When Victims Rule - THE JEWISH COSMOLOGY OF VICTIMHOOD

 

11
THE JEWISH COSMOLOGY OF VICTIMHOOD 

"I have frequently had hotheaded romantics assume that our family fled
Russia to escape persecution. They seem to think that the only way we got
out was by jumping from ice flow to ice floe across the Dnieper River, with
bloodhoods and the entire Red Army in hot pursuit. No such thing. We
were not persecuted and we left in a quite legal manner with no more
trouble than one would expect from any bureaucracy, including our own.
If that's disappointing, so be it."
-- Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov. A Memoir. 1994, p. 19

      

Ask any non-Jewish American what his or her personal link is to the Roman era, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and other epics of human history and he will tell you: nothing. He knows nothing about it. And he doesn't care. For such a late twentieth century American to reflect on his own roots back to, say, medievalism, is to look with the naked eye for Mars: it is a vague dot, reputed by others to exist, in the remotest distance. Indistinct. Unfathomable. Something eternally elusive, lost forever.

 

Few Americans can trace their family history more than a few generations, if that. Throughout anyone's own ancestral lineage, however, going back deeply into time, there obviously exists their own share of participants -- as both perpetrators and victims -- in great and minor wars, massacres, invasions, famines, epidemics, and other disasters of every kind. Presuming five procreative generations per century, exponentially, any human being alive today can theoretically claim direct genetic lineage to over a thousand ancestors back to 1800, over 37,000 people to 1700, over a million back to the year 1600, and over a staggering billion human beings back to 1400 (thirty generations). Whatever the mathematically realistic number, (and Jewish history claims 4,000 years) the deeper we go back into history, the more we must consider the veritable Milky Way of humanity that preceded us in direct ancestral lineage; people of every imaginable sort, and they all knew well the melancholic chords of human suffering, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally. Every single one of them.

 

Today's Americans of French, British, Italian or other European descent find themselves today lumped together in the generic "white" American community. Their respective ancestries are stirred together, gone. Their European origins mean little to them; they are homogenized in the New World, their identities now expressed -- for better or worse -- in the icons of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid, Babe Ruth, the hallowed Constitution, even McDonald's hamburgers, or other superficial national icons that ancestrally have nothing directly to do with them.

 

The typical American's alienation, disinterest, and lack of connection to distant history is not characteristic of modern Jews. On the contrary. A stone thrown in spite through a Jewish window in Italy in the fourteenth century is a stone thrown into Jewish hearts today. The actions against Jews by desperate thugs in Poland in the eighteenth century are dumped on Gentile doorsteps in our time by Jews who are still grieving, still embittered, still seeking redress. And when we turn, in more recent history, to the bestial deeds of Adolf Hitler to conquer the world, we find that Jews have pulled tightly in a circle to proclaim that everything sinister in the whole world malevolently labors against them, and them only.

 

Ultimately, it is a central article of modern Jewish faith -- reflecting both secular and religious attitudes, formed and hardened over the ages -- that to be Jewish is to be always maltreated for innocence by others.  Or, perhaps more correctly to Jewish eyes, as part of this innocence, being Jewish is to be a victim for the crime of being superior to their persecutors. This claim to superiority was originally religiously based, as God's "Chosen People" of Old Testament tradition. And this Jewish preoccupation -- as being victims of their self-presumed superiority -- has been passed down, religiously, over the ages (traditionally epitomized in Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall to bemoan their communal fate, manifest also in the likes of the volume Sefer Yosifon, anonymously compiled in the tenth century as a litany of Jewish complaints and miseries). In the aftermath of Hitler's atrocities against Jews during World War II, this world-view has come to define, more tightly than any other aspect of Jewish tradition -- and now highly politicized -- modern Jewish self-identity.

        

But is this true? From the evidence we have already seen, are Jews correctly depicted as history's consummate, incomparable, and innocent victims? Have Jews pre-eminently and collectively suffered more than all other human beings, "victims of centuries of persecution and bigotry?" [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 378] And for no reason?

Here's a typical view of the Eastern European Jewish past, by Judith Arcana, who discusses the roots of Jewish American poet Grace Paley's family to the Jews of Russia:

      "One of Isaac's brothers, Russya, was killed in a workers demonstration
      in 1905 ... In the wake of that death, probably spurred by the retaliatory
      wave of pogroms, the family decided to leave Russia. Knowing the
       unpredictability of royal whim, Natasha Gutseit, Isaac's widowed
      mother, sent the young couple to America before the czar could change
      his mind and snatch them back again." [ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 10] 

Here Arcana, who omits the relevance of Jewish socialist agitation in Russia as a factor in their "persecution" [Elsewhere she notes that even both Paley's parents were socialists, enemies of the Tsarist regime -- p. 9], speculates that the Russian czar would have interest in "snatching" Jews back to Russia. 

 

In the American context, "one commonly finds a sentence like this in many [Jewish] books or articles," says Joshua Rothenberg, "... 'Jews came to the shores of this country from the ghettos of the shtetlekh [Eastern European Jewish villages] as a result of the pogroms.' Each phrase in this sentence is untrue or oversimplified to the point of untruth. There were no ghettos in 19th century Eastern Europe (except in the metaphysical sense) ... And the pogroms were not the principal reason for emigration: proportionately more Jews came to the United States from Austrian-ruled Galicia -- where there were no pogroms -- than from Tsarist Russia." [ROTHENBERG, p. 3]

 

"It has been discovered," says Henry Feingold, "that religious persecution, even its physical manifestations of pogroms, rarely furnishes sufficient impetus for Jews to uproot themselves. Moreover, it cannot account for the thousands of Jews who chose to leave areas relatively free of religious persecution ... [FEINGOLD, p. 60] ... Historians have taken a closer look at the early acculturation process and have discovered that the highly touted ability of the Jewish family to withstand the stresses of transplantation have been overstated. New studies on Jewish vice and crime and criminality and the discovery of a relatively high divorce and desertion rate among immigrant Jews present a picture of a community paying a dear price for establishing itself." [FEINGOLD, p. 61]

 

"The lachrymorose recollection of the shtetl, which are still with us," says Daniel Bell, "fail to recall its narrowness of mind, its cruelty, especially to schoolchildren (to whom a whole series of memoirs, such as Solomon Ben Maimon's, testify), and its invidious stratification." [BELL, Reflections, p. 318] Little remembered is this oppression of Jews by Jews. "Prior to World War I," adds Rothenburg, "the Kehilah  [Jewish governing bodies] were ruled, in most cases, by an oligarchy of the rich and the [Jewish] clergy. Their excesses, especially in the area of indirect taxation (kosher meat, etc.) and the silencing of the protesting voices of the poor, are well-known and documented. The Kehilahs remained a source of bitter complaint for the majority of the Jewish population, which had no say in the conduct of their own community affairs." [ROTHENBURG, p. 5]

 

American Jews today hold dear many nostalgic "Fiddler on the Roof"-type myths about their Eastern European ancestors. As, however, Jewish author Ivan Kalmar notes

 

    "A stalwart Jewish peasant, with a native wit and a naive religiosity,

    ever sturdy in the face of unending adversity, he is the epitome of

    Jewish nostalgia ... The Fiddler is so much part of the way we

    think of our Jewish background ... The Fiddler image has some

    basis in reality, but it is also very much part of a nostalgic

    reconstruction of our past, an example of what anthropologists

    call 'invention of tradition' ... Jewish authors [like Sholem

    Aleichem, creator of Fiddler on the Roof] tried to create

    stereotypes of the Jews that would identity them with less

    wealthy groups who were looked at more favourably by the

    greater society. Sholom Aleichem's Tevye [hero of Fiddler

    on the Roof] is very much a Ukrainian peasant. To counter

    the idea of the Jew as a 'parasite,' Sholom Aleichem presents

    Tevye as a dairy farmer, who sells not the Gentile peasant's

    products but his own. North American Jews have

    enthusiastically accepted the validity of Sholom Aleichem's

    Tevye as a metaphor for the Eastern European Jew of old ...

    Where finally Tevye finally shows unique character, he

    turns out to be a modern Jew. Where he is being a 'typical,'

    folksy, traditional East European Jew, he resembles the

    romanticized Ukrainian peasant ... Of course, there were

    in reality Jewish peasants like Tevye, but compared to the

    Slavs, the percentage of Jews who farmed was miniscule."

    [KALMER, I., quoted by PRYTULAK, L., UKRAINIAN

    ARCHIVES]

 

"Having ... turned their backs on Poland," notes Jewish scholar Victor Seidler about modern Jewish perceptions of Eastern European heritage, "it can be difficult for the second generation [of Jews in America] to recognize just how Polish their parents were. Things we learned to think of as 'Jewish' turn out to be Polish." [SEIDLER, V.J., 2000, p. 74]  "Indeed," notes George Mosse, "when the first German-Jewish painter, Mortiz Oppenheim, painted scenes from the ghetto shortly after emancipation, it was transformed, as we have seen, into a community permeated with German middle-class values." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 80]

 

Jewish author Howard Jacobson notes Jewish historic myth-making at an exhibition of photographs of Eastern European Jews at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Particularly troubling to him was the depiction of the stereotypically "studious Jew":

 

     "Something is wrong with this exhibition. Something is wrong with

     the way we modern Jews idealize a past we wouldn't touch with a

     barge-pole if it were offered us again ... Why is Jewish study always

     made to look so soulful in these sorts of photographs, so unrelieved,

     so unvarious, so fucking miserable and desolating? What is it about

     Jewish books that make absorption in them such an invariably

     heart-rendering business? What a sell! How have the Jews done it,

     how have we persuaded ourselves, but gentiles as well, that anguish

     and lamentation and self-abnegation and bodilessness and pathos

     attach inalterably and exclusively to our studies? You don't see

     [St. Thomas] Aquinas looking into a book like that." [JACOBSON, H.,

     1995, p. 192-193]

 

The distinguished Jewish historian, Salo Baron, of Columbia University, whose twelve-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews is the most extensive Jewish history by a single author in existence, argued a view that, post-Holocaust, has been swept to the wayside by modern Jewish discourse. His view was that Jewish suffering in the European Middle Ages, and throughout history, has been exaggerated. That is, that the Jews of Europe, as a group, in comparison to their Christian neighbors, actually had a better life in the Middle Ages, to the 20th century.  For all the claims of massacres and pogroms, according to surviving documents, the Jewish population actually grew more rapidly than the Gentiles around them. [LIBERLES, p. 42]  This accelerated in later centuries.  "The two and a half centuries from 1660 to 1914," says Baron, "the Jewish population grew numerically some fifteen times ... while mankind at-large increased by only 250 per cent, Europe by 350 per cent ..." [BARON, H and J.H., p. 50] This thesis, addressing later years, is supported by a non-Jewish scholar of the Ukraine, Orest Subtleny:

 

           "Throughout the nineteenth century, especially in its latter part, the

           Jews experienced a tremendous population rise. Between 1820 and

           1880, while the general population of the [Russian] empire rose by

           87%, the number of Jews increased by 150%. On the Right Bank,

           this rise was even more dramatic:  between 1844 and 1913 the number

           of its inhabitants rose by 265% while the Jewish population increased

           by 844%! Religious sanctions of large families, less exposure to

           famines, war, and epidemics, and a low mortality rate because of

           communal self-help and the availability of doctors largely accounted

           for this extraordinary increase." [SUBTLENY, p. 276]

 

Salo Baron argued that his people, the Jews, were so privileged, relative to non-Jews throughout the European Middle Ages, that with the coming of the Enlightenment era "emancipation" and "equality" amounted to "a net loss [to Jews] in status and lifestyle." [SCHORSCH, p. 383]  Elsewhere, he wrote that "it is likely ... that even the average medieval Jew, compared to his average Christian contemporary ... was the less unhappy and destitute creature -- less unhappy and destitute not only by his own consciousness, but even if measured by such objective criteria as standards of living, cultural amenities, and protection against individual starvation and disease." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 11]

 

"Throughout the Middle Ages," notes David Biale, "the Jews enjoyed considerable influence in many of the lands in which they lived  ... In addition to their interest Court politics, these Jews participated in political life in defense of Jewish interests." [BIALE, POWER p. 69] "The situation of the Jews in the first half of the Middle Ages," says Abram Leon, "was ... extremely favorable. The Jews were considered as being a part of the upper classes in society and their juridicial position was not perceptibly different from that of the nobility." [LEON, p. 128]  "At least some of the Jewish dress of the Middle Ages," adds Biale, "such as the Jewish hat, originated out of choice rather than compulsion ... The yellow patch [worn by Jews] ... was not originally intended as an instrument for segregating and humiliating the Jews ... but to proclaim publicly that its wearer enjoyed official protection." [BIALE, POWER, p. 67]

