Note: The "Past" footnotes are a work in progress.
If you know of a source that would be useful to other readers, consider passing
it along to me at reachpast@gmail.com.
The wide sweep of topics and time periods touched on in The Past Didn't Go
Anywhere make it difficult to cite comprehensively, without the resources
that are available in a scholarly institution. But I hope these notes will be
helpful, and I will do my best to keep adding information as I find it to
sections
-
where a historical fact is not widespread common knowledge
-
where I know of resources of use to readers who want to learn more
-
where immediate clarification seemed valuable
-
where I receive helpful comments from readers
In general, I will avoid citing
from Wikipedia, due to its frequent changes and partial reliability. Wikipedia
citations are included here when a quick sampling from it offers good summary
of arguments I've seen in more in-depth sources, or occasionally when they are
more articulate than other sources.
Apologies to fellow researchers
that sources are not currently cited in a standard, uniform format.
Dedicated to Dr. Oscar
Klier...
In 1989, Oscar Klier founded a
path-breaking university in the
Rather than endanger the university
itself, Klier submitted to pressures and resigned, and his former opponents
succeeded in gaining the reigns of the Universidad de Congreso. In an act of
self-satisfied power, they chose Hitler's Mein Kampf to
be the first book to be promoted using the virtual library Klier had helped to
create for the school.
Klier attempted to pursue
the case through legal channels, but encountered systematic silencing and
refusal to investigate, including within the Jewish community's official
defense organizations. He continues to seek support for an investigation into
the case.
In coming to know a variety of
Argentine Jewish community members and lay leaders, I found a view of contempt
for the organizations invested with the role of defending the Jewish community,
such as the DAIA, to be common. Many Jews I spoke to felt them to be partners
to the antisemitic power structure in Argentina's governing circles; a Jewish
"leadership" which sells out, rather than coming to the defense of, Jews
who are targeted. For more on Klier's case, read "An Open Letter to the
Authorities of AMIA," [in Spanish],
and Cherie Brown... Brown directs the National Coalition Building
Institute [www.ncbi.org] and has led the
pro-Israel peace organization Brit Tzedek v'Shalom [http://www.btvshalom.org]. Many activists I
interviewed came into contact with her theories on anti-Jewish oppression
through the Re-Evaluation Counseling community.
PAGE 1 - TWO
JEWS, A CRUMBLING EMPIRE, AND A STRUGGLING RESISTANCE MOVEMENT WALK INTO A
BAR...
PHOTO: Sidewalk stencil reads "Jews
- the new Nazis;" photographed in
A note on spelling: I use the spelling "antisemitism" to the
traditional “anti-Semitism,” following Prager and Telushkin (1983),
Emil Fackenheim and others who point out that the hyphenated term falsely
infers opposition to a movement of “Semitism”.
PAGE 2 -
ANTISEMITISM IS STILL A WORLD PROBLEM
Compiled coverage at http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/012505_Duma.shtml
Elsewhere in the former Soviet
region, Ukraine's Conservative party asked President Yuschenko to open criminal
proceedings against Chasidic "Judeo-Nazi" rabbis for teaching from a
text described as racist in Jewish schools. The party was suported by MAUP, the
largest private university in the
and here: http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=16093&intcategoryid=2
Malaysia, October 2003: Addressing the world’s
Muslim leaders, prime minister Mahathir Mohamad declared... See CNN's coverage at http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/10/16/oic.mahathir/
See full text of Mohamad's speech at http://www.adl.org/Anti_semitism/malaysian.asp
...demonstrators in a
government-supported protest proclaimed the Zionists had pushed
See Hamshahri's rules of entry, http://pinteleyid.com/bavayz/hamshahri.html
In a conflict where Jews
played no part, it was Jews who were fair game. In the wake of the riots against the Danish cartoons,
denying, or "questioning" the Holocaust has become a standard way
that critics of Europe's racism & Islamophobia propose to measure freedom
of speech and fairness. The argument becomes, if you're really not prejudiced
against Muslims, you'll be willing to question the Holocaust. The
highest-ranking leader I've seen employ this tactic is Pakistani President
General Pervez Musharraf. See BBC interview at http://212.58.226.50/1/low/world/south_asia/4761338.stm
...assumed, because he was
Jewish, he would be rich. Halimi's family - who couldn't afford to send him to
college, let alone pay the ransom demanded - followed police instructions to
remain passive, and were furious when he died and French police and media
resisted labeling it an act of antisemitism. See Int'l Herald Tribune coverage, http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/05/news/killing.php
Residents from throughout the
building joined in... See http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008006&ojrss=wsj
(Also, "“It was an open secret in the neighborhood that a Jew
was being held and tortured, and nobody called the police anonymously, not one
person," says Halimi's mother in an interesting interview where she
emphasizes, "The problem is not with Muslims. ...I grew up with Muslims;
the problem is with France." http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/20060322MotherofmurderedF.html )
Halimi's mother warned French police
of several recent kidnapping attempts on local Jews... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/european_football/article733433.ece
(The woman acted as a lure said she'd been instructed to target Jews) http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,,1715029,00.html
...the orders to collect ransom from
synagogues... See http://ejpress.org/article/news/france/5916
After Halimi's murder the government
resisted acknowledging it as an antisemitic killing. Both police and higher levels of government attempted
to evade recognition of the anti-Jewish element of the crime. The public
prosecutor declared early on that http://ejpress.org/article/news/france/5916
See "Halimi's mother blames police," http://ejpress.org/article/6135 and
"The Murder of Ilan Halimi," http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008006&ojrss=wsj
See also:
"
Halimi's murder was incorrectly
hailed as the first antisemitic murder of a Jew in
PAGE
3 - ANTISEMITISM IS
STILL A WORLD PROBLEM (cont'd.)
