"Most Jews have a slight knowledge of Jewish
history," says Chaim Bermant,
"This is true even of those in Yeshiva
(college of higher learning), for the
Yeshiva is devoted largely to the study
of the Talmud, and the Talmud,
though encyclopaedic in scope, was completed
by the sixth century and
events beyond that date are largely terra
incognita, except where they are
echoed by liturgy and lore." [BERMANT,
C., 1977, p. 18]
The above observations, and one of the theses
of this volume, point to a Jewish identity that is at its conceptual roots
-- even for the secular today -- religious in complexion and fundamentally
ahistorical.
Firmly going against the grain of popular
Jewish proclamation that they, and their old religion, Judaism, are the root
of everything wise and wonderful on earth, a Jewish author and social activist,
Maurice Hindus, wryly observed in 1927 that
"The force that first pried the Jewish
mind open to radical doctrines of
a modern nature had its origin not in Jewish
but in distinctly non-Jewish
intellectual associations ... [Political
philosophers] Marx and Lassalle
were steeped in Western, that is, modern
Gentile culture, Gentile
philosophy, Gentile science ... It is only
after the Jew began to ram
down the gates of the ghetto and to make
excursions into the intellectual
temples of his Christian neighbors, only
after he had laid aside the
Talmud and the Shulcan Aruch for
modern, western, that is Gentile,
history, biology, psychology, science,
that he embarked on a
career of achievement in modern arts and
science ... The old Jewish
civilization, with its rigid orthodoxy
and its emphasis on Jewish
superiority, compelled aloofness from worldly
intellectual intercourse
even as it compelled social isolation.
It frowned on the perusal of
modern literature, philosophy, social theory,
even on the study of
foreign, that is Gentile, languages."
[HINDUS, p. 369-370]
"Guided by the dictum that 'all that
is new is forbidden by the Torah,'" says Charles Silberman, "the
rabbis spoke as though the slightest deviation from tradition was a lapse
into heresy." [SILBERMAN, p. 171]
"The
Jewish nature does not produce its rarest fruits in a Jewish environment,"
noted Israel Abrahams, "... It was ancient Alexandria that produced Philo,
medieval Spain Maimonides, modern Amsterdam Spinoza." [FEUERLICHT, p.
38] "One can be ignorant of all the sayings of the wise old rabbis,"
notes Ann Roiphe, "and still acknowledge the Magna Carte, the Declaration
of Independence, the words of Rousseau, Hobbes, Emerson, the art of Leonardo
da Vinci, Michealangelo and Dante, the science of Darwin, Newton and Galileo.
These were not Jewish, and the great Jewish thinkers, Freud, Marx and Einstein,
Claude Levi-Strauss, studied at Christian universities and learned form Christian
scholars ... The great universities of the West were founded without Jews
... The Christian world created Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, Harvard,
and Yale." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 209]
These perspectives do not reflect the mainstream
current of modern Jewish history, however. For most, the self-repeating myths
of the wonders of Jewish Talmudic scholarship and its attendant Jewish martyrology
were -- and are -- central to Jewry's understanding of its past.
In the late nineteenth century, for example, Heinrich Graetz, the seminal
"modern" Jewish historian, was only following a long line of self-portrayal
when he introduced one of his volumes of Jewish history with what he felt
to be the essence of their story:
"The long era of the dispersion,
lasting nearly seventeen centuries,
is characterized by unprecedented
sufferings, an uninterrupted
martyrdom, and a constantly aggravated
degradation and
humiliation unparalleled in history
... " [GRAETZ, v. 4 Intro,
in LIBERLES p. 104]
In 1911 a Jewish anthropologist, Maurice
Fishberg, blamed common Jewish "nervous disposition" largely on
historic persecutions:
"Considering that in medieval times
massacres of Jews were quite
frequent ... it may be said that many
of the survivors have remained
with unstable nerves, and that a fair
proportion of neurotics and
psychopathics have inherited their nervous
disposition from their
maltreated grandparents ... Any people,
no matter what race, could
not remain with healthy nerves under
the ban of abuse and persecutions
to which the Jews were subjected."
[FISHBERG, p. 532]
In 1917, H. G. Enelow framed the same world
view this way:
"There is no history as full of hardship
and suffering as the history of
Israel. But there is none so heroic, either.
That is just what has made it
the most heroic history in the world. That
because the Jews were
chosen for a divine work, they have to suffer
a great deal." [ENELOW,
p. 45]
Likewise, another nineteenth century Jewish
scholar, Leopold Zunz, made the convergence of Jewish superiority and "aristocracy"
through suffering explicit in a quote that eventually became "perhaps
the best known in modern Jewish literature" [ROTH, Most, p. 136]:
"If there be an ascending scale
of sufferings, Israel reached its highest
degree. If the duration of affliction,
and the patience with which they
are borne, confer nobility upon man,
the Jews vie with the aristocracy
of any country." [SCHULMAN, p.
34]
A 1954 "High Holy Days Prayer Book"
for Jewish congregations even devoted two pages to quotes (including the one
immediately above) by secular Jewish commentators, a legendary Jewish martyrological
history framed here as the expression of religious faith. Other lamentations in the prayer book included:
* "Combine all the woes that temporal
and ecclesiastical tyrannies
have ever inflicted on men or nations,
and you will not have
reached the full measure of suffering
which this martyr people
was called upon to endure." [Leopold
Zunz]
* "The thousand years' martyrdom
of the Jewish people, its
unbroken pilgrimage, its tragic fate, its teachers of religion,
its martyrs, its philosophy, champions
-- this whole epic will,
in days to come, sink into the memory
of men." [Simon Dubnov]
[SILVERMAN, M., p. 386-387]
Fredda Herz and Elliot Rosen understand such self-definitions as
"aristocratic" victims to be essential to modern Jewish temperament:
"Jews anticipate attack from non-Jews, while privately reassuring themselves
that they are 'God's chosen people.' The assumption is that suffering is a
basic part of life. This suffering may even reinforce the notion that they
are superior to others by virtue of their burden of oppression." [HERZ/ROSEN,
p. 367]
In 1993, one of England's chief rabbis,
Jonathan Sacks, framed Jewish resistance to assimilation in the land they
lived as a noble sacrifice, the willingness to stand loyal with a relentlessly
subjugated, oppressed people: "For the most part, Jews [through history]
did not say, 'What advantage is it to remain part of the people of Israel,
seeing that they are humiliated and persecuted? It is better for me to join
my destiny to those who have power.' They declared their willingness liheyet miyisrael, to be counted among
Israel." [SACKS, J., p. 131]
"[The] self-image of Judaism,"
says Philip Sigal, "as originating in bondage and redemption indelibly
engraves itself upon the group memory and it became the permanent mythos of
its origin. Beside that, documentable history is irrelevant. All that has
transpired since antiquity is wedded to that theology." [SIGAL, p. 1]
Israeli scholar Boas Evron notes that
"Long historical memory, delving
into centuries-old, even millennia-old,
disasters, massacres and wrongs (accompanied
by the convenient
forgetting of wrongs and atrocities perpetrated
by ones' own people
against others), lachyrmorose self-righteousness,
are all characteristics
of groups whose experience is basically
passive, as the Jews have been
politically for thousands of years. In
such groups, the consciousness of
being victims accumulates and poisons
the very being of its members.
