ANTISEMITISM: The Oldest Hatred – John Mann

This is basically a collection of pious exhortations. All from men, with one female exception. The cover is misleading as Mann didn’t write this. He merely edited it.

The book is published under the auspices of the ‘All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism’

Throughout Christian history the hatred and prejudice towards the Jewish people have often been blamed on the betrayal and crucifixion of Christ, but ethnic Jewish oppression began long before.

It is beyond dispute that antisemitism in our societies is on the increase. Following the Israeli bombing of Gaza, antisemitic feeling has grown significantly – though a prominent group of French Orthodox Jews in Paris recently demonstrated with placards saying ‘Israeli action in Gaza is not the action of the Jewish people`. Yet still Jewish graves are desecrated and Synagogues daubed with swastikas.

However, the term ‘antisemitism` was only conceived in the late nineteenth century.

 

The three sections focus on “Survival”, “Intersectionality” (we’re all in this together, the solidarity of all oppressed groups)  and “Zionism”.

There are contributions from George Washington, and film actors Charlie Chaplin and Michael Douglas.

The EU has done a lot for peace and justice and it is a tragedy with we are leaving it.

Quotations:

In 1941, when The Great Dictator was released, Chaplin had been one of the most famous men in the world for almost three decades. The Great Dictator was Chaplin’s first significantly political work as well as being his first ‘talkie’ (he had continued to make silent films long after talkies became the established form of cinema in the 1930s).

Chaplin plays the joint roles of a Jewish Barber and Adenoid Hynkel, a dictator explicitly based on Hitler. Following repeated persecution, internment and escape dressed as a soldier, the barber is eventually mistaken for Hynkel and taken to a rally to give a speech. Introduced by his number two, Garbitsch (a parody of Goebbels), who argues against free speech and for the subjugation of Jews, the barber gives his response, announcing a democracy and calling for our humanity to free us all.

The film was released to great acclaim, though arguments have been made that its overt politicization marked the beginning of the end for Chaplin’s popularity. Chaplin himself said in his 1964 autobiography that he would never have made the film had he known the true monstrosity of the Nazis: Had I known of the actual horrors of the concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.

Speech from The Great Dictator

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost …

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish …

Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you ­enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men ­machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: ‘the Kingdom of God is within man – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you!

You, the people, have the power – the power to create happiness! You, the people, ha life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful pleasure.

Then – in the name of democracy – let us unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent chance to work – that will give youth a future the promise of these things, brutes have risen ti do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the national barriers – to do away with greed, with us fight for a world of reason, a world where lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! In the name of democracy let us all  unite!

Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod (which from 1932 to 1990 was renamed Gorky in his honour). After his father died when Gorky was five and his mother remarried, the boy was brought up by his grandmother, but ran away aged twelve. He moved to a small village and became a baker whilst receiving an education from the revolutionary group Land and Liberty. It was during this period that Gorky became a Marxist and his later political views began to take shape.

It is useless for Americans to deceive themselves into thinking that the Russian Jewish question is either unimportant or incomprehensible from the point of view of our progress and democracy. Do we not have our Negro and Asiatic problems? Do not the English have their Irish and Indian questions?’ In drawing these comparisons, he gave early birth to unity of understanding in the twentieth-century struggles of all oppressed peoples.

`The Jews are human beings, just like others, and, like all human beings, the Jews must be free.

A man who meets all the duties of a citizen, thereby deserves to be given all the rights of citizenship.

`Every human being has an inalienable right to apply his energy in all the branches of industry and all the departments of culture, and the broader the scope of his personal and social activities, the more does his country gain in power and beauty:

I am inclined to think that anti-Semitism is indisputable, just as leprosy and syphilis.are, and that the world will be cured of this shameful disease only by culture, which sets us free, slowly but surely, from ailments and vices.

The Jews – mankind’s old, strong leaven – have always exalted its spirit, bringing into the world restless, noble ideas, goading men to embark on a search for finer values.

All men are equal; the soil is no one’s, it is God’s; man has the right and the power to resist his fate, and we may stand up even against God ­all this is written in the Jewish Bible, one of the world’s best books. And the commandment of love for one’s neighbour is also an ancient Jewish commandment, just as are all the rest, “Thou shalt not kill’ among them.

