"Instead of learning about the Holocaust through the larger

18 (pt. 1)

THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE

                 "Instead of learning about the Holocaust through the large lens of
                  Jewish history, many Jews and non-Jews in America
                  now learn the whole of Jewish history through the lens of the                   Holocaust."                          -- James Young, p. 304

"The myth of the Holocaust teaches that throughout their

history of persecution the Jews have been blameless, their

oppressors irrational." -- Liebman and Cohen p. 33

"It isn't the truth [about Jews in the Holocaust era] that

frightens me but the suppression of free speech in order to

protect communal myths that are not lies but truths rendered

so sacrosanct and undiscussed that they start to smell fishy."

-- Carol Oppenheim, Jewish author,

"Many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the six million

by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots -- or

in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry.

It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be

exploiting you that he cannot be doing what you know he

is doing because he is a Jew."

-- James Baldwin, Black novelist,

"Related to the film's box-office success is the fact that

precisely because Schindler's List has been watched

by large numbers of people who had very little previous

knowledge of the Holocaust, and cannot be expected to

gain much more knowledge in the future. This specific

version of the event may remain the only source of

information about it for many of its viewers."

-- Omer Bartov, p. 46

"It is doubtful that history is the genre for writers who are

so overwhelmed by the Holocaust and yet want to describe

it. It seems that some fictional form of expression may be

more suitable than history for those who want to respond

emotionally rather than historically to that great tragedy."

--Richard Lucas, p. 222

"[Jewish] manufactured claims of uniqueness for their own

people are, after all, synonymous with dismissal and denial of

the experience of others ... Narcissistic false claims of

uniqueness are joined with brutal, racist denials of the

sufferings of others, becoming two sides of the same coin."

-- David Stannard, p. 198

"I would be the last to minimize the atrocity of Auschwitz,

where my father and mother perished. But don't the tears

                  of others count? "         -- Maxime Rodinson, p. 9

        "[The Holocaust had been] hardly talked about for the first twenty years or so
        after World War II; then, from the 1970s on, [it became] ever more central in
        American public discourse -- particularly, of course, among Jews, but also in the
        culture at large. What accounts for this unusual chronology?"
                                                       -- Peter Novick, 1999, p. 2

"The actual historical subject [of the Holocaust] itself has

become almost unimportant compared with its contemporary

political function in the hands of some Jews."

-- John Fox, non-Jewish faculty member

in Jewish history and Holocaust studies at both

University College and Jews College, London,

[3-19-2000, p. 47-48]

It is the profoundest of ironies that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis may have saved worldwide Jewry from extinction. (In the case of Jewish Hassids, Menachem Friedman notes that "paradoxically, it was the destruction of Eastern European Jewry in the twentieth century that created the conditions which enabled the spread of ultra-orthodoxy.") [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 31] At the very least, judging by common Jewish commentary about their fate in Europe over fifty years ago, Hitler is responsible for a dramatic Jewish revival. Before World War II many Jews were on a slow but steady path of assimilation wherever they resided in their diaspora, particularly in Western Europe, each generation inched further away from the separatist myths of the Jewish past. Religion of all kinds continued in retreat and the rationale for being Jewish was -- at least in some parts of the Jewish community -- steadily weakening. As the Nazi regime came to power, however, many German Jews (if we take what they say at face value) had strayed from a specifically Jewish connection in their lives and were forced to re-examine their identities. In 1935, for instance, the German literary critic Jean Amery (Hans Mayer) supposedly discovered himself a Jew in a Viennese cafe when reading a newspaper about new Nazi laws on the subject. Likewise, in 1938, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein connected to his long lost Jewish identity as a consequence of Nazi dictates. They were both suddenly Jews because Hitler said so. [TRAVERSO, p. 39] Even Albert Einstein found his identity as a Jew in the context of rising political anti-Semitism in Germany in 1914. There had been nothing in Switzerland, he said, "that called forth any Jewish sentiments in me. When I moved to Berlin all that changed." [CLARK, p. 377] (He was helping to raise "funds for the Zionist cause of a Hebrew university" by 1921.) [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 173] "The composer Arnold Schoenberg and many other baptized Jews," notes Nachum Gidal, "now publicly declared their return to Judaism." [GIDAL, p. 425]

Sigmund Freud reflected, at least publicly, the same experience:

"My language is German. My culture, my attainments, are German. I

could identify myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of

anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that

time, I prefer to call myself a Jew." [GAY, MOMENT, p. 50]

In 1937, an American Jew, Alfred Siegel, wrote in the American Israelite that

"Hitler has been a life-giving stimulant for me. In times when there is no

Jewish flame left in me and I am feeling very cold, I get warm again on

account of Hitler ... I know I shouldn't say this, but ... Hitler [is] helping

me to fulfill my status as an immortal man ... What will become of me

when there is no more Hitler and there is no one to set flames under me

to keep me warm? What if we come at last to a world in which no

anti-Semite is left and everybody loves me? What of my poor Jewish

bones which set so quickly cold without stimulation? Who and what

will keep me warm then? -- May 27, 1937 [in GOLDSTEIN, p. 115]

For today's many Jewish "ideologists," wrote Jacob Neusner, decades after Hitler, "there is no real choice about 'being Jewish' if born one. The Holocaust dictates that there is no escape from it. Hitler knew you were one." [NEUSNER, Holo, p. 978] "The gas chambers at Auschwitz," notes Jonathan Sacks, "made no distinction between [Jewish] assimilators and traditionalists, believers and heretics, atheists and Jews of faith." [SACKS, J., p.6] Such comments are terribly true, but always left unstated is the disturbing fact that the same all-encompassing view that "born Jews" (whatever they choose to believe) are inescapably Jewish is a concept intrinsic to classic Jewish identity itself. Hitler did not invent the idea that being Jewish is a racial pedigree, often these days euphemistically referred to as a "community of fate." Was not Hitler following the same path as this 1970s observation by a Jewish theologian, Eugene Borowitz? : "To be a Jew means to have a bond with every other Jew -- and somehow know how to find him." [in SILBERMAN, C., p. 76]