At times these characteristics become
the primary content of their self-
awareness as a group, a perverted focus
of their self-identity. Finally,
this suffering becomes a source of pride.
('I am persecuted and hated,
a sign that I am valuable and unique,
for which I am envied and hated'),
rather than engendering a desire to be
rid of it." [EVRON, p. 109]
The cloaking of Jewish martyrological legend
over an authentic Jewish history in the real world is noted by another Israeli,
Meron Benvenisti:
"It is an ahistoric philosophy of an ahistoric
people. It sustained us
for two thousand years and is so imbued
in our psyche that it was
not altered even when we made the profound
leap from an ahistoric,
dispensed, and powerless people to an historic,
independent, and
powerful nation [Israel]." [BENVENISTI,
p. 73]
"The belief that the Jewish people
had always been the passive sufferer of Christian persecution," says
Hannah Arendt, "actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization
of the old myth of chosenness." [FEUERLICHT, p. 35] "The more desperate the oppression," writes Raphael Jospe,
"the more oppressors reinforced the Jewish view that they, the victims,
were the Chosen People, and that the oppressor religions were all the more
morally spiritually bankrupt." [JOSPE, R. p. 130]
Michael Aronson notes the way that riots
against Jews in Russia in the late nineteenth century were simply plugged
into traditional interpretive Jewish martyrological frameworks focusing on
categorical Jewish innocence:
"In Jewish consciousness, three biblical
images are deeply ingrained
as archetypes of Jewish oppression. First
is that of the Pharoahs,
who enslaved the Children of Israel in
Europe. Next, are the
treacherous and murderous Amalekites, who
attacked the Children
of Israel in Sinai after their exodus from
Egypt and became the
symbol of causeless hatred. And third is
the archetypical murderer
Haman (by tradition a descendant of Amalek),
who tried to destroy
all the Jews in the Persian Empire. From
the very beginning of
anti-Jewish outbreaks in 1881, the biblical
images must have sprang
to people's minds and influenced their
interpretation of events.
Indeed, these images were invoked repeatedly
in both journalistic
and historical literature on the pogroms
written by Russian Jews,
and others." [ARONSON, p. 9]
Like many Jewish or Gentile historians
tainted by martyrological contagion, Bryan Moynahan's index to the Jews' role
in his book about the last 100 years of Russian history reflects almost solely
the Jewish victimology theme:
"Jews:
-accusations against
-anti-Semitism
-behavior toward
-emigration
-in Great War
-massacre
-pogroms against" [MOYNAHAN, p.
266]
Prominent Jewish psychoanalyst and child
psychologist Bruno Bettelheim once wrote an article about the popular social
psychology surrounding (famous Nazi victim) Ann Frank, noting the special
state of "innocence" the Jewish people decree about themselves,
a blanket character afforded no one else:
"Some time ago I questioned in print
why there is such vast admiration
for The Diary of Ann Frank. I received
many reactions, positive and
negative, but whether those who let me know
their reactions agreed
or disagreed, they all shared one feature:
a deep compassion for what
they called the 'innocent' victims of Nazi
aggression ... I was further
startled to find that in the many communications
I received, the
adjective 'innocent' was applied only by
Jews to Jewish victims.
Nobody referred to the innocent Gypsies
or the innocent Jehovah's
Witnesses, though they, like the Jews were
internal minorities, one
of which, the Gypsies, was exterminated
in toto. Maybe I overlooked
it, but despite search I can recall no popular
reference to the innocent
Norwegians, for example, who the Nazis also
killed in numbers."
[BETTELHEIM, 1991, p. 257]
"Jewish consciousness is cultivated
consistently from the moment they are capable of understanding the spoken
word," observed Maurice Feurlich in 1937,
"... I had the theme, Children of a
Martyr Race, dinned into my
consciousness so deeply that it became the
basic element of my
emotional life. Almost the first words I
understood were "oppressed
people," "martyrs," "prejudice,"
"persecution." Like all other Jewish
children, I emerged with a 'Persecution
Complex' which grew stronger
as I grew older ... [This] more than anything
else constitutes the Jewish
consciousness we have today ... Our persecution
complex makes us
abnormal in dealing with our neighbors ...
For few of us have the courage
to admit that the fault might rest in our
personal makeup. It is true of
human nature generally that men seek to
blame for failure everywhere but
their own doorstep, but we Jews divulge
from the normal when this
becomes a mental habit with which we constantly
salve the wounds of
our failures." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 116]
"It became customary [in the Middle Ages] to record the names
of the victims of persecutions," says Leon Poliakov, "many lists
are preceded by the evocation of the 'cities of blood' ... Thus the memory
of the first martyrs was perpetuated and a tradition was created and strengthened,
inspiring succeeding generations to follow the lead and example of their ancestors."
[POLIAKOV, p. 84] The ancestors have followed the lead well. In a 1984 survey,
94% of American Jews were found to believe that "Jews have a uniquely
long and tragic history of persecution." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 31] "One
critical element in this statement," note Charles Liebman and Steven
Cohen, "is the word unique. The image of Jewish victimization has its
political and psychological uses, and as a result Jews often have a deep emotional
investment in preserving their image as a uniquely long-suffering minority.