In 1885 the German-Jewish Union in Germany published The Principles of the Jewish Moral Doctrine. Here is one of these principles: `Judaism teaches: “Love thy neighbour as thyself” and announces this commandment of love for all mankind to be the fundamental principle of Jewish religion. It therefore forbids all kinds of hostility, envy, ill-will and unkindly treatment of any one, without distinction of race, nationality and religion

The true Shekinah – is man,’ says a Jewish text. `Ibis thought I dearly love, this I consider the highest wisdom, for I am convinced of this: that until we learn to admire man as the most beautiful and marvellous phenomenon on our planet, until then we shall not be set free from the  abomination and lies that saturate our lives.

this tract, Bernatzky dismisses human rights and ethical arguments, instead focusing only on the economic case for Jewish equality in Russia. He not only sets out the conditions under which Russian Jews were living in the early part of the twentieth century – the laws of the country effectively limiting their entry into many forms of Russian society: ‘limitations of residence … forcing … a peculiar character of the Jewish occupations’ ­but also sets out an economic case for equal rights of different racial groups in Russian society. Bernatzky’s argument, though limited, is ground­breaking in the sense that much of this economic case set out a century ago forms the basis of Western economic deliberations on subjects such as multiculturalism and, critically, immigration today.

Bernatzky was acutely aware that by stifling the role that Jews played in Russian society, the economic life of his country was put at risk. Today, proponents of flexible immigration policies across the Western world make a similar argument – that immigration can only enhance a nation’s prosperity and that cultural and racial factors must not be allowed to stand in the way.

It is from this standpoint of economic interests that we shall approach the painful Jewish question. The time is long sincepast when it was possible to say with the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna: ‘From Christ’s enemies I desire no profit:3 It is precisely in this profit that both the Exchequer and the higher classes, and – what is most important – the people at large, are greatly interested. The basic productive force of a country is the living work of its population. The body politic of Russia contains about 6 million gifted and undoubtedly industrious Jews.

Let us turn to those characteristic social and economic conditions under which the Jews exist in our country. Nearly all of them, upward of 5 million, live within the Pale of Settlement, which comprises fifteen governments and Poland, and only 6 per cent live outside of this territory. Within the Pale, Jews are not allowed to buy or take on lease real estate outside the towns and townlets, which circumstance makes it impossible for them to become farmers. This, in connection with the limitation of residence, has naturally resulted in a peculiar character of Jewish occupations. It is characteristic of the part the Jews play in Russia’s economic life that nearly 73.08 per cent of them are forced to seek employment in the country’s commerce and industry. Of the entire Jewish population throughout the Empire, only 2.4 per cent are engaged in agriculture, 4.7 per cent in liberal professions, 11.5 per cent in personal service (domestic service, etc.); the rest, minus the persons without any definite employment, are forced to seek means of livelihood in the field of commerce (31 per cent), industry (36.3 per cent), and transport (3 per cent). The same goes for the artificial congestion of the Jews in the cities: only 18 per cent live in the villages of the Pale of Settlement, while the rest – more than four-fifths – toil in the towns and townlets. Such a one-sided distribution of Jewish labour would not be a negative phenomenon if it were possible to spread it uniformly over the entire country. For, backward as Russia is industrially and commercially, the Jews would easily find a place in the fields of endeavour which suit them best and would greatly benefit the country by furthering the process of its industrialization. Under present circumstances they are crowded in one place and overburden the commerce and the industry of the Pale of Settlement …

The anti-Semite is afraid of discovering that the world is ontrived, for then it would be necessary for him to invent and modify, with the result that man would be found to be the master of his own destinies, burdened with an agonizing and infinite responsibility. Thus he localizes all the evil of the universe in the Jew.

Many people are anti-Semites in the way Cousin Jules was an Anglophobe, without, to be sure, realizing the true implications of their attitude.

We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world – of everything except the Jews.

The Jew only serves him as a pretext; elsewhere his counterpart will-make use of the Negro or the man of yellow skin. The existence of the Jew merely permits the anti-Semite to stifle his anxieties at their inception by persuading himself that his place in the world has been marked out in advance, that it awaits him, and that tradition gives him the right to occupy it. Anti-Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti-Semite is a man who wishes to be pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt – anything except a man.

As parents we all thought that perhaps our sons, our daughters, our children would never again hear a cry of ‘Dirty Jew’ at school or at college, that cry which struck us, which painfully marked us, and which although we had barely reached the age of reason made us fearfully ask our parents what that sinister war cry meant.