 

One of the privileges Jews enjoyed throughout Europe until relatively modern history was that they didn't have to serve in the local military organizations. "During the continuous wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries," wrote Baron, " ... the Jews were neutral and suffered few losses. If they had been combatants they might have lost more than in all the pogroms." [LIBERLES, p. 42] Yet Medieval Jews were allowed the extremely significant privilege of carrying weapons, a privilege equal to knights and one to which all commoners (the overwhelming majority of the population) were forbidden. [GOLDBERG, p. 123]  Baron also noted that, while there were certainly Jews who suffered poverty, the surrounding Christian population was worse off. And if the Jewish ghettos were, as widely claimed, abject holes of enforced degradation, "is it not remarkable that the most typical Ghetto in the world, the Frankfurt Judengasse, produced in the pre-Emancipation period the greatest banking house in history?" [LIBERLES p. 45]

 

"The Jews," says Israel Shahak,

 

     "in spite of all the persecution to which they were subjected, formed

     an integral part of the privileged classes ... Jewish historiography,

     especially in English, is misleading on this point inasmuch as it tends

     to focus on Jewish poverty and anti-Jewish discrimination ... The

     poorest Jewish craftsman, peddlar, landlord's steward, or petty cleric

     was immeasurably better off than a serf [most of the non-Jewish

     population]. This was especially true in those European countries

     where serfdom persisted until the nineteenth century, whether in a

     partial or extreme form: Prussia, Austria (including Hungary), Poland,

     and the Polan lands taken by Russia. And it is not without significance

     that, prior to the beginning of the great Jewish migration of modern

     times (around 1889), a large majority of all Jews were living in those

     areas and that their most important social function there was to

     mediate the oppression of peasants on behalf of the nobility and

     the Crown." [SHAHAK, p. 52-53]

 

Jews in Eastern Europe understood the people around them as, categorically, persecutors. And "the Jews saw their persecutors as an inferior race," noted World Zionist Organization President Nahum Goldmann,  "Most of my [physician] grandfather's patients [in Lithuania] were peasants. Every Jew felt ten or a hundred times the superior of these lowly tillers of the soil; he was cultured, learned Hebrew, knew the Bible, studied the Talmud -- in other words he knew that he stood head and shoulders above these illiterates." [GOLDMANN, 1978, p. 13]

 

"It would never have occurred to us," said one Jewish immigrant to the United States, "that the Gentile world [in Eastern Europe] was happier ... On the contrary, we considered our world happier and finer." "We thought they were unfortunate," says another, "We were above them, this was the feeling [towards peasants]." [MORAWSKA, p. 17] In the face of the commonly cherished belief among modern Jews that their brethren of Eastern Europe were terribly and uniformly impoverished, it is a fact that Jews were doing so well (relative to the non-Jews around them) that non-Jewish servants in Jewish households were common.

 

Apart from racist folk tales, Zborowski and Herzog note that most Jewish children in Eastern Europe learned fragments of the surrounding non-Jewish culture via the Gentile servants in their homes. "These impressions [of non-Jewish life]," the scholars write, "[were] available not only to the children of the rich, for [Jewish] women of modest circumstances who worked in a store or at the market often had the help of a [non-Jewish] peasant girl in the house." [ZBOROWSKI, p. 155] "[Jewish life] was certainly better than the life of the Russian peasant," remarks Howard Sachar. [SACHAR, p. 215]

   "We were luckier than most of our fellow-Jews in being able to afford 'servants,' if that is the real name for them," declares Chaim Weizmann, an immigrant from the "Pale" of Russia, an agitator for how bad Jews had it in his place of birth, and the first president of modern Israel, "... [My second servant] who outlived the first and was with us for something like thirty-five years, was a lovable peasant by the name of Yakim ... He had learned to sing, after a fashion, the Jewish national anthem, Hatikvah; and in moments of enthusiasm would cry out: 'Come, little ones, let us sing Tikvah!'" [WEIZMAN, C., 1949, p. 22] 

Elsewhere, Weizman adds:

   "The teachers and governing authorities of the schools within the Pale [an area of Russia] were typical Russian officials, and as such, not free from corruption. So the rich Jew would use his gold to pave the way for his boy to enter the school ... There were occasions when a rich Jew would hire ten non-Jewish candidates (at times rather oddly selected) to sit for the entrance examination at the local school, and thus make room for one Jewish pupil -- needless to say his own son or a protege." [WEIZMAN, C., 1949, p. 31]

 

"Even when the Jewish common people were known to be desperately poor," adds Albert Lindemann, "as in Austrian Galicia or parts of the Jewish Pale of Settlement in tsarist Russia, their overall per capita wealth still seems to have been greater than that of non-Jews, mostly peasants, among whom they lived." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 21] "On the whole," says sociologist Stephen Steinberg, "Eastern European Jews [prior to immigration to America in the late nineteenth century] were unquestionably poor, though decidedly better off than the surrounding peasant population." [STEINBERG, p. 97]

 

What, one wonders, is to be read between this relativity of being "poor?"  How poor could Jews have really been if they were "decidedly better off" than the non-Jewish peasants (who were most of the Eastern European population), even hiring Polish servants for their homes?

 

Another part of Jewish popular mythology is that the Jews were forced against their will into ghettos in Europe. The widely-believed accusation that Jews were forcibly segregated, particularly into ghettos, is a distortion of historical fact. In the Middle Ages most Christian towns themselves had walls, gates, and locks for protection from outsiders. The enclosed Jewish ghetto was, in origin, a Jewish construction, conceived for both protection and self-segregation from the taint of non-Jewish ways.

 

"In the thirteenth century," writes Max Weinrich, "segregated living quarters for Jews were made compulsory. The fact of the matter is that separate Jewish streets had existed all along ... If the Jews lived together long before segregated living quarters were imposed upon them, then their segregation must have been voluntary. It was. Living apart, no matter how bizarre it may appear in the light of present day concepts and attitudes, was part of the 'privileges' accorded to the Jews in conforming with their own wishes." [WEINRICH, p. 105]

 

As president Nachum Goldmann of the World Zionist Organization notes:

 

     "It is wrong to say that the goyim forced the Jews to separate themselves

     themselves from other societies. When the Christians defined the

     ghetto limits, Jews lived there already." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 66]

 

For centuries Jews isolated themselves from their surrounding non-Jewish neighbors except, of course, for the necessities of commerce. "Had the Jews not possessed a deep-rooted conviction of the truth of their religion," says Jacob Katz, "and had they not actively sought to maintain their separate identity, the tendencies inherent in medieval conditions would inevitably have ended by breaking down the social barrier erected by Jewish ritual." [KATZ, Ex, p. 40]  "In Orthodox Judaism," wrote anthropologist Maurice Fishberg in 1911, "a Jew must not eat at the same table with a Gentile, nor any food prepared by the latter; must not eat or drink from dishes, with spoons, forks, knives, etc. which have been used by a Gentile; must not drink wine with the container of which has been touched by a Christian, Mohammadan, or heathen ... I know Jews to feel nauseated and even vomit when told that the food they have consumed was not kosher. ... It was the intense tribal spirit engendered by his religion which kept the Jew from intimate contact with the Gentiles, more than the laws promulgated by Christian states for the purpose."  [FISHBERG, p. 536]

 

"We [Jews] formed the ghetto ourselves," wrote the Zionist leader Vladamir Zabotinsky, " ... voluntarily, for the same reason for which Europeans in Shanghai established their separate quarter, to be able to live their own way." [KORBANSKI, p. 8] "The Ghetto was rather a privilege than a disability," notes J. O. Hertzler, "and sometimes was claimed by the Jews as a right when its demolition was threatened." [HERTZLER, p. 73] Boas Evron cites the work of fellow Israeli scholar, Yehezkel Kaufmann, in noting that

 

       "the popular assumption that external anti-Jewish pressures forced

       group identify and exclusivity on the Jews is unconvincing, since

       historical evidence shows that Jewish exclusivity and aloofness

       preceded outside hostility and were thus its cause, not its result ...

       Jewish communities were always borne by host societies ... They

       never shared in political, military, administrative, or technological

       responsibilities." [EVRON, p. 53]

 

In articles in 1928 and 1932, Cecil Roth, one of the foremost Jewish scholars of his day, set out to debunk the Jewish myths of incessant persecution by non-Jews through the ages. "In the first place," wrote Roth, ".... the Jew has always tended to regard as a martyr all persons who died at Gentile hands ... even if he died in a drunken brawl ... All those [Jews] who met a violent end, no matter under what circumstances, were included under the head of martyrs in the Jewish popular consciousness and recollection." [ROTH, Most, p. 136-137]

 

This martyr tradition and schema has even been outrageously used, quite the same, with the identical religious base, in Orthodox Jewish messianic political quarters in our own day. Baruch Goldberg, the American-born Orthodox Israeli doctor who murdered 29 Arabs with an automatic weapon this decade as they prayed in a Hebron mosque, and who was subsequently beaten to death, was proclaimed by some Jews to be kadosh. (This word is commonly translated as meaning "holy;" it also has connotations meaning "separate" or "apart.") "A Jew who is killed because he is a Jew," wrote Dov Leor (a rabbi for the messianic Gush Emunim organization) about Goldberg's violent death, "must certainly be called ... a holy martyr ... without investigating their previous conduct." [LEOR, p. 61] "Baruch Goldstein was the greatest Jew alive," declared a Jerusalem teacher, Samuel Hacohen, "not in one way, but in every way ... There are no innocent Arabs here, and thank God that one Jewish hero reminded us that it had become almost legal to kill Jews in the street. He is the only one who could do it, the only one who was 100 percent perfect. He was no crazy ... Killing isn't nice, but sometimes it is very necessary." Rabbi Yaacov Perin also announced at Goldberg's funeral that "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." [BROWNFELD, A., 3-99, p. 85]

 

A 1908 pamphlet, notes Cecil Roth, was widely circulated in the Jewish community under the title, Jews Hanged or Burned Alive in Rome.... Because They Refused to Change Their Faith. Of the hanged Jews listed, all but one were in fact executed for specific crimes, a harshness rendered no differently to any other people of past eras.  "This instance," says Roth, "... is symptomatic of the attitude which Jewish historiography has consistently adopted. Any popular attack or any governmental persecution in which Jews were victims is set down outright as an expression of anti-Semitic sentiment."

 

In another example, in 1278, on charges of money clipping [skimming gold or silver content from coinage], 267 Jews were hanged in London. This punishment was not merited out to Jews as Jews, but to those who were disproportiontely "in possession of the greater amount of ready money." Those who accumulated money in the Jewish money-lending and usury era happened to be overwhelmingly Jews, but also included a lesser number of Christian goldsmiths and such who were similarly arrested and executed. "What seems at first blush," says Roth, "[to be] an act of sheer persecution appears in a closer examination one of primitively sharp justice." [ROTH, p. 137]

 

In the early years of Christianity, in Alexandria (of today's Egypt), attacks upon Jews rendered in Jewish historical consciousness as acts of anti-Semitism were really what Roth says today would be called "an interracial riot." [ROTH, p. 138]

 

Roth underscored the precarious existence of all peoples' lives in the Middle Ages:

 

      "The modern reader frequently fails to realize that, generally speaking,

       life in the Middle Ages was not secure. For every section of the

       population the probabilities of meeting a violent death were high, even

       in times of comparative peace. Country people were continually subject

       to the onslaught of bandits or of lawless barons, as well as the

       marchings and counter marchings of armed forces. [Even] city dwellers

       ... [ran] the risk of sack and wholesale murder. The whole of medieval,

       and a great part of modern, history is studded with instance of the sort:

       the devastation of Attila, the Scourge of God; the ravaging of the Vexin

       by William the Conqueror; the sack of a score of German cities during

       the Thirty Years War. There were frequently cases when only a minority

       of the population survived, the vast majority being piteously massacred.

       These events and their like should be borne in mind when one considers

       the vicissitudes of any particular racial or religious minority. The scarlet

       of Jewish persecution does not stand out on a ground of virginal white.