Leading Jewish spokesmen have resisted efforts to deny Jews their history
of extraordinary persecution and to diminish the singularity, the distinctiveness,
of Jewish victimization." [LIEBMAN, COHEN, p. 31] "All the Jews
must internalize past events as if they happened to them only yesterday,"
explains Meron Benvenisti about traditional Jewish victim identity, "My
father still feels the agony of the expulsion from Spain as if it happened
to him personally and not five hundred years ago." [BENVENISTI, 1989,
p. 73]
Jewish religious history -- and Jewish
identity itself -- has always been founded upon the idea that non-Jews are
out to destroy them. "For Thy
[God's] sake are we killed all the day long," proclaims the Torah/Old
Testament. "We are counted as sheep for the slaughter." [PSALMS
44:22] "Eysor soyneh l'yaakov," wrote Joshau
Halberstam in 1997, "[is] a phrase well known to Jews brought up in traditional
homes. The literal translation of the phrase is 'Esau hates Jacob,' but the
names are always understood as referring to the gentile hatred of Jews, an
enmity that is presumed to be perpetual." [HALBERSTAM, p. 215] Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriyah, director of a network
of religious Zionist high schools in Israel, and a former member of the Knesset,
publicly declared that there were two kinds of Gentiles, "those that
simply hate us and those who attempt with all their power to destroy us."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 59] "The Holocaust is not a national insanity that
happened once and passed," remarked a former Israeli Minister of Education
in 1984, "but an ideology that has not passed from the world and even
today the world may condone crimes against us." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 61]
A number of Jewish religious fast days, including the traditional ninth of Av, the tenth
of Tereth, the seventeenth of Tammuz, and the third of Tishri, commemorate
"national and communal catastrophes." Most are linked to the destruction
of the First Temple (physically memorialized today in Jerusalem at what is
widely known as the "Wailing Wall") by non-Jewish enemies. At one
time in Jewish history thirty-six such fast days of mourning were observed
each year. [YOUNG, p. 263] "Three
times a day," notes Howard Sachar, "and oftener on special occasions,
pious Jews prayed for the Restoration [of the destroyed Temple]." [SACHAR,
p. 309] Even at Jewish marriages, wrote Alfred Siegel, "you know how
it is to be a Jew. In the hour of pleasure he remembers his pains, and even
in the ecstatic instant of a wedding he breaks a glass under his foot to remind
himself of the crash of the Temple in Jerusalem. A Jew is never entirely happy."
[GOLDSTEIN, p. 115]
Samuel Heilman notes the way the story of
the biblical Samson is treated in an ultra-Orthodox religious school he visited:
"This Samson was not the Jewish Hercules
as much as the weakened
and tormented Jew who begs God to allow
him to avenge the
injustices he has suffered." [HEILMAN,
S., 1992, p. 247]
Heilman also notes that the traditional
Queen Esther story (in which she saves the Jewish people in Persia from destruction
from an arch-enemy), and the yearly Jewish celebration of the story at Purim,
may be simply a borrowed tradition from another people, plugged into the Jewish
martyrological base. As Heilman notes,
"Purim in Israel comes at the end of
winter and commemorates the
deliverance of the Jews of ancient Persia
from the genocidal decree
of Vizier Haman ... There are some scholars
who argue that in fact
the [Purim] holiday precedes the scroll
[about Esther] and simply
enshrines the principle of Jewish salvation
from all those who have
tried to destroy the [Jewish] nation. And
indeed, Jewish tradition is
filled with many local 'Purims,' each with
its own 'megillah'
commemorating the deliverance of the Jews
in question from
disaster. Some of those scholars who see
Purim in such relative
terms argue that it arose in Persia as a
Jewish counter holiday to many
of the pagan winter festivals. Others cite
the absence of any evidence
of a king named Ahasueras in Persian records
as well as the similarity
of the names Esther and Mordechai to the
ancient Babylonian gods
Ishtar and Marduk as evidence of a linkage
with precursor non-Jewish
traditions." [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p.
109]
A tradition of reciting the names of local
"martyrs" to the faith was a widespread tradition among Jews in
Europe for centuries; modern Israel has its own remembrance "Day of Holocaust
and Heroism." The mass suicide
of 900 Jews at the fortress of Massada rather than surrender to Roman attackers
is a major icon in modern Israeli mythology. In the Biblical Exodus tradition,
the Egyptian Pharoah also chases Jews to annihilate them; in the Book of Esther,
as noted above, Jews are saved from an evil Persian court minister, Haman,
who sought their destruction. Still recited today as part of the yearly Jewish
Passover rituals, Jews say, "In every generation they [non-Jews] rise
against us to annihilate us: Bekhol dore omdm alaynu l'khalotaynu." Other aspects of the Passover seder, notes
Stephen Whitfield, include the identification "with the fate of [Jewish]
ancestors so fully that the distinction between past and present has in effect
been obliterated." One way to attain this collapsing of time is "to
raise a piece of matzah and announce (in the present tense): 'This is the
bread of affliction which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt.'"
[WHITFIELD, American, p. 29]
Other forms of Jewish martyrology reportedly
evidenced in the Middle Ages were occasions of mass suicide (including the
slaying of fellow family members) if threatened with forced conversion to
Christianity. "Medieval Christians ... tended to perceive it not as the
extraordinary behavior of individual Jews but as behavioral practices sanctioned
by the Jewish community and law. In the minds of some it encouraged and confirmed
the perceptions of the Mosaic law as harsh and Jews as murderous." [REL.&THEO.
38, 863, 1995] The rabbinical tradition itself, notes Nahum Glatzer, is rooted
in a martyrological world view: "Talmudic tradition preserves the memory
of the chief scholars who suffered martyrdom rather than bow to the imperial
[Roman] decree that forbade the study of the Torah ... The story of the Ten
[rabbi] martyrs became one of the motifs of medieval Jewish liturgy."
[GLATZER, p. 175-176] One talmudic tradition even notes 400 Jewish children
who were reputedly "captured for shameful purposes. "They all leaped
to their deaths into the sea." [GLATZER, p. 183]
The Jewish cosmology of eternal victimization
is virtually celebrated in our own day. In a 1985 "fact-filled, fun-filled"
book for children, for instance, The Jewish Kids' Catalogue, there
is a section on the Jewish experience in World War II, including a full-page
photograph of children walking towards Nazi box cars. The caption reads: "Orphan
children from the ghetto of Lodz boarding a train that will take them to death
camps." [BURSTEIN, p. 67] In 1987 a Jewish psychologist, Ruth Bers Shapiro,
took public exception to another children’s' book entirely about the Holocaust
entitled The Children Remember; it was created for 4-8 year-olds. Such
early socialization to the Jewish Cult of the Persecuted worried Shapiro;
she suggested that the Jewish community "needs to anticipate how this
information will be absorbed and shaped by the child's inner life." [GALLOB,
B., p. 15]
(Emblazoning perceived martyrdom in communal
memory is central to Jewish tradition. "The Hebrew Bible," notes
Peter Novick, "contains the verb 'to remember,' in its various declensions,
169 times (along with numerous injunctions not to forget). Yet what Jews are
enjoined to remember is almost always God's handiwork; secular history, insofar
as such a category is even admitted by tradition, gets short shrift. Mourning
and remembering the dead are, of course, traditional Jewish obligations.")
