Holodomor + Holohoax = Anti-Zydism In Ukraine
Deborah Sharavi
Nicholas Lyssson
1. ROLE OF JEWS IN UKRAINIAN FAMINE
One might think the worst holocaust deniers—at least the only
ones who command serious attention—are those who insist the Nazi
holocaust, as it involved the Jews only, was without parallel.
Guenter Lewy argues for example in The Nazi Persecution of the
Gypsies (Oxford University Press, 2000) that while the Gypsies were
gassed, shot and otherwise exterminated in great numbers, right
alongside the Jews, they were not true victims of “the” Holocaust
(capital “H”) but only of something collateral.
Lewy even suggests the Gypsies invited their own destruction with
certain cultural traits—in particular, sharply divergent moral
standards for dealing among their own and with outsiders.
But pre- or anti-Enlightenment Judaism is hardly a less
ethnocentric or hostile moral system. As Edward Gibbon correctly notes
in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ch. 15 (1776),
“the wise, the humane Maimonides openly teaches [in The Book of Torts,
5:11] that, if an idolator fall into the water, a Jew ought not to
save him from instant death.” See also Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai’s
remarkable second-century exercise in ejusdem generis: “The best of
the heathen merits death; the best of serpents should have its head
crushed; and the most pious of women is prone to sorcery” (Yer. Kid.
iv. 66c; Massek. Soferim xv. 10; comp. Mek., Beshallah, Wayehi, 1, and
Tan., Wayera, 20, all as cited by JewishEncyclopedia.com). For
“heathen” some translators simply write “goyim”; for “prone to
sorcery” they write “a witch.” Rabbi Simeon is mentioned more than
700 times in the Talmud.
A particularly relevant parallel to the Nazi holocaust is the
Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33, a state-created famine—not a crop
failure—that killed an estimated five million people in the Ukraine,
one million in the Caucasus, and one million elsewhere after the
Soviet state confiscated the harvest at gunpoint. Throughout the
famine, the state continued to export grain to pay for
industrialization. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford
University Press, 1987). Norman Davies gives the following description
in Europe: A History, p. 965 (Oxford University Press, 1996). His
first paragraph assembles quotations from Conquest; the bracketed
phrase is his own:
“A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children,
lay dead or dying” in “a great stretch of territory with some forty
million inhabitants, ”like one vast Belsen.” “The rest, in various
stages of debilitation,” “had no strength to bury their families or
neighbours.” “[As at Belsen] well-fed squads of police or party
officials supervised the victims.”
. . . All food stocks were forcibly requisitioned; a military
cordon prevented all supplies from entering; and the people were left
to die. The aim was to kill Ukrainian nationhood, and with it the
“class enemy.” The death toll reached some 7 million. The world has
seen many terrible famines. . . . But a famine organized as a
genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.
See also Oksana Procyk, Leonid Heretz and James E. Mace, Famine
in the Soviet Ukraine, 1932-33 (Harvard University Press, 1986);
Nicolas Werth, “The Great Famine,” in Stephane Courtois, et al., The
Black Book of Communism, pp. 159-68 (Harvard University Press, 1999);
Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 257-59 (1996); Miron Dolot, Execution by
Hunger (1985); Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red
Tsar, pp. 84-85 (2003); and the Commission on the Ukrainian
Famine, Report to Congress (1988). That report, at pp. 6-7, cites
estimates of the number killed that range as high as 8 million in the
Ukraine and 9 million overall.
At pp. 239-40, Taylor says this famine “remains the greatest
man-made disaster ever recorded, exceeding in scale even the Jewish
Holocaust of the next decade.”
Several days after giving the 7-million number to Lyons and
McCormick, Duranty told the assembled staff at the British chancery in
Moscow that the toll for the Soviet Union as a whole might be as high
as 10 million. See the report of William Strang, the charge d’affaires
(Sept. 26, 1933), quoted by Carynnyk in the text accompanying n. 46.
The British government referred publicly to the ongoing situation as
an “illegal famine.” Id., n. 46.
Duranty’s 10-million number may have come from Stalin himself.
It’s reputedly the same number Stalin gave Winston Churchill a decade
later; see, e.g., Eric Margolis, “Remembering Ukraine’s Unknown
Holocaust,”Toronto Sun, Dec. 13, 1998 (available online).
Some Ukrainian accounts, and that of Muggeridge, who covered the
Holodomor for the Manchester Guardian, take the trouble to say that
this mass starvation was imposed largely by Jews[ZYDS].
