She starts out badly by ignoring the pre-Christian existence of antisemitism from such figures as Antiochus Epiphanes and Tacitius and the existence of some of the most virulent features of modern antisemitism - the blood libel was an invention of classical, pagan Greeks, not Christians. The fact that Tacitus's antisemitism became a part of German antisemitism during the Renaissance as his antisemtic and Germanophilic screeds were published and translated through many, many editions during a time in which books which were bought were certainly read and influential makes that a not insignificant elision from the history of antisemitism.
Of course much of what she said about the Biblical source of antisemitism of a kind is undeniable, though, as she, herself, says, the very same sources identify Jesus Christ, the central figure of Christianity as a Jew, and many of the writers of many of the books of the Second Testament certainly identified as Jews, Paul, the author of James, etc. This means that what she calls the origin of antisemitism is certainly not identified as such without enormous ambiguity. That ambiguity is not her fault, it is contained in the text anymore than the use of those texts by later people who read them selectively for evil purposes is the fault of the writers of the texts. As used in the Second Testament, the word "Jews" clearly means different things at different times and in different contexts.
There is no place in the Second Testament that I know of, not even in the most troubling of the Gospels in this regard, John, which says that Jesus Christ, somehow, stopped being a Jew right up to the time of is execution by Rome and his burial. I would say that chapter 19, where the author talks about the crucifixion and burial of Jesus goes out of his way to show that all of those involved considered Jesus a Jew, even the authorities who called for his death had to have acknowledged that or they would have had no standing to bring him before Pilate demanding his crucifixion. Even the discourse of Acts and the Pauline Epistles (Paul explicitly called himself a Jew, a Pharisee) shows that Peter and James and the rest of the original Christian Church in Jerusalem not only went to the Temple to worship daily, they took for granted the necessity of the Mosaic Law in the life of their new community. It was Paul the Pharisee who, converting Greeks and other non Jews advocated the relaxation of the requirements of conversion to Judaism for members of the new movement, of exempting them from the definitive acts of conversion, circumcision, observance of dietary and other laws. And he considered himself a Jew even as he did that.
So the situation is far more complex and nuanced than even Deborah Lipstadt is willing to admit. I would go so far as to say that most of what is now called "antisemitic" in medieval and later Christianity is a willful suppression of the fact that Jesus, all of his called "apostles" and almost all of his named disciples in the Gospel were Jews who certainly, to a person, believed they were Jews for their entire lives and even as the most distinctive holy day of Christianity was tied to the Passover. I take some of her point seriously, it would be impossible not to, but to call the phenomenon of nominally medieval Christian antisemtism the same thing as the 19th and 20th century phenomenon which gave rise to the word is both anachronistic and dangerously inaccurate.
The word "antisemitism" was not invented by a Jewish writer to describe hatred of Jews, it was a word invented by the anti-religious, anti-Christian atheist Wilhelm Marr to give his hatred of Jews and his identification of them as biologically "other-than-German" linguistic and scientific cachet and, so, respectability in the secular, scientistic milieu of modernism. The ironies of his life - such as the fact that all of his wives had Jewish ancestry - abound as is the fact that, in his telling, Judaism corrupted Germany and Europe exactly through the Christianization of Europe - his called Christians "new-Jews". Clearly, his antisemitism at least by implication, would have to include Christians. He invented the term as the theories of evolution, especially that of Charles Darwin, and the cladistic classification and ranking of human alleged sub-populations was in vogue. "Antisemitism" is a word which, if it were kept true to its origin, is specifically meant as a scientific, biological ideology.
The most basic folly of the current attempt to define "antisemitism" is that it is made to mean whatever the person using the term wants it to mean. Which means it means ever less with each expansion of its us. It is used to mean:
Christians who believe that belief in Christianity is necessary for salvation want to convert Jews so that Jews are "saved" and who are welcomed with open arms by those who want to convert them. That is certainly true historically when even first generation and second generation converts were able to achieve high office in the Catholic Church and even canonization as Saints. The conversion of Jews and Muslims and others accounts for virtually all of the phenomenon of "Christian antisemitism" in so far as theology or even most of the policies of the Christian churches enter into, it is not anti-Jewish in its conception, it is pro-salvation. They want Jews to be "saved" not obliterated as people, not as some inferior or inherently hereditary evil or competing "other" to be destroyed. And lots of, especially, modern Christians do not believe that Jews need to convert to be "saved". To not acknowledge that in 2019 is certainly as wrong and false as it is to pretend away any of the past or present antisemitism mentioned here.