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 10]
Jewish author Paul Cowan notes the socialization
of his half-Jewish son into Jewish tradition:
"One night in March 1973, we were invited
to a puppet show dramatizing the
story of Purim. At the dramatic high point,
when the evil Persian vizier Haman
threatened to murder all the Jews, Matt ran
across the room and threw himself
into Rachel's arms, pleading for comfort. 'Mom,
he won't get me, will he?
I'm only half-Jewish.'" [COWAN, P., 1987,
p. 24]
In 1986, Ze'ev Chafets, a Jewish American
immigrant to Israel, and eventual head of the Israeli Government Press Office,
noted something wrong with his six-year old daughter Michal:
"I noticed a change coming over her.
Suddenly she became afraid to go
to bed in the dark; often she had a hard
time falling asleep. A few times
she cried out in the middle of the night
and woke up with a headache.
Obviously, something was bothering her."
Eventually Chafets managed to get his daughter
to tell him what was wrong. As he tells it:
"Abba [Father]," she sobbed,
"Why does anyone want to kill us?"
"Michali, what do you mean? Who
wants to kill us?"
"Us, the Jews. Everyone wants to
kill the Jews. But why, Abba? What
have we done wrong?"
I was stunned by the question, and
by Michali's fear. One of the
reasons I had decided to live
in Israel was to bring up children free
of tics and neuroses of diaspora
life. And now here was my sabra
[Israeli-born] daughter shaking
with insecurity. "Who told you that
everyone wants to kill Jews?"
I almost shouted.
"Our teacher. She told us about
Haman and Pharoah the King of
Egypt. And Hitler. Abba,
he puts Jews in the oven and burns them
up. And the Christians too."
Michali burst into tears. "Abba, is
John one of those Christians?"
John was a friend of mine who
worked for the international Red
Cross.
"Yes, baby, John is a Christian,
but he doesn't want to hurt you."
[CHAFETS, p. 89-90]
Similarly, in 1993 an Israeli scholar noted
with concern the comments of a colleague's kindergarten-age daughter:
"Daddy, I know that on Passover we
celebrate our freedom from the
horrid Egyptian Pharaoh who wanted to keep
us as slaves. On Purim
we are happy because brave Queen Esther
convinced the King to hang
the wicked Persian Haman who wanted to
destroy all the Jews. On
Hanukah we celebrate our freedom from our
Greek enemies. Daddy,
tell me -- who were our enemies on Tu Bi-Shevat [Israel's national tree-
planting day]?"
Myron Aronoff calls such a story a manifestation
of Israel's "national paranoia." [ARONOFF, p. 57] This paranoia,
of course, is not just Israeli; it is a foundation of Jewish identity. And
for the little girl who wondered about the Jews' enemies against trees, they
are there to be conjured. In a 1987
appeal by the Jewish National Fund to Americans for money to plant trees in
Israel, a recent forest fire was highlighted as a "suspected arson"
by Arabs, and fund-raising for trees is often requested to honor children
Holocaust victims. [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 32]
Steven Cohen notes four main themes in
the Jewish victimization mythology (Cohen frames them in the past tense, but
they are, for most Jews, as viable as ever):
"1) premodern Jews viewed life among
Gentiles as galut, exile.
2) Jews believed that Gentiles hate Jews.
3) They believed that Christian culture
and civilization are inferior
to Jewish civilization.
4) They believed that individual Gentiles
have personality characteristics
which are inferior to those of Jews."
[COHEN, Uses, p. 26]
In our own time "Pulitzer prize-winning"
Jewish historian and former president of the American Academy, Barbara Tuchman,
is typical. (In 1967 Tuchman argued in the New York Times that the
United States should intervene militarily for Israel in its war with Arabs.
[FEUERLICHT, p. 196] Tuchman, daughter of wealthy financier Maurice Wertheim
and niece of a former secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., obviously
can't -- with a straight face -- claim victim status herself without some
serious help from the Jewish martyrology tradition). [CHRISTOPHER, p. 219]
In her 650-page volume on "calamitous" European society in
the fourteenth century, originating in her interest in the Bubonic plague,
Jews are represented solely in relation to her own sense of their socio-political
victimization. Of all the possibilities of a group of human beings over a
century, (including the story of their own experience with the epidemic) Tuchman
frames virtually the entirety of Jewish experience as merely a sponge for
abuse from Gentiles. This is the book's complete index for the heading
"Jews":
* money lenders --
* resented by Pastoureux
--
* persecution of --
* blamed for plague --
* rights of --
* accused of ritual murder
--
* Talmud tried for heresy
--
* badges worn by --
* sexual relations with
Christians forbidden --
* ransom of Jean II --
* attacked in working
class revolts --
* in Spain --
* pogrom in Prague --
If fourteenth century Jews spent every
moment of their lives fielding insults and running away from vigilante mobs,
when did they have a moment of freedom to record the chain of misery that
always wrapped so tightly around them, so that their progeny might still agitate
with authority about their lack of relief, 600 years later? Jews did find
time, however, in the Middle Ages to regularly memorialize lists of martyrs
during synagogue services, emphasizing "Jewish suffering and its exaggeration."
[MACDONALD, p. 219]
Tuchman's conviction of non-Jews' unrelieved
hatred of Jews through the centuries as one of the foundations for her perspective
of history is evidenced in her following quote about the Holocaust:
"What lurks in the shadows of ancient
memory [was] a bitter recognition
that a Gentile world ... would fundamentally
have felt relieved by the Final
Solution." [BAER, p. 64]
Jewish historian Arnold Wiznitzer reflects
the Jewish martyrological base to understand history in his books about Brazil.