Lazar M. Kaganovich is often identified as an architect of the
policy. A photograph in Montefiore, Red Tsar, above, shows him
personally searching a farm for concealed food. In Muggeridge’s novel
Winter in Moscow (1934) he appears as Kokoshkin, “a Jew” and “Stalin’s
chief lieutenant.”
In 2003 Levko Lukyanenko, the first Ukrainian ambassador to
Canada, was said to have made an anti-Semitic embarrassment of himself
on this subject. But see Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, p. 363
(2d ed. 1994)(“Jews were . . . disproportionately prominent among the
Bolsheviks, notably in their leadership, among their tax- and
grain-gathering officials, and especially in the despised
and feared. .. secret police [emphasis added]”); Montefiore, Red Tsar,
above, p. 305 (as late as 1937, Jews accounted for only 5.7 percent of
Soviet party members, but “formed a majority in the government”
[emphasis added]); Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 254
(Princeton University Press, 2004)(the secret police was “one of the
most Jewish of all Soviet institutions”); and Arno J. Mayer, Why Did
the Heavens Not Darken?, p.60 (1988)(“As of the late twenties . . .
[a] disproportionate number of Jews came to hold high posts in the
secret police and to serve as political commissars in the armed
services. They. . . were. . . appointed to high-level and conspicuous
positions which called for unimpeachable political loyalty. . .
”).
On February 8, 1920, Winston Churchill published an article,
“Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish
People,” in the Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), reprinted in Lenni
Brenner, ed., 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, p.
23 (2002).
Among other things, Churchill said (pp. 25-26):
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the
creation of Bolshevism. . . by. . . international and for the most
part atheistical Jews. .
. . [I]t probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of
Lenin [who had a Jewish grandfather and by some accounts a Jewish
wife], the majority of leading figures are Jews.
Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the
Jewish leaders. . . . And the prominent, if not indeed the principal,
part in the system of terrorism. . . has been taken by Jews. . . . The
same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of
terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon
has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this
madness has been allowed to prey on the temporary prostration of the
German people.
Churchill’s views, as expressed here, resemble those of the Times
of London’s correspondent in Russia, Robert Wilton. See George Gustav
Telberg and Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (1920), esp.
pp. 222-30, 391 (“[t]aken according to numbers of population, the Jews
represented one in ten; among the komisars that rule Bolshevik Russia
they are nine in ten—if anything, the proportion of Jews is still
higher”), 392-93 and 400. The Jewish proportion is a bit over eight
in ten, including two-thirds of the leadership of the secret police.
Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, pp. 442-43 (Cambridge
University Press, 1997) says that “[i]n. . . the Ukraine, the Cheka
leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish”; that “the high percentage of
Jews in the secret police continued well into the 1930s”; and that
“[c]omparisons to the secret police in Nazi Germany have tempted many
observers.
. . . [T]he extent to which both. . . prided themselves in being.
..willing to carry out the most stomach-turning atrocities in the name
of an ideal. . . is striking.” Lindemann adds that:
George Leggett, the most recent and authoritative historian of
the Russian secret police, speculates that the use of [non-Slavic
ethnic minorities in the secret police] may have been a conscious
policy, since such ‘detached elements could be better trusted not to
sympathise with the repressed local population’.[ii] Of course, in the
Ukrainian case that population had the reputation of being especially
anti-Semitic, further diminishing the potential sympathies of Jewish
Chekists in dealing with it. [Citing Leggett, The Cheka, Lenin’s
Political Police, p. 263 (Oxford University Press, 1981).] . . . .
Cheka personnel regarded themselves as a class apart. . . with a power
of life or death over lesser mortals. (Emphases added.)
Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, above, illustrates the
attitude of Jewish Bolsheviks toward dying Ukrainians. See Kevin
MacDonald’s review of Slezkine, entitled “Stalin’s Willing
Executioners?”, www.vdare. com/ misc/051105
/macdonald _stalin.htm (a much fuller version of which appears in the
Occidental Quarterly, fall 2005, also available online):
Lev Kopelev, a Jewish writer who witnessed and rationalized
the Ukrainian famine in which millions died horrible deaths of
starvation and disease as an “historical necessity,” is quoted [on p.
230 as] saying “You mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We are the
agents of historical necessity. We are fulfilling our revolutionary
duty.” On the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the largely
Jewish elite in Moscow and Leningrad where they attended the theater,
sent their children to the best schools, [and] had peasant women
(whose families were often the victims of mass murder) for nannies. .
. .
