Our
common inhumanity: anti-semitism and history
by RICHARD
WEBSTER
Antisemitism: The
Longest Hatred by Robert S. Wistrich, Thames Methuen, 1991
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| .Hieronymus Bosch, Christ carrying the cross, c1490 |
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‘POSSIBLY,’ WROTE THE THEOLOGIAN, Rosemary Ruether, ‘anti-Judaism is too deeply embedded in the foundations of
Christianity to be rooted out entirely without destroying the whole
structure.’
It is partly because its implications are so
terrifying that we have sometimes been reluctant to face up to the history
of anti-semitism. Among Christian scholars one of the earliest and most
notable exceptions was James Parkes who did much to draw attention to the
relentless anti-Judaism of early Christian literature and to the origins
of this anti-Jewish attitude in the bitter conflict between the Church and
the Synagogue. In addition to his more specialised books Parkes also wrote
a history of anti-semitism in which he traced the disastrous consequences
of these early Christian attitudes in medieval and modern European
history.
But for more than
twenty years, ever since James Parkes’s Antisemitism went out of
print during the 1960s, there has been no concise history of anti-semitism
for the general reader with anything like the breadth and authority of
Parkes’s work. As the years went on the need for such a book became
increasingly urgent, and its failure to materialise began to seem both
puzzling and worrying. This need has at last been met by the distinguished
historian Robert S. Wistrich, himself a former winner of the James Parkes
prize for his research on anti-semitism. Wistrich’s book, which was
written to accompany Rex Bloomstein’s Thames Television series, is both
scholarly and lucid. It is also a small miracle of compression which
manages, in the space of eighteen brief chapters, to indicate the relative
positions, and the relative importance of almost every single thread among
the many which make up the complex and terrible tapestry of Western
anti-semitism.
Wistrich recognises
the role which was played by anti-semitism in pagan Antiquity, but he also
recognises, as have many Christian scholars, that an even more important,
and ultimately more potent source of anti-semitism is to be found in the
New Testament – not only in the letters of Paul and the Gospel of John but
in the account of the crucifixion given by all four gospels. It was the
gospels and not the Church which first cast the Jews in the role of the
deicide people. Wistrich succinctly establishes the importance both of
this charge and of the demonisation of the Jews which began with John, was
continued by the Church Fathers, and which subsequently became the basis
of modern anti-semitic fantasies.
In his condensed
history of the development of anti-semitism Wistrich is particularly
interesting on Luther, on the mixed blessings of the Enlightenment and on
the anti-semitism of Voltaire and Marx. One of the things that Marx’s
socialism had in common with Hitler’s National Socialism was that both
grew out of the traditional demonological view of ‘the Jew’ as the
personification of greed, acquisitiveness and capitalism. Wistrich notes
that Hitler, in his early years as a political agitator, ‘frequently
played on the deicidal myth and on his own messianic role as a militant
German saviour bearing a sword rather than a crown of thorns, who would
drive the Jewish capitalists from the Temple of the Lord. “The task which
Christ began but did not finish,” he told a Munich audience in 1926, “I
will complete.”’
The Holocaust, according to the analysis offered here, grew out a fatal
combination of Christian demonological anti-semitism and a new atheistic
ideology which ruthlessly secularised this demonology at the same time
that it destroyed the traditional restraints of the Christian conscience.
In effect National Socialist leaders ‘subverted Christianity from within’.
For ‘by continuing to use a long familiar language about the diabolical
Jew, they could guarantee themselves the collaboration of the Christian
churches and of millions of ordinary laymen throughout Europe.’
‘Collaboration’ is not quite the right word here and Wistrich seems to
forget about the significant minority of Christians who courageously and
actively opposed Hitler’s policies. But there is nevertheless too much
truth in this general judgment for it to be easily dismissed.
In the second part of his book Wistrich offers a number of illuminating
surveys of the development and resurgence of anti-semitism in a variety of
countries, including France, America, Poland and the Soviet Union.