As Jonathan Schorsch notes:
"Much of the American Jewish historiography
from the 1960s continued
the monumentalist, nationalist orientation
of its predecessors, and Arnold
Witznitzer's work could easily be included
here. A historian of Brazilian
history whose work to this day practically
constitutes the field in the
English language, Wiznitzer summed up his
findings in his now classic
book, Jews in Colonial Brazil. There
he takes great concern to
memorialize every 'Jewish' victim of the
various Inquisitions."
[SCHORSCH, J., 2000]
In the Jewish cosmology, Jews can only be
victims, even when they are pre-eminent in the society in which they live.
In 1987, David Schers, for example, explored "the oppression of those
[Jews] who are 'well off' in Latin America." "Is it possible,"
he asked, "to speak of those who eat well, have attractive lives, and
live in relative prosperity? The case of the Jews of Latin America demonstrates
that it is indeed possible. [They have] alienation, self-hate, and family
conflict ... The very invisibility of Jewish suffering ... makes it more painful
than might otherwise appear." [SCHERS, CULTURE, p. 285-286] Jews, insists Sarah Horowitz, bizarrely, are also
"victimized by their own positive
stereotypes, which mask the gender,
class, ideological and ethnic differences
that distinguish them from one
another ... The invisibility of Jewish
studies as an academic field [?!]
moreover, is hidden behind the presence
of Jews as scholars in all
fields." [HOROWITZ, p. 123]
Jews, who are collectively the wealthiest,
most comfortable ethnic/racial group of people in modern America, [see later
chapter] nonetheless remain insistent in clinging to the identity core as
themselves being victims and never
oppressors, economic or otherwise. "If Jews are, by definition, victims,"
notes Edward Shapiro, explaining the common Jewish world view, "then
those Jews who do not sympathize with this cult of victimization are inauthentic
Jews who betray the essence of Jewishness." [SHAPIRO, E., 1998]
Even Jewish multi-millionaires like financier Harry Solomon, (whose
1989 estimated worth was $50 million) apparently fail to see the irony in
claiming that "We [Jews] are all the victims of our backgrounds."
[KOTKIN, p. 45] When Celia Heller wrote her book about the Jews of Poland,
she completely ignored historic Jewish commercial dominance of Eastern Europe
[see earlier chapters] and traditional Jewish self-segregation to preposterously
link the Jewish situation there to that of oppresssed African-Americans, evolving
from the shackles of slavery: "The concept of caste is extremely useful
in understanding the situation of Jews in interwar Poland just as it was in
understanding the situation of the Negroes in the United States before the
Civil Rights struggle." [HELLER, C., 1977, p. 59]
Robert Greene wrote an entire volume about
professional "hustler and swindler" Mel Weinberg [GREENE, preface]
and his role in "Abscam," an FBI sting operation to investigate
white collar crime in America. Even as a six-year old, however, the future
master scam artist was already primed to his identity as a Jewish victim:
"His mother answered his knock
on the door.
'You're late. How did it go in school
today?' she asked.
'Not so good,' answered the boy.
'What happened?'
'I got left back,' he replied.
His mother stared at him. The message
short-circuited her ability
to comprehend, much less believe.
'You must be mistaken,' she said,
clearly aware that something was
amiss. 'Nobody gets left back in the
first grade. Besides, you
bring home all those gold stars every
day. That means you are
doing wonderful work in school. Why would
they leave you back?'
'Because I'm Jewish,' he sighed,
fixing his mother with his most
earnest look.
'Because you're Jewish,' she replied
in a voice that took on a slightly
hysterical edge. ' How can that be? This
is the Bronx, in New York,
not Poland. Your teacher is Jewish. Why
were you left back?'"
[GREENE, 1981, p. 17-18]
"When I was a little kid," says controversial
talk show host Howard Stern,
"I was a victim. Many times I would turn
the other cheek when I should have
stood tall. I was overly polite when I needed
to be firm. There was something
in my personality that avoided confrontation
because I always felt I would lose
in a two-way struggle. I never excelled at
anything ... I had 'victim' written all
over my freakish face. I was a gawky lamb available
for slaughter. I had lived
my entire young life as a sniveling coward.
I was the half-Jew who bowed his
head and walked into the gas chamber without
putting up a fight." [STERN, H.,
1995, p. 255]
The Cleveland Jewish News notes this
about famous feminist Gloria Steinem:
"Steinem was born to a 'gentle, nurturing'
Jewish father and a Protestant mother
who believed in theosophy, a set of beliefs
based on mystical insight. Largely
home-schooled until the age 12 while her 'itinerant'
father packed up the family
and traveled around the country, Steinem does
not identify with any organized
religion, except when there's antisemitism.
'Then I identify with the Jewish person.'"
[KARFELD, M., 10-22-1999, p. 20-]
"As Jews," a "leader in the Jewish
community" of Brooklyn, New York, told researcher Jonathan Reider, regarding
the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, "we know what it means to be hostages.
We have been hostages since day one." [REIDER, J., 1985, p. 256]
A. M. Rosenthal (eventually Executive Editor of the New
York Times) and Times reporter Arthur Gelb even titled their 1967
book about a Jewish Nazi "One More Victim." The subject of
the volume is Daniel Burros, the King Kleagle of the New York Ku Klux Klan
and former official in the American Nazi Party, who was a vehement hater of
Jews. How, one wonders, is Burros a victim? Is he a victim of his own choices
in life? Is he a victim of his own racism? Is he a victim of his own strange
psychological dilemmas? Is he perhaps a victim of A. M. Rosenthal and the
New York Times, who published an expose about Burros, noting that he
was secretly Jewish? (Burros committed suicided immediately after publication
of the article). No, insist the Jewish authors, Burros is a victim of anti-Semitism
-- his hatred of Jews is something internalized from an ugly, exterior, non-Jewish
world. The authors put it this way (and they are blaming Gentile society for
the creation of the Burros Nazi identity):
"The fact that there is a Jewish condition disturbs
many Jews and they rail against it,
but it is a fact nonetheless, because it cannot
be otherwise. It is a condition not inborn
but created, created not so much by Jews but
by Gentiles, and arising from the one
simple fact that, being apart, Jews have no
privacy [i.e., if a Jewish mother calls out
in public to her son "Irving," everyone
knows they are Jewish. Rosenthal and Gelb
go on to argue that Jewish "separateness"
and "distinctiveness" is an attribute branded
upon Jews by the non-Jewish world, completely
ignoring this as an absolute
pillar of historical, and current, Jewish identity]
... No number of laws, no strength of
others'
traditions, and no faith in morals or even religion, can protect the Jew
-- German Jew, Russian Jew, Brazilian Jew, and American
Jew -- from knowing
that he was born into a tribe of victims ... From
the moment he is aware of his Jewishness
and
of the history of Jews he is aware that this history is the biography of the
scapegoat,
the martyr, the dispossessed, the
wanderer, the outcast, the tortured, the despised or the
pitied,
the beaten, the murdered -- the victim. What is a Jew? ' A misfortune!' There
is
not a Jew who has not said that to himself, sometimes
in a whisper he can hardly
hear ... Every Jew now alive has lived in the memory
of the ghetto's stench, remembers
Torquemada
[of the Spanish Inquisition], and every Jew now alive has an Auschwitz
number
on his soul ... What is a Jew? A Jew, among other things, is a prisoner caged
in the
ugliest of ages, the mind of his own
enemy."[ROSENTHAL/GELB, 1967, p. 57-60]
Hence, we are lead to believe -- somehow in
all this -- the Jewish Ku Klux Klan leader, is born, "victim" of
an anti-Semitic society.
