The Rise of Anti-Semitism
There appears to be a desperate and deep-seated human need to define oneself. The need to say "I am a ____" seems to be a constant human condition. Though humans never seem to be able to define the "I", or the "we" for that matter, without defining what they are not. The template of the other, by necessity, has to be employed to articulate the self. I think that most people would agree that the us-and-them mentality is a universal amongst humans (of course, if they don't agree with me then perhaps they have already proven my point). The use of antagonistic rhetoric has remained throughout human history, but humanity's expression of identity has changed. Clean-Unclean, Roman-Barbarian, English-French; the diametric remains, but the details change.
The Jew-Christian diametric can be seen as a microcosm of this human condition. For nearly 2000 years, Christians have used Jews to both define what they are, and what they are not. The 'Jew' was, and perhaps still is, an integral device employed in the service of Christian self-identification. During the formative years of the early Christian community, the early Christians did not, of course, think of themselves as such. They were still Jews, but their form of Judaism was better. The Jews referred to in the passion narratives are the other Jewish groups from the perspective of its Jewish authors.[1] The sectarian intra-Jewish polemic laid the foundation for future Christian theological anti-Judaic sentiments.[2] When the passion narratives describe the Roman governor insisting upon Jesus' innocence and a Jerusalem crowd insisting upon his crucifixion (Matt. 27:17-23, Mark 15:6-15, Luke 23:17-25), how much of it is factual history and how much of it is (early) Christian propaganda? This remains a point of contention for Christians, but John Crossan, among others, feels that these passages represent an attempt to rigidify their own sect's identity. Furthermore, it acts as a kind of a defensive mechanism against the sect's enemies, both real and perceived.[3] It was not until Jesus' disciples went out amongst the Gentiles and changed Jewish law for the palates of non-Jews that the Jesus people became Christians (Acts 11:26). From that point on, the sectarian intra-Jewish polemic became both a tumor within Christianity, and a necessary blemish. The righteousness of the Christian Church became tied to the anti-Judaic tradition. On one hand, the true meaning of the scripture is the prophecy of Jesus the Christ. On the other hand, the authority of Jewish tradition is undermined through the collection and emphasis on "anti-Jew" texts.[4]
How did the sectarian intra-Jewish polemics found in the New Testament culminate in the extermination of 6 million Jewish lives in the holocaust? Perhaps this very question would take an entire course, indeed an entire career to ascertain. As Alan Dershowitz puts it,
I cannot explain the underlying causes of anti-Semitism because they are varied and because they reflect deep-rooted psychological pathology. That is why I prefer the term Judeopathy to anti-Semitism.[5]
Nevertheless, for the purpose of this paper, I would like to explore this phenomenon during the period from the 18th to the 20th century. This was a period when European Jewry experienced legal emancipation, desegregation, and terrific horrors.
In the 18th century, Western European nations began the separation of Church and State that had enjoyed a symbiosis for thousands of years (arguably, dating back to the time of the cult of the Roman Emperor). Revolution and the Enlightenment facilitated the breakdown of feudal society.[6] The age of the individual had begun. A change of the Jewish community accompanied the changes that affected Western and Central Europe, which led to new forms of expression of faith. Moses Mendelsohn, David Friedlander and Israel Jacobson in succession tried to articulate responses to the changes in their world through the expressions of their faith, which eventually led to the formulation of Reform and Liberal Judaism.[7]
Emancipation is the word that several authors have used to describe the process that affected the Jewish communities in Western and Central Europe.[8] Perhaps it was emancipation from the political subordination and social isolation from and by their Christian neighbors, but this process involved so much more than the casting off of social and political shackles. The dissolution of the ghetto also brought with it a fundamental re-evaluation of identity.[9] This was true, I believe, for not only the Jews, but for all of the communities in Central and Western Europe. The price of emancipation was the destruction of Jewish self-government and a decay of their autonomous corporate identity.[10] It was their sense of autonomous corporate identity which had allowed the Jews to keep a sense of peoplehood within Christian society. It was this sense of autonomous corporate identity and peoplehood that the modern nationalist state could not tolerate.
The blossoming of modern cultural and economic life across Central and Western Europe in the 18th century did not change the theological basis for anti-Judaic sentiments.[11] Christianity's identity was through and beyond Judaism. Christianity was seen as the religion of reason, which came about through the negation of its antithesis, Judaism. The emancipation offered to everybody, with obvious consequences to the Jews, was based on ideology that was itself based on a rationale of anti-Judaism.[12]
The breakdown of feudal society against a backdrop of the Industrial Revolution created tremendous social upheaval. The process through which the Jews entered mainstream society also created a traumatic reaction in those classes who felt deeply threatened by the new secular industrial society: clerics, landowners and lower-middle-class artisans.[13] Furthermore, this coincided with the organized and official persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire, which precipitated a flood of Jews into Central and Western Europe.[14] The archaic stereotype of Jewish usury had stuck in the depths of Christian psyches and emerged in a new and even more vilifying form. The Jews, even though they were by no means the precipitators of social change, were concentrated in highly visible and (in the minds of anti-Semites) conspicuous professions in urban areas.[15] The notion that Jewish materialism was the driving force behind a great machine of change became more and more prevalent.[16] The Jews were seen by some as the wealthy capitalists bent on swallowing up all of the resources in the name of greed. Others saw them as the equally malicious insurrectionists bent on destroying the old order which had traditionally been the great stabilizers of society. Paradoxically, the Jews were thought by some to be the conspirators at the helm of both capitalism and communism. Amidst all of the social change in the 18th and 19th centuries in Western and Central Europe the Jews emerged, willing or not, from the ghettos and the shtetls. Their demarcation, their visibility, led Christians to view the Jews as agents of social change. Of course, Christians only associated the Jews with the worst aspects or kinds of social change going on at that time.