It is used to mean the various political suppression of Jews in Europe in various places at various times of various harshness, requirements that Jews be segregated into ghettos, distinctive clothing or badges, laws restricting property ownership and other forms of economic restrictions. It is used for pogroms and banishings by local and even national governments and, at times, officially owned church-states. All of that is so varied, so varied in stringency and varied in practice and even official approval that it is too complex to go under one label. In so far as the official position of the Catholic Church is concerned, sometimes, under some Popes and bishops, they were complicit with some of the worst of it, under some Popes and some bishops, they acted to protect the rights and lives of Jews, often in direct opposition to local prices and kings who clearly wanted to confiscate the property of the Jews they were dispossessing and dispelling and killing. There are Popes and some Protestants who forbid the spreading of the blood libel myths that European Christianity seems to have inherited from classical times and there were those who were complicit in it. That long history is clearly not all the same thing accurately named by one word.
Then there is the modern, scientific form of hatred of Jews, starting in the "enlightenment" with such heroes of modernism as Voltaire sounding as bad as any medieval or classical Jew-hater, the scientific classification of Jews as "other" as I already pointed out the inventor of the word under discussion and other sciency Jew-haters, many of them who hated Christianity as much as if not more than Judaism, not least because Christianity is saturated with Jewish content with the same God and its central figures are, to a person, Jews.
The most deadly of antisemitism was explicitly anti-Christian in act and sometimes in word, as well, Nazism, Stalinism, etc. It was explicitly an expression of Darwinian natural selection applied to the human species. It wanted to kill all Jews, it killed Jews who had converted to Christianity, it killed Jews who had in previous generations stopped identifying as Jews, it wanted to eradicate all of Jewish thought and belief from human life. As Susannah Heschel has brilliantly pointed out, the nominally Christian churches in Germany which wished to go along with the new, scientific regime, were quite prepared to eviscerate the Second Testament of any content which could be considered "Jewish" and when they did that they got rid of most of the contents of the very book which Deborah Lipstadt says is the origin of antisemitism. Needless to say, most Christians rejected the radical amputation of Christianity from not only its roots but most of its substance, as well. That's one thing that Wilhelm Marr got right, Christianity without Judaism is not Christianity.
I don't know if in her book or in other places Deborah Lipstadt gives a more nuanced study of the topic but from what I've heard and read, I don't suspect she did.
One of the things I distrust about the current movement to try to define the word "antisemitism" is that it is clearly a means of trying to use the word to shield the Israeli government, now under decades of proto-fascistic rule, from the same kinds of criticism that any other such government with such abominable and racist and murderous policies would be fairly open to. That antisemites might use the reaction against Israel to promote their hatred of Jews is certainly a terrible complication to the practice of criticizing the Israeli government, it is also one of the ironies of the establishment of the Israeli state that it has, as Jacobo Timmerman once pointed out, become the motive of some of the worst violence against Jews in the post-WWII period.
There were eminent Jews who warned about the dangerous features of the Israeli political establishment from the time of its founding, many of their warnings have come to pass, including warnings of the potential of those who founded the current ruling establishment to become fascists. It was certain that an Israel which could have been expected to exist only under a state of permanent attack would develop into a nationalistic-militaristic country which was, in fact, fascist and exclusionary in nature. I'm not going to apologize for believing what Isadore Abramowitz, Hannah Arendt, Abraham Brick, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo, Albert Einstein, Herman Eisen, M.D. Hayim Fineman, M. Gallen, M.D., H. H. Harris, Zelig S. Harris, Sidney Hook, Fred Karush, Briuria Kaufman, Irma L. Lindheim, Nachman Majesl, Seymour Melman, Myer D Mendelson, M.D., Harry M. Orlinsky, Samuel Pitlick, Fritz Rohrlich, Louis P. Rocker Ruth Sager,
Itzhak Sankowsky, I. J. Schoenberg, Samuel Schuman, M Znger, Irma Wolpe, and Stefan Wolpe were warning about seventy years ago, now that their predictions have come truer than not. I'm not going to refrain from noting the same criticisms that can be made in Israel by Jewish Israeli critics noting the fascistic features that have arisen in Israel and in the very parties which have ruled it for decades but which are suppressed here with false and frivolous accusations of "antisemitism". I'm not going to tell lies for another country that I'm certainly not going to lie for my own or any other country. Anyone who allows name-calling to keep them from telling the truth has debased themselves, I won't do it.
