Judeophobia
From Hobson's Choice
Judeophobia is dogmatic loathing of B'nei Yisrael (Jews). This word is preferable to "antisemitism" because (a) the term "Semitic" refers to a language group, not to B'nei Yisrael; and (b) judeophobia is existentially much more virulent than "antisemitism" implies. Also this site encourages the term "B'nei Yisrael" as the traditional self-designation.
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Context
All populations have aroused some hostility where ever they settle in large numbers; this hostility is usually molded by the social relations imposed by neighboring communities, and has little to do with peculiarities of the group itself. Hostility to B'nei Yisrael therefore arises not from any reliable attribute of Jews, as from some imposed social role that is itself unpopular. Understanding this is critical, because judeophobia is both extremely important to the history of Europe and also very complex; the B'nei Yisrael has existed in Europe for such a long time and under so many different social orders that no simple explanation can exist for judeophobia.
Over the last thousand years in Europe, however, there has been a consistent theme to judeophobia: allegations of conspiracy (typically involving magical thinking), and association with money. Other themes that have featured in delusional judeophobia include the blood libel, deicide, and racialism.
Some General Theories
Historical maps of Jewish Settlement in Europe (1)
There are many theories developed to explain judeophobia; most tend to focus on peculiar allegations against the B'nei Yisrael, such as deicide, blood libel, conspiracy, avarice, and racialist competition. The allegation that "the Jews" killed Jesus of Nazareth (himself Ben Yisrael) formed one rationale for medieval judeophobia.[1] Another focuses on the occurrence of the blood libel in past episodes of genocide against the B'nei Yisrael. This usually incorporates the perpetual "foreignness" of the Yeshuv, as well as the deicide myth: as a socio-economic caste, the B'nei Yisrael were defined partly, but not wholly, by their distinctive religion. While not nomadic, the constant expulsions by European monarchies (England, 1290, France, 1306, Spain 1492) coupled with opportunistic extortion and arbitrary cruelty, led to constant movement of individuals and communities. In all cases, the B'nei Yisrael were reluctant to leave and tried to weather persecution. Yet there was always going to be an immigrant character to the Yeshuv anywhere, with its parvenus, its destitute, and its confinement to a ghetto.
When combined with a religion that had not embraced the Christian promise of salvation in exchange for faith, there emerged a myth of some bloody mockery of the Christians. The ritual of killing an innocent Christian child was, of course, so shocking that it made skepticism look like ice-hearted treason. The child, being young, could only be someone's son or daughter—never a lover, spouse, or parent. The killing was supposed to mock the Eucharist by making the blood into bread for use in a "heathen" ceremony. And there was always an endless supply of urban legends of murders such as these.
The blood libel and deicide, closely related concepts in the Medieval/Renaissance mind, naturally spawned the corollary of Jewish conspiracy. In particular, the Jewish conspiracy theory was probably a novel concept born of really flamboyant paranoia. Rather than merely plot a series of surreptitious murders, it was alleged that the Jews controlled all of the courts of Europe and instigated wars among their pawns. The fact that the B'nei Yisrael usually lived under conditions of misery and violent persecution did not deflate these theories. The actual masters of Europe—princely families like the Romanovs and the Bourbons—encouraged these theories when their policies proved unpopular. Moreover, money, finance, and banking were urgent technologies whose expansion was vital to the success of the regime. In some cases, the technical expertise and international connections could only have come from the B'nei Yisrael.
In the years following the Enlightenment, most Western powers loosened restrictions on the social role of the B'nei Yisrael, but also strove to assimilate the Yeshuv into Gentile culture. Whereas before, there was isolation, expulsion, and pogroms; after emancipation there was a concerted effort to demolish the Jewish quarters of European cities. While the parvenu class of the Yeshuv was glad of the change, and adapted readily (in many cases, converting to a post-Enlightenment Christianity), the poor, the conservative, and the devout found themselves wedged into the new slums and exposed to a new wave of lumpen confrontation. This probably contributed to radical judeophobia. The new radical current perceived the B'nei Yisrael solely as representative
of economic liberalism and cosmopolitan cities.