How weird does the Jewish persecution thing get?
Jewish publisher Lyle Stuart even recalls an incident he had with William
Gaines, also Jewish and the publisher of Mad magazine: "One day
Bill and I were riding in his Cadillac and he said, 'You know, sometimes when
I pass a bus stop I see those people standing there. I think they hate me.
And I said, 'Bill, you have to get some self-esteem.' And I suggested he see
a psychiatrist, which he promptly did.'" [TEBBEL, R., 1999]
Jewish author Ben Stein once noted the mood
among the wealthy producer/writer elite of Jewish-dominated Hollywood [See
later chapter about this subject]:
"There was
a distinct feeling that, despite the high pay and the access
to powerful media that TV writers and producers
enjoy, they are still
part of a despised underclass, oppressed psychologically,
and
(potentially) physically by an Aryan ruling
class of businessmen and
others. This feeling was by no means confined
to Jews. [?]
The belief in
a ruling class of white, East Coast Protestants meeting
occasionally in corporate board rooms to give
its orders to whoever
happens to be elected to office is so strong
that no amount of
argument to the contrary makes a dent. And hostility
to that real
or imagined class is just as strong." [in
ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982,
p. 107]
Despite the fact that the exploitation,
oppression and sovereignty over non-Jews, as we have seen, is a very foundation
of talmudic Judaism, Jews commonly portray themselves as victims even in their
exploitation of others. In a relentless apologetic and Zionist-inspired volume
(see the later chapter on Zionism), The Jews of Germany, Nachum Gidal
asserts that "the Jews were forced into the role of pawnbrokers, money
changers, and usurers, very public offices and therefore often hated ... Thus
'the Jew' became the tool and the scapegoat of the rising capitalist economic
system." [GIDAL, p. 40]
Even if this apologetic myth -- often cited
in the Jewish community -- was true, that they were somehow "forced into"
their historic roles as oppressors of the non-Jewish populace, such self-preserving
actions still represent a self-centered, self-protective amoralism where self-preservation
("self" being either the individual or ethnocentric community) is
considered the paramount concern. If we may this way dismiss collective Jewish
responsibility for negative actions against others over centuries, we may
likewise conveniently excuse all Germans who were also "forced"
to join the Nazi movement (or any other collective expression of evil) because
there were no alternative options (short of personal trouble, hardship, and,
of course, danger and self-impairment).
In modern America, even Jews responsible
for a huge share of communist-instigated terror in post-war Poland, are reconceived
as "victims" through a lens that can see nothing else. As Stefan
Korbonski says,
"The ten years of Jewish rule in Poland
[in the Stalinist era] could not
easily be forgotten. It was an era of the
midnight knock on the door,
arbitrary arrests, torture, and sometimes
secret execution. Most of
those responsible for that reign of terror
left Poland and upon arrival
in the West represented themselves as victims
of Communism and
anti-Semitism -- a claim which was readily
believed in the West
and earned them the full support of their
hosts." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 63]
"In other words," notes Tadeusz
Piotrowski, "these [Jewish] executioners were transformed into victims."
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 63] [More information about these people in the Holocaust
chapter]
Jewish celebration of communal victimology
is the cornerstone of Jewish identity. Simon Wiesenthal, the famed hunter
of Nazi fugitives and namesake of Holocaust remembrance organizations, has
even written the ultimate coffee table book for Jews (Every Day Remembrance
Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom) who wish more specific attachment
to their self-perception of historic victimization; the book is a kind of
calendar, listing selected atrocities against Jews throughout history, at
least one for every day of the year.
"That collective Jewish consciousness
(of suffering and martyrdom)," writes Lucy Dawidowicz, "has been
and remains -- with justice, I think -- one of the central myths of Jewish
history, being an essence distilled from real events and reinforced in nearly
every Jewish generation until our own time by brute reality." [DAWIDOWICZ]
"Every Jew," declares Milton Steinberg, "at some time
or other has reason to conclude that he has been penalized for his Jewishness."
[NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 77] "The Jews," observed Sir Lewis Namier,
both a Jew and Zionist, "do not have a history, they have a martrylogy."
[RAPHAEL, p. 30] "Being a Jew
and sufferer go together," a Jewish senior citizen told anthropologist
Barbara Myerhoff, "When we stop suffering, we get rich and secure, we
stop being Jews. We become like everyone else, living for enjoyment only.
Without it we don't know what our purpose is." [MYERHOFF, p. 198]
"Moral decency, sympathy for the victim, sympathy for those who
suffer," claims Ann Roiphe, reciting the myth she deeply believes, "these
are the building blocks of the mystical connection Judaism. It seems not so
much to be a matter of indulging in masochism as to be a matter of aligning
oneself with innocence." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 187]
Molly Katz, in a book of humor, Jewish
as a Second Language, highlights a number of Jewish cultural traits. Finding
humor in the enduring truths of what the Jewish community recognizes in itself,
she notes that a Jew must "always agonize, resent, be disappointed, gloat,
get even, suffer, [and] be positive something terrible is going to happen."