       [ROTH, p. 138]

 

In medieval Poland, says Bernard Weinyrb, "In an epoch and a country where most of the time people were in danger of attacks by Tatars and Turks, of wars, soldiers, and robber gangs on the roads, insecurity became the normal way of life for people who had never known anything different." [WEINRYB, p. 159]

 

The miseries caused by the sack of Rome in 1527, Christian crusades against Muslim-controlled Jerusalem in 1096, Leon in 1197, Malaga in 1487, Naples in 1494, Padua in 1509, Tunis in 1535, or "a hundred other occasions" were at least equivalent tragedies to Jewish descriptions of "Jewish martyrdom." [ROTH, p. 138]

 

"It is probably the fact," says Roth, "that in the course of the medieval wars and disorders, the Jews normally suffered more than any other section of the population. This was not necessarily, however, because they were Jews, but simply because they belonged to the more opulent class ... on the capture of a town (by an army), the first objective of the assailants would naturally be the streets of the goldsmiths and the street of the Jews." [ROTH, p. 139]

 

Likewise, Jews  -- perceived as affluent and exploitive outsiders to native populaces --suffered the same way at the hands of mobs as did Italian traders in London in 1439 and 1455, and at the "Hansa Steelyard" in 1494. Jews were also subject to random "acts of rapine," like any Christian -- or other community -- of the Middle Ages, as happened in the Jewish part of Asolo, in northern Italy, in 1547. Perpetrators in that case were punished by the central government.

 

While Jews were sometimes required to wear special badges of identification in the European Middle Ages, it was a norm of discrimination for the era. Muslims also had to wear such marks of "outsider" distinction in Christian societies. Conversely, in the Muslim world, Christian communities were also faced with such laws and legislation of discrimination, sometimes even in clothing. And of course Jewish law itself has various nomenclature and attendant rules for treatment of various categories of non-Jews as second-class, or worse, people. (Even in modern Israel, Arabs are discriminatorily noted as such on national identity cards).

 

"Some current histories," said Roth in 1932, "appear to assume the Jews were sole victims of the Spanish Inquisition ...  Strictly, this is so far from the truth that a precisian might retort that [the Jews] never came under the [Inquisition's] scope, save in exceptional cases, since the activities were essentially confined to [Christian] apostates and renegades." [ROTH, p. 141] Those "Jews" who risked trouble were those among the Marranos/Conversos, who disingenuously represented themselves as Christians and were thereby subject to the same scrutinization for religious conformance as that directed upon any other Christian. Widely targeted were Christian heretics, not the Judaic faith. As M. Hirsh Goldberg notes,

 

     "Contrary to popular belief, Jews who openly remained Jews were

     not tortured or killed as part of the inquisition proceedings. The

     Inquisition was specifically authorized by the Church to root out

     heresy among Catholics, so only heretical Christians and Jewish

     converts to Christianity accused of secretly reverting to Judaism

     were prosecuted." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1979, p. 16] 

"[T]he Holy Inquistion in Portugal," notes Arnold Wiznitzer, "did not persecute Jews who never had been Catholics. Only persons of Jewish origin who had been born Catholic, or those, born Jews and baptised later, who had deserted Catholicism openly or secretly were subject to the Inquisition since they were considered as being apostates." [WIZNITZER, A., 1957, p. 64]

"The Inquistion," notes Joachim Prinz,

     "is considered one of the many traumatic experiences of Jewish history, and as
     such, it is always spoken of with dread. But, of course, the Inquistion had no
     power over Jews at all. It was established for the purpose of dealing with
     Christians who had deviated from their faith. The Marranos who were called
     into account for their secret practices appeared not as Jews but as allegedly
     heretical Chrisitans ... No unconverted Jews were ever called to the tribunals."
     [PRINZ, J., 1973, p. 44]

 

"Living under the Inquisition," adds Goldberg in another volume,

 

     "caused Jews to make some curious adjustments, as can be seen

     in the family of Manoel Pereira Coutinho, who had five daughters --

     all nuns in a convent in Lisbon -- while in Hamburg his sons were

     living openly as Jews." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 109]

 

"All Jews know about the Inquisition," wrote David Goldstein, a Jewish apostate, "but of Jewish [-perpetrated] injustices they know hardly anything." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 117]  "The name of Torquemada," wrote Jewish author John Cournos in 1937, "the loathsome Grand Inquisitor, was a byword among us children, as it was in other Jewish households." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 117] This view that the Inquisition somehow centered on Jews still remains widespread in the community today, as proclaimed in a 1990 issue of the American Jewish Congress magazine devoted to the subject of Jewish identity.  Ignoring the Christian target groups of the heresy trials, Zvi Bekarman remarked that "The Inquisition is brought to us as one more proof of the suffering of the Jews." [BEKERMAN, p. 14]

 

Despite all the Jewish lamenting of pogroms and massacres upon their ancestors, the Catholic-Protestant massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day in the 1500's was as spectacularly horrible as any Jewish medieval misfortune to that time. Nor, adds Roth, "was persecution of the Jews in its acutest form [ever] systematic." (The later World War II Holocaust scenario, which of course was systematic, will be addressed later at length in its own chapter).

 

Jews were often blamed for the epidemic of the Plague and the Black Death that swept Europe in the Middle Ages (while Jewish communities were relatively free from the disease, [HERTZLER, p. 95] but such causal connection to medieval minds was not to the detriment of Jews only. Non-Jews were also accused of, and murdered for, causing the Plague in Palermo in 1526, in Germany in 1530, 1545, and 1574, at Casale Monferrat in 1536, and other places throughout Europe. In Breslau, in 1349 sixty Jews were executed for having caused a town fire, "but," says Roth, "when one recalls that 300 years afterwards the Great Fire of London was [blamed upon] the Papists, one realizes that the Jews had no monopoly on unjust accusations." [ROTH, p. 144]

 

Jewish communities themselves had irrational superstitions to scapegoat others and to explain disease and other misfortunes. Says Zborowski and Herzog:

 

      "If an epidemic strikes the shtetl, prayers are, of course, offered up.

       Other steps consist chiefly in marrying off two orphans or cripples,

       so that God will be mollified by the good deeds of the worshippers...

       Whenever there was an epidemic in the shtetl they used to blame it

       on peoples' sins. They tried to find the guilty ones and expose them

       to the public ... Another method for getting rid of an epidemic was

       to get two orphans if possible and to marry them off on the cemetery

        ..."  [ZBOROWSKI, p. 224]

 

Throughout Europe, "it was.... dangerous to be an old woman in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries"' when witch hunts put 100,000 unfortunates on trial for sorcery in Germany alone. [ROTH, p. 145] Some 30,000 such victims are reputed to have been burned alive or torn to pieces in England, and over a two hundred year period in Scotland, an average of two hundred "witches" were burned at the stake each year. Throughout Europe gypsies were sporadically singled out for persecution and blame, and various Christians and other non-Jews from time to time were executed for the charge of cannibalism.

 

Lest modern Jews feel too smug in the brutal superstitions of the ancient Gentiles, the Talmud itself notes an instance when eighty Jewish women were hung at one time at the instigation of a fellow Jew, "Simeon the Son of Shetach," in Ashkelon for the crime of being witches.  [HARRIS, p. 174] When coming across a witch, the Talmud recommends that the passerby "should mutter thus, 'May a potsherd of boiling dung be stuffed in your mouths, you ugly witches!'" [HARRIS, p.189] Some rabbis even opined that a witch may be either male or female, but "most women are witches." [HARRIS, p. 190] Even "the best among women," said Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, "is a witch." [HARRIS, p. 191]

 

The Talmud also details the various manners of stoning, strangling or beheading Jewish "blasphemers and idolaters." Such criminals were also buried up to their knees in manure, and their mouths forced open by strangling. Molten lead could then be poured "into his bowels." [HARRIS, p. 170]

 

The persistence of the Jewish mythology of unique persecution, says Roth, has much to do with their longevity and communal dispersal throughout Europe and the world. The persecution of the Albigensians of France, for instance, is known by hardly anyone today because their destruction was singularly localized, they were completely wiped out, and there is no one interested in heralding their suffering. Likewise the Waldenses of France, and various others. "The Jews," notes Roth, "are an inseparable element in the history of every country in Europe ... and thus have an advantage, as it were, of a superior publicity service; and no historian, even a Gentile, could fail to be impressed by this insistent, pathetic, unique record." [ROTH, p. 147] 

 

Roth goes to the essence of the Jewish mythos of communal agony:

 

     "In the classical period ... with its holocausts and heroes, the lot of

     the Jewish people was much the same as that of the ancient Britons,

     the Iberians, and the Gauls; and the leaders of those peoples' struggles

     for freedom deserve to be remembered as much as the Jewish martyrs

     who are commemorated each year on the ninth of Ab. But this is far

     from the case. Generally, they are forgotten, save by a few industrious

     antiquarians; and they have no place today in the proud memories of

     any people. The reason is very plain. The races for which they fought

     are long since dead. The Jews are still alive." [ROTH, p. 147]

 

These insightful observations were written by Roth in 1932. The rise of German fascism and its institutionalized inhumanity was still only rising. Yet we can see here in Roth's unusually honest overview of Jewish history the broader, foundational context for current Jewish thinking about themselves to this day. Of course the so-called Holocaust of World War II has completely solidified the traditional view of the persecution of Jewry and obliterated Roth's broadly realistic brand of Jewish historiography.

 

To a now militant Jewish polemic, their community's European experience in World War II merely confirms the Jewish mythos of unique and eternal victimization and martrydom. It is monolithic, irrefutable, immutable, and immoveable:  Jews argue they were uniquely "singled out." There will be a great deal more about the Holocaust and its part in Jewish identity in its own chapter. For immediate purposes, it is enough here to recognize the historical context for modern Jewry's fundamental self-conception: that of humankind's foremost -- and superlative -- victims, passed along as part of religious faith century after century, reified in Jewish cosmology at every turn.

 

Roth's early 1930's view, in the context of rising Nazi fascism and worry about anti-Semitism spreading in America, has been completely muted in our own day, and Jewish apologetics about Jewish identity and history began rising in direct proportion to the gravity of the growing German threat. By 1941, a Jewish author, Oscar Janowsky, reviewed -- in the same Jewish journal that earlier published Roth's critiques of the Jewish victimization cosmology -- two new books that championed Jewish history. Each book was authored by well-respected Jewish scholars. One of them was Cecil Roth. Janowsky's title for his article was "Apologetics for Our Time." In the context of German Nazism, even Roth was swallowed by the demands for Jewish positive image-making against all and any self-critical Jewish commentary. "Both authors," wrote Janowsky, "would readily concede that the purpose [of these books] was not to write 'history' of the accepted variety. Our age requires apologetics, and this sad need has been filled by the authors." [JANOWSKY, p. 225] This "sad need" was so great that a 1951 volume entitled The Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization even stated bluntly in its very first sentence: "This book is a book of propaganda." [RUNES, D., p. vii] 

 

In 1947, Milton Steinberg wrote a volume, Basic Judaism, explaining the faith for both Jews and "those many non-Jews who happen to be curious about Judaism." [STEINBERG, p. viii] Here Steinberg's apologetic, in doing his part to engender a positive Jewish public image (like so many others to our own day), was grossly untrue: "Judaism is totally unaware of race. Though the Tradition loves to trace the House of Israel to the Patriarchs, blood descent is no factor in its calculations." [STEINBERG, M., p. 99]

 

With World War II and the disaster that befell humanity -- and the Jews within it -- looming soon over Europe, this apologetic methodology (as well as a resultant Jewish militancy) about Jewish history has continued in a rarely interrupted straight line to the present day. (Examine, for example, the gushingly laudatory content of the popular 1999 bestseller by a non-Jewish author: The Gifts of the Jews). In fact, the mythology of perpetual Jewish victimhood was well along as an exploitable tool by American Jews and Zionists as a political devise at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, where Jewish woe centered upon anti-Jewish riots and attacks in Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia. "Some of the atrocities [against Jews] initially reported," writes Albert Lindemann, "were exaggerated or simply did not occur, and some Jews made false claims in the hope of getting relief money from Western Europe and America." [LINDEMANN, p. 154]

   

Many of the exaggerations were also created to enhance Zionist propaganda to garner sympathy and support for a Jewish state in Israel.  An important target of Zionist propaganda and historical exaggeration was American Jews. "You have to speak to American Jews in superlatives," remarked Nachum Goldmann, for many years the president of both the World Zionist Organization and World Jewish Congress, "Cool, balanced, analysis makes no impression on them, and exaggeration is almost indispensable." [GROSE, p. 162] Elsewhere, in 1978 he noted that his Zionist group alone had spent "millions of dollars on propaganda." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 63]

 

A pioneer strategist in the use of the accusation of anti-Semitism as a propaganda device was Theodore Herzl, a Viennese journalist and playwright, the man most credited for the successful promotion of the Jewish "return to Israel" Zionist ideology. Herzl "understood the true nature of propaganda," notes former Israeli diplomat, Moshe Leshem," of the emotional appeal." "In truth ... noise amounts to a great deal," Herzl noted in his diary, "A sustained noise is in itself a noteworthy fact, world history is nothing but noise." [LESHEM, p. 85]

 

Among the most reported Russian anti-Jewish pogrom sites at the turn of the century was Kishinev. (This incident led to the creation of the Jewish lobbying agency, the American Jewish Committee in 1903). [HALKIN, p. 54] Chaim Weitzmann, another Zionist activist and the first President of the state of Israel, wrote to a member of the wealthy Jewish Rothschild family (instrumental in funding early Jewish settlements in pre-Israel Palestine):

 

        "Eleven years ago ... I happened to be in the cursed town of Kishinev

         ... In a group of about 100 Jews we defended the Jewish quarter with

        revolvers in our hand, defended women and girls ... We slept in the  

        cemetery -- the only safe place and we saw 80 corpses brought in,

        mutilated dead...”