Whatever the case, in attempting to racially define and annihilate the Jewish people, Hitler rejuvenated them. This is exemplified in the famous plea by the Jewish theologian, Emil Fackenheim, who implored his fellow Jews to renew with vigor their sense of Jewishness. To allow it to wane -- post-Holocaust -- was now equated to be a posthumous victory for Hitler. (Even for Jews married to non-Jews, distinctive Jewish progeny is often a burning issue. A liberal feminist professor, Amy Sheldon, notes that "although I had many mixed feelings towards traditional Judaism, there was never any doubt in my mind that our children would be raised as Jews. 'I can't finish what Hitler started,' I told my [non-Jewish] husband before we were married." [SHELDON, p. 82])

We see in Hitler's last breath in 1945 the birth of Israel in 1948, and the conjoining of the Holocaust and the modern state of Israel as the sacred pillars of a renewed Jewish identity rooted in guilt, fear, resentment, hostility, and rage. It was, however, not an identity that took immediate shape after Hitler's persecution of Jewry. The martyr status of concentration camp victims, the heroizing of survivors no matter what they had to do to live, the stress upon exaggerated Jewish resistance to the Nazis, a deeper embracement of Jewish tribalism, and the political exploitation of the Holocaust for Jewish and Israeli myths and manipulations came later. What came to be known as "the Holocaust," says Edward Lilenthal, "was often indistinguishable, in the immediate postwar years, from the millions of noncombatant casualties due to terror bombings of civilian populations, epidemic illness, or starvation. It was considered by most as simply part of the horror of war." [LILENTHAL, p. 5]

In Israel, in the early years after the Holocaust, Jewish survivors were even scorned with contempt by Israeli Jews as "soap" (i.e., feebly passive Jews who were passively turned into bars of soap by Nazi tormentors, [GOREN, p. 159] the fulfillment of demeaning stereotypes about fellow Jews. "With what scorn," noted Georges Tamarin in 1973, "Israeli youth reacts to the alleged faint-heartedness of the six million victims of Nazis!" [TAMARIN, p. 115] The Holocaust was an emblem of shame to Jewry, little discussed, more often avoided. "Even in their extraordinary death agony," notes Haim Breseeth, "the millions of European Jews had not attracted sympathy [in Israel] -- a minimum expectation from an important Jewish community." [BRESEETH, p. 196] "In retrospect," says Arye Carmon," it appears that a disturbing conjunction evolved between the incomprehensible magnitude of evil of the Nazis and the victims who conscientiously were presented as an ideological object to be disassociated from. This conjunction may explain the duality of guilt and shame that has portrayed mourning in Israel." [CARMON, p. 76] A daughter of Holocaust survivors who was raised in Israel remarked at a conference there that

"What I hated and dreaded most when I was a child was summertime.

It was a time when the [tattooed concentration camp] numbers on my

mother's arm would be there for all to see and people would know

that she was a survivor and was one of the despised people. People

like my parents were despised in Israel, and I was ashamed of

them." [EMMETT, p. 147]

"In 1947 a Jewish concentration camp survivor, Primo Levy, could only interest a small, obscure press to publish an account of his experiences and the volume was little noticed. [TRAVERSO, p. 104] Even Eli Wiesel's ultimately influential work about the Holocaust, Night, did not appear in English until 1960, after twenty publishers had rejected it. [WHITFIELD p. 74] "We would look in vain in the 1950s," says Jacob Neusner, "for what some call 'Holocaustomania.'" [NEUSNER, STRANGER, p. 84]

"Many Jews raised in the United States in the wake of the Holocaust," notes Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, "experienced it like a family secret -- hovering, controlling, but barely mentioned except in code or casual reference." [BRODKIN, K., p. 141]

In 1961 only two of 31 discussants in a major Jewish magazine's symposium on "Jewishness and Younger Intellectuals" put any emphasis on the Holocaust effecting their lives. In that same year, another important Jewish magazine's theme of "My Jewish Affirmation" overlooked the Holocaust almost completely. [LINENTHAL, p. 8] Even as late as 1966, when Commentary published a forum on "Jewish belief" in its pages, "the Holocaust," notes Nathan Glazer, "did not figure in any of the questions, nor, it must be said, did it figure in the answers." [GLAZER, American, p. 172] In a collection of 1960s-era interviews with Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion "the word Holocaust never appears." [STERNBERGER, I., 8-15-95]

The book that first attracted, and furthered, widespread interest in the particularly Jewish experiences of World War II was the diary of Ann Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl), a volume that a Jewish novelist, Meyer Levin, almost single-handedly pushed to fame. Levin urged the diary's publication in the American Jewish Congress Weekly; it was serialized in the Jewish magazine, Commentary. Doubleday eventually published it and Levin himself heralded its importance on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, his editors not informed about his own "vested interest" -- commercially and politically -- in the story. [BLAIR, p. 3] The volume has since sold over sixty million copies in fifty-one languages. [WHITFIELD, p. 72] (There appeared with such revelations a corresponding shame and guilt among diaspora Jews and a rising need to atone for their own sin of doing so little to help European Jewry during the Hitler era. [RUBENSTEIN, p. 24]) The diary of Ann Frank is so well publicized internationally that, note David Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa,