Conversely, Jews can "never be satisfied, think everything is fair, be
a good sport, feel undeserving, let go of a grudge, ease up, [or] acknowledge
the possibility of any light at the end of a tunnel." [KATZ, M., p. 72]
"I share ... an identification with
the tribal suffering," wrote senior editor Jack Newfield in the Village
Voice, "I don't know why, but if I read of Russian Jews waiting outside
a visa office, if I read that a synagogue was blown up in Brussels, or I read
[Jacobo] Timerman's book, it affects me more on a certain level than when
I read about a massacre in El Salvador or if I read about some atrocity in
South Africa. There is a sense that those are my brothers and sisters."
[BRENNER, p. 55] "Although American
Jews seem rooted, comfortably integrated in Christian America," wrote
Jewish art critic Donald Kuspit in 1997, "their long history has taught
them, with paranoid precision, that one never knows what persecution and ostracization
the future may bring." [KUSPIT]
"It isn't easy to find a Jew whose personality hasn't been
warped by his feelings toward gentiles," wrote Jewish commentator James
Yaffe in 1968, "Sometimes the damage is great, sometimes slight; many
individuals succeed in overcoming it, or in learning to live with it, or even
in making something valuable out of it. But the damage, in one form or another,
is almost always there." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 57]
"How can a Jew not be bitter,"
wondered Ann Roiphe in 1995, "how can a Jew not be bent by the stories
we know, stories that have come to us through the generations, so many stories
of communal disaster, of individual pain, of lies and exclusions, of expulsions
and blood libels, of Cossacks riding down on our villages, inquisitions and
their instruments of torture, of cold shoulders and cold murders, of blame
placed on our children's heads for plagues, for draught, for flood, despised
for our enforced poverty and envied and loathed for our assumed wealth? ...
[ROIPHE, p. 443] ... It is hard for a Jew not to feel that the plot of the
world, its most central story, is about his or her destruction, exclusion,
failed attempts to find a safe spot." [ROIPHE, p. 446] "According
to the Hebrew Bible (and its Christian analogue, the Old Testament),"
notes Jewish feminist Andrea Dworkin, "Jews are God's chosen people.
It is not easy to see the benefits, if any, of this divine chosenness, since
the history of the Jews is one of persecution and oppression ... In the often-joined
race for having suffered most, Jews are the group to beat." [DWORKIN,
A., 2000, p. 109]
The Jewish novelist, Bernard Malamud, took
chauvinist Jewish martyrology so far as to subsume all human suffering under
the Jewish umbrella, claiming that "suffering makes all men Jews."
[WHITFIELD, Mult, p. 10] Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida "says
we are all Jews, insofar as people in the contemporary world are nomads and
displaced." [STEYN, J., 1999, p. 11] The ridiculousness of such notions
may be quickly dismissed in many ways, most poignantly with a comparison of
Jewish consummate "suffering" to an almost unfathomable kind known
by so many, even today, in the Third World. As Pascal Bruckner describes his
experience with overwhelming poverty in a Third World train station:
"Here, the suffering are not just
little groups scattered in a crowd; they
are laid out, row upon row, on the bare
cement. There are far more of
them than there are travelers. Creatures
are lined up in rags made of bags
and cloth, with arms that are eaten away
by gangrene and repulsive
pustules sticking out.
You walk uneasily past these prostrate
figures, as if you were walking
in a swamp, and make your way to the ticket
window. Bodies are strewn
about like damaged goods, as if waiting
along with their emaciation,
eczema, and lumpus for street cleaners to
sweep them up. It is impossible
to tell if they are living or dead. Nobody
pays them any attention ... It is
an entire race of crushed, reviled, beaten
down remnants, and this tide
of flotsam begs you, calls to you, pulls
at you, but so weakly that you
push them aside with a simple movement of
your foot." [BRUCKNER,
P., 1986, p. 53]
This is no episodic "holocaust"
against a people who are declared by Evil Ones to have too much power and
influence in surrounding society. Bruckner's description here is a norm of
survival for entire defined castes in places like India for centuries. Do
these people, an underclass that is an unchanging fixture in Indian history,
merit status as honorary Jews, history's
declared foremost sufferers?
Further along on the Jewish martyrological
bandwagon, a Marxist and atheist, Isaac Deutscher, rejected all cultural,
religious, and Zionist definitions of his Jewishness, but said
"I am, however, a Jew by force
of my unconditional solidarity with the
persecuted and exterminated. I am a
Jew because I feel the Jewish
tragedy as my own tragedy." [SHAPIRO,
p. 8]
"Deutscher's Jewish identity,"
explains Edward Shapiro, "was dependent on Jews remaining among the persecuted."
[SHAPIRO, p. 8] "With the invention of nuclear weapons the world has
become Jewish," decides Eli Wiesel. [ROSENBERG, D. , p. xiv]
The emotions of the Jewish Persecution Complex
are deep, powerful and often vengeful, as evinced by left-wing publisher Michael
Lerner:
"There are moments when I become
so overwhelmed by the feelings of
anger at what was done to my family
and my people that I become
sympathetic to the most extreme fantasies
of the Israeli right wingers."