Judeophobia and Communism
For many years after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks were equated with B'nei Yisrael, on the grounds that the new regime had opposed the pogroms. This led to a vicious circle, with non-Bolshevik movements in Eastern Europe (e.g., Simon Petliura's militia in Ukraine) focusing on stopping Communism by murdering B'nei Yisrael, and Bolsheviks assuming-with increasingly good reason-that the Jewish communities in Europe would support them. In the writings of Holocaust deniers today, it is common for the writer to complain that "Jews supported the Bolsheviks," and even go so far as to blame everything the Soviet regime did on its Jewish citizens.
Anyone who is reasonable will, I submit, see at once that Jewish Europeans of the day had a perfectly understandable reason for preferring the Bolsheviks to czarists and nationalists, when the latter had a long track record of murdering them and made it an increasingly central part of their ideology. Stalin, as Commissar of Nationalities, essentially dissolved this relationship but appreciated the fact that B'nei Yisrael of the Soviet Union or Central Europe were hostages regardless of their personal inclinations. After WW2, he concluded that attempting to re-integrate B'nei Yisrael refugees into the countries the Red Army now occupied would make its job harder; he therefore supported the creation of Israel. At the same time, he became extremely suspicious of B'nei Yisrael who remained in Europe, and in 1948 instigated the first of a series of show trials essentially aimed at "cleansing" the Communist Party of them. The Polish and Romanian Communist Parties likewise curried favor with ultranationalists by accommodating virulent judeophobia.
The spurious association of B'nei Yisrael with Communism is partly related to the "noble lie" view of Christianity among prior generations of European conservatives. Often, in the ideological matrix of Europe, Communism was not set in opposition to capitalism or classical liberalism, but to Christianity. The central feature of Communism was thought to be not its attack on private property, but rather its attack on the distinctive national character of societies it hoped to govern. It is commonly assumed that, since the B'nei Yisrael are distributed around the world, that they are the same everywhere and have an interest in undermining the peculiar aspects of each nation's culture. The tendency that people have in each region to respect their "betters" would come under fire, and strip each nation of old, arbitrary social customs in favor of a logical social order.
Judeophobia in the Arab World
Generally speaking, judeophobia is mainly a European phenomenon exported to the Americas and the Arab World. An exception appears to be the Arabian Peninsula; both the kingdoms of the Nejd and those of Saba (core states of modern day Saudi Arabia and Yemen, respectively) have ancient vendetti between Jewish and (as it so happens) Muslim clans. In Yemen, the extremely nebulous political matrix meant that these feuds between, say, Himyaritic Jewish clans and rival Hanif/Muslim clans, were private matters that did not usually affect large parts of Yemen—at least, not after the 6th century CE. In the Nejd, aristocratic memories of Dhu Nuwas probably explain the fierce judeophobia endemic to the region. Dhu Nuwas was a political adventurer who converted to Judaism for complicated geostrategic reasons, then undertook to defeat other power bases in the Peninsula with the assistance of the Persians.[2]
In 1958 the Egyptian President Nasser recommended [the Protocols] to an eminent Indian journalist as essential reading for an understanding of global politics. In 1974 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia sent copies as gifts to the French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert and the Italian Foreign Minister Aldo Moro. Libyan President Qaddafi usually gives it as a present to his guests.
p.61-62 (cited in Why Clublet)
Whatever the origins, judeaphobic conspiracy theories are endemic to Southwest Asia & North Africa; it is difficult to establish, however, how much of this is merely a reaction to the seemingly slavish devotion of Western powers to Israel (as opposed to a settled belief about B'nei Yisrael as such).