"Ann Frank's Diary of a Young Girl has sold over a four million copies

in Japan, more than any other country except the United States. So

beloved is Ann Frank in Japan that the first Japanese company to market

sanitary napkins designed especially for Japanese women called itself

Anne Co., Ltd., and sold its product under the brand name 'Anne's

Day' (Anne no hi), which quickly became a euphemism for menstruation

       in Japan." [GOODMAN, p. 6]

     The Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted continued popular promotion of Anne Frank in 2001, half a century after her death:

     "A four hour miniseries, following Anne's life from her happy school days
     through her two years in hiding in Amsterdam and to her final days in the
     concentration camp, air nationally over ABC TV on May 20 and May 21.
        The 20th Century Fox studio is developing a feature move based on
    'The Diary of Anne Frank.'
        A new edition of the diary, including five previously unpublished pages
     describing her parents' difficult marriage, was released in March.
       The Helos Dance Theatre premiered 'About Anne: A Diary in Dance'
     in Los Angeles last month.
        An interactive CDROM titled 'Anne Frank House: A House with a Story'
     was released earlier this year, offering a virtual tour of the building and
     the 'secret annex' where the Frank family hid.
        In Boise, Idaho, ground has been broken on a $1.6 million Anne
     Frank Human Rights Memorial Park." [TUGEND, T., 5-13-01]

In formal literature, "apart from the notable exception of [Saul] Bellow's The Dangling Man," says Theodore Ziolkowski, "it was not until the 60s with Edward Wallant's The Pawnbroker, Norma Rosen's Touching Evil, Susan Schaeffer's Anya, Arthur Cohen's In the Days of Simon Stern, and later works by Cynthia Ozick and Saul Bellow -- that the Holocaust became a genuine theme." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 599] By 1998, however, Sheila Schimpf noted that

"For 10 years Barry Gross has asked Michigan State University students

in his English classes how many have read or seen 'The Diary of Anne

Frank.' Almost every hand goes up. 'It has become almost the common

text for this generation of students,' Gross says." [SCHIMPF, p. E1]

In 1967, with the multiple-nation Arab war against Israel, worldwide Jewry snapped to a new kind of attention and consciousness, one that has since accelerated to our own day into deeply politicized Jewish obsessions with anti-Semitism, the hallowed specialness of the Holocaust, and the absolute sanctity of Israel. During the 1967 Arab war, Jews everywhere (as it is told and retold in Jewish scholarship) imagined the prospect for another Holocaust. "It would be impossible to understand the present Israeli stance toward the Arabs without taking full account of the Holocaust," says Jay Gonen. [GONEN, p. 151] In the Arab armies Jews saw Nazi storm troopers. In the PLO leadership of Yassar Arafat, they stamped the face of Hitler. "Israel," says Melvin Urofsky, "made it possible [for Jews worldwide] to endure the memory of Auschwitz. Were Israel to be destroyed [by Arabs], then Hitler would be alive again, the final victory would be his." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 351]

The old Jewish self-identity of weakness and victimization -- based on the Jewish martyrological tradition of death, destruction, and terror -- became now a conviction of armor, militantly wielded, shaped with the very shame and horror of the Holocaust. The resultant Israeli victory over the Arabs meant a symbolic return to physical power, along biblical lines even, for many Jews, redemption. It also meant the springboard for a new Holocaust-centeredness, aggressive in its character, hostile and embittered to non-Jews everywhere around them. And it was adept in milking communal guilt from comfortable Jews in America who experienced nothing of the risks of 1967 Israel nor the European Holocaust years. A victorious Israel rising up out of ashes of the Holocaust became the cornerstone of Jewish self-conception. The Holocaust was no longer shamefully harmful to the Jewish self-image. It was now a much-heralded building block for the state of Israel and impassioned Jewish vigor, everywhere discussed, everywhere publicized.

Jews who paid little attention to the Jewish annihilation during World War II, and in the early years after, two decades later were increasingly consumed with it. "A profound sense of their status as survivors seized world Jewry," notes Jacob Neusner. [NEUSNER, Holo, p. 976] "The question," adds Hanno Loewy, "which constantly recurs is, 'Why did I of all people survive?' -- a question which pursues the survivor and to which there is no answer." [LOWEY, p. 240] "Every time I attend a gathering of Jewish children," wrote well-known lawyer Alan Dershowitz in 1991, "at a family event, at a Bar Mitzvah, at Simchath Torah -- I imagine SS guards lining up these children for the gas chambers." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 178]

"To some extent," says Jacob Petuchowski, "this preoccupation [with the Holocaust] represents a repercussion of the guilt-complex of the survivors (and perhaps more so of those who survived at a safe trans-Atlantic distance than of the actual survivors of the camp.)" [PETUCHOWSKI, p. 6] The Jew, says James Yaffe, "feels guilty over the six million Jews who were killed by Hitler. What more could he have done to help them? Perhaps nothing, but his guilt stems from his sense that he might so easily have died instead of them." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 59] "The notion of survivor guilt and of resurrecting the dead to greater power than they had in life," suggests Samuel Heilman, "is of course an old one, most dramatically elaborated in Freud's famous essay Totem and Taboo." [HEILMAN, S, 1992, p. 370] It is important for many Jews to diffuse their own guilt by dumping much of it into the laps of others: "I am burdened with collective guilt," said Hans Meyer, "I say; not they. The world, which forgives and forgets, has sentenced me, not those who murdered or allowed the murder to occur." Meyer, Ruth Wisse informs us, "committed suicide, driven 'to the mind's limits' and beyond by the dishonest postwar reimposition of normalcy." [WISSE, p. 48]

