Anti-Semitism

This a series of posts explores anti-Semitism, its origins, the motivations behind it, its various manifestations, its consequences, and its possible future. The series also proposes a method for determining when an act or statement is anti-Semitic and concludes with some suggestions for remedying the consequences of anti-Semitism. A series of discussion questions is also included.

Review of the previous post.

The previous post, post number 3 of 33, was the second of 4 posts discussing an overview of anti-Semitism and continued the discussion

Preview of this post.

This post, post number 4 of 33 and the third of four posts discussing an overview of anti-Semitism and continues the discussion.

Even in modern times Jews are blamed for all manner of ills, especially in the Middle East. In fact, this modern form of anti-Semitism often masquerades as hatred for the state of Israel rather than for Jews per se. “Intellectuals” in many countries actually refuse to allow Israeli scientists to attend conferences, or “intellectuals” advocate boycotts of Israeli goods – all under the guise of disagreement with Israel policies regarding the Palestinians, in spite of the fact that other countries, such as China and Russia, do far worse to countries such as Tibet, without similar reaction from the “intellectuals.”^[1]

Historian Robert Waistrich calls anti-Semitism “the longest hatred”, Leon Pinsker, in his paper “Auto-emancipation: An Appeal To His People” termed it “Judeophobia.”:

Friend and foe alike have tried to explain or to justify this hatred or to justify this hatred of the Jews by bringing all sorts of charges against them. They are said to have crucified Jesus, to have drunk the blood of Christians, to have poisoned wells, to have taken usury, to have exploited the peasant, and so on.

…to the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the proprietary a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country,  for all a hated rival.

In this way have Judaism and Anti-Semitism passed for centuries through history as inseparable companions. Like the Jewish people, the real wondering Jew, Anti-Semitism, too, seems as if it would never die. He must be blind indeed who will assert that the Jews are not the chosen people, the people chosen for universal hatred. No matter how much the nations are at variance in their relations with one another, however diverse their instincts and aims, they join hands in their hatred of the Jews; on this one matter all are agreed.

Then, Pinsker offers this dispiriting conclusion:

“Having analyzed Judeophobia as an hereditary form of demonopathy, peculiar to the human race, and having represented Anti-Semitism as proceeding from an inherited aberration of the human mind, we must draw the important conclusion that we must give up contending against these hostile impulses as we must against every other inherited predisposition.”

A succinct summary of the spawning and spreading of anti-Semitism is found at page 269 of Great Ages & Ideas of the Jewish People, edited by Leo W. Schwarz (New York NY Modern Library 1956 hardback):

“When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity in the fourth century, a novel and intolerant spirit began to establish itself and to increase in strength in the new Europe as the Middle Ages advanced. In due course the Christian Church evolved an elaborate anti-Jewish code, which one may say reached its final form in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and which was reinforced by the popular prejudice that it had itself half reluctantly stimulated. Jews and Christians were not to dwell together, to trade together, to work together. The unbelievers were not allowed to engage in honorable professions such as medicine, lest they should attain improper influence over their patients. They were excluded from handicrafts, and so reduced in many lands to pawnbroking and old-clothes dealing. They were not to own land or even live outside towns, though they were hypocritically blamed sometimes for being divorced from the countryside. In the places where they were suffered to exist, they were crowded into separate, fetid streets, later called ghettos, and marked off from other men by a special garb or badge of shame. At intervals they were compelled to listen to conversionist sermons, and as late as the nineteenth century their children were sometimes seized and baptized by force.

Meanwhile, as the result of their isolation and of the unremitting propaganda against them, their physical security continuously deteriorated. From the period of the First Crusade (1066), outbreaks of violence against them became appallingly frequent throughout Europe. Preposterous charges, such as the accusation of ritual murder at Passover time, were increasingly common. The treatment thus stimulated finally resulted in a series of expulsions from one country after the other – from England in 1290, from France in 1306 and 1394, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497, from most of the cities of Germany during the period of stark tragedy which succeeded the massacres (on the absurd charge of poisoning wells) at the time of the Black Death in 1348-1349. By the end of the fifteenth century the Jews had been excluded from the whole of Western Europe except some parts of Germany and of Italy, her political disunity fortunately prevented the pursuit of any single policy. Henceforth they were concentrated overwhelming in the two great eastern empires of that age: Ashkenazim or Northern (literally “German”) Jews in Poland, the Sephardim or Southern (literally “Spanish”) Jew in Turkey.”

Preview of the next post.

The next post, post number 5 of 33, and the fourth of four posts discussing an overview of anti-Semitism and continues the discussion.

^[1] But see, “How the Boycott Got Boycotted” by Adam Kredo, Commentary Magazine, March 2014 Vol. 137: No. 3, pages 31-34.