 

"Thus Weizmann," says Albert Lindemann, "reports that he personally saw eighty mutilated corpses in a single place, when the death toll for the entire city was later generally recognized to be forty-five. But there is another problem with the account he provides. It is pure fantasy. Weizmann was in Warsaw at the time." [LINDEMANN,  p. 164]

 

The long -- and continuing -- Jewish defamation of Poles and Poland, as part of a broad Zionist propaganda policy and secular Jewish victimization theology, has been going on for a long time. For all western Jewry's complaints about massive Polish violence against Polish Jewry, in 1919 Hugh Gibson, the United states minister to Warsaw, wrote that, "It is ridiculous as we are told about every incident where the Jew gets the worst of it and a great many incidents that never happened at all. These yarns are exclusively of foreign manufacture for anti-Polish purposes." Two prominent and powerful American Zionists -- Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter (both United States Supreme Court justices) -- confronted Gibson to complain about his dispatches to Washington. "They complained that my reports on the Jewish question had gone round the world and undone their work [in proclaiming enormous violent Polish anti-Semitism]," said Gibson,

 

       "... They finally said that I had stated that the stories of excesses against

       the Jews were exaggerated, to which I replied that they certainly were  

       and I should think any Jew would be glad to know it ... [They] seemed

       to be interested in agitation for its own sake rather than in learning the

       situation ... Their efforts were concentrated on an attempt to bully me

       into accepting the mixture of information and misinformation which

       they have adopted as the basis of their propaganda ... Felix handed

       me a scarcely veiled threat that the Jews would try to prevent my

       confirmation by the Senate [then pending] ... They made it clear to

       me that they do not care to have any diagnosis made that is not based

       entirely on Jewish statements as to conditions and events and doesn't

       accept them at face value. If they are not ready to go into the question

       honestly I don't see how they can hope to accomplish anything for their

       people... [American Jews have embarked upon] a conscienceless and

       cold-blooded plan to make the condition of the Jews in Poland so bad

       they must turn to Zionism for relief." [GROSE, p. 94-95]

 

In 1923 the United States Vice Consul to Warsaw, Monroe Kline, added that "It is true that the Pole hates the Jew ... The Jew in business oppresses the Pole to a far greater extent than does the Pole oppress the Jew in a political way." [GROSE, p. 95]

 

More recently, Leonard Fein notes Jewish fears of assimilation that could erase them as a people, and the emotional cloud that informs Jewish perception of the facts of history:

 

      "Deep down -- and sometimes not so very deep -- we [Jews] still

      believe that we depended on the pogroms and persecutions to

      keep us a people, and that we have not the fibre to withstand

      the lures of a genuine open society. It is seduction, not rape,

      that we fear the most, and nowhere is the seducer more blatant,

      less devious, than here in America." [in SILBERMAN, p. 165]

 

The Jewish limited historical memory (and corresponding embracement of legend) and its singular focus on its martyrological tradition has also been systematically exploited to buttress Zionist reasoning for the necessity of the modern state of Israel: a home for Jews from worldwide anti-Semitic persecution. The lengths some Jews will go to enforce -- and create -- the martyrological/persecution tradition for political purposes was noted by Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former CIA agent stationed in Iraq in the early years after the foundation (1948) of today's Israel. A few months before his arrival to that country in 1950, a bomb went off "outside a Passover gathering," underscoring Arab hostility to Jews and encouraging 10,000 to move to the new Israeli state. Eveland wrote that

 

        "Just after I arrived in Baghdad, an Israeli citizen had been recognized

        in the city's largest department store: his interrogation led to the

        discovery of fifteen arms caches brought into Iraq by an underground

        Zionist movement. In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American

        and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the United

        States Information Service Library and in synagogues.  Soon

        leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel ... Although

        the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that

        the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-

        American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground

        Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab

        terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the

        Zionists had 'rescued' really just in order to increase Israel's Jewish

        population."  [FEURLICHT, p. 231]

 

Aware from personal experience about the facts in such matters, in 1998, an Iraqi-born Jew and former Zionist activist, Naeim Giladi, wrote that he wanted "to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews." [GILADI, p. 1]

 

In 1975 Jewish CBS reporter Mike Wallace journeyed to another Arab nation, Syria, to do a 60 Minutes program on the country. Years later, he noted his own biases (about alleged Syrian anti-Semitism) that were destroyed when he actually went to Damascus:

 

     "[Before I went to Syria] I had a strong impression of what life was

     like for [Jews] there. From Jewish friends in America, I had heard

     the same stories over and over again: The Jews in Syria were confined

     to ghettos and were constant victims of persecution. A tight curfew was

     imposed on them and they were not allowed to have telephones or

     drives automobiles. Nor were they permitted to worship in synagogues

     of study in their traditional language, Hebrew. In short, the Syrian Jews

     were forced to live as prisoners within their own country." [WALLACE/

     GATES, 1984, p. 282]

 

All this, as Wallace soon learned upon visiting Syria, was complete nonsense. Jews owned cars; Jews had classes in Hebrew. Although the Jewish community was under close surveillance by the Assad regime, Wallace is careful to note that so was everyone in that police state. The CBS reporter interviewed a variety of Jews in the Arab country. Speaking to a Jewish teacher, Wallace notes his surprise to her response about the myths he had heard about Syrian anti-Semitism :

 

     "Then I mentioned all the stories I had heard about how badly the

     Jews were treated in Syria, and when I asked her where she thought

     they came from, she replied in an almost malevolent tone: 'I think

     that it's Zionist propaganda.'" [WALLACE, M., 1984, pl. 285]

 

Cecil Roth, in his overviews of Jewish history with its attendant polemics and apologetics (let alone some of the fraudulent escapades of modern Zionism), argued that the continued suppression of an honest evaluation of the Jewish past could come back to haunt them:

 

       "By suppression we play into the hand of the anti-Semite, who may one

        day make capital out of the innocent humanity we have chosen to

        ignore. But, above all, by repression we are faithless to the most sacred

        charge of history, which is the pursuit of truth." [ROTH, p. 423] 

"I also tried to avoid becoming uncomfortably hooked on anti-Semitism
as the main problem in the world. Many Jews I knew divided the world into
Jews and anti-Semites, nothing else. Many Jews I knew recognized no problem
anywhere, at any time, but that of anti-Semitism ... Such is the blindness of
people that I have known Jews who, having deplored anti-Semitism in unmeasured tones, would, with scarcely a breath in between, get on the subject of
African-Americans and promptly begin to sound like a group of petty Hitlers.
And when I pointed this out and objected to it strenuously, they turned on me
in anger. They simply could not see what they were doing. I once listened to a
woman grow eloquent over the terrible way in which Gentiles did nothing to
save the Jews of Europe. 'You can't trust Gentiles,' she said. I let some
time elapse and then asked suddenly, 'What are you doing to help the blacks
in their fight for civil rights?' 'Listen,' she said, 'I have my own troubles.'
And I said, 'So did the Gentiles.' But she only stared at me blankly. She
didn't get the point at all."
-- Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov. A Memoir, 1994, p. 20, 21

                        

For nearly fifteen centuries in their diaspora, after the Jewish/Roman historian Josephus, the Jewish community taught and re-taught only its religious dogma and martyrological mythos to define its past, present, and future. Until the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, the Jewish ghettos were filled with people cloistered away under rabbinical blinders. Jewish "history" was all history, and it was entirely framed in the religiously-based conventional framework for understanding the world: Jewish exceptionality, Jewish martyrology, and an apocalyptic vision entwined in Jewish suffering in search of atonement. [LOPATE, p. 306] As Jacob Neusner notes:

 

     "What strikingly characterizes the imagination of the archaic Jew is the centrality
     of Israel, the Jewish people in human history, the certainty that being Jewish is the
     most important thing about oneself, and that Jewishness, meaning Judaism, was      the dominant aspect of one's consciousness." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 62]

 

Simon Dubnov, a prominent and well-respected Jewish historian, notes that Jews were so self-isolated from the non-Jews around them that for centuries their own history was merely the recycled metacommentaries about their seminal myths of Chosen People victimhood:

 

      "Talmudic literature (including the Midrashim) ... hardly contained any

       material concerning social dynamics which is necessary for history in

       the true sense. The leaders of the nation that was deprived of its

       kingdom seemed to have lost interest in the events of the world

       around them ... The historian is greatly distressed when, in the scores

       of volumes of talmudical literature, he finds merely vague hints at events

       of the first five centuries of the Christian era, and searches in vain for

       chronological data. He has a sense of shame for the nation ... which...

       lost its ability to perpetuate its experiences, even in simple chronicles...

       The one-sidedness of the Jewish sources, which illuminated only the

       spiritual side of life, created a false historical perspective." [DUBNOV,

       p. 436-438]

 

Robert Goldenberg notes that, in Jewish tradition,

 

      "great rabbinic leaders ... became both disembodied bearers of a

      an elaborate legal tradition and also heroes of a marvelously rich

      tradition of legend ... From the historian's point of view, the Talmud

      thus becomes a terribly frustrating book. It is rich with stories that

      may -- or may not -- reflect the way certain events happened, and it

      is full of legal discussions that may -- or may not -- report the actual

      content of early rabbinic scholarly activity. Everything is fascinating,

      everything is potentially an open window on the past, but nothing

      can be trusted." [GOLDENBERG, R., 1984, p. 157]

 

"Jews have suffered and Christians have suffered [throughout history]," wrote Rabbi Richard Singer, "Mankind has suffered. There is no group with a monopoly on suffering and no human beings which have experienced hate and hostility more than any other. I must say, however, that it is my impression that Jewish history has been taught with a whine and a whimper rather than a straightforward acknowledgement that man practices his inhumanity on his fellow human beings." [ZUKERMAN, p. 66]

 

"[A] disability for the Jews in modern times," says Barnet Litvinoff, "has been their own obscurantism. If all the questions of how to live were to be answered only in the wisdom of the Talmud, there could be no intellectual explorations, and therefore no progress." [LITVINOFF, p. 10]  "[Rabbis] had cut off [the Jewish community] from the community of nations," wrote Bernard Lazare in 1894 about the Jewish ghetto mentality, "They had made of it a sullen recluse, a rebel against all laws, foreign to all feeling fraternity [with others], closed to all beautiful, noble, and generous ideas; they had made of it a small and miserable nation, soured by isolation, brutalized by a narrower education, demoralized and corrupted by an unjustifiable pride." [LAZARE, p. 14] "The Eastern European Jews," notes Raphael Patai, "(with a few very notable exceptions) considered interest in all realms of non-Jewish intellectual endeavor as un-Jewish and therefore prohibited. Even the readings of books other than the Bible, the Talmud, the codes, and the Midrashim was strictly forbidden, and has remained so to this day in those circles in which the Eastern European Yeshiva tradition survives." [PATIA, R., 1971, p. 294]

 

"Jews lived with memory, so that redemption might be hastened," adds Stephen Whitfield, "but they did not live with history. The rabbis ... made little effort to record the history of their own post-Biblical era ... The first post-medieval attempt at a history of the Jews was written by a gentile, Jacques Basnage ... Only ... under the impact of modernization … could Jews ... wrest meaning from Jewish life and identity. [WHITFIELD, p. 29-30]

 

Basnage's 17-volume work, published between 1706 and 1711, has been called by one twentieth-century Jewish reviewer "the basis for the science of Jewish history; and though his work was far from perfect, it remained the best for a century to come." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 212]

 

Although Jewish history usually highlights Christian intolerance and the periodic burnings of the Talmud, the earliest printings of even this religious tract were accomplished with substantial Christian support. As M. Hersch Goldberg notes:

 

     "Pope Leo X, who reigned from 1513 to 1521, encouraged the printing

     of the first complete edition of the Talmud. Under his patronage, fifteen

     volumes of the Babylonian Talmud were printed in Venice beginning in

     1519 ... Another Christian played an important part in preparing that

     historic edition of the Talmud. The printer Daniel Bomberg (whose name

     may sound Jewish, but who was a Christian) had set up his press in

     Venice in 1516. He devoted great care and attention in printing the

     Talmud ... Seemingly fascinated with Jewish literature, Bomberg is

     said to have done more to spread Jewish learning than any other

     printer of his time ... Over the years, Bomberg printed approximately

     two hundred books of Jewish interest." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976,

     p. 210-211]  

 

The Talmud itself, of course, is not history, but religious polemic. "Memory of the past," says Yosef Yerushalmi, "was always a central component of Jewish experience; the historian was not its primary custodian." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 30] "The [Israelite] prophet," notes Old Testament scholar John Allegro, "saw Yahweh [the Israelite God] as a cosmic deity, lord of the heavenly hosts and forces of nature, but at the same time still the special god of Israel, a tribal deity whose main interest was the welfare of his Chosen People. Thus it followed that whatever the grand strategy in the Creator's mind, it involved the destiny of the Jews, and all history was directed to their glorification." [ALLEGRO, J., 1971, p. 58]

"Most Jews have a slight knowledge of Jewish history," says Chaim Bermant,

     "This is true even of those in Yeshiva (college of higher learning), for the
      Yeshiva is devoted largely to the study of the Talmud, and the Talmud,
      though encyclopaedic in scope, was completed by the sixth century and
      events beyond that date are largely terra incognita, except where they are
      echoed by liturgy and lore." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 18]

 

The above observations, and one of the theses of this volume, point to a Jewish identity that is at its conceptual roots -- even for the secular today -- religious in complexion and fundamentally ahistorical.

