Note the "anti-Semitic" feelings of Israeli secular Jews about their ultra-Orthodox brethren -- a parallel of German disdain for the same people (who dominated much of Europe): The ultra-Orthodox Hasidic movement, which was created in the 1700s and represents a particular back-to-basics strand of Judaism, numbered about half of the Eastern European Jewish population. [LEVIN, M., 1966, p. xi] David Berger notes that "with the dawn of the 19th century, Hasidism .. became the dominant form of Judaism in much of Eastern Europe, the heartland of 19th-century Jewry." [BERGER, D., 2001, p. 24] Jewish scholar Solomon Poll even notes, for example, that, according to a Hungarian government report in 1914, Orthodox Judaism dominated the Jewish community in that country. And the attitude of Hungarian Jews not part of this traditional community? "Among the less observant and nonobservant Jews," says Poll, "... they considered the observant Jews "old-fashioned," "bigoted," and "unreasonable.") [POLL, S., 1969, p 14-15] Not surprisingly, the perception by many secular Jews today -- most particularly in Israel -- of the self-segregated Hassidim (also called Haredi) communities is extremely similar to the classical non-Jewish Shakespearean-era perception of Shylock. An Israeli professor, Menachem Friedman, notes the characterization of these Ultra-Orthodox talmudists by secular fellow Jews in Israel: "The alienation and isolation of the Haredim, their eagerness to claim exemption from service in the Israeli army, their demands for increasing allocations for their society of scholars and sometimes unrestrained use of political power arouses resentment and even hatred among large sections of the Israeli public." [FRIEDMAN, M, p. 190] [See also former, and later, chapters].
"Hatred of the ultra-Orthodox has deep roots [in Israel]," noted Israeli critic Laor Yitzhak in 1998,
"There is no offense so great that one cannot tag it on the Haredim --
especially the guy with the black hat, frock coat, and side curls beloved
of modern anti-Semites ... 'Death to the black hatters' is scribbled on
toilet doors at the Tel Aviv School of Humanities; if fliers showing
Haredi children and screaming 'Kill them while they're young!' are being
distributed in Kfar Saba, then it is those who participate in fomenting
hatred against the Haredi minority who must prove there is not something
behind their behavior frighteningly like anti-Semitism." [LAOR]
Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz notes the conflicts between secular Jews and the Ultra-Orthodox, and that "Perhaps we will reluctantly arrive at a separation into two nations [in Israel], with a differentiation not only from the aspect of marriage, but also with each going his historic way imbued by intense hatred [of the other]." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 40]
In 1986 the Jerusalem Post reported an Israeli poll that found one-fourth of its secular Jewish respondents called the Ultra-Orthodox -- who like their ancestral counterparts have retreated into self-created ghettos, even in Israel -- "opportunists, liars, and charlatans." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 24] "There is much hostility to the Orthodox rabbinate among the majority (about 70% of the Jewish population) of secular Israeli Jews," says Adam Garfinkel, "They see the rabbis as coercive and intolerant ... excessively political and unspiritual ... seeming never to have a word to say about kindness, humility, and God's love for humanity ... To be blunt, some secular Israelis see the haredim as fanatical atavistic freeloaders who have yet to discover modern hygiene." [GARFINKEL, p. 140]
In 2000, the results of study by Jerusalem's Hebrew University about "hate" in 168 secular Israeli schools indicated that "47% of the Jewish students hate haredim." [PRINCE-GIBSON, E., 9-17-2000]
"Today, the attack upon the religious Jewish population is most heavily felt in the Israeli media, including newspapers, radio and TV ... In a recent 9 (Dec 98) column, Israel Eichler charges that many of the stereotypes used by the Nazis against Jews have been translated into Hebrew and employed to delegitimize the haredi (religious) public ... [Meretz political party founder] Shulamit Aloni described the haredi population as 'suck[ing] from the same sinister passions which nurtured the Nazis' ... 'We have to storm Mea She'arim [a famous Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox enclave] with machine guns and mow them down,' recommends left-wing darling Uri Avneri. 'I would take all those weird people from Shas, Aguda, and Degel Hatorah and tie all their beards together and light a match,' says Popolitika's Amnon Danker. Yonaten Gefen announces his wilingness to cast the first stone in the intifada [uprising] against haredim, and Prof. Uri Arnon tells a Kol Ha'ir interviewer, 'Haredim should be suspended on an electricity pole' ... Today 'bloodsucker' is a favored term for haredim ... 