Holohoax + Holodomor = Origins of Anti Semitism
Dezi Cohen <yitzhak_in_eretz@yahoo.com>
From: JMD Morgan <John...@email.non>
Holocaust and Holodomor 'Origins of Anti Semitism'
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.
According to S. J. Taylor, Stalin�s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York
Times�s Man in Moscow, p. 202 (Oxford University Press 1990), �. . .Soviet
authorities . . . require[d] that the shades of all windows be pulled down on
trains traveling through the North Caucasus, the Ukraine and the Volga basin.�
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.�
In September 1933, Duranty�who cultivated his relationship with Stalin, and
is remembered today for his public denials that any such thing was
happening�privately told fellow journalists Eugene Lyons (United Press) and Anne
O�Hare McCormick (herself from the New York Times) that the death toll was 7
million, but that the dead were �only Russians.� (Sic: mostly Ukrainians; and
note the word �only.�) See Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 579-80 (1937).
Duranty�s number is described in Lyons�s book only as �the most startling I had.
. . heard,� but is revealed in Lyons�s �Memo for Malcolm Muggeridge� (Dec. 9,
1937), quoted by Marco Carynnyk in �The New York Times and the Great Famine,
Part III,� available online.
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.
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 forunimpeachable political loyalty. . .
�). Mayer, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton, is himself Jewish, and
had to flee the Nazis as a refugee.
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. . . .
When I told Solzhenitsyn the history of the various parties and
reached the Socialist Revolutionaries, recalling the leaders, Gorovits,
Gershuni, Gots, he interrupted in astonishment, almost in disbelief: how
can that be� Jewish surnames, when the SRs were a Russian peasant party?
Notwithstanding Kopelev�s self-definition, he was incontestably Jewish for
purposes of the Israeli Law of Return, which came into effect well within his
lifetime.[iv]
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 H.R. Trevor-Roper,
The Rise of Christian Europe, 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 is
a 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 ........
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