"Ironically," says Leon Wieseltier, "for many Jews what remains [of Jewish identity] most vivid and 'ethnically' alive is the Holocaust." [BECHSTEL, p. 118] Rabbi David Novak even argues that today's Holocaust-based Jewish identity (i.e., the peculiar notion that modern Jewish identity is fundamentally defined by its contradistinction from real, and imagined, enemies) ironically owes much of its conception -- in the modern post-Holocaust context -- to the existentialist non-Jew, Jean Paul-Sartre, and his own book about anti-Semitism. [NOVAK, p. El of Is, p. 20]

     With the growing emphasis upon a Jewish identity largely defined by the Holocaust, vacation tours were created for American and other diaspora Jews to visit death camps in Europe as part of an immersion in "the Jewish experience." "At bar and bat mitzvahs, in a growing number of communities," notes Peter Novick,

     "the child is 'twinned' with a young vicitm of the Holocaust who never lived to
      have the ceremony, and by all reports the kids like it a lot. Adolescent Jews
      who go on organized tours to Auschwitz and Treblinka have reported that
      they were 'never so proud to be a Jew' as when, at these sites, they vicariously       experienced the Holocaust. Jewish college students oversubscribe courses on the       Holocaust, and rush to pin yellow stars to their lapels on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust       Remembrance DAy). And it's not just the young. Adult Jews flock to Holocaust
      events as to no others and give millions unstintingly to build yet another Holocaust       memorial." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 8]

      The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, one of the greatest Holocaust centers, built a multi-million dollar high-tech environment to "recreate the Holocaust experience" for Jews who missed it. The director of a Jewish education committee even proposed a high school course about the Holocaust so that all students could be able to understand "what it means to be Jewish." [LIPSTADT, p. 356] By 1986, a quarter of all new books reviewed in Judaica Book News had a Holocaust subject and more college students were taking courses about the Holocaust than any other Jewish concern. [SILVER, p. 460] In 1985, 86% of American Jewry, as evidenced in one survey, believed that "there's no doubt that the Holocaust has deeply affected the way I think and feel about being Jewish." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 33] "For American Jews," notes David Schnall, "Israel has become vitally important not as a living alternative [as a place to live] but more so as a refuge, a final port in the storm of humanity, should the unthinkable occur once more." [SCHNALL, p. 124]

The horror of the Nazi's mass murder of Jews was not just that so many millions of people were sadistically violated, tortured, and murdered. The human capacity for mass atrocity is as old as humanity itself. History is full of Tamerlanes, Genghis Khans, and Crusaders of every type riding into pillaged villages by ruthless exterminators, entire vistas laid waste in carnage. Tribe, clan, kingdom, and nation have, over the millennia, taken turns in being victim and victimizer.

The REAL horror of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe was that this atrocity was elaborately construed and constructed in modern times by a supposedly "civilized" state, Germany. It was not carried out by a band of head hunters or Neanderthal brutes, but by people who drove cars, went to the grocery store, paid taxes, and lived in familiar-looking homes and apartment buildings. Strangely, they were people quite like us, like anybody, wrapped in nationalist institutions. That is what is most frightening about it. All the Nazis needed was a national narcissism about themselves, their past, and their destiny which was the precondition necessary to entirely dehumanize, enslave, and exterminate others. Where have we seen these preconditions before?

To the everlasting shame of our sad species, none of this is new. The rudimentary foundation of the Nazi's "Master Race" self-perception and glorification finds a fanatic precursor, among others, in the most ironic of places: the origins of the Judaic faith itself in the Jewish self-conception as the "Chosen People." What is the essential ideological difference, really, between those who envision themselves to have partnership in a superior racial lineage (in the Nazi case, pure Aryans) and those who traditionally understand themselves to be a likewise hereditary lineage of human beings, in the Jewish case supposedly descended from a single man, Abraham, especially graced and privileged by God (Jews)? Both rely, traditionally and fundamentally -- in origin -- upon racist criteria in their respective belief systems. For the Nazis, it is essential to prove pure Germanic lineage to qualify in the Aryan membership. By Nazi standards, if a grandparent was a Jew, a person was considered racially tainted, and Jewish. For Jews, as legally established in today's secular state of Israel, the racial lineage is matrilineal: a Jew is defined as someone who has a Jewish natural mother. If the father was Jewish and the mother not, the child is tainted and is not, by Orthodox standards, Jewish.

Dr. Joseph Mengele, the horrible Nazi medical experimenter and "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz, echoed this racial antithesis -- at least as he saw it -- when he reputedly remarked "that the [Nazi's] Final Solution was the ultimate struggle for the control of the world between the only two peoples superior enough to vie for it, the Jews and the Germans. [LESHEM, p. 63] Or, as Hannah Arendt saw it, "[The Nazi movements'] claim to chosenness could clash seriously only with the Jewish claim ... Leaders [of Nazism] knew quite well that the Jews had divided the world, exactly as they had, into two halves -- themselves and all the others." [ARENDT, p. 240]

In 1937, amidst the rise of German fascism, Charles Clayton Morrison at the liberal Protestant journal, The Christian Century, (which was a well-known crusader against Hitler and anti-Semitism) wrote that "[it is] this obsession with the doctrine of a covenant race that now menaces the whole world, and Jews themselves are the chief sufferers from it. [The Jewish idea] of an integral race, with its own exclusive culture, hallowed and kept unified by a racial religion, is itself the prototype of nazism." [MORRISON, p. 736] "Nazi racism," notes Richard L. Rubenstein, "was an attempt to reestablish a basis for community on shared archaic roots. The exclusion of the alien was intrinsic to its very nature." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 110] This exclusionism, as we have repeatedly seen, is also integral to traditional Judaism.