'Parasite' has become used so frequently in connection with haredim that the two have become virtually synonymous ... 'When I see the haredim surrounded by their large families, I understand the Nazis,' wrote sculptor Yigal Tumarkin -- a statement which did not prevent him from being honored by Yad Vashem [Israel's Holocaust memorial center]. And Tommy Lapid sees the haredim as having usurped the traditional Jewish role of 'taking advantage of the gentile, trading in his blood, and laughing at him,' only this time with the secular [Jewish] public in the role of the gentile." [AHAVAT ISRAEL, 2001] At another site, the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, a Jewish author sites a list of anti-chasid charges compiled by the editor of the Israeli magazine NATIV: "'Black ants.' 'Dogs tied up in the back yard, barking psalms all nights.' 'Humming locusts.' 'Forces of darkness and kidnappers of Souls.' 'Vulgar baboons.' 'Barbarians, the Black Front ... representing the magical, bewitched and most primitive ... whose schools are colleges of darkness.' 'The darkest and and most horrible phenomena (sic) of our age,' (by a senior Israeli diplomat in the United States). From two different members of the Knesset: 'Leeches, snakes, suckled on the same evil urges as Nazism, greedy and domineering, evil and primitive, corrupt, parasites, ambitious.' 'A horrible evil, a black devil.' Finally, Arie Stav quotes one of Israel's best known writers: 'A band of armed gangsters comitting crimes against humanity, sadists, pogromchiks and murderers." [WINSTON, E., 10-98] "Stav [the editor of NATIV]," says Emmanuel Winston, "quotes even worse examples of statements and caricatures that are actually blood libel by the self-styled 'intellectual elite of the Israeli Left. They are authors, members of the Knesset, senior journalists, diplomats and professors." [WINSTON, E., 10-98] In 2000, the Cleveland Jewish News reported that, in Israel, "there have been many instances of anti-haredi graffiti on haredi synagogues, and even, in 1998, the torching of two haredi classrooms in Pardess Hanna, where local secular [Jewish] residents tried to keep haredim from moving into their neighborhood." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-2000, p. 10-] Robert Eisenberg, whose parents are Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, even notes what a Holocaust survivor had to say about the ultra-Orthodox. Here Eisenberg speaks to an older Jewish couple in New Jersey: "My [husband] Morris was in Auschwitz. Ask him what he thinks of the Hasidim. Morris, come here,'' she orders. He shuffles in like a Foghorn Leghorn auditioning for a part, cigar clenched firmly between his teeth. 'What do you think of the Hasidism?' Without missing a beat in he begins to intone, Huset Ganef Geh Ka' Chrzanow Koif a fayert Lieg in drayert. (Hasid, you crook Travel to Chrzanow, for a look Buy a horse Then drop dead, of course.) It's a child nursery rhyme my grandmother used to chant on those rare occasions when she saw a Hasid in Nebraska." [EISENBERGER, R., 1995, p. 158] In a 1982 book Jewish American author Earl Shorris noted the Hasids in a chapter about Jewish shame ("anti-Semitism?" "Self-hatred?") for the behavior of other Jews. Here Shorris is troubled by an encounter with Hasidic salesmen at a photo shop in New York City: "As we neared [the sale counter], now sweating like everyone else in the salesroom, I saw that the salesmen were all young Hasidic Jews. A fat boy in his twenties -- his white shirt smudged; his fly partly unzipped below his bulging belly; his spotty, untrimmed beard curling with sweat --waited on the customer next to me. When my turn came, he said, Well? I want an AM-FM portable radio, one that sounds reasonablly good. You want ten dollars? A hundred dollars? what? Somewhere in the middle. Fifty. He thrust a catalogue in front of me, opened it to the pages devoted to portable radios, and said, When you know, you'll tell me. The Hasidim have given up ritual bathing, I thought, for I could smell him from across the counter. He stank of the gruel of seat and detritus that collects in the creases of the body and sours. His clothes stank. He eyeglasses were smudged. His hands were pale and dirty ... He went to another customer. I could not think of the radio, only of him, of this Jew who had presented himself to me. I chose a radio ... [A second Hasidic salesman comes over to help him] ... We stared at each other for a moment, as if to compare our lives. I , too, wear a bear, a curly Jewish beard, once black, now turning gray. He knew what I was thinking. Well, what? he said. He did not hide his irritaion at my examination of him ... Hostility grew between us. He saw in my eyes what the Ostjuden [Eastern European Jews] had seen in the eyes