The breakdown of the old feudal order created a crisis not only of Jewish identity, but also non-Jewish (i.e. Christian) identity. The old rigid class barriers and antecedents became dissolved and pliant; something had to replace these identifying divisions. Their replacement came with the formation of the nation-state. The necessity to define a citizen of a nation led to the promotion of new social theories, namely the theory or concept of race. The notion of Judaism, as thought of by Christians, thus became a system of laws that governed a nation, not a religion per se.[17] A Jewish nation within a Christian nation could not be tolerated and was wholly repugnant to a Christian people's sense of self vis-a-vis nationhood. Anti-Judaism had gestated into anti-Semitism in the womb of social reformulation. The Jewish faith was no longer at the heart of the matter, Jewish peoplehood was. Christian religious anti-Judaism demanded the containment, and if possible the reversal, of Jewish unbelief; the final solution was in God's hands.[18] Racial anti-Semitism could not stop there. The entire weight of the nationalistic modern state was brought to bear on the Jews. This meant state sponsored massacres on an unprecedented scale in the name of racial anti-Semitism. Simple conversion of a Jew to Christianity would not appease this terrible modern monster. "A disease of the body, unlike that of the will, cannot be cured by conversion."[19]
To what extent did modern Europe create notions of racial identity? Perhaps racial theorists of the time were simply reformulating old ideas in new ways. As Andrew Gow notes, both anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism were present in the Middle Ages and the Reformation. Confrontations of Jews by Christians were not limited to a polemic, but no less violent environment; physical confrontations "on the street" also occurred. The later development of racial theories by no means presupposes the us-and-them altercations of Christians towards Jews with regards to peoplehood.[20]
On the other hand, Hieko Oberman, among others, does not hold true the same position as Andrew Gow.
Strictly speaking, 'anti-Semitism' did not exist prior the race theory of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, there are events, attitude, or statements which long before the rise of the concept come very close to the reality of anti-Semitism.[21]
Perhaps the rise of anti-Semitism is purely a matter of semantics. Perhaps the invention and investment of new us-and-them labels simply grew out of existing, less prevalent forms.
The concept of race, isolated from the concrete characteristics of the nation, the tribe or the community, did not exist before 19th century Europe invented it. And the traditional concept that was closest to it (was) the idea of the blood community implied by the assertion of a common tribal origin.[22]
Furthermore, there were, and perhaps always have been, us-and-them demarcations based on language, custom and religion. Whether or not the ancients equated one or more of these demarcations to so-called racial characteristics demands further investigation.
Anti-Judaism is no longer in vogue, but it still lingers. It took the nightmare of the Holocaust and the work of theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer to de-popularize this ideology. Consequently, the supposed supremacy of the Christian religion was also thrown into question. Religion, in the minds of Western citizens, has become passe, a kind of curiosity of the past. Race, however, is still a hot topic, and anti-Semitism still lurks in the shadows of the Western psyche. Surely humankind is able to irradicate racism, the irrational form of hate that it is. Will we give it up and replace it with another form of hate under a different label? Perhaps I'm an optimist to believe that we can give it up, but a pessimist to believe we will replace it because hate, like identity, is a constant human attribute.
End
1 John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus, (HarperSanFrancisco (sic): New York, 1995), p 36.
2 Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide-The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, (The Seabury Press: New York, 1974), p 65.
3 John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, p 36.
4 Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, p 65.
5 Alan M. Dershowitz, Contrary to Popular Opinion, (Pharos Books, New York, 1992), p 320.
6 W. Gunther Plaut, The Rise of Reform Judaism, (World Union for Progressive Judaism, Ltd.: New York, 1963), p xiii.
7 Ibid., p xiv.
8 These authors include Rosemary Ruether, Ilan Halevi and Alan T. Davies. Please see the bibliography for the details of their respective works.
9 Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews-Ancient and Modern, (Zed Books Ltd.: London and New Jersey, 1987), p 130.
10 Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, p 218.
11 Ibid., p 218.
12 Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews, p 131.
13 Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, p 221.
14 Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews, p 132.
15 Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, p 221.
16 Ibid., p 222.
17 Ibid., p 220.
18 Ibid., p 224.
19 Ibid., p 224.
20 Andrew Colin Gow, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600, (E. J. Brill: New York, 1995), p 2.
21 Heiko A. Oberman, The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation, (Fortress Press: Philadelphia, 1984), p xi.
22 Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews, p 21.
Bibliography:
Crossan, John Dominic. Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus, (HarperSanFrancisco (sic): New York, 1995).
Ruether, Rosemary. Faith and Fratricide-The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, (The Seabury Press: New York, 1974).
Dershowitz, Alan M. Contrary to Popular Opinion, (Pharos Books: New York, 1992), page 320.
Plaut, W. Gunther. The Rise of Reform Judaism, (World Union for Progressive Judaism, Ltd.: New York, 1963).
Halevi, Ilan. A History of the Jews-Ancient and Modern, (Zed Books Ltd.: London and New Jersey, 1987).
Gow, Andrew Colin. The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600, (E. J. Brill: New York, 1995).
Oberman, Heiko A. The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation, (Fortress Press: Philadelphia, 1984).