 

Firmly going against the grain of popular Jewish proclamation that they, and their old religion, Judaism, are the root of everything wise and wonderful on earth, a Jewish author and social activist, Maurice Hindus, wryly observed in 1927 that

 

      "The force that first pried the Jewish mind open to radical doctrines of

      a modern nature had its origin not in Jewish but in distinctly non-Jewish

      intellectual associations ... [Political philosophers] Marx and Lassalle

      were steeped in Western, that is, modern Gentile culture, Gentile

      philosophy, Gentile science ... It is only after the Jew began to ram

      down the gates of the ghetto and to make excursions into the intellectual

      temples of his Christian neighbors, only after he had laid aside the

      Talmud and the Shulcan Aruch for modern, western, that is Gentile,

      history, biology, psychology, science, that he embarked on a

      career of achievement in modern arts and science ... The old Jewish

      civilization, with its rigid orthodoxy and its emphasis on Jewish

      superiority, compelled aloofness from worldly intellectual intercourse

      even as it compelled social isolation. It frowned on the perusal of

      modern literature, philosophy, social theory, even on the study of

      foreign, that is Gentile, languages." [HINDUS, p. 369-370]

 

"Guided by the dictum that 'all that is new is forbidden by the Torah,'" says Charles Silberman, "the rabbis spoke as though the slightest deviation from tradition was a lapse into heresy." [SILBERMAN, p. 171] 

"The Jewish nature does not produce its rarest fruits in a Jewish environment," noted Israel Abrahams, "... It was ancient Alexandria that produced Philo, medieval Spain Maimonides, modern Amsterdam Spinoza." [FEUERLICHT, p. 38] "One can be ignorant of all the sayings of the wise old rabbis," notes Ann Roiphe, "and still acknowledge the Magna Carte, the Declaration of Independence, the words of Rousseau, Hobbes, Emerson, the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michealangelo and Dante, the science of Darwin, Newton and Galileo. These were not Jewish, and the great Jewish thinkers, Freud, Marx and Einstein, Claude Levi-Strauss, studied at Christian universities and learned form Christian scholars ... The great universities of the West were founded without Jews ... The Christian world created Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Yale." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 209]

 

These perspectives do not reflect the mainstream current of modern Jewish history, however. For most, the self-repeating myths of the wonders of Jewish Talmudic scholarship and its attendant Jewish martyrology were -- and are -- central to Jewry's understanding of its past.  In the late nineteenth century, for example, Heinrich Graetz, the seminal "modern" Jewish historian, was only following a long line of self-portrayal when he introduced one of his volumes of Jewish history with what he felt to be the essence of their story:

      

            "The long era of the dispersion, lasting nearly seventeen centuries,

            is characterized by unprecedented sufferings, an uninterrupted 

            martyrdom, and a constantly aggravated degradation and

            humiliation unparalleled in history ... " [GRAETZ, v. 4 Intro,

            in LIBERLES p. 104]

 

In 1911 a Jewish anthropologist, Maurice Fishberg, blamed common Jewish "nervous disposition" largely on historic persecutions:

 

        "Considering that in medieval times massacres of Jews were quite

        frequent ... it may be said that many of the survivors have remained

        with unstable nerves, and that a fair proportion of neurotics and

        psychopathics have inherited their nervous disposition from their

        maltreated grandparents ... Any people, no matter what race, could

        not remain with healthy nerves under the ban of abuse and persecutions

        to which the Jews were subjected." [FISHBERG, p. 532]

 

In 1917, H. G. Enelow framed the same world view this way:

 

     "There is no history as full of hardship and suffering as the history of

     Israel. But there is none so heroic, either. That is just what has made it

     the most heroic history in the world. That because the Jews were

     chosen for a divine work, they have to suffer a great deal." [ENELOW,

     p. 45]

 

Likewise, another nineteenth century Jewish scholar, Leopold Zunz, made the convergence of Jewish superiority and "aristocracy" through suffering explicit in a quote that eventually became "perhaps the best known in modern Jewish literature" [ROTH, Most, p. 136]:

 

         "If there be an ascending scale of sufferings, Israel reached its highest

          degree. If the duration of affliction, and the patience with which they

          are borne, confer nobility upon man, the Jews vie with the aristocracy

          of any country." [SCHULMAN, p. 34]

 

A 1954 "High Holy Days Prayer Book" for Jewish congregations even devoted two pages to quotes (including the one immediately above) by secular Jewish commentators, a legendary Jewish martyrological history framed here as the expression of religious faith. Other lamentations in the prayer book included:

 

       * "Combine all the woes that temporal and ecclesiastical tyrannies

          have ever inflicted on men or nations, and you will not have

          reached the full measure of suffering which this martyr people

          was called upon to endure." [Leopold Zunz]

 

       * "The thousand years' martyrdom of the Jewish people, its

          unbroken pilgrimage, its tragic fate, its teachers of religion,

          its martyrs, its philosophy, champions -- this whole epic will,

          in days to come, sink into the memory of men." [Simon Dubnov]

          [SILVERMAN, M., p. 386-387]

 

Fredda Herz and Elliot Rosen understand such self-definitions as "aristocratic" victims to be essential to modern Jewish temperament: "Jews anticipate attack from non-Jews, while privately reassuring themselves that they are 'God's chosen people.' The assumption is that suffering is a basic part of life. This suffering may even reinforce the notion that they are superior to others by virtue of their burden of oppression." [HERZ/ROSEN, p. 367]

 

In 1993, one of England's chief rabbis, Jonathan Sacks, framed Jewish resistance to assimilation in the land they lived as a noble sacrifice, the willingness to stand loyal with a relentlessly subjugated, oppressed people: "For the most part, Jews [through history] did not say, 'What advantage is it to remain part of the people of Israel, seeing that they are humiliated and persecuted? It is better for me to join my destiny to those who have power.' They declared their willingness liheyet miyisrael, to be counted among Israel." [SACKS, J., p. 131]

 

"[The] self-image of Judaism," says Philip Sigal, "as originating in bondage and redemption indelibly engraves itself upon the group memory and it became the permanent mythos of its origin. Beside that, documentable history is irrelevant. All that has transpired since antiquity is wedded to that theology." [SIGAL, p. 1] Israeli scholar Boas Evron notes that

 

       "Long historical memory, delving into centuries-old, even millennia-old,

       disasters, massacres and wrongs (accompanied by the convenient

       forgetting of wrongs and atrocities perpetrated by ones' own people

       against others), lachyrmorose self-righteousness, are all characteristics

       of groups whose experience is basically passive, as the Jews have been

       politically for thousands of years. In such groups, the consciousness of

       being victims accumulates and poisons the very being of its members.

       At times these characteristics become the primary content of their self-

       awareness as a group, a perverted focus of their self-identity. Finally,

       this suffering becomes a source of pride. ('I am persecuted and hated,

       a sign that I am valuable and unique, for which I am envied and hated'),

       rather than engendering a desire to be rid of it." [EVRON, p. 109]

 

The cloaking of Jewish martyrological legend over an authentic Jewish history in the real world is noted by another Israeli, Meron Benvenisti:

 

     "It is an ahistoric philosophy of an ahistoric people. It sustained us

     for two thousand years and is so imbued in our psyche that it was

     not altered even when we made the profound leap from an ahistoric,

     dispensed, and powerless people to an historic, independent, and

     powerful nation [Israel]." [BENVENISTI, p. 73]

 

"The belief that the Jewish people had always been the passive sufferer of Christian persecution," says Hannah Arendt, "actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization of the old myth of chosenness." [FEUERLICHT, p. 35]   "The more desperate the oppression," writes Raphael Jospe, "the more oppressors reinforced the Jewish view that they, the victims, were the Chosen People, and that the oppressor religions were all the more morally spiritually bankrupt." [JOSPE, R. p. 130]

 

Michael Aronson notes the way that riots against Jews in Russia in the late nineteenth century were simply plugged into traditional interpretive Jewish martyrological frameworks focusing on categorical Jewish innocence: 

 

     "In Jewish consciousness, three biblical images are deeply ingrained

      as archetypes of Jewish oppression. First is that of the Pharoahs,

      who enslaved the Children of Israel in Europe. Next, are the

      treacherous and murderous Amalekites, who attacked the Children

      of Israel in Sinai after their exodus from Egypt and became the

      symbol of causeless hatred. And third is the archetypical murderer

      Haman (by tradition a descendant of Amalek), who tried to destroy

      all the Jews in the Persian Empire. From the very beginning of

      anti-Jewish outbreaks in 1881, the biblical images must have sprang

      to people's minds and influenced their interpretation of events.

      Indeed, these images were invoked repeatedly in both journalistic

      and historical literature on the pogroms written by Russian Jews,

      and others." [ARONSON, p. 9]

 

Like many Jewish or Gentile historians tainted by martyrological contagion, Bryan Moynahan's index to the Jews' role in his book about the last 100 years of Russian history reflects almost solely the Jewish victimology theme:

 

     "Jews:

        -accusations against

        -anti-Semitism

        -behavior toward

        -emigration

        -in Great War

        -massacre

        -pogroms against" [MOYNAHAN, p. 266]

 

Prominent Jewish psychoanalyst and child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim once wrote an article about the popular social psychology surrounding (famous Nazi victim) Ann Frank, noting the special state of "innocence" the Jewish people decree about themselves, a blanket character afforded no one else:

 

     "Some time ago I questioned in print why there is such vast admiration

     for The Diary of Ann Frank. I received many reactions, positive and

     negative, but whether those who let me know their reactions agreed

     or disagreed, they all shared one feature: a deep compassion for what

     they called the 'innocent' victims of Nazi aggression ... I was further

     startled to find that in the many communications I received, the

     adjective 'innocent' was applied only by Jews to Jewish victims.

     Nobody referred to the innocent Gypsies or the innocent Jehovah's

     Witnesses, though they, like the Jews were internal minorities, one

     of which, the Gypsies, was exterminated in toto. Maybe I overlooked

     it, but despite search I can recall no popular reference to the innocent

     Norwegians, for example, who the Nazis also killed in numbers."