The Nazis were indeed conscious of themselves as a counter-Chosen People, based upon their racially Aryan-centered ideology which was antithetical and ultimately violent to the Jewish self-assertion of superiority. Adolf Hitler appropriated for his Aryan Master Race the Jewish notion of being a Chosen People, and then twisted it to his own megalomania, saying:

We [Aryans] are chosen ... [and] whoever proclaims his allegiance

to me is, by this very proclamation and by the manner in which

it is made, one of the chosen. [Emphasis in original; KATZ, p. 9]

Feminist Merlin Stone even speculates, from a linguistic perspective, that Hitler and the Nazis may have known something about the ancient Hittites and Hebrews, arguing that if her theories about the "warlike Hebrews" are right,

"We must certainly view the ... atrocities enacted upon the Hebrew

people of the twentieth century by the self-styled Aryans of Nazi

Germany not only as tragic but ironic. The researches and excavations

of the Hittites culture have been carried on primarily by German

archeologists throughout this century. It was sometimes before and

directly after the First World War that nasili was slowly beginning

to be accepted as the real name of the Hittite language and Nesa, or

Nasa, their first capital ... One cannot help but wonder how much

Adolf Hitler was affected by reports of these finds ... Strangely enough

one more connection between the Hittites and Hebrews is the Hebrew

use of the word nasi for prince." [STONE, M., 1976, p. 127]

Hitler even had a pseudo religious view about Jews as a satanic kind of nemesis. As Steven Katz puts it:

"[In the Nazi view] the struggle between Aryan and Jew is not only

necessary and inevitable but also a clash of world-historical...

significance. Though actualized through blood and time, the depth

of this homicidal encounter is rooted in eternity."

Yoel Taitelbaum, former leader of the Ultra-Orthodox "Guardians of the City" movement, argued that a kind of cosmic struggle inevitably existed between Jews and non-Jews; the Nazis were one such -- particularly brutal -- Jewish nemesis. In this view, "hatred of Jews is inherent in the nations of the world because the choice of God fell upon Israel." [FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308]

A more secular allusion to the Jewish Chosen People/German Master Race parallel is reflected in the work of the popular Israeli poet Uri Greenberg who wrote that Jews were "the race of Abraham, which had started on its way to become master." [FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308] And what of Vladimir Jabotinsky, a seminal Zionist leader, who -- imagining the modern Israeli nation -- poeticized in 1920 that "with blood and sweat / a race will be born to us / proud, magnanimous, and cruel." [FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308]

The Nazi focus in scientifically proving their own racial superiority had respective precedents even in the European Jewish community who were receptive to such confirmation of their own superiority. In the late nineteenth century, Jules Caravallo, an official at the Alliance Israelite Universelle (one of the earliest Jewish lobbying organizations) reported the results of a French study that "Jews constituted a distinct racial type; [and] that the Jewish cranial dimensions were found 'without exception to be superior to the dimensions of the corresponding Christian cranium; and that it seemed to be reasonable to accept a superiority of the Jewish heads over the Christian heads.'" The Jewish Alliance liked the study so much that they awarded a gold medal to its French author and widely distributed the results of the study. [PATAI] ("Leaders of the Alliance Israelite Universelle,' says Albert Lindemann, "warned its members against 'arrogance' yet still implicitly accepted, often in the social-Darwinian language current at the time, the notion of Jewish superiority.") [LINDEMANN, p. 69]

Even in the late 1970's a respected Jewish scholar saw fit to excerpt the following text of a German Nazi, Fritz Lenz, to support his own argument. The new context for this was a discussion by the Jewish author, Raphael Patai, of the possible reasons -- as he saw it -- for Jewish intellectual superiority over other people:

"Jews and Teutons [Germans] are alike distinguished by great

powers of understanding and by remarkable strength of will. Jews

and Teutons resemble each other in having a large measure of self-

confidence, an enterprising spirit, and a strong desire to get their

own way ... [They each] are inclined to diffuse themselves as a

ruling caste over foreign populations. They, too, prefer whenever

they can to have the hard physical toil of life done for them by

others..." [PATAI, p. 328]

"Lenz's attitude to the 'Jewish race,'" declares Patai, "was unsympathetic but correct." [PATAI, p. 327]

Incredibly, this kind of thinking continues to have currency for some influential Jews in our own day. In 1994 another Jewish American scholar, Norman Cantor, in one breath discarded the Nazi scientism that claimed Aryan superiority as a Master Race and replaced them with the innate, genetic superiority of Jews:

"... the further we travel from the monstrosity of Nazi misuses of

the racial concept and the more genetic applications are

investigated, the more does a scientific sanction for viewing the

Jews as a distinct genetic group, and furthermore one exhibiting an

extraordinary creative behavior pattern, come within the

parameters of legitimate discourse." [CANTOR, p.]

In the realms of Orthodox Judaism, (from which claims of Jewish superiority over others stems), there are Jews today who cite traditional Jewish religious texts to argue profoundly extremist, and shocking, ideas. In the last decade three Hebrew "radical right-wing" anthologies published in Israel, entitled Tzifiya, included recent Jewish writings that were, by any standards, echoes of Nazi ideologues. Charles Liebman remarks about a rabbi we have heard from earlier:

"In the last issue [1988] a rabbi from Merkaz Harav [David Bar Haim]

writes on the differences between Jews and non-Jews ... After

bringing proof texts he concludes that ... 'non-Jews are considered

as animals ... The status of non-Jews in Jewish law resembles the

status of animals and there is generally no distinction between

them.' A number of the articles in the anthology are overtly racist,

some are written by rabbis of some distinction. The most

depressing aspect is not that there are learned rabbis who hold such

views but that the religious establishment finds no cause to condemn

them." [LIEBMAN, p. 318]

In 1988 Rabbi Binyamin Tzvielli, the former Director of the Religious Department of Israel TV and Radio, attacked the principle of democracy:

"The democratic psychosis ... has taken control of us for no substantial

and visible reason ... Democracy is part of the culture of the West and

together with this culture it goes down and disappears before our eyes."