Note: While I acknowledge that Lipstadt is correct that the issue of "money and Jews: is a part of the anti-Jewish invective but that doesn't change the fact that in the United States, political influence is intrinsically tied to money. The fact is that in American politics the influence of money IS the issue. To acknowledge that AIPAC and other entities that lobby the United States government have used money and the pressure of campaign contributions to candidates opposing their critics in its activity is to acknowledge a fact of life under the corruption that the U. S. Supreme Court has imposed on us. I don't fault them for using money to do what all other groups use money to do, or at least not any more than I do any other group. But I will not pretend they don't because it makes people feel queasy. That it makes people feel queasy is understandable and unfortunate, but that's not my fault, either.
"a member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs."
ReplyDeleteI googled "Semite," that's the first entry that came up. In "Ship of Fools," I think it is (the movie), a German character protests being labeled an "anti-Semite" because he has nothing against Arabs. Always thought that was an interesting point of view, even though it's pointless now to quibble over the term "anti-semite."
How is it applied is another matter. AIPAC is a pro-Israel lobbying group, not a Jewish organization (or at least Jewish in the sense Woody Allen is), so it still strikes me as questionable to complain that pointing out lobbying groups are all about the Benjamins is anti-semitic when applied to a group that lobbies for the nation of Israel. I think I can engage that line of argument without resorting to the "Protocol of the Elders of Zion." There are distinguishing features of analysis of the effect of Israel on American foreign policy that don't involve stereotypes and racism.
It's especially telling when depictions of Yahweh in popular culture paint the God of Abraham as a violent, blood-thirsty tyrant, but the God of Jesus was a hippie flower-child. "Jew" has, there, more to do with a cultural/racial identification than with religion, which is odd, to me. I can insult their religious beliefs and central religious figure without insulting Jews? How does that work, especially since such insult is the basis of most Christian-founded anti-semitism (which is a thing, but not the only thing.)?
Of course anti-Semitism arising from Xianity is largely religiously based. Jews as "Christ killers" is a common trope. Three of the four gospels were probably written for Jewish communities; all portray the Pharisees or the Jewish priestly authorities as responsible for what was an entirely Roman form of execution, one reserved for those who challenged Roman political authority. But that portrayal is to keep Roman authorities from doing to them what they did to Jesus of Nazareth; still, it gives rise to anti-semitism. I remember as a child being taught that Jews kept Mosaic law because they rejected the liberation from the law that Jesus the Messiah brought, even as Peter argued for the Law, and Jesus says in Matthew he comes to fulfill the Law. We weren't taught that argument was among historical Jewish sects (the right interpretation), but that it was between Jews and Christians. And ironically, the strongest source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Christianity is located in the Gospel of John, although it shouldn't be. It's an historic mis-reading of that Gospel that creates the anti-Jewish tropes that plague Christianity to this day; but it is a plague that Xianity can rectify, as much of it has done (there's always an outlier).
Ironically, the Jews we all know now are largely spiritual descendants of the Pharisees; and "Jew" is derived from the Roman designation, "Judea." Jews are people from Judea, just as Jesus of Nazareth was a "Nazarene."
Some of the anti-semitism of Xianity also stems from Church Fathers (Augustine, etc.) explaining Xianity in terms of Greek thought, because they were trained in Greek philosophy and that was the way "reasonable" people understood the world (and the gods). I mention that because of your comments on Greek anti-semitism, or rather anti-jewish, thought. Interestingly there is a lively debate still going on in some circles about the distinctions between Hellenistic thought (foundational to Western culture) and Hebraic thought (also foundational, but usually swamped by, or interpreted through, Hellenistic thought). Just as Christianity without Judaism is not Xianity, we are coming to understand that Western thought without Hebraism is not Western thought.
I think the people who are trying to impose a definition of "antisemitism" on the world would do a lot better to come up with terms that distinguish the various things that that word is used for because its use is a total mess that, too often, is used to shield the government of Israel from criticism. I'd heard the phrase "It's about the Benjamins" in contexts that had nothing to do with Israel or anything remotely Jewish, I assumed it meant Benjamin Franklin as on the $100 bill. That could be said of any political pressure group in the United States because of the corruption of our politics by money, that's a simple fact of life. Ilhan Omar could have said it in any way and it would have been used as an excuse to claim a perfectly accurate statement about political pressure was an expression of "antisemitism" I think the word has come be too much of an opportunity to suppress the truth about the corruption of our politics. It's losing its force which may be tragic, in the end, though I think, given its provenance, its use was always problematic.
ReplyDeleteIt was antisemitic largely because a Muslim woman said something unapproving about AIPAC.
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