of the German Jews. He could dance, he could fly, he could tell stories of the Baal Shem Tov that even Martin Buber did not know. How dare I look at him with scathing eyes! ... [As he left, he paid a female cashier for his purchase] ... I gave her the money. She gave me the package. We did not speak. She told me that she knew what I was thinking and that she had known similar thoughts. She smiled. It was not a real smile. It seemed to belong to a prisoner ... It's difficult to be in a place like that ... I'm so put off by them. I have to keep reminding myself that we're brothers." [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 67, 68] ... Is it possible that Jews could rise completely above the pain of disapproval that we call shame?" [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 72] In the 1990s, secular Jewish professor Stephen Bloom tried to connect to his Jewish heritage via a Chabad Lubavitcher (ultra-Orthodox/Hassidic) community in the little town of Postville, Iowa. He went there with the legends of Jewish historic identity and was stunned with what he found. "Many of the Hasidim I had encountered in Postville pretended to be holy," he wrote, "but their actions displayed bigotry and racism of the worst degree. The book [Bloom wrote, entitled Postville] explored taboo topics such as bargaining, poor hygiene, atrocious manners, disrepair of homes, Jewish elitism, sexism, crime and prejudice directed a gentiles. In response, I've received dozens of hate letters, all from Orthodox Jewish readers, who essentially pose the same question as my father's. To these readers, to criticize any aspect of Judaism is patently unacceptable. To them, I wasn't a journalist doing my job. I was a self-loathing Jew, the worst kind of anti-Semite. I was embarrassing the family ... When journalists parachuted into Postville, if the locals said anything bad -- or even neutral -- about the Hasidic Jews, the response was swift and to the point. Mayor John Hyman was labeled an anti-Semite when he told a reporter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the Jews in Postville don't pay their bills on time [which Bloom found to be a true assessment]." [BLOOM, S., 2000, p. 355, p. 340] What does all this mean? The foundation of animosity (defined as "anti-Semitism") towards "traditional" Jewish behavior, as best manifest today by the cloistered, seclusionist, Jewish haredim/hasidic communities -- a behavior that was a mainstay for centuries by all Jews in Europe and throughout the world, is so great that even other (secularized) Jews today express vehement disdain and outrage towards their obsessively "particularist" -- and exploitive -- fellows. And this is crucial: today's haredim merely reflect meticulous attention to the ages-old religious laws of Jewish orthodoxy.
As Israeli Amos Elon notes, more mildly, about the tensions within the secular Jewish psyche when they visit Mea Shearim (the hasidic ghetto in Jerusalem):
"Modern Israelis ...are attracted to the notion of encountering their
own roots and at the same time they are repelled ... When they gaze
now at these bearded men, with their alarmingly pallid faces, at their
ringlets and strange clothes, so unsuited to the climate, and at their tired
looking wives, modern Jews are torn by conflicted feelings ... They see
their own grandfathers and grandmothers, who went up as smoke
through the chimneys of Auschwitz and Treblinka. 'Because of Hitler
you have no right to oppose this kind of Judaism,' the [Israeli] novelist
wrote in 1982." [ALON, 1991, p. 189]
Melford Spiro, in a study of the Israeli kibbutz system (known for his socialist system), has the following commentary:
"Religious Jews -- or more accurately, orthodox Jews whose 'visibility'
is pronounced -- are the objects of similar attitudes [among residents of
the kibbutz]. A fourth-grade girl, asking her father if he had ever prayed,
proceeded to describe with much laughter how the 'Jews in Europe' had
the tradition of anti-Semitic caricature. And from the other end of the
age scale came this comment from an adult sabra [native born Israeli]:
'I hate them (the orthodox Jews), and when I see them I can understand
Yet another angle on all this is Israeli Ashkenazim (Jews from Europe) views of their Sephardic (Jews from Arab countries, Iran, et al) fellow citizens. As Raphael Patai notes: "In addition to instability, emotionalism, impulsiveness, unreliability, and incompetence, the Oriental [Sephardic] Jew is accused [by other Israeli Jews] of habitual lying and cheating, laziness, uncontrolled temper, superstitiousness, childishness, lack of cleanliness and in general 'primitivity' and 'lack of culture.'" [PATAI, in Selzer, p. 58] (This, of course, probably also reflects racist Jewish views of Arab culture, by which the Sephardic were inevitably tainted).
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