Arendt's View of Judeophobia
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Many still consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews. Only the horror of the final catastrophe, and even more the homelessness and uprootedness of the survivors, made the "Jewish question" so prominent in our everyday political life. What the Nazis themselves claimed to be their chief discovery—the role of the Jewish people in world politics—and their chief interest—persecution of the Jews all over the world—have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy. The failure to take seriously what the Nazis themselves said is comprehensible enough. There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion. Such discrepancies between cause and effect outrage our common sense, to say nothing of the historian's sense of balance and harmony. Compared with the events themselves, all explanations of antisemitism look as if they had been hastily and hazardously contrived, to cover up an issue which so gravely threatens our sense of proportion and our hope for sanity.She goes on to point out that judeophobia flourished in Europe just when the political and economic power of the Jewish population was in severe decline:
The Origins of Totalitarianism, p.1
Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence and were left with nothing but their wealth. When Hitler came to power the German banks were already almost judenrein (and it was here that Jews had held key positions for more than a hundred years)...The Dreyfus Affair exploded not under the Second Empire, when French Jewry was at the height of its prosperity and influence, but under the Third Republic when Jews had all but vanished from important positions... Austrian antisemitism became violent not under the reign of Metternich and Franz Joseph, but in the postwar Austrian Republic when it was perfectly obvious that hardly any other group had suffered the same loss of influence... Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone. What makes men obey or tolerate real power, and on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.Arendt's passage here disturbed me because it seems to imply that the B'nei Yisrael were reliably distinguished by their higher incomes and even considerable wealth; in fact, the great majority lived in severe poverty. In Poland, the 3.3 million sometimes represented affluent upper middle class professions, but only a third were involved in trade, and only then, mostly petty trade. Jewish peasants often lived in severe poverty.[4]
Ibid., p.5
Part of the problem that seems to emerge from the monographs and testimonies of Jewish survivors was that the Shtetl (Jewish community) became extremely hierarchical and rigid. Social institutions of medieval and 18th century Europe responded to the peculiar political relationship of the Jewish community to the nation by regimenting the life of each member. This was not accepted without protest, especially since the stratification of Jewish society under antisemitism was more extreme than for other communities in Europe. Intermarriage was barred by both insiders and outsiders, while the powers of the Jewish leader to speak for other Jews was massively enhanced by royal fiat.
A legacy of this is the extremely honorable record of the Jewish American community of liberal dissent (hence, contributing mightily to the Civil Rights Movement in the USA). The urban Jewish European took to liberalism readily, albeit not slavishly. It does not deflect from my point that it is always a minority of any community that is open to dissent or radical social transformation. Some communities lack even a minority so inclined. Still, when households remains within the clutches of the Shtetl, there were actually two hierarchies with different men at each apex: a hierarchy for "Court Jews," or men with standing among the gentiles; and the internal hierarchy of the Shtetl itself.
Confronted with an obvious symptom of the decline of the decline of Christianity, they could therefore imagine in all ignorance that this was some revival of the so-called "Dark Ages." Ignorance or misunderstanding of their own past were partly responsible for their fatal underestimation of the actual and unprecedented dangers which lay ahead. But one should also bear on mind that lack of political ability and judgment have been caused by the very nature of Jewish history, the history of a people without a government, without a country, and without a language. Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people unique in the respect, which almost began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumscribed plan on earth and then without giving up on this concept, avoided all political action for two thousand years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none.
Ibid., p.9
Arendt is not exactly being harsh in judgment so much as warning of the extreme challenges that communities face in sustaining a non-confrontational relationship with their neighbors. Her analysis also pounds into the discourse, so to speak, the concept of Jewishness not as a "mere" religion or ethnic affinity, but as a set of closely related economic classes.
The nature and history of Jewishness as a form of economic class, occupying explicit social positions and serving explicit social needs (as an "estate") could, and indeed has, filled multi-volume monographs. An interesting aspect of the multi-class matrix, which is held together by the hostility of others, is that it was a crucial determinant of economic relations. It was part of the complex quantum mechanics of a real economic system, in which the smooth Newtonian physics of Neoclassical economics was subverted by contortions in the fabric of the supply-demand continuum. But by the end of the 19th century it had ceased to have a guiding structure, and the shtetls pulled apart; the wealthiest and most prestigious members of them understandably wished to pursue lives separate and distinct from the invasive leadership.