The phrase “Stalin’s willing executioners”—with its echo of
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen—is Slezkine’s (p. 130). At pp. 183-84,
translating from the Russian, Slezkine quotes Ia. A. Bromberg (1931)
on what Stalinism brought out in its Jewish servitors:
The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death
penalty.. . , who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed,
has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a
revolver and [has], in fact, lost all human likeness. . . , standing
in a Cheka basement doing “bloody but honorable revolutionary work.”
II. PEASANT-JEWISH RELATIONS: "ARENDARS"
Shahak, in Three Thousand Years, above, ch. 4, traces Jewish
“hatred and contempt” for peasants— “a hatred of which I know no
parallel in other societies”—back to the great Ukrainian uprising of
1648-54, in which tens of thousands of “the accursed Jews” (to quote
the Ukrainian Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky) were killed. Some say
the number is more accurately stated in the hundreds of thousands.
Heinrich Graetz says the number “may well be. . . a quarter of a
million.” See his History of the Jews, vol. 5, p. 15 (1856-70, English
tr., Jewish Publication Society of America ed., 1956).
The Jews at the time of the massacres were serving the Polish
szlachta (nobility) and Roman Catholic clergy on their Ukrainian
latifundia as arendars—toll-, rent- and tax-farmers, enforcers of
corvee obligations, licensees of feudal monopolies (e.g., on banking,
milling, storekeeping, and distillation and sale of alcohol), and as
anti-Christian scourges who even collected tithes at the doors of the
peasants’ Greek Orthodox churches and exacted fees to open those doors
for weddings, christenings and funerals. They had life and death
powers over the local population (the typical form of execution being
impalement), and no law above them to which that population had
recourse. See Graetz, vol. 5, pp. 3-6; Subtelny, pp. 123-38; Norman
Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 1, p. 444 (Oxford
University Press, 1982); and Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, Jews in Poland,
pp. 68-79, 283 (1993). According to the last three of these sources,
the arendars leased estates for terms of only two or three years and
had every incentive to wring the peasants mercilessly, without regard
to long-term consequences.
Norman Cantor comments in The Sacred Chain, p. 184 (1994) that
“perhaps the Jews [of the arenda period] were so moved by racist
contempt for the Ukrainian and Polish peasantry as to regard them as
subhuman. . . . There is a parallel with the recent attitude of the
West Bank Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox toward the Palestinians. Judaism
can be in its Halakhic form an extremely restrictive and blinding
faith.”
According to Chaim Bermant, The Jews, p. 26 (1977):
. . . [O]ne cannot see the events of [1648-49] as entirely
the result of crazed fanaticism or mindless superstition. . . . [I]f
the nobility were. . . the ultimate exploiters,the Jews were the
visible ones and aroused the most immediate hostility. Rabbis warned
that Jews were sowing a terrible harvest of hatred, but while the
revenues rolled in the warnings were ignored. Moreover, the rabbis
themselves were beneficiaries of the system.
Those rabbinical forebodings are also mentioned in Jacob Katz,
Exclusiveness and Tolerance, p. 152 (Oxford University Press, 1961).
Graetz (vol. 5, pp. 5-6) says of the Jewish arendars that they had
lost “integrity and right-mindedness. . . as completely as simplicity
and the sense of truth. They found pleasure and a sort of triumphant
delight in deception and cheating.” He adds that they “advised the
[Polish noble and ecclesiast-ical] possessors of the Cossack colonies
how most completely to humiliate, oppress, torment, and ill-use [those
colonies].
. . . No wonder that the enslaved Cossacks hated the Jews. . . . The
Jews were not without warning what would be their lot, if these
embittered enemies once got the upper hand.”
Graetz (vol. 5, p. 7) also says Khmelnytsky had personal reasons
for leading the revolt: “A Jew, Zachariah Sabilenki, had played him a
trick, by which he was robbed of his wife and property.” It says
everything, of course, that it was possible by trickery to rob a
Cossack of his wife.
Arendas did not disappear after the Khmelnytsky uprising. See
Jewish FamilyHistory. org/ Grand_ Duchy_of_Lithuania. htm (“During the
18th century, up to 80 percent of Jewish heads of households in rural
areas [of what are now Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and parts of
Poland] were arendars, that is, holders of an arenda”). Pogonowski, p.
72, describes the return of the Jews to the Ukraine after 1648-54.
Similarly, see Simon M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and
Poland, vol. 1, p. 158 (1916).
Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4) says that under the arenda
system, “the full weight of the Jewish religious laws against gentiles
fell upon the peasants.” As to the nature of those laws, see id.,
ch.5, especially under the heading “Abuse.” See also such passages as
Psalm 2:8-9 (“. . . I shall give thee the heathen for thine
inheritance. . . .
Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in
pieces like a potter’s vessel”); Psalm 21:8-10 (“[T]hy right hand
shall find out those that hate thee. Thou shalt make them as a fiery
oven in the time of thine anger: the Lord shall swallow them up. .
.”); Psalm 79:6-7 (“Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen. . . [f]or
they have devoured Jacob [i.e., Israel], and laid waste his dwelling
place”); Jeremiah 10:25 (al-most identical); Psalm 137:8-9 (“O
daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, . . . [h]appy shall he
be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”);
Psalm 149:7-8; Isaiah 45:14 (“Thus saith the Lord, . . . in chains. .
. they shall fall down unto [Israel].
. .”); Isaiah 60:12 (“. . .[T]he nation and kingdom that will not
serve [Israel] shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly
wasted” );Isaiah 61:5-6 (“. . .[S]trangers shall stand and feed your
flocks. . . :
[Y]e shall eat the riches of the Gentiles. . .”); and of course Esther
8:11 through 10:3. As to the last, and the feast of Purim, celebrated
yearly then as now, see Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites (Princeton
University Press, 2006).
III. JEWISH ATTITUDE TO NON-JEWS, i.e. "ESAU AND EDOM"
The Babylonian Talmud, cabbalist treatises, and other rabbinical
writings extant during the arenda period were even harder on the
gentiles, particularly Christians. See Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s
hugely controversialEntdektes Judenthum (1700), translated as
Rabbinical Literature: Or the Traditions of the Jews (1748). At p. 253
of that translation we read that:
The [cabbalist] Treatise Emek hammelech, in the Part entitled
Shaar shiashue hammelech, gives us the following Passage. “Our
Rabbins, of Blessed Memory, have said, Ye Jews are stiled Men; because
of the Soul ye have from the Supreme Man (i.e., God; whom the
Cabalists call Adam Ahelion; that is, the Supreme Man). But the
Nations of the World are not stiled Men, because they have not, from
the Holy and Supreme Man, the Neshama (or glorious Soul). But they
have the Nephesh (i.e. the Soul) from Adam Belial; that is, the
malicious and unnecessary Man, called Sammael, the Supreme Devil.”
* * * There was a nucleus of truth in all his claims: the
Jews lived in a world of. . . ethical duality—following different
standards in their internal and external relationships. . . .(Emphases
added.)[vi]
According to Davies (God’s Playground, vol. 1, p. 444) the
oppressiveness of the Jews as arendars “provided the most important
single cause of the terrible retribution that would descend on them on
several occasions in the future. . . .” In 1986 the Stanford history
department voted 12-11 against offering tenure to Davies, then a
professor visiting from the University of London. Davies sued
unsuccessfully for defamation, which suggests the tenor of the
discussion. Davies is now a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. The
queen awarded him a CMG in 2001.
Actually, the Jewish “hatred and contempt” that Shahak remarks on
can be traced back to times well before the events of 1648-54. Such
attitudes can be seen, for example, in medieval traditions in which
Esau—portrayed in Isaiah 63 and Obadiah as one with whom God himself
is at war—came to stand for agricultural Christian Europe. See Rabbi
Tzvi Weinberg, “Esau-Edom: Profile of a People” (Dec. 16, 2000), at
http://www .biu.ac.il/ JH/Parasha/ eng/ vayishlach/ wei.html. See also
Exclusiveness and Tolerance, above, p. 6, which says that in medieval
Jewish poetry Edom was synonymous with Christianity. In Malachi 1:4
“the Lord hath indignation for ever” against Edom; see also Jeremiah
49:7-8, Lamentations 4:21-22, Ezekiel 35, and Amos 1:11.
IV. SLAVE TRADE
Edom was never geographically fixed. It followed the Jews wherever
they went—the nation allotted to Israel’s dehumanized twin, as ripe
for righteous predation as the original Esau.[vii] Edom’s presence in
Europe helped rationalize the Jewish role in the immensely profitable
slave trade of the eighth through the 10th centuries. European
boys—mostly in the East, but in the West as well—were kidnapped and
castrated by Vikings, sold to Jews, taken south down the major rivers,
and sold again as eunuchs in Muslim lands from Persia to Spain. See
The Rise of Christian Europe, H.R. Trevor-Roper,pp. 92-93 (1965). As
Trevor-Roper points out, the words for slave and Slav come from the
same root in every European language, a reminder of a commerce whose
memory has faded away in the West. The Arabic word for eunuch is from
the same root. Some trace this trade as far back as the fifth century.