     [BETTELHEIM, 1991, p. 257]

 

"Jewish consciousness is cultivated consistently from the moment they are capable of understanding the spoken word," observed Maurice Feurlich in 1937,

 

     "... I had the theme, Children of a Martyr Race, dinned into my

     consciousness so deeply that it became the basic element of my

     emotional life. Almost the first words I understood were "oppressed

     people," "martyrs," "prejudice," "persecution." Like all other Jewish

     children, I emerged with a 'Persecution Complex' which grew stronger

     as I grew older ... [This] more than anything else constitutes the Jewish

     consciousness we have today ... Our persecution complex makes us

     abnormal in dealing with our neighbors ... For few of us have the courage

     to admit that the fault might rest in our personal makeup. It is true of

     human nature generally that men seek to blame for failure everywhere but

     their own doorstep, but we Jews divulge from the normal when this

     becomes a mental habit with which we constantly salve the wounds of

     our failures." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 116]

 

"It became customary [in the Middle Ages] to record the names of the victims of persecutions," says Leon Poliakov, "many lists are preceded by the evocation of the 'cities of blood' ... Thus the memory of the first martyrs was perpetuated and a tradition was created and strengthened, inspiring succeeding generations to follow the lead and example of their ancestors." [POLIAKOV, p. 84] The ancestors have followed the lead well. In a 1984 survey, 94% of American Jews were found to believe that "Jews have a uniquely long and tragic history of persecution." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 31] "One critical element in this statement," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "is the word unique. The image of Jewish victimization has its political and psychological uses, and as a result Jews often have a deep emotional investment in preserving their image as a uniquely long-suffering minority. Leading Jewish spokesmen have resisted efforts to deny Jews their history of extraordinary persecution and to diminish the singularity, the distinctiveness, of Jewish victimization." [LIEBMAN, COHEN, p. 31] "All the Jews must internalize past events as if they happened to them only yesterday," explains Meron Benvenisti about traditional Jewish victim identity, "My father still feels the agony of the expulsion from Spain as if it happened to him personally and not five hundred years ago." [BENVENISTI, 1989, p. 73]

 

Jewish religious history -- and Jewish identity itself -- has always been founded upon the idea that non-Jews are out to destroy them.  "For Thy [God's] sake are we killed all the day long," proclaims the Torah/Old Testament. "We are counted as sheep for the slaughter." [PSALMS 44:22] "Eysor soyneh l'yaakov," wrote Joshau Halberstam in 1997, "[is] a phrase well known to Jews brought up in traditional homes. The literal translation of the phrase is 'Esau hates Jacob,' but the names are always understood as referring to the gentile hatred of Jews, an enmity that is presumed to be perpetual." [HALBERSTAM, p. 215]  Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriyah, director of a network of religious Zionist high schools in Israel, and a former member of the Knesset, publicly declared that there were two kinds of Gentiles, "those that simply hate us and those who attempt with all their power to destroy us." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 59] "The Holocaust is not a national insanity that happened once and passed," remarked a former Israeli Minister of Education in 1984, "but an ideology that has not passed from the world and even today the world may condone crimes against us." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 61]

 

A number of Jewish religious fast days, including the traditional ninth of Av, the tenth of Tereth, the seventeenth of Tammuz, and the third of Tishri, commemorate "national and communal catastrophes." Most are linked to the destruction of the First Temple (physically memorialized today in Jerusalem at what is widely known as the "Wailing Wall") by non-Jewish enemies. At one time in Jewish history thirty-six such fast days of mourning were observed each year. [YOUNG, p. 263]  "Three times a day," notes Howard Sachar, "and oftener on special occasions, pious Jews prayed for the Restoration [of the destroyed Temple]." [SACHAR, p. 309] Even at Jewish marriages, wrote Alfred Siegel, "you know how it is to be a Jew. In the hour of pleasure he remembers his pains, and even in the ecstatic instant of a wedding he breaks a glass under his foot to remind himself of the crash of the Temple in Jerusalem. A Jew is never entirely happy." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 115]

 

Samuel Heilman notes the way the story of the biblical Samson is treated in an ultra-Orthodox religious school he visited:

 

     "This Samson was not the Jewish Hercules as much as the weakened

     and tormented Jew who begs God to allow him to avenge the

     injustices he has suffered." [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 247]

 

Heilman also notes that the traditional Queen Esther story (in which she saves the Jewish people in Persia from destruction from an arch-enemy), and the yearly Jewish celebration of the story at Purim, may be simply a borrowed tradition from another people, plugged into the Jewish martyrological base. As Heilman notes,

 

     "Purim in Israel comes at the end of winter and commemorates the

     deliverance of the Jews of ancient Persia from the genocidal decree

     of Vizier Haman ... There are some scholars who argue that in fact

     the [Purim] holiday precedes the scroll [about Esther] and simply

     enshrines the principle of Jewish salvation from all those who have

     tried to destroy the [Jewish] nation. And indeed, Jewish tradition is

     filled with many local 'Purims,' each with its own 'megillah'

     commemorating the deliverance of the Jews in question from

     disaster. Some of those scholars who see Purim in such relative

     terms argue that it arose in Persia as a Jewish counter holiday to many

     of the pagan winter festivals. Others cite the absence of any evidence

     of a king named Ahasueras in Persian records as well as the similarity

     of the names Esther and Mordechai to the ancient Babylonian gods

     Ishtar and Marduk as evidence of a linkage with precursor non-Jewish

     traditions." [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 109]

 

A tradition of reciting the names of local "martyrs" to the faith was a widespread tradition among Jews in Europe for centuries; modern Israel has its own remembrance "Day of Holocaust and Heroism."  The mass suicide of 900 Jews at the fortress of Massada rather than surrender to Roman attackers is a major icon in modern Israeli mythology. In the Biblical Exodus tradition, the Egyptian Pharoah also chases Jews to annihilate them; in the Book of Esther, as noted above, Jews are saved from an evil Persian court minister, Haman, who sought their destruction. Still recited today as part of the yearly Jewish Passover rituals, Jews say, "In every generation they [non-Jews] rise against us to annihilate us: Bekhol dore omdm alaynu l'khalotaynu."  Other aspects of the Passover seder, notes Stephen Whitfield, include the identification "with the fate of [Jewish] ancestors so fully that the distinction between past and present has in effect been obliterated." One way to attain this collapsing of time is "to raise a piece of matzah and announce (in the present tense): 'This is the bread of affliction which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt.'" [WHITFIELD, American, p. 29]

 

Other forms of Jewish martyrology reportedly evidenced in the Middle Ages were occasions of mass suicide (including the slaying of fellow family members) if threatened with forced conversion to Christianity. "Medieval Christians ... tended to perceive it not as the extraordinary behavior of individual Jews but as behavioral practices sanctioned by the Jewish community and law. In the minds of some it encouraged and confirmed the perceptions of the Mosaic law as harsh and Jews as murderous." [REL.&THEO. 38, 863, 1995] The rabbinical tradition itself, notes Nahum Glatzer, is rooted in a martyrological world view: "Talmudic tradition preserves the memory of the chief scholars who suffered martyrdom rather than bow to the imperial [Roman] decree that forbade the study of the Torah ... The story of the Ten [rabbi] martyrs became one of the motifs of medieval Jewish liturgy." [GLATZER, p. 175-176] One talmudic tradition even notes 400 Jewish children who were reputedly "captured for shameful purposes. "They all leaped to their deaths into the sea." [GLATZER, p. 183]

 

The Jewish cosmology of eternal victimization is virtually celebrated in our own day. In a 1985 "fact-filled, fun-filled" book for children, for instance, The Jewish Kids' Catalogue, there is a section on the Jewish experience in World War II, including a full-page photograph of children walking towards Nazi box cars. The caption reads: "Orphan children from the ghetto of Lodz boarding a train that will take them to death camps." [BURSTEIN, p. 67]  In 1987 a Jewish psychologist, Ruth Bers Shapiro, took public exception to another children’s' book entirely about the Holocaust entitled The Children Remember; it was created for 4-8 year-olds. Such early socialization to the Jewish Cult of the Persecuted worried Shapiro; she suggested that the Jewish community "needs to anticipate how this information will be absorbed and shaped by the child's inner life." [GALLOB, B., p. 15]

(Emblazoning perceived martyrdom in communal memory is central to Jewish tradition. "The Hebrew Bible," notes Peter Novick, "contains the verb 'to remember,' in its various declensions, 169 times (along with numerous injunctions not to forget). Yet what Jews are enjoined to remember is almost always God's handiwork; secular history, insofar as such a category is even admitted by tradition, gets short shrift. Mourning and remembering the dead are, of course, traditional Jewish obligations.") [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 10]

Jewish author Paul Cowan notes the socialization of his half-Jewish son into Jewish tradition:

     "One night in March 1973, we were invited to a puppet show dramatizing the
     story of Purim. At the dramatic high point, when the evil Persian vizier Haman
     threatened to murder all the Jews, Matt ran across the room and threw himself
     into Rachel's arms, pleading for comfort. 'Mom, he won't get me, will he?
     I'm only half-Jewish.'" [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 24]

 

In 1986, Ze'ev Chafets, a Jewish American immigrant to Israel, and eventual head of the Israeli Government Press Office, noted something wrong with his six-year old daughter Michal:

 

     "I noticed a change coming over her. Suddenly she became afraid to go

     to bed in the dark; often she had a hard time falling asleep. A few times

     she cried out in the middle of the night and woke up with a headache.

     Obviously, something was bothering her."

 

Eventually Chafets managed to get his daughter to tell him what was wrong. As he tells it:

 

         "Abba [Father]," she sobbed, "Why does anyone want to kill us?"

         "Michali, what do you mean? Who wants to kill us?"

         "Us, the Jews. Everyone wants to kill the Jews. But why, Abba? What

               have we done wrong?"

          I was stunned by the question, and by Michali's fear. One of the

               reasons I had decided to live in Israel was to bring up children free

               of tics and neuroses of diaspora life. And now here was my sabra

               [Israeli-born] daughter shaking with insecurity. "Who told you that

               everyone wants to kill Jews?" I almost shouted.

         "Our teacher. She told us about Haman and Pharoah the King of

               Egypt. And Hitler.  Abba, he puts Jews in the oven and burns them

               up. And the Christians too." Michali burst into tears. "Abba, is

               John one of those Christians?" John was a friend of mine who

               worked for the international Red Cross.

          "Yes, baby, John is a Christian, but he doesn't want to hurt you."

          [CHAFETS, p. 89-90]

 

Similarly, in 1993 an Israeli scholar noted with concern the comments of a colleague's kindergarten-age daughter:

 

      "Daddy, I know that on Passover we celebrate our freedom from the

      horrid Egyptian Pharaoh who wanted to keep us as slaves. On Purim

      we are happy because brave Queen Esther convinced the King to hang

      the wicked Persian Haman who wanted to destroy all the Jews. On

      Hanukah we celebrate our freedom from our Greek enemies. Daddy,

      tell me -- who were our enemies on Tu Bi-Shevat [Israel's national tree-

      planting day]?"

 

Myron Aronoff calls such a story a manifestation of Israel's "national paranoia." [ARONOFF, p. 57] This paranoia, of course, is not just Israeli; it is a foundation of Jewish identity. And for the little girl who wondered about the Jews' enemies against trees, they are there to be conjured.  In a 1987 appeal by the Jewish National Fund to Americans for money to plant trees in Israel, a recent forest fire was highlighted as a "suspected arson" by Arabs, and fund-raising for trees is often requested to honor children Holocaust victims. [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 32]

 

Steven Cohen notes four main themes in the Jewish victimization mythology (Cohen frames them in the past tense, but they are, for most Jews, as viable as ever):

 

       "1) premodern Jews viewed life among Gentiles as galut, exile.

        2) Jews believed that Gentiles hate Jews.

        3) They believed that Christian culture and civilization are inferior

             to Jewish civilization.

        4) They believed that individual Gentiles have personality characteristics

             which are inferior to those of Jews." [COHEN, Uses, p. 26]

 

In our own time "Pulitzer prize-winning" Jewish historian and former president of the American Academy, Barbara Tuchman, is typical. (In 1967 Tuchman argued in the New York Times that the United States should intervene militarily for Israel in its war with Arabs. [FEUERLICHT, p. 196] Tuchman, daughter of wealthy financier Maurice Wertheim and niece of a former secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., obviously can't -- with a straight face -- claim victim status herself without some serious help from the Jewish martyrology tradition). [CHRISTOPHER, p. 219]  In her 650-page volume on "calamitous" European society in the fourteenth century, originating in her interest in the Bubonic plague, Jews are represented solely in relation to her own sense of their socio-political victimization. Of all the possibilities of a group of human beings over a century, (including the story of their own experience with the epidemic) Tuchman frames virtually the entirety of Jewish experience as merely a sponge for abuse from Gentiles.  This is the book's complete index for the heading "Jews":

 

                        * money lenders --

                        * resented by Pastoureux --

                        * persecution of --

                        * blamed for plague --

                        * rights of --

                        * accused of ritual murder --

                        * Talmud tried for heresy --

                        * badges worn by --

                        * sexual relations with Christians forbidden --

                        * ransom of Jean II --

                        * attacked in working class revolts --

                        * in Spain --

                        * pogrom in Prague --

 

If fourteenth century Jews spent every moment of their lives fielding insults and running away from vigilante mobs, when did they have a moment of freedom to record the chain of misery that always wrapped so tightly around them, so that their progeny might still agitate with authority about their lack of relief, 600 years later? Jews did find time, however, in the Middle Ages to regularly memorialize lists of martyrs during synagogue services, emphasizing "Jewish suffering and its exaggeration." [MACDONALD, p. 219]  

 

Tuchman's conviction of non-Jews' unrelieved hatred of Jews through the centuries as one of the foundations for her perspective of history is evidenced in her following quote about the Holocaust:

 

      "What lurks in the shadows of ancient memory [was] a bitter recognition

      that a Gentile world ... would fundamentally have felt relieved by the Final

      Solution." [BAER, p. 64]

 

Jewish historian Arnold Wiznitzer reflects the Jewish martyrological base to understand history in his books about Brazil. As Jonathan Schorsch notes:

 

     "Much of the American Jewish historiography from the 1960s continued

      the monumentalist, nationalist orientation of its predecessors, and Arnold

      Witznitzer's work could easily be included here. A historian of Brazilian

      history whose work to this day practically constitutes the field in the

      English language, Wiznitzer summed up his findings in his now classic

      book, Jews in Colonial Brazil. There he takes great concern to

      memorialize every 'Jewish' victim of the various Inquisitions."