We must recognize now, in 1951, that we are still engaged in the struggle and the defence, because Hitler did win the war on that level: he knew very well that through racism he would corrupt the world.

Many Christians have at some time taken up the idea of the ritual crime of the Jews. In the Near East itself, this idea is deeply rooted in popular belief. And yet, in ancient times, it was not the Jews who were the recipients of that monstrous accusation but the first Christians. History is full of many testimonies to this hateful accusation. The facts have been clearly laid out in a recent work which merits careful reading, Verus Israel by Marcel Simon, and in the literature of the Middle Ages we find other accounts. Minucius Felix, author of a dialogue entitled Octavius, at the beginning of the third century, produced the most striking document. Here is what he said about the Christians: The tale told of the initiation of recruits is as horrible as it is notorious. A very young boy, covered in flour so the novice may abuse without suspicion, is placed before the one who is to be initiated in the mysteries. Deceived by this floured mass that makes him think his blows are harmless, the neophyte kills the child by giving him invisible, hidden injuries. 0 sacrilege! They drink the blood of this child avidly; they squabble over his limbs and divide among themselves; they cement their affiance through this victim, through this complicity in the crime which they commit in mutual silence. (Octavius, IX, 6)

On a battlefield, a wounded man asked for a crucifix. The year was 1914. A chaplain went to find one, in the face of machine-gun fire, and was mortally wounded at the very moment he lifted the cross to the lips of the dying soldier. This chaplain was the great Rabbi Bloch of Lyon, of whom a poet wrote that he:

Falls and dies, sublime deist, For a God that is not his own.

Thirty years later, a priest hid tens of Jewish children from the menace of deportation in his monastery near Lyon. He was later deported and would never return from Buchenwald.

Do these two images not prefigure the strongest reconciliation between Christianity and Israel?

With little knowledge of what it meant to be a Jew, I found passionately defending the Jewish people. Now, half a century later, I to defend my son. Anti-Semitism, I’ve seen, is like a disease that dormant, flaring up with the next political trigger.

In my opinion there are three reasons anti-Semitism is appearing now with renewed vigilance.

The first is that historically, it always grows more virulent whenever and wherever the economy is bad. In a time when income disparity is growing, when hundreds of millions of people live in abject poverty, some find Jews to be a convenient scapegoat rather than looking at the real source of their problems.

If we confront anti-Semitism … if we combat it individually and as a society, and use whatever platform we have to denounce it, we can stop the spread of this madness.

A second root cause of anti-Semitism derives from an irrational and misplaced hatred of Israel. Far too many people see Israel as an apartheid , state and blame the people of an entire religion for what, in truth, are internal national-policy decisions. Does anyone really believe that the innocent victims in that kosher shop in Paris and at that bar mitzvah in Denmark had anything to do with Israeli-Palestinian policies or the building of settlements 2,000 miles away?

The third reason is simple demographics. Europe is now home to 25 million to 30 million Muslims, twice the world’s entire Jewish population. Within any religious community that large, there will always be an extremist fringe, people who are radicalized and driven with hatred, while rejecting what all religions need to preach – respect, tolerance and love. We’re now seeing the amplified effects of that small, radicalized element. With the Internet, its virus of hatred can now speed from nation to nation, helping fuel Europe’s new epidemic of anti-Semitism. It is time for each of us to speak up against this hate.

Speaking up is the responsibility of our political leaders. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has made it clear that anti-Semitism violates the morals and spirit of France and that violent anti-Semitic acts are a crime against all French people that must be confronted, combated and stopped. He challenged his nation to tell the world: without its Jews, France would no longer be France.

Intersectionality is the study of how groups exposed to different kinds of oppression relate to one another and frequently overlap. The theory holds that the classical conceptualizations of oppression within *ety, such as racism, sexism, homophobia and belief-based bigotry, including nationalism, do not act independently of one another; instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the ‘intersection of multiple forms of discrimination.

Today, Muslims need to educate their clerics and inform them that the days of caliphates and kingdoms are long gone. Never again will I any Jew be willing to live as Vhimmis’ under Muslim protection. In medieval times, this arrangement may have worked and was much more progressive than the harsh treatment the Jews received in Christendom, but the world has evolved into a place where neither race nor religion, gender nor sexual orientation, can be invoked to legislate a hierarchy of citizenship rights, be it in Saudi Arabia today or South Africa under apartheid.

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