[LERNER, Goyim, p. 430]
On another front, in an article in the feminist
MS magazine, one of its founders and editors, Letty Pogrebin, solicits
"Christian sisters ... to try to understand the immediacy of our [Jewish]
mourning and the 5,000 years of terror that echo in our souls." [POGREBIN,
Antisem, p. 46] Another "liberal feminist," and regular contributor
to the Village Voice, Ellen Willis, echoed this view in her own public
utterance:
"It is what all Jews, religious and
secular, Zionist and non-Zionist, have in
common -- our status as outsiders, of
being persecuted." [COHEN,
Uses, p. 26]
There are even intra-Jewish concentric circles
of this ideology of incessant victimhood. In Israel, Orthodox Jews have taken
the tool of self-perceived oppression to understand themselves systematically
discriminated against and persecuted by secular Jewry around them. "This
Orthodox self-perception as victims," says Meir Lockshin, "in its
most extreme forms, involves seeing the discrimination against Orthodoxy as
systemic. A number of Orthodox Jews are now saying that the basic structures
of Israeli democracy -- the Knesset, the police, the army, and the courts
-- all discriminate against observant Jews." [LOCKSHIN]
Meanwhile, not to be outflanked in the hierarchy
of fellow Jews' feelings of persecution, Shlomo Cohen wields his own Jewish
essence by counter-claiming that
"I am a secular Jew, a member of
a group that is probably the most
oppressed in Jewish life today, certainly
in Israel." [COHEN, S. p. 23]
Also in Israel, with the influx of Jews
from Russia to the new Jewish state, "Russian mafia" head Grigori
Lerner (who was imprisoned in Israel) "in Israel's Russian language press
... is being portrayed as a [victim] of ethnic persecution." [GROSS,
N., 1997, p. 22] And what about the hyper-religious, far-right Messianic Gush
Emunim movement in the Israeli-Occupied Territories? Israeli psychologist
(and apologist) Tzvi Moses sees something familiar in their self-obsessions:
"The [Gush Emunim] settlers developed
a feeling of persecution as
a defense mechanism, similar to what was
essential in its time to
the Jewish nation in exile for its defense
and adjustment in an inimical
environment. The existence of such a mechanism
in the psyche of the
Jewish nation creates a problematic system
in which change is difficult
... Obstinacy and inflexible thinking
typify the thinking of the Gush
today." [GROSSMAN, D., 1988, p. 42-43]
Even within the elemental unit of the
household, Jewish women have traditionally cultivated complaint of personal
suffering and victimhood abuse to practical ends. Zborowski and Herzog note
that "vulnerability becomes a weapon, especially for the mother. Her
suffering serves not only as a rebuke for the past but also as control of
the future." [ZBOROWSKI, p. 297]
Oppression of Jews is commonly understood
by Jews to have always existed, in varying but usually harsh degrees, everywhere
they went in their exile from the Holy Land. Most of the world's Jewry, by
the Middle Ages, ended up as a minority people in Christian Europe. Their
experiences there, particularly in relation to the Christian faith throughout
medieval times, are widely believed by Jews today to have lain a foundation
for the Nazis' savage treatment of their people in the twentieth century.
Ann Roiphe goes out to do some calisthenics
and lose some calories and, apparently, this is what runs through her mind:
"Even here in America stepping up and
down in the aerobics classes of
our local Jewish community centers we remember
the trains of the
Christians, those nation builders who called
us 'Christ killers' as they
killed us." [ROIPHE, p. 444]
Psycho-socially and religiously then, since
ancient history, to be Jewish has always meant exilic misery -- exile from
one's country (driven out of the Holy Land in ancient history by the Babylonians
and Romans), from one's God (who has been traditionally understood to be angry
with too much Jewish disregard for His dictates), and --increasingly for some,
with the rise of rationalism a couple hundred years ago and estrangement from
Jewish tradition in a sea of non-Jews -- from ones' own people. But always, to be
Jewish over the past millennium there has been an anchoring in the belief
that Jews -- the Biblical "chosen people" -- are exceptional, and
bound, at least, for some glorious leadership destiny. Many Jews today -- secular or religious -- still quite literally
believe that they are God's gift to mankind (often self-described as "the
light unto the world.") It is
also a widely believed article of Jewish dogma, however, that, even in today's
comfortable Western Diaspora, a Jew's non-Jewish neighbor might at any time
turn on him -- the Jewish Other, the ultimate scapegoat -- with animosity.
For essentially no reason. (Traditional
Orthodoxy's reason for Gentile hostility, however, is Gentile jealousy because God selected Jewry as His Chosen People).
The successful creation of the modern state of Israel in recent times (as
a direct consequence of Nazi Germany) -- and its overwhelming support by worldwide
Jewry -- is a communal defense of such perspectives.
By the end of the 20th century "being
Jewish" had reaffirmed its ultimate expression as both religious and
supra-religious collective complaint, codified as a militantly arrogant politic
against the rest of humanity.
There is, of course, considerable evidence
across history -- over seventeen hundred years of it -- of destructive acts by others against Jews
in their Diaspora ("dispersion"): restrictive laws, harassment,
and sometimes large scale violence. We
are not, however, talking about a weekend time span. Nor are we speaking of
anti-Jewish actions that were systematically reasonless. We are talking about nearly two thousand years of exile
and, quite literally, the life experiences of many millions of people. Lost
to Jewish ideology is the fact that their mistreatment at times by others
has always had a context and that perils, misery, and misfortunes have also
been the common lot of all peoples everywhere -- of all faiths, politics,
and social persuasions. Whenever and
wherever Jews suffered, non-Jews suffered too. Human history is a long and
torturous catalogue of social, economic, and political upheavals; everywhere
the struggle for power, everywhere the struggle for survival. Other peoples
have always suffered too, sometimes catastrophically, in sequence across history,
with their own dilemmas, strife and tragedies, and much of Jewish misfortune
has resonated, inevitably, from others' painful struggles. Often enough --
and this is hotly and routinely denied, or reductively qualified, by common
Jewish discourse these days -- Jews caused
other people suffering too. Whatever the case, few peoples have had the good fortune to survive as an ideological
unit as long as the Jews who culminate a trans-historical diary of troubles
and grievances across thousands of years as a unified expression of their
modern selves. Most other peoples quietly assimilated into surrounding communities,
woefully perished, or began anew.
Many Jews see the presence of a divine
hand to account for the fact of their longevity, that -- after 4,000 years
and innumerable historical obstacles -- they are still here. Such commentators
-- and they are legion -- always fail to recognize, however, that untold billions
of other human beings are "still around" too who are NOT Jews, by
divine hand or otherwise. And while not all non-Jews exactly mirror the same
habits, ethnicity, and self-image of their own direct ancestors thousands
of years ago, neither do Jews. Things have changed. Always and everywhere.
The Talmud itself (a sacred compilation of Jewish religious opinions over
centuries) is a map of such changes. No Western Jew today -- who represents
the cumulative absorption of Hellenism, the Enlightenment, and a myriad of
other extra-Jewish historical influences, as well as a long line of interbreeding
with other racial types -- would be recognized as brethren by illiterate Jewish
goat-herders living in tents 4,000 years ago. And meanwhile, untold billions
are not descendants of Abraham. Who cares? Somewhere back up the ancestral
line we all merge souls to our common human ancestors, of whom no greater
covenant in this world has ever been made.
For Jews who take too much pride in (however drastically changed) a
4,000-year-old identity linked to a particular individual
(the early Abraham-Isaac-Jacob lineage), one need only scan the jungles
of New Guinea, Africa, and the Amazon to find remote tribes whose modern religious
and ethnic identity still very closely echoes their unfathomably
ancient origins. So what? Does their longevity confirm -- as so many Jews
would have it for themselves -- the Divine hand of favoritism? A hand that
in some cases far outdistances the Jews?