In 1985, says Ehud Sprinzak, "Relying on Maimonides and other distinguished Halakhic sources [Rabbi Israel] Ariel maintained that the famous commandment ["Thou Shalt Not Kill"] was never meant to be universal, that only the killing of a Jew qualifies as murder and is punished accordingly. Killing of a non-Jew is not punishable by society." [SPRINZAK, p. 270] Rabbi Ariel even wrote that the Jewish Promised Land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile and sooner or later a war would have to be undertaken against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, "with the expressed purpose of their elimination." [SPRINZAK, p. 270] "Although [Ariel] writes in a scholarly manner and eschews policy recommendations," notes Ehud Sprinzak, "any reader familiar with his very dogmatic fundamentalism is left with no doubt: neither Muslims nor Christians qualify as alien residents [in Israel]; both should be expelled from the Holy Land." [SPRINZAK, p. 22]

In 1994, Israeli rabbi Yitzhak (Joseph) Ginsburg produced a treatise "glorifying Baruch Goldstein's murder of 29 Muslims in a Hebron mosque," selling 1,000 copies in its first two days of publication. The author proclaimed that "the crowning glory of [Goldstein's] act is the sanctification of God" and that "God looks more fondly on Jewish blood and therefore it is redder and its life has priority." A second edition of Ginsburg's publication was printed in 1995. Another volume, entitled "Baruch Hagever: A Memorial Volume for the Holy Person Baruch Goldstein," was published by Michael Ben-Horin, Netanel Uzari, Yoel Lerner, and Yosef Dayan. Another rabbi, Ido Elba, faced Israeli charges of incitement to violence in his work entitled, "Clarification of Religious Precepts on Killing Gentiles." [ALON, G., HA'ARETZ]

Rabbi Elba faced Israeli court action for his dangerous views but, as Orit Shochat noted in 1998 in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz,

"Elba expounded on the halacha [Jewish religious law], as many others

do. True, he did so at a rather inconvenient time shortly after the

massacre of dozens of Palestinians by Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein

but the halacha itself (which is, after all, immune to charges of

incitement) contains some racist and sinister statements for which

Rabbi Elba is not responsible. Why is there no ban on Sefer Hinuch,

which is given as a bar mitzvah gift to Jewish boys throughout the

country, although it also contains interpretations of these matters, in the

very spirit of Rabbi Ido Elba?" [SHOCHAT]

It must be emphasized that all such commentators as those above are not just aberrant Jews who drag up racist and totalitarian dogma out of the blue: such people, often "learned rabbis," are citing Jewish religious sources to today argue their theses. The crucial questions here, of course, involve how seminal Jewish religious texts can be used to sanction such monstrous material, to what degree it always has been used in this way, and how others -- like the Nazis, reacting to Jewish fanaticism and racial claims -- have built and expanded upon it for their own purposes. And lastly, of course: How widespread is Jewish interest in such religious sources now? Charles Liebman even notes another disturbing example in a more mainstream, and respectable, Orthodox Jewish journal in Israel:

An article in Tkhumin, the most distinguished annual [in Israel]

dealing with matters of Jewish law and public issues from an

orthodox perspective, published a learned essay on the status

of Muslims, according to Jewish law. The author seems to phrase

himself carefully and there is no trace of polemic in the tone of

the article, a fact that makes the conclusions all the more striking.

According to the writer, under the ideal conditions envisioned

by Jewish law, non-Jews in the land of Israel ought to live in

servitude to Jews. In fact, their very right to live in the Land of

Israel is problematic. It is permitted though not required to save

their lives when they are endangered. [LIEBMAN, p. 311]

Overtly racist and fascist-like dogma from Jewish religious texts are finding new receptivity in modern Israel's "religious Zionist" schools. Students are instructed that non-Jews have "inferior biological characteristics." Charles Liebman and Stephen Cohen note that students "learn that the first two [Jewish] patriarchs, Abraham and Isaac, each had two sons so that the Jewish son might inherit pure genes whereas the corrupt, impure genes that Abraham inherited from his idolatrous ancestors could be passed on to the non-Jewish son. Only Jacob's son -- those of the third generation -- inherited pure genes and were worthy of being Jewish ... That there is no outcry against [this] being made part of the religious Zionist high school curriculum suggests the level that Jewish ethnocentrism has reached in some quarters." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 60] Which is to say, a level it has been for many for most of Jewish history. (If such material is given credence in some Jewish circles in our own day, what, one imagines, was the Jewish community thinking in the medieval era?)

"There is a strain in Jewish thought," laments London rabbi Mark Solomon, "that says there is a special Godly something or other that is passed down in a certain genetic line which confers a special quality on people and Jewishness is a special quality. I call that metaphysical racism." [KLEIN, E., p. 58]

It is not difficult to find instances where texts can be mined for religious justification of divinely-sanctioned Jewish chauvinism, racism, and dominance over others. Some Jewish religious texts centered on the Chosen People ethos underscore this attitude of Jewish preeminence and control over non-Jews:

"Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I will lift up mine hand to the

Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people: and they shall bring thy

sons in their arms and thy daughters shall be carried upon their

shoulders. And kings shall be thy nursing fathers and their queens thy

nursing mothers; they shall bow down to thee with their face towards

the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet." ISAIAH, 49:22-23

"Kings shall come from you [Israelites] and shall rule wherever

the foot of the sons of man has trodden. I [God] shall give to your

seed all the earth which is under heaven, and they shall rule over

all the nations according to their desire; and afterward they shall

draw the whole earth to themselves, and shall inherit it forever."

