Guest Blog: Anti-Semitism, history and denial

According to one respondent to my recent article, Understanding the Holocaust: Shoah in Historical Perspective, Jews should "seek the causes (for anti-Semitism) in our own acts." Self-blame is not an uncommon response to tragedy. Rape victims come immediately to mind. But what motivates the idea that we Jews, by our own actions, invite anti-Semitism and are somehow responsible for the Holocaust?

Several years ago, a prominent Israeli rabbi attributed the massacre of a busload of children by terrorists as divine punishment for the "sins of Israelis." As if god targets children, using terrorists to carry out his will. In the wake of the Shoah, seeking to somehow explain the inexplicable, some orthodox Diaspora leaders suggested that the Holocaust was god's punishment for the sins of our people in Europe. But as in the Israeli bus massacre, most of the Jews who fell victim to the European slaughter, during and for centuries before the Shoah, were mostly the pious and the poor, those least likely to be halachic "transgressors." And was the hand of god also present in the elimination of eastern Europe's famed Hassidic centers? The murder of orthodox communities dedicated to a life of learning and halachic tradition?

Jews have experienced anti-Judaism during most of our Diaspora existence, and at great cost in life. As I observed in my earlier post, one prominent Holocaust research center suggests that, had Jewry not been subject to two millennia of European persecution our numbers today would equal that of the entire British Isles!

Since we had never before experienced anything on the scale of Shoah, though, we could not have anticipated, taken evasive or direct action to the emerging danger. Yes, there were those few, Jabotinsky and Abba Kovner, for example, who by intuition born of their Zionist background were more sensitive and alert to the unfolding events. But Martin Buber was more typical of general Jewish understanding and response: anti-Semitism was a pendulum that was now at its extreme. Germany would, he believed, sooner or later pass through that terrible period and life would return to normal for the Jews. Buber urged German Jewry to remain in place, to wait out the storm.

Sixty years later the Shoah is part of our Diaspora experience. We cannot now pretend that such a thing as a government-organized effort to murder each and every Jew alive, including non-Jews defined as "Jewish" due to a single Jewish grandparent (1930's German legal definition), is impossible, unthinkable. It is an established fact. We ignore at peril to self and our future generations that the Holocaust is the latest, but not the last development in a process begun two thousand years ago. As that prehistory and cultural experience served as precedent for state-organized murder (Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremburg referred to Luther's writings as inspiration and justification), so will the nearly successful Final Solution to the Jewish problem serve in the future. The road to the Shoah may have taken some twists and turns, but overall was continuous and straight.

So the Shoah is neither unique in history, nor a mystery beyond human comprehension. It did and, if history serves, will again befall us, for the Nazi solution was not final. The Holocaust was not an invention of the twentieth century as so many of our historians would have us believe, an event comparable to other such 20th century genocides. It was only the most recent in a long and continuing process. The only real contribution of the twentieth century was technological: those computers IBM provided to Hitler, the software IBM developed to identify and locate each and every Jew for arrest and murder; Henry Ford's assembly line adapted to the problem of mass production and disposal of human corpses.

While each of us, every Jewish adult alive today, may choose not to study the evolution of anti-Semitism and the Shoah, still we cannot avoid awareness of it as a real and recent event. Should there be another attempted genocide of the Jewish people, our responsibility will lie not in that we somehow encouraged its recurrence, but rather in that we chose to ignore its precedent. Our guilt will lie in denial; that our particular chosen homeland is "exceptional," that such a thing cannot happen here.

Denial was the response of our German community, with far more justification. Had not Jews settled the Danube one hundred years before the Common Era? Had not a Jew been prime minister in the Weimar Government in the years before the election of Adolph Hitler? Had not a Jew authored the Weimar constitution which was the very foundation of Weimar German democracy? Where else, or since, had our people resided longer, achieved such prominence, contributed to and been more accepted and assimilated?

For we who lived an ocean away from Europe's death camps, anti-Semitism was little different in popularity and intensity. Nativism, anti-Semitism and isolationism kept the United States neutral towards Germany's persecution of their Jews, leaning as much to join Hitler in the crusade against the "godless" Soviet Union as to ally with America's traditional ally England against the German threat. Even the Nazi program of racial hygiene which inspired the Holocaust was modeled after the American "science" of eugenics - America's effort to create its own white, Nordic master race.

Had Henry Ford or Charles Lindberg, populist anti-Semites and isolationists, decided to accept the Republican Party nomination and oppose Roosevelt for the presidency, and won, a real possibility before Pearl Harbor, then it takes little imagination to appreciate the likely outcome for New World Jewry also. Even under the Roosevelt administration, the US built concentration camps to imprison its Japanese-American citizens.

As our German experience proves, anti-Semitism does not require a religious base. Western society is anti-Jewish by history and tradition. This is a fact we cannot, by our actions, change. The starting point for eliminating anti-Semitism would be for Christianity - in all its forms - to delete those anti-Jewish references from its gospels. But that is unlikely to happen since to do so would be to throw into question the divine inspiration of the texts as the true word of God. And where would that leave Christianity?

And where does that leave the Jewish people?