Notes
- ↑ Judith Civan, Abraham's Knife: The Mythology of the Deicide in Antisemitism Xlibris (2004), has argued that deicide lies at the core of Christian theology, and is of paramount importance to understanding judeophobia. I have not read Civan's book and am not qualified to comment on it. However, the premise seems highly implausible to me. For one thing, the misreading of Christian teaching that would lead to it is so massive and profound that it makes the original message irrelevant.
- ↑ My source for this is the US Library of Congress's The Yemens: a Country Study, which is not online. I also read several surveys of religious minorities of South Arabia, which caused me to believe Dhu Nuwas' career is the cause of Nejdi judeophobia. It has all the earmarks of antedating Islam.
- ↑ A special thanks to Faith & Freedom for providing this clarification.
- ↑ For the moment, much of my economic/demographic data on the Jewish community between the wars comes from The Course of Modern Jewish History, by H.M. Sachar (1973 ed.), "The Jews of Eastern Europe between the Wars." Sachar is not a leftist, but his assessment of violent antisemitism in depression-era Poland certainly jibes with Guerin's (HC). Sachar mentions the industrial managers' association, which he refers to as "The Leviathan" (p.359), which mobilized and subsidized the Endeks and Naras (Polish falangists).
In researching my essays I stumbled across Lenni Brenner's online book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983), which is critical of Zionism, but with a nuanced twist: Brenner understands why people might embrace an ideology they would otherwise reject:Chapter 1: But from the very beginning the movement represented the conviction of a portion of the Jewish middle class that the future belonged to the Jew-haters, that anti-Semitism was inevitable, and natural. Firmly convinced that anti-Semitism could not be beaten, the new World Zionist Organisation never fought it. Accommodation to anti-Semitism – and pragmatic utilisation of it for the purpose of obtaining a Jewish state – became the central stratagems of the movement, and it remained loyal to its earliest conceptions down to and through the Holocaust.
Embrace of it was a form of despair that understandably became endemic. In many respects, Brenner's analysis seems like Arendt's; the B'nei Yisrael had mores and customs that had gradually evolved to accommodate antisemitism with internal stratification.
External Links
- Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Harvest Books; New edition 1973
- A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust, Florida Center for Instructional Technology
- Jewish Encyclopedia (19001-1906)
- Jewish Virtual Library
- Jonathan Edelstein (Head Heeb, Arrival Day Posts)
- Moorish Girl (site search, "Jews")
- "Production line of murder," Le Monde Diplomatique, Feb 2005:
There are many other threads that link the ideology of Naziism and its methods (domination and extermination) with the history of the West. Despite its pathological aberrations, they make it part of the historical development of the West.
Superb and concise.
The first link is ideological. Naziism emerged in the socio-political constellation of German nationalism, which was crisscrossed by currents well represented in European culture as a whole: racial anthropology, with its idea of a hierarchy of human groups dominated by “Aryans”; Social Darwinism, with its concept of natural selection of the fittest; and eugenics, with its reactionary utopia of an artificially created higher species.
The salvatory antisemitism of Naziism saw the struggle against the Jews as a crusade against evil that would enable the German nation to liberate itself from the enemy within. It was, however, only a radical expression of an ideology and wide-ranging forms of social discrimination and persecution that were hardly a German monopoly before the second world war. Racial anthropology was well represented in Italy (Cesare Lombroso), Social Darwinism in England (Alfred Russel Wallace), eugenics in the United States (Francis Galton), and antisemitism in France (Eduard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, and many others).
- Howard Morley Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History, (1963)
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1973 edition *[HC posts on];
James R MacLean (17:39, 1 October 2007 (PDT))