-- Book of Jubilees 32:18-19 [MACDONALD]

This kind of thinking even has credibility in some quarters of American Jewish academe. In 1993, in a book published by SUNY (State University of New York Press), David Novak examined various Jewish religious perspectives, including the idea of Jewish domination over others, and finds that such a notion is irrefutably part of Orthodox Judaism:

"If the Torah is only for the sake of Israel's election, then it appears to be

[in] the interest of her nationalist self-interest ... The practical

implications of assuming that the Torah is solely for the sake of affirming

the election of Israel [by God] is to see no transcendental standard

governing Israel's relationships with the nations [other people] of the

world. The only relationship possible, then, is one where Gentiles accept

Jewish sovereignty and dominance, be it political or only "religious" -- in

the usual western sense of that distinction ... Such a theology can all too

easily lend itself to such a practical program of dominance. Indeed, a

consistent proponent of it would have no theological arguments with

which to argue against such programs, however much he or she might

be morally offended by them." [NOVAK, Elec of Is, p. 25-26]

With the military empowerment of modern Israel and Jewish religious texts in mind, Shalom Carmy notes that

"A decade before the Balfour declaration [the 1917 British decree that

helped to establish the modern state of Israel]," Isaac Breuer had warned

that the power conferred by halaka on male Jews over women, slaves,

and aliens, imposed an awesome responsibility, and that only the most

rigorous discipline would prevent its abuse." [CARMY, Rel Zio, p. 19]

With the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1996, most Jews were shocked that his killer, Yigal Amir, was Jewish -- a man who felt that the myths of historic Israel and Jewish religious laws were being betrayed by Rabin's peace accords with Arabs. Many were also disturbed to find out that Amir was so deeply and passionately trained in traditional Jewish religious doctrine. Earlier, Baruch Goldstein, another devout Orthodox Jew and a doctor, had machine-gunned to death 29 Arabs as they prayed in a Hebron mosque. Meir Lockshin, a Canadian professor and himself an Orthodox Jew, was so disturbed by the killings that he wrote

"One just can't ignore the fact that Amir and the other famous Orthodox

murderer of the nineties, Baruch Goldstein, attended the finest modern

Orthodox schools and excelled in their studies. They were not

sociopaths. They were well-integrated and respected members of

their communities; it was impossible to tell them apart from their

colleagues and friends. As Rabbi Lichenstein said on the day before

the assassination, the nationalist Orthodox community in Israel would

have gladly shown off Yigal Amir as one of the great successes of its

educational system. It is absurd then for the Orthodox community to

say that he and Goldstein are not representative." [LOCKSHIN]

Within a year of Rabin's death, his imprisoned assassin had "attracted marriage proposals from dozens of young women at home and abroad, including some from wealthy American families." [AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, 8-18-97]

Baruch Goldstein's terrorist act against random Arabs was not the first such attack in Israel. In 1982 a Jewish American in Jerusalem, Alan Harry Goodman, a veteran of the Israeli army, "shot his way into the Dome of the Rock [the third holiest shrine/mosque in worldwide Islam] with an M-16 rifle, killing one man and seriously wounding three others." "Since Goodman's trial in 1982," noted Amos Elon nine years later, "more than twenty religious fanatics have been caught in the act of preparing one or another violent outrage on the Temple Mount. Many more suspects were charged but released for lack of sufficient evidence." [ELON, 1991, p. 100]

In 1984, 16 Jewish religiously-obsessed men were arrested for their plans to blow up the Dome of the Rock. A few months later, 28 "young yeshiva students from mainstream rabbinical colleges in Jerusalem were arrested one night at the foot of the Temple Mount with ladders and ropes in their hands. Some were armed. The presiding judge in their case allowed them all to go free." Not long after this incident, yet another set of 28 religiously-driven criminals were apprehended "as they were plotting to blow up Moslem shrines on the Temple Mount. Some members were caught in the act of connecting explosives to Arab buses." "Some of the plotters," notes Amos Elon, "had distinguished service records in the army. A few were public figures ... All were devoutly Orthodox. Most were graduates of prominent religious seminaries. They included ranking officers in the army and a veteran air-force pilot." [ELON, 1991, p. 100-102]

Funds for their legal defense came from "hundreds of synagogues throughout the country," "nearly a million" Israeli signed petitions requesting amnesty. "Given the gravity of the charges against them," notes Amos Elon, "most of the defendants came away with relatively light sentences." [ELON, 1991, p. 105] Some of the convicted eventually had their sentences dismissed by the president of Israel.

In view of such events, a troubled Israeli rabbi, Tzvi Marx, worries that "the unwillingness of the yeshiva [Orthodox training] world to allow for moral criticism, on the simplistic religious assumption of the [Jewish Orthodox] tradition's inherent perfection, has spawned an exaggerated, unholy triumphalism as well as racism which bore fruits in the violence of the Jewish Defense League, the [Meir Kahane's] Kach movement, the [Jewish terrorist underground] Machteret, and finally in Hebron." [MARX, p. 95] Such a dangerous Orthodox attitude has counterparts in the United States, as evidenced by Brooklyn's Rabbi Abraham Hecht's religious sanctioning of the Rabin assassination. [GOLDBERG, JJ, p. 260] (Rabin was purportedly murdered for transgressions against Jewish religious law, particularly in his willingness to relinquish conquered land back to Arabs).