      [SCHORSCH, J., 2000]

 

In the Jewish cosmology, Jews can only be victims, even when they are pre-eminent in the society in which they live. In 1987, David Schers, for example, explored "the oppression of those [Jews] who are 'well off' in Latin America." "Is it possible," he asked, "to speak of those who eat well, have attractive lives, and live in relative prosperity? The case of the Jews of Latin America demonstrates that it is indeed possible. [They have] alienation, self-hate, and family conflict ... The very invisibility of Jewish suffering ... makes it more painful than might otherwise appear." [SCHERS, CULTURE, p. 285-286]  Jews, insists Sarah Horowitz, bizarrely, are also

 

      "victimized by their own positive stereotypes, which mask the gender,

       class, ideological and ethnic differences that distinguish them from one

       another ... The invisibility of Jewish studies as an academic field [?!]

       moreover, is hidden behind the presence of Jews as scholars in all

       fields." [HOROWITZ, p. 123]

 

Jews, who are collectively the wealthiest, most comfortable ethnic/racial group of people in modern America, [see later chapter] nonetheless remain insistent in clinging to the identity core as themselves being victims and never oppressors, economic or otherwise. "If Jews are, by definition, victims," notes Edward Shapiro, explaining the common Jewish world view, "then those Jews who do not sympathize with this cult of victimization are inauthentic Jews who betray the essence of Jewishness." [SHAPIRO, E., 1998]  Even Jewish multi-millionaires like financier Harry Solomon, (whose 1989 estimated worth was $50 million) apparently fail to see the irony in claiming that "We [Jews] are all the victims of our backgrounds." [KOTKIN, p. 45] When Celia Heller wrote her book about the Jews of Poland, she completely ignored historic Jewish commercial dominance of Eastern Europe [see earlier chapters] and traditional Jewish self-segregation to preposterously link the Jewish situation there to that of oppresssed African-Americans, evolving from the shackles of slavery: "The concept of caste is extremely useful in understanding the situation of Jews in interwar Poland just as it was in understanding the situation of the Negroes in the United States before the Civil Rights struggle." [HELLER, C., 1977, p. 59]

 

Robert Greene wrote an entire volume about professional "hustler and swindler" Mel Weinberg [GREENE, preface] and his role in "Abscam," an FBI sting operation to investigate white collar crime in America. Even as a six-year old, however, the future master scam artist was already primed to his identity as a Jewish victim:

 

           "His mother answered his knock on the door.

           'You're late. How did it go in school today?' she asked.

           'Not so good,' answered the boy.

           'What happened?'

           'I got left back,' he replied.

           His mother stared at him. The message short-circuited her ability

        to comprehend, much less believe.

           'You must be mistaken,' she said, clearly aware that something was

        amiss. 'Nobody gets left back in the first grade. Besides, you

        bring home all those gold stars every day. That means you are

        doing wonderful work in school. Why would they leave you back?'

            'Because I'm Jewish,' he sighed, fixing his mother with his most

        earnest look.

            'Because you're Jewish,' she replied in a voice that took on a slightly

        hysterical edge. ' How can that be? This is the Bronx, in New York,

        not Poland. Your teacher is Jewish. Why were you left back?'"

       [GREENE, 1981, p. 17-18]

"When I was a little kid," says controversial talk show host Howard Stern,

     "I was a victim. Many times I would turn the other cheek when I should have
      stood tall. I was overly polite when I needed to be firm. There was something
      in my personality that avoided confrontation because I always felt I would lose
      in a two-way struggle. I never excelled at anything ... I had 'victim' written all
      over my freakish face. I was a gawky lamb available for slaughter. I had lived
      my entire young life as a sniveling coward. I was the half-Jew who bowed his
      head and walked into the gas chamber without putting up a fight." [STERN, H.,
      1995, p. 255]

 The Cleveland Jewish News notes this about famous feminist Gloria Steinem:

      "Steinem was born to a 'gentle, nurturing' Jewish father and a Protestant mother
      who believed in theosophy, a set of beliefs based on mystical insight. Largely
      home-schooled until the age 12 while her 'itinerant' father packed up the family
      and traveled around the country, Steinem does not identify with any organized
      religion, except when there's antisemitism. 'Then I identify with the Jewish person.'"
      [KARFELD, M., 10-22-1999, p. 20-]

"As Jews," a "leader in the Jewish community" of Brooklyn, New York, told researcher Jonathan Reider, regarding the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, "we know what it means to be hostages. We have been hostages since day one." [REIDER, J., 1985, p. 256]

A. M. Rosenthal (eventually Executive Editor of the New York Times) and Times reporter Arthur Gelb even titled their 1967 book about a Jewish Nazi "One More Victim." The subject of the volume is Daniel Burros, the King Kleagle of the New York Ku Klux Klan and former official in the American Nazi Party, who was a vehement hater of Jews. How, one wonders, is Burros a victim? Is he a victim of his own choices in life? Is he a victim of his own racism? Is he a victim of his own strange psychological dilemmas? Is he perhaps a victim of A. M. Rosenthal and the New York Times, who published an expose about Burros, noting that he was secretly Jewish? (Burros committed suicided immediately after publication of the article). No, insist the Jewish authors, Burros is a victim of anti-Semitism -- his hatred of Jews is something internalized from an ugly, exterior, non-Jewish world. The authors put it this way (and they are blaming Gentile society for the creation of the Burros Nazi identity):

    "The fact that there is a Jewish condition disturbs many Jews and they rail against it,
     but it is a fact nonetheless, because it cannot be otherwise. It is a condition not inborn
     but created, created not so much by Jews but by Gentiles, and arising from the one
     simple fact that, being apart, Jews have no privacy [i.e., if a Jewish mother calls out
     in public to her son "Irving," everyone knows they are Jewish. Rosenthal and Gelb
     go on to argue that Jewish "separateness" and "distinctiveness" is an attribute branded
     upon Jews by the non-Jewish world, completely ignoring this as an absolute
     pillar of historical, and current, Jewish identity] ... No number of laws, no strength of
      others' traditions, and no faith in morals or even religion, can protect the Jew    
     -- German Jew, Russian Jew, Brazilian Jew, and American Jew -- from knowing
     that he was born into a tribe of victims ... From the moment he is aware of his Jewishness
      and of the history of Jews he is aware that this history is the biography of the scapegoat,
      the martyr, the dispossessed, the wanderer, the outcast, the tortured, the despised or the
      pitied, the beaten, the murdered -- the victim. What is a Jew? ' A misfortune!' There is
     not a Jew who has not said that to himself, sometimes in a whisper he can hardly
     hear ... Every Jew now alive has lived in the memory of the ghetto's stench, remembers
      Torquemada [of the Spanish Inquisition], and every Jew now alive has an Auschwitz
      number on his soul ... What is a Jew? A Jew, among other things, is a prisoner caged in the
      ugliest of ages, the mind of his own enemy."[ROSENTHAL/GELB, 1967, p. 57-60]

Hence, we are lead to believe -- somehow in all this -- the Jewish Ku Klux Klan leader, is born, "victim" of an anti-Semitic society.

How weird does the Jewish persecution thing get? Jewish publisher Lyle Stuart even recalls an incident he had with William Gaines, also Jewish and the publisher of Mad magazine: "One day Bill and I were riding in his Cadillac and he said, 'You know, sometimes when I pass a bus stop I see those people standing there. I think they hate me. And I said, 'Bill, you have to get some self-esteem.' And I suggested he see a psychiatrist, which he promptly did.'" [TEBBEL, R., 1999]

Jewish author Ben Stein once noted the mood among the wealthy producer/writer elite of Jewish-dominated Hollywood [See later chapter about this subject]:

         "There was a distinct feeling that, despite the high pay and the access
     to powerful media that TV writers and producers enjoy, they are still
     part of a despised underclass, oppressed psychologically, and
     (potentially) physically by an Aryan ruling class of businessmen and
     others. This feeling was by no means confined to Jews. [?]
          The belief in a ruling class of white, East Coast Protestants meeting
     occasionally in corporate board rooms to give its orders to whoever
     happens to be elected to office is so strong that no amount of
     argument to the contrary makes a dent. And hostility to that real
     or imagined class is just as strong." [in ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982,
     p. 107]

 

Despite the fact that the exploitation, oppression and sovereignty over non-Jews, as we have seen, is a very foundation of talmudic Judaism, Jews commonly portray themselves as victims even in their exploitation of others. In a relentless apologetic and Zionist-inspired volume (see the later chapter on Zionism), The Jews of Germany, Nachum Gidal asserts that "the Jews were forced into the role of pawnbrokers, money changers, and usurers, very public offices and therefore often hated ... Thus 'the Jew' became the tool and the scapegoat of the rising capitalist economic system." [GIDAL, p. 40]

 

Even if this apologetic myth -- often cited in the Jewish community -- was true, that they were somehow "forced into" their historic roles as oppressors of the non-Jewish populace, such self-preserving actions still represent a self-centered, self-protective amoralism where self-preservation ("self" being either the individual or ethnocentric community) is considered the paramount concern. If we may this way dismiss collective Jewish responsibility for negative actions against others over centuries, we may likewise conveniently excuse all Germans who were also "forced" to join the Nazi movement (or any other collective expression of evil) because there were no alternative options (short of personal trouble, hardship, and, of course, danger and self-impairment).

 

In modern America, even Jews responsible for a huge share of communist-instigated terror in post-war Poland, are reconceived as "victims" through a lens that can see nothing else. As Stefan Korbonski says,

   

     "The ten years of Jewish rule in Poland [in the Stalinist era] could not

     easily be forgotten. It was an era of the midnight knock on the door,

     arbitrary arrests, torture, and sometimes secret execution. Most of

     those responsible for that reign of terror left Poland and upon arrival

     in the West represented themselves as victims of Communism and

     anti-Semitism -- a claim which was readily believed in the West

     and earned them the full support of their hosts." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 63]

 

"In other words," notes Tadeusz Piotrowski, "these [Jewish] executioners were transformed into victims." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 63] [More information about these people in the Holocaust chapter]

 

Jewish celebration of communal victimology is the cornerstone of Jewish identity. Simon Wiesenthal, the famed hunter of Nazi fugitives and namesake of Holocaust remembrance organizations, has even written the ultimate coffee table book for Jews (Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom) who wish more specific attachment to their self-perception of historic victimization; the book is a kind of calendar, listing selected atrocities against Jews throughout history, at least one for every day of the year.

