Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best manga ereader txt) 📗

Anti-Semitism arises because people are irritated by their own consciences. Jews are symbolically their superego, and no one likes to be ridden so hard by his superego. Ethical conduct is insisted upon by Judaism, relentlessly, immediately, hauntingly. People who dislike this insistence, along with the self-discipline and acts of charity implied, are likely to justify their rejection by discrediting the whole race that produced such high ethical ideals.71

To think of Judaism as simply a religious choice like Methodism or Unitarianism is to deny the historic meaning of a people. The Jew is the stranger, the disbeliever, the alien—not at your border but in your streets and in your presence. It is not the “high ethical ideals” that offend the antisemites, it is the Jew’s ubiquity. Jews are everywhere, everywhere a minority (Israel excepted), and everywhere identifiable. Their identity is marked not just by their beliefs, but by their very behavior and the practices that sustained those beliefs over the ages—circumcision, dietary laws, Sabbath celebrations, and special historic and religious holidays. These practices—embraced by them as a proud cultural heritage—confront the common Christian culture and its most profound religious beliefs. Jews reject the figure of Christ and deny the revealed truth of the New Testament. For the Jew there is no new testament. The very term is anathema to Orthodox Jews, who see in it a rejection of the Scriptures, the very word of God. The name “Old Testament” was indeed coined by Christians and many Jews are careful not to use that term.

In most cultures this denial has been perceived as a stubborn arrogance; a rejection of the customs of the host country; and, particularly offensive, a rejection of the new religion. To some devout Christians, not only do the Jews reject Christ, but they also killed him. And in much of the Christian world, antisemitism has had strong support—even encouragement—from the moral authorities of the Church. The powerful rationalizing effect of such moral authority—exactly like the rationalizing effect of a delusion—gives legitimacy to bigotry. Moreover, it lends passion to bigotry, converting it into hatred. The Nazis had generations of cultural and religious hatred of Jews to draw on when they launched their genocidal assault.

Nazi Germany

The Nazis did not arbitrarily select the Jews rather than Sunni Muslims or the Zen Buddhists. The Nazis emerged from a European and Christian culture and were influenced by their location and historic traditions. Antisemitism was evident in Europe from the beginnings of the Diaspora in the sixth century B.C. Even the greatest of the classical writers—Cicero, Juvenal, Ovid, Pliny, Seneca, and Tacitus—all managed to embroider their works with antisemitic observations. But antisemitism never had the central role in the classical period that it would gain with the rise of Christianity.

Greek and Roman culture had the same contempt for early Christians—perhaps more—that it had for the Jews. It was only with the ascendance of Christianity that the Jews were perceived as the primal enemy within, the living symbols of the rejection of the Christ. The antisemitism built into Church writings and Church attitudes accompanied the spread of Christianity throughout Europe. The Nazis, despite their own rejection of Christianity, would exploit the traditional Christian antisemitic stereotypes dormant in most of the cultures of Europe.

The Nazis found rationalizing arguments for their assault on the Jews in the tradition of antisemitism laced throughout the theology of the New Testament and the writings of the Christian churches in Europe. Robert S. Wistrich, a distinguished scholar of antisemitism, pointed out the easy pathways and respectable rationalizations that were readily available to Nazi propagandists in the traditions of the Christian religion.

He noted that there was the rich strain of antisemitism central to the Gospels, themselves, where the Jews are depicted as “as a pariah people, as the murderers of Christ . . . in league with Satan himself.” And the Nazis drew on teachings of the Church Fathers, who persistently referred to Jews as slanderers, blasphemers, an accursed people. Even the most saintly of Christian fathers—Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and Cyril—saved “a cold spot in their hearts” for the Jews. Luther, fully embracing the traditional antisemitism of the Catholic church he was rejecting, would offer even further religious justifications for demonizing the Jews.

Wistrich said, “The Nazi hierarchy was laden with paranoid Jew haters. The Nazis exploited and secularized familiar religious images of the Jew as Host desecrators, demons, sorcerers, well poisoners, and ritual murderers—as usurers, infidels, and insatiable conspirators seeking the destruction of Christian society.”72

Demonizing the Jews—an essential ingredient of hatred toward them—came naturally to the Nazi leaders. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and many others in the Nazi leadership truly believed in the demonic and vile Jew. They did not cynically invent a myth for the masses. They offered the Volk what was already in their hearts. The secular religion called Nazism, in its selection of an enemy and victim, successfully drew on the centuries of anti-semitism endemic in Christian theology and teaching.

In a religious community, the image of the Jews as the devil incarnate, the anti-Christ, formed an effective means of demonizing them. One could attack the Jews as the forces of evil and label their persecution a noble pursuit and a religious obligation. But in a perverse way, this image of the Jews enhances them. The devil is admittedly the force of evil, but he is a force. He is superhuman. In Nazi philosophy, the role of the superhuman is reserved for the Aryan hero. The Jew must be a creature less than human.

The Germans went beyond demonizing in their particularly virulent form of antisemitism. The Jews were not just evil people. They were not people. They were subhuman. They were parasites.

The rules of behavior are changed when one moves from dealing with humans, even evil humans, to lesser creatures. To make the Jew into an animal is to remove him from the limits of protection afforded even the vilest of humans. Most countries