He then turns to consider the history of the Jews in Islamic lands. From
his perspective as Professor of Modern European history at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem he can see very clearly that some of the more
extreme anti-Zionist propaganda by which Israel is surrounded in the
Middle East is but another form of anti-semitism. What has happened, as he
suggests, is that a body of anti-semitic myths and stereotypes which grew
up within Christendom has been grafted on to the more moderate
anti-Judaism of the Koran both by Islamic fundamentalists and by pan-Arab
nationalists.
The amount of destructive violence which is contained in this new,
culturally hybrid Arab anti-semitism should not be underestimated, and
Wistrich is right to devote so much anxious attention to it. But, because
of the cultural perspectives involved, a scholarly survey of such Arab
anti-semitism can all too easily become a subtle form of pro-Zionist
propaganda. Wistrich bends over backwards in order to acknowledge that
there are legitimate arguments against Zionism and that some Palestinians
have put these arguments with both reason and passion. But this section of
his book remains, understandably enough perhaps, tilted towards the
Zionist point of view.
It is interesting
in this respect that on several occasions, both in the text of his book
and in the glossary, Wistrich characterises Muslims as belonging to an
exclusivist faith which is committed to Jihad, ‘until such time as
the non-Muslim world submits to the supremacy of Islam, the only “true”
religion.’ In recognising that Islam is an ideology of world-domination
Wistrich is, of course, absolutely correct. But according to any ordinary
reading of their scriptures, so too are Judaism, Christianity or, for that
matter, Marxism. The point is an extremely important one. For it leads –
or should lead – to the recognition that anti-semitism is rooted in
beliefs about covenant and divine election which are to be found not only
in Christianity and Islam but in Judaism as well.
Ultimately indeed, the terrifying theological questions raised by the
Holocaust concern the Old Testament just as much as the New Testament.
For, in its pre-secularised form, anti-semitism never took the form of a
quarrel between one religious tradition and another tradition which was
alien to it. It was a quarrel which took place (and continues to take
place) inside a religious family. In this quarrel, as perhaps in
all family disputes, no single tradition emerges as wholly sinful. Neither
does any emerge as wholly virtuous. All three of the religious traditions
involved (or four if we include Marxism) have scriptures which can
encourage exclusivism, intolerance and cruelty. It is perhaps only when we
have acknowledged this – our common inhumanity – that we will come a
little closer to recognising our common humanity
Like Jewish history itself Wistrich’s book begins and ends in Palestine.
Throughout it there is scarcely any relief from what amounts to a
catalogue of human callousness and human cruelty. This, perhaps, is what
we should expect from such a compressed account. The courage of Karl Barth,
of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and of Father Bernhard Lichtenberg, who prayed
openly for the Jews at his Berlin cathedral and died on the road to Dachau,
has, after all, been recorded elsewhere. So too has the role of the
womanising industrialist Oskar Schindler who saved more than a thousand
Jews from Auschwitz. Yet their roles remain important. For, as one Jewish
survivor, Pierre Sauvage, put it:
If
we do not learn how it is possible to act well even under the most
trying circumstances, we will increasingly doubt our ability to act well
even under less trying ones. If we remember solely the horror of the
Holocaust, we will pass on no perspective from which to confront and learn
from that very horror … If Jews do not learn that the whole world did not
stand idly by while we were slaughtered, we will undermine our ability to
develop the friendships and alliances that we need and deserve … If the
hard and fast evidence of the possibility of good on earth is allowed to
slip through our fingers and turn into dust, then future generations will
have only dust to build on. If hope is allowed to seem an unrealistic
response to the world, if we do not work towards developing confidence in
our spiritual resources, we will be responsible for producing in due time
a world devoid of humanity – literally.
Wistrich’s book lacks resonance partly because it omits the kind of
perspective which is provided by the words of Pierre Sauvage, or the deeds
of Barth, Bonhoeffer, Lichtenberg and Schindler. But he does tell the rest
of the story with rare skill. This story needs to be told for the simple
reason that without a profound understanding of the history of
anti-semitism – a history which has been deeply repressed – it is
impossible to comprehend the course of Western history itself. For this
and for many other reasons Robert Wistrich’s book is both necessary and
important. I hope it will be widely read and deeply pondered.
A shorter version of this review appeared in
The Tablet
in 1992.