 

"That collective Jewish consciousness (of suffering and martyrdom)," writes Lucy Dawidowicz, "has been and remains -- with justice, I think -- one of the central myths of Jewish history, being an essence distilled from real events and reinforced in nearly every Jewish generation until our own time by brute reality." [DAWIDOWICZ]  "Every Jew," declares Milton Steinberg, "at some time or other has reason to conclude that he has been penalized for his Jewishness." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 77] "The Jews," observed Sir Lewis Namier, both a Jew and Zionist, "do not have a history, they have a martrylogy." [RAPHAEL, p. 30]  "Being a Jew and sufferer go together," a Jewish senior citizen told anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, "When we stop suffering, we get rich and secure, we stop being Jews. We become like everyone else, living for enjoyment only. Without it we don't know what our purpose is." [MYERHOFF, p. 198]  "Moral decency, sympathy for the victim, sympathy for those who suffer," claims Ann Roiphe, reciting the myth she deeply believes, "these are the building blocks of the mystical connection Judaism. It seems not so much to be a matter of indulging in masochism as to be a matter of aligning oneself with innocence." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 187]

 

Molly Katz, in a book of humor, Jewish as a Second Language, highlights a number of Jewish cultural traits. Finding humor in the enduring truths of what the Jewish community recognizes in itself, she notes that a Jew must "always agonize, resent, be disappointed, gloat, get even, suffer, [and] be positive something terrible is going to happen." Conversely, Jews can "never be satisfied, think everything is fair, be a good sport, feel undeserving, let go of a grudge, ease up, [or] acknowledge the possibility of any light at the end of a tunnel." [KATZ, M., p. 72]

 

"I share ... an identification with the tribal suffering," wrote senior editor Jack Newfield in the Village Voice, "I don't know why, but if I read of Russian Jews waiting outside a visa office, if I read that a synagogue was blown up in Brussels, or I read [Jacobo] Timerman's book, it affects me more on a certain level than when I read about a massacre in El Salvador or if I read about some atrocity in South Africa. There is a sense that those are my brothers and sisters." [BRENNER, p. 55] "Although American Jews seem rooted, comfortably integrated in Christian America," wrote Jewish art critic Donald Kuspit in 1997, "their long history has taught them, with paranoid precision, that one never knows what persecution and ostracization the future may bring." [KUSPIT]

 

"It isn't easy to find a Jew whose personality hasn't been warped by his feelings toward gentiles," wrote Jewish commentator James Yaffe in 1968, "Sometimes the damage is great, sometimes slight; many individuals succeed in overcoming it, or in learning to live with it, or even in making something valuable out of it. But the damage, in one form or another, is almost always there." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 57]

 

"How can a Jew not be bitter," wondered Ann Roiphe in 1995, "how can a Jew not be bent by the stories we know, stories that have come to us through the generations, so many stories of communal disaster, of individual pain, of lies and exclusions, of expulsions and blood libels, of Cossacks riding down on our villages, inquisitions and their instruments of torture, of cold shoulders and cold murders, of blame placed on our children's heads for plagues, for draught, for flood, despised for our enforced poverty and envied and loathed for our assumed wealth? ... [ROIPHE, p. 443] ... It is hard for a Jew not to feel that the plot of the world, its most central story, is about his or her destruction, exclusion, failed attempts to find a safe spot." [ROIPHE, p. 446] "According to the Hebrew Bible (and its Christian analogue, the Old Testament)," notes Jewish feminist Andrea Dworkin, "Jews are God's chosen people. It is not easy to see the benefits, if any, of this divine chosenness, since the history of the Jews is one of persecution and oppression ... In the often-joined race for having suffered most, Jews are the group to beat." [DWORKIN, A., 2000, p. 109]

 

The Jewish novelist, Bernard Malamud, took chauvinist Jewish martyrology so far as to subsume all human suffering under the Jewish umbrella, claiming that "suffering makes all men Jews." [WHITFIELD, Mult, p. 10] Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida "says we are all Jews, insofar as people in the contemporary world are nomads and displaced." [STEYN, J., 1999, p. 11] The ridiculousness of such notions may be quickly dismissed in many ways, most poignantly with a comparison of Jewish consummate "suffering" to an almost unfathomable kind known by so many, even today, in the Third World. As Pascal Bruckner describes his experience with overwhelming poverty in a Third World train station:

 

       "Here, the suffering are not just little groups scattered in a crowd; they

     are laid out, row upon row, on the bare cement. There are far more of

     them than there are travelers. Creatures are lined up in rags made of bags

     and cloth, with arms that are eaten away by gangrene and repulsive

     pustules sticking out.

       You walk uneasily past these prostrate figures, as if you were walking

     in a swamp, and make your way to the ticket window. Bodies are strewn

     about like damaged goods, as if waiting along with their emaciation,

     eczema, and lumpus for street cleaners to sweep them up. It is impossible

     to tell if they are living or dead. Nobody pays them any attention ... It is

     an entire race of crushed, reviled, beaten down remnants, and this tide

     of flotsam begs you, calls to you, pulls at you, but so weakly that you

     push them aside with a simple movement of your foot." [BRUCKNER,

     P., 1986, p. 53]

 

This is no episodic "holocaust" against a people who are declared by Evil Ones to have too much power and influence in surrounding society. Bruckner's description here is a norm of survival for entire defined castes in places like India for centuries. Do these people, an underclass that is an unchanging fixture in Indian history, merit status as honorary Jews, history's declared foremost sufferers?

    

Further along on the Jewish martyrological bandwagon, a Marxist and atheist, Isaac Deutscher, rejected all cultural, religious, and Zionist definitions of his Jewishness, but said

    

         "I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the

         persecuted and exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish

         tragedy as my own tragedy." [SHAPIRO, p. 8]

 

"Deutscher's Jewish identity," explains Edward Shapiro, "was dependent on Jews remaining among the persecuted." [SHAPIRO, p. 8] "With the invention of nuclear weapons the world has become Jewish," decides Eli Wiesel. [ROSENBERG, D. , p. xiv]

 

The emotions of the Jewish Persecution Complex are deep, powerful and often vengeful, as evinced by left-wing publisher Michael Lerner:

 

         "There are moments when I become so overwhelmed by the feelings of

          anger at what was done to my family and my people that I become

          sympathetic to the most extreme fantasies of the Israeli right wingers."

          [LERNER, Goyim, p. 430]

 

On another front, in an article in the feminist MS magazine, one of its founders and editors, Letty Pogrebin, solicits "Christian sisters ... to try to understand the immediacy of our [Jewish] mourning and the 5,000 years of terror that echo in our souls." [POGREBIN, Antisem, p. 46] Another "liberal feminist," and regular contributor to the Village Voice, Ellen Willis, echoed this view in her own public utterance:

 

      "It is what all Jews, religious and secular, Zionist and non-Zionist, have in

       common -- our status as outsiders, of being persecuted." [COHEN,

       Uses, p. 26]

 

There are even intra-Jewish concentric circles of this ideology of incessant victimhood. In Israel, Orthodox Jews have taken the tool of self-perceived oppression to understand themselves systematically discriminated against and persecuted by secular Jewry around them. "This Orthodox self-perception as victims," says Meir Lockshin, "in its most extreme forms, involves seeing the discrimination against Orthodoxy as systemic. A number of Orthodox Jews are now saying that the basic structures of Israeli democracy -- the Knesset, the police, the army, and the courts -- all discriminate against observant Jews." [LOCKSHIN]

 

Meanwhile, not to be outflanked in the hierarchy of fellow Jews' feelings of persecution, Shlomo Cohen wields his own Jewish essence by counter-claiming that

 

       "I am a secular Jew, a member of a group that is probably the most

        oppressed in Jewish life today, certainly in Israel." [COHEN, S. p. 23]

 

Also in Israel, with the influx of Jews from Russia to the new Jewish state, "Russian mafia" head Grigori Lerner (who was imprisoned in Israel) "in Israel's Russian language press ... is being portrayed as a [victim] of ethnic persecution." [GROSS, N., 1997, p. 22] And what about the hyper-religious, far-right Messianic Gush Emunim movement in the Israeli-Occupied Territories? Israeli psychologist (and apologist) Tzvi Moses sees something familiar in their self-obsessions:

 

      "The [Gush Emunim] settlers developed a feeling of persecution as

       a defense mechanism, similar to what was essential in its time to

       the Jewish nation in exile for its defense and adjustment in an inimical

       environment. The existence of such a mechanism in the psyche of the

       Jewish nation creates a problematic system in which change is difficult

       ... Obstinacy and inflexible thinking typify the thinking of the Gush

       today." [GROSSMAN, D., 1988, p. 42-43]

 

Even within the elemental unit of the household, Jewish women have traditionally cultivated complaint of personal suffering and victimhood abuse to practical ends. Zborowski and Herzog note that "vulnerability becomes a weapon, especially for the mother. Her suffering serves not only as a rebuke for the past but also as control of the future." [ZBOROWSKI, p. 297]

 

Oppression of Jews is commonly understood by Jews to have always existed, in varying but usually harsh degrees, everywhere they went in their exile from the Holy Land. Most of the world's Jewry, by the Middle Ages, ended up as a minority people in Christian Europe. Their experiences there, particularly in relation to the Christian faith throughout medieval times, are widely believed by Jews today to have lain a foundation for the Nazis' savage treatment of their people in the twentieth century.

 

Ann Roiphe goes out to do some calisthenics and lose some calories and, apparently, this is what runs through her mind:

 

     "Even here in America stepping up and down in the aerobics classes of

     our local Jewish community centers we remember the trains of the

     Christians, those nation builders who called us 'Christ killers' as they

     killed us."  [ROIPHE, p. 444]

 

Psycho-socially and religiously then, since ancient history, to be Jewish has always meant exilic misery -- exile from one's country (driven out of the Holy Land in ancient history by the Babylonians and Romans), from one's God (who has been traditionally understood to be angry with too much Jewish disregard for His dictates), and --increasingly for some, with the rise of rationalism a couple hundred years ago and estrangement from Jewish tradition in a sea of non-Jews  -- from ones' own people. But always, to be Jewish over the past millennium there has been an anchoring in the belief that Jews -- the Biblical "chosen people" -- are exceptional, and bound, at least, for some glorious leadership destiny.  Many Jews today -- secular or religious -- still quite literally believe that they are God's gift to mankind (often self-described as "the light unto the world.")  It is also a widely believed article of Jewish dogma, however, that, even in today's comfortable Western Diaspora, a Jew's non-Jewish neighbor might at any time turn on him -- the Jewish Other, the ultimate scapegoat -- with animosity. For essentially no reason. (Traditional Orthodoxy's reason for Gentile hostility, however, is  Gentile jealousy because God selected Jewry as His Chosen People). The successful creation of the modern state of Israel in recent times (as a direct consequence of Nazi Germany) -- and its overwhelming support by worldwide Jewry -- is a communal defense of such perspectives.

 

By the end of the 20th century "being Jewish" had reaffirmed its ultimate expression as both religious and supra-religious collective complaint, codified as a militantly arrogant politic against the rest of humanity.

 

There is, of course, considerable evidence across history -- over seventeen hundred years of it  -- of destructive acts by others against Jews in their Diaspora ("dispersion"): restrictive laws, harassment, and sometimes large scale violence.  We are not, however, talking about a weekend time span. Nor are we speaking of anti-Jewish actions that were systematically reasonless. We are talking about nearly two thousand years of exile and, quite literally, the life experiences of many millions of people. Lost to Jewish ideology is the fact that their mistreatment at times by others has always had a context and that perils, misery, and misfortunes have also been the common lot of all peoples everywhere -- of all faiths, politics, and social persuasions.  Whenever and wherever Jews suffered, non-Jews suffered too. Human history is a long and torturous catalogue of social, economic, and political upheavals; everywhere the struggle for power, everywhere the struggle for survival. Other peoples have always suffered too, sometimes catastrophically, in sequence across history, with their own dilemmas, strife and tragedies, and much of Jewish misfortune has resonated, inevitably, from others' painful struggles. Often enough -- and this is hotly and routinely denied, or reductively qualified, by common Jewish discourse these days -- Jews caused other people suffering too. Whatever the case, few peoples have had the good fortune to survive as an ideological unit as long as the Jews who culminate a trans-historical diary of troubles and grievances across thousands of years as a unified expression of their modern selves. Most other peoples quietly assimilated into surrounding communities, woefully perished, or began anew.

 

Many Jews see the presence of a divine hand to account for the fact of their longevity, that -- after 4,000 years and innumerable historical obstacles -- they are still here. Such commentators -- and they are legion -- always fail to recognize, however, that untold billions of other human beings are "still around" too who are NOT Jews, by divine hand or otherwise. And while not all non-Jews exactly mirror the same habits, ethnicity, and self-image of their own direct ancestors thousands of years ago, neither do Jews. Things have changed. Always and everywhere. The Talmud itself (a sacred compilation of Jewish religious opinions over centuries) is a map of such changes. No Western Jew today -- who represents the cumulative absorption of Hellenism, the Enlightenment, and a myriad of other extra-Jewish historical influences, as well as a long line of interbreeding with other racial types -- would be recognized as brethren by illiterate Jewish goat-herders living in tents 4,000 years ago. And meanwhile, untold billions are not descendants of Abraham. Who cares? Somewhere back up the ancestral line we all merge souls to our common human ancestors, of whom no greater covenant in this world has ever been made.  For Jews who take too much pride in (however drastically changed) a 4,000-year-old identity linked to a particular individual  (the early Abraham-Isaac-Jacob lineage), one need only scan the jungles of New Guinea, Africa, and the Amazon to find remote tribes whose modern religious and ethnic identity still very closely echoes their unfathomably ancient origins. So what? Does their longevity confirm -- as so many Jews would have it for themselves -- the Divine hand of favoritism? A hand that in some cases far outdistances the Jews? 

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