In the first half of the twentieth century, a prominent American rabbi, Mordecai Kaplan, found the implications of traditional Jewish views of themselves as a Chosen People so ominous and out of sync with modern universalistic, egalitarian, and democratic values that he founded an entire movement, Reconstructionism, that rejected many of the tenets of Orthodox Judaism. (Members of Orthodox Judaism in turn of course rejected his views; some groups excommunicated him). Kaplan had this to say about the Jews as the Chosen People:

"We cannot fail to recognize in the claim of Jewish superiority a kinship

and resemblance to the similar claims of other national and racial groups

which have been used in defense of the imperialist exploitation of the

yellow and black man by the whites on the grounds that they were the

'white man's burden.' They are the grounds for the German persecution

of Jewry, in accord with the Aryan clause of the Third Reich's

fundamental law. They were in the past the grounds in which our own

people rationalized their conquest and expropriation of the Canaanites...

All such claims to superiority of one race, nation, or caste [are]

detrimental to the interests of humanity, and [are] essentially vicious."

As Jacob Wasserman, a German-Jewish novelist wrote in 1929:

"It is clear to me that no people can continue being chosen, nor

unceasingly designate itself as such, without upsetting in the eyes

of other peoples the normal order of things. The whole idea is plainly

absurd and immoral." [in BARON, J., 1956, p. 209]

This "immoral" and racist "viciousness" is directed by traditional Jewish teachings at any non-Jew. In the particular case of the people of African descent, Jewish racism is well evidenced in the writings of the influential and revered medieval Jewish sage, Moses Maimonides, whose work is so well regarded by orthodox Jews that some of it has become part of Orthodox liturgy. Maimonides said this about Africans:

"The Negroes found in the remote South, and those who resemble them

from among them that are with us in these climes ... the status of those is

like that of irrational animals. To my mind they have not the rank of men,

but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher

than the rank of apes." [GUIDE TO THE PERPLEXED]

(While pious Jews are supposed to follow 613 commandments in the Torah, Maimonides even "spoke about forcing" Gentiles to follow seven laws that the Talmud deems anyone must follow, if Jews have the power to enforce them.) [NOVAK, p. 48, E of I]

In recent years African-American scholars in particular have been speculating on the origins of racism as it affected their ancestors and the resultant moral climate that permitted the dehumanization of Africans for exploitation in the New World slave trade. Many believe that the seminal equation of Blacks and slavery is to be located in Jewish tradition, in the so-called "Hamitic" myth. In the Old Testament Noah (of "Ark" fame) had three sons, each brother the patriarch of different racial and social lines of humanity. One of them, Ham, had a son who was eventually cursed by Noah (Genesis 9:25) to be a "servant of servants" (i.e., slave). Jewish tradition links Africans as descendants of this grandson of Noah, Canaan:

"[Canaan's] children shall be born ugly and black! ... Your

grandchildren's hair shall be twisted into kinks ... they shall go naked,

and their male members shamefully elongated. Men of this race are

called Negroes; their father Canaan commanded them to love theft and

fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their masters and never

tell the truth." [GRAVES, p. 121]

"The association of Ham with the African race," writes Tony Martin, an African-American professor at Wellesley College, "made this myth a major rationalization for the European enslavement of Africans ... Christians have customarily borne the brunt of blame for the Hamitic myth and they certainly are not without sin in this regard. Yet, the Hamitic myth (that is, the association of the African with the supposed curse of Noah) was invented by Jewish talmudic scholars over a thousand years before the transatlantic slave trade." [MARTIN, p. 33]

"Since early times," notes Judah Rosenthal, "Noah's curse of Canaan was utilized by the defenders of slavery.... [Jewish] legend was that some Canaanite tribes left Canaan during Joshua's conquest and settled in Africa ... In the Talmud Africans are called Canaanites." [ROSENTHAL, p. 74] Some Jewish religious literature (the Midrash) opines that all descendants of Ham were cursed to be slaves. [ROSENTHAL, p. 76]

This version of the Ham tradition is noted in the Jewish Encyclopedia:

"Ham is represented by the Talmudist as one of the three who had

intercourse with their wives in the Ark, being punished therefore in that

his descendants, the Ethiopians, are black ... Ham was punished by

having his descendants led into captivity with their buttocks

uncovered." [JEW ENCY, v. VI, p. 186]

The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion notes: "The Canaanites are believed to have been descended from Canaan, youngest son of Ham ... Noah cursed Canaan for the depravity of Ham upon his father, destining him to be subjugated by Shem -- thereby foretelling the eventual displacement of the Canaanites by the Israelites (descended from Shem), consistently justified by the Bible as the inevitable outcome of the sexual licentiousness practiced by the Canaanites." [WERBLOWSKY, p. 149]

In modern history, few expressions of Jewish racism towards Blacks were as boldly proclaimed as Norman Podhoretz's infamous article in the 1960's in the American Jewish Congress' magazine Commentary, of which he was editor. Podhoretz, once self-described as a liberal, readjusted Commentary down an increasingly neoconservative path:

"The hatred I feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to

face or admit, and it is the most hidden and most overloaded...

It no longer ... has any cause or justification ... I know it from insane

rage that can stir me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism, I know it

from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a

mixed couple." [LINCOLN, p. 179]

Traditional Jewish racism, based on religious principles, has taken new forms with newer secular Jewish ideologies. Boas Evron, an Israeli writer, traces traditional Chosen People attitudes into its newly secularized mode: Zionism, through the "Revisionist" Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky, says Evron, "poeticized about 'hidden glory,' declaring that every Jew is a potential 'prince' -- in other words, that Jews are noble by their very nature (just as the Germans imagined themselves to be innately superior) ... Indeed, this belief in innate superiority is the basis of racism and of all the varieties of fascism, which is also a reason for classifying revisionist Zionism within the general category of fascist psychology." [EVRON, p. 112]