.
For a much fuller discussion of this whole set of issues, see
Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb(English tr., University
of California Press, 2006). At pp. 120-21 Yuval tells of prayers that:
. . . demonstrate the abyss of hostility and hatred felt by
medieval Jews toward Christians. And we have here not only hatred, but
an appeal to God to kill indiscriminately and ruthlessly, alongside a
vivid description of the anticipated horrors to be brought down upon
the Gentiles. These pleas are formulated in a series of verbs—“swallow
them, shoot them, lop them off, make them bleed, crush them, strike
them, curse them, and ban them. . . destroy them, kill them, smite
them. . . crush them [again], abandon them, parch them”—and in the
best alphabetical tradition, the string of disasters the poet wishes
for the Gentiles goes on and on.
Yuval collects an abundance of such material, from both before
and after the events of 1096. In agreement with Schremer, he says (p.
123) that “we are dealing here with a comprehensive religious ideology
that sees vengeance as a central component in its messianic doctrine.”
He repeats (p. 125) that this vengeance was to be “against the
Gentiles”—most of whom, it seems safe to say, were peasants—and that
the vengeance stood “at the very heart of the messianic process.” He
says tellingly (p. 134) that “the Christians were not unaware of the
Jewish desire to see their destruction.”[viii]
The ethnocentric hostility of the Jews—consistently commented on
by the peoples who have encountered them over the millennia—can be
traced ultimately to the origins of Judaism as set forth in the Torah,
e.g., Genesis 9:25 (“Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he
be unto his brethren”); Exodus 17:14-16 and 34:12-13 ; Numbers 24:8
(“God. . . shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their
bones, and pierce them through with his arrows”), 25:6-13 (wherein God
commends Phineas for his initia-tive in running a javelin through both
parties to a marriage of Jew and gentile), 31:7-19 and 33:50-56; and
Deuteronomy 2:33-35 (“[on God’s command] we. . . utterly destroyed the
men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none
to remain”), 3:4-7, 7:1-5 (“thou shalt. . . utterly destroy them”),
7:14-26 (“thine eye shall have no pity”), 20:10-17 (“thou shalt save
alive nothing that breatheth”) and 25:19. Disdain for ordinary
labor—to be performed by Esau and Edom, but to be exploited by
Israel—appears as early as Genesis
25:23-27, as discussed in note vii below.
Ethnocentric hostility has lent itself to Jewish tax-farming.
This can be traced back to very early times, and has sometimes
involved copious use of deadly force, put at the disposal of the
tax-farmers by their noble clients. See Flavius Josephus, The
Antiquities of the Jews, bk. 12, ch. 4 (1st c.), available online
(Syria violently stripped to its “bones” for Ptolemy III); and Elias
Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age, p. 120 (Harvard University
Press, 1988).
See also Rabbi Simeon’s lumping of gentiles with serpents, above;
Cornelius Tacitus, The Histories, bk. 5.5 (c. 109 A.D.) (“[the Jews]
regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies”); Gibbon,
ch. 15 (“the[ir] sullen obstinacy. . . and unsocial manners seemed to
mark them out a distinct species of men, who boldly professed, or who
faintly disguised, their implacable hatred to the rest of humankind”);
and Emilio Gabba, “The Growth of Anti-Judaism or the Greek Attitude
Toward the Jews,” in W.D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein, eds., The
Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 2 (Cam-bridge University Press,
1990). At p. 629 Gabba attributes to Hecataeus of Abdera (early 3d c.
B.C.) an observation about the hostility of the Jews. Gabba excuses
that hostility, saying the Jews’ “misanthropic reserve” was
understandable in light of the exodus from Egypt. But the
exodus—thought by Hecataeus to have been an expulsion, and by Tacitus
to have been an expulsion of lepers—was perhaps a thousand years past
even when Hecataeus wrote. At p. 645 Gabba cites Posidonius (134 B.C.)
on the advice given to his contemporary, King Antiochus Sidetes, to
destroy the Jews, “for they alone among all peoples refused all
relations with other races and saw everyone as their enemy. . . .”
Almost identical advice was given to King Ahasuerus (Xerxes I,
485-465 B.C.) in Esther 3:8-9. Some two-and-a-half millennia after
Ahasuerus, the Jews still celebrate on their most joyous holiday the
vengeance he allowed them: “sl[aughter] of their foes seventy and five
thousand,” including “both little ones and women,” and hanging not
just of the man who gave the advice, but of all ten of his sons. It
was an occasion of “light, and. . . joy, and honour,” and of “gladness
and feasting.” Id., 8:11-17, 9:13-28.
Martin Luther’s comments on this story, in The Jews and Their
Lies (1543), fit with Yuval’s account of “a comprehensive [Jewish]
religious ideology that sees vengeance as a central component in its
messianic doctrine,” and Schremer’s account of Jewish hopes for
“eschatological redemption in terms of the total eradication of the
nations”:
Oh how [the Jews] love the Book of Esther, which so nicely
agrees with their bloodthirsty, revengeful and murderous desire and
hope. The sun never did shine on a more bloodthirsty and revengeful
people than they, who imagine themselves to be the people of God, and
who desire to, and think they must, murder and crush the heathen. And
the foremost undertaking which they expect of their Messiah is that he
should slay and murder the whole world with the sword.
This passage—indeed, the whole 64-page essay—is often cited as
evidence of Luther’s pathological anti-Semitism, but Yuval and
Schremer show that at least on this point he knew whereof he spoke. As
Yuval says, “the Christians were not unaware of the Jewish desire to
see their destruction.” Luther’s comments also fit with the
descriptions of Jewish arendars given above—men who “found pleasure
and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating” (Graetz);
who sowed “a terrible harvest of hatred” (Bermant); and who may have
been “so moved by racist contempt for the Ukrainian and Polish
peasantry as to regard them as subhuman” (Cantor).
V. THE NEED TO HATE AND TO BE HATED
Even in the 21st century, Israeli children are taught to sing
“The Whole World is Against Us”(“Ha’olam Ku’lo heg’denu”). We have not
only David M. Weinberg’s defense of the “shfoch hamatcha” prayer, but
even Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik, “The Virtue of Hate,” First Things,
Feb. 2003 (available online) (“When hate is appropriate, then it is
not only virtuous, but essential for Jewish well-being”). Soloveichik
is not a fringe figure. He is a member of an exceedingly eminent
Orthodox rabbinical family.
Note the words “essential for Jewish well-being.” The “virtue of
hate” seems to come of a positive need to be hated. The
widely-published Rabbi Dr. Dan Cohn-Sher-bok, professor of Jewish
history at the University of Wales (Lampeter) and author of The
Paradox of Anti-Semitism (2006), says in an interview with the
Independent(U.K.), March 19, 2006 (available online) that: “Jews need
enemies in order to survive. . . . [I]n the absence of Jew-hatred,
Judaism is undergoing a slow death. . . . We want to be loved, and we
want Judaism to survive intact. . . . [T]hese are incompatible
desires. . . . Why do we endure?
Because we’re hated.” (Emphases added.)
In his book (p. 209) Cohn-Sherbok says that “in the past
ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders were profoundly aware of this dynamic.”
One of his examples is Schneur Zalman of Lyady, the first Lubavitch
Rebbe and author of the Tanya (1796), the fundamental book of the
Habbad movement, whose first chapter famously concludes by saying
gentile souls “contain no good whatever.” [ix] In 1812, Zalman worked
with the anti-Semitic Czar Alexander I to defeat Napoleon.
Similarly, according to Ha’aretz, June 3, 2004 (available
online), “in the mid-19th century, Rabbi [Samson Raphael] Hirsch, the
leader of Germany’s Orthodox Jews, wrote that anti-Semitism is the
tool through which the God of Israel preserves his people.” In 1958,
Rabbi Dr. Nahum Goldmann, then president of the World Jewish Congress,
complained that the “current decline of overt anti-Semitism might
constitute a new danger to Jewish survival,” one that “has
had a very negative effect on our internal life.” In 1957, Leo
Pfeffer, then counsel to the same organization, said much the same. As
to both, see Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II, p. 412
(1982). See also Charles E. Silberman, A Certain People, p. 165
(1985):
Hannah Arendt says of this whole line of thinking, in The Origins
of Totalitarianism, p. 7 (1973 ed.), that “. . . eternal anti-Semitism
would imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish [corporate] existence. This
superstition isa secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent
in a faith in chosenness.”
VI. PROVOKING ANTI SEMITISM
It follows from this “superstition” (or psychological insight)
that where anti-Semitism is inadequate to ........
Continue
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/05/26/holocaust-holodomor-origins-of-anti-semi