After
Halimi's murder the government resisted acknowledging it as an antisemitic
killing. See
previous page's footnotes.
Visibly recognizeable Jews were most vulnerable, with frequent attacks
on rabbis near synagogues. People who are easily identifiable as Jewish are the ones most
vulnerable to physical attack - noticeable Orthodox Jews like David
Rosensweig, killed in Canada [http://www.rickross.com/reference/skinheads/skinheads19.html]
Or the 33-yo leader of Uzbekistan's Jewish community who was murdered while
leaving his synagogue in February. Avraham Yagudayev Hacohen was fatally
beaten, no valuables stolen from him. [http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395509030&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull]
Or the
Within such attacks, routine beatings
and street intimidations of Jews (like the ones discussed here in a 2001 ADL
report on
When
yeshiva student Mordechai Molozhenov... See http://web.amnesty.org/report2006/ukr-summary-eng
Thirty rabbis begged for
action, saying, "Calls to violence against Judaism and Jews... See http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=619614
...the country’s
only major terror attacks have targeted Jewish sites... The other major terrorist attack in the country's
history occurred in 1992 at the Israeli Embassy, which also housed a Jewish
community center, including a childrens' daycare center, etc.). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorism_in_Argentina
...the bombing of the country's central Jewish community center in
1994... See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_Bombing
In July, the president
admitted that officials had for ten years been actively destroying evidence... See “Diez años estuvieron destruyendo”
("For ten years they were destroying"), in Pagina 12 newspaper
(in Spanish), http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-53873-2005-07-19.html
...eleven years earlier, the military
dictatorship that killed 30,000 people disproportionately targeted Jews and
reserved special torture for Jewish prisoners. Evidence that continued to come out through the 1990s
revealed that during the dictatorship, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, "at
least two international Jewish organisations requested support from the
governments of
From www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Terrorism/Argentina_STATUS.html comes this illustration: "Despite the fact that Jews constitute only one
percent of the population of
To understand the level of
antisemitic ideology and fantasy at the highest levels of the Argentine
governement during the dictatorship, the must-read memoir is Prisoner
Without a Name, Cell Without a Number [Original: Preso sin nombre,
celda sin numero] the autobiography of publisher Jacobo Timerman, who was
imprisoned and tortured partly for speaking out about the dictatorship, and
partly for being a Jew. Original publication 1981; 2002 English edition from
The dictatorship was
rubber-stamped by
Even in the
See more on Christian Zionism at TheocracyWatch: http://www.theocracywatch.org/christian_zionism.htm
See also:
Good discussion
at Talk2Action: http://www.talk2action.org/story/2005/12/1/181232/117
"Jews and the Christian right: Is the honeymoon over?" by Michelle
Goldberg, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/11/29/foxman/index_np.html
...the hit film that
restaged the public “Passion plays”... I'm speaking, of course, of Mel Gibson's The
Passion of the Christ. Mel
Gibson's denials of antisemitic beliefs behind his movie frustrated Jews
deeply, who frequently couldn't get Christians - usually ignorant of the
Passion plays' history, the historical circumstances of Jesus' death, and the
brutal consequences deicide charges have had for Jews for centuries since then
- to see our critiques of the movie as more than complaining, despite Gibson's
known personal defense of his high-profile, Holocaust-denying father. When
Gibson was arrested and blurted out routine world-control attacks on Jews, it
offered little consolation.
..."Passion
plays" which sparked annual Easter massacres of Jews in medieval
Suggested Reading:
"Loosely based on a true story," by
John Dominic Crossan, Tikkun (March/April 2004); available for a $10 year-long
archive membership at http://tikkun.org/archive/backissues/xtik0403/politics/040312a.html/view?searchterm=jesus%20passion or see www.pinteleyid.com/myths.html
Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen,
by Jeremy Cohen (Oxford University Press, 2007) http://www.amazon.com/Christ-Killers-Passion-Bible-Screen/dp/0195178416
See also:
Katha Pollitt's
essay on The Passion in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040329/pollitt
FAQ on the ADL's response to
"The Passion": http://www.adl.org/Interfaith/gibson_qa.asp
Background on Passion Plays http://www.flholocaustmuseum.org/history_wing/antisemitism/arts/passion_plays.cfm
"Why Some Jews Fear 'The Passion,'" by Colin Hansen, http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter/2004/feb20.html
...several other oppressed groups are
in more imminent danger as we speak. I'll speak of the
PAGE 4 - HOW
COULD JEWS BE OPPRESSED?
Jews are isolated... While the clearest example of this
is the ghettos that began in
In hopes of gaining
safety, Jews are pressured to cooperate with rulers, to silence themselves and
to not rise up against the powerful, for fear of greater targeting. Thanks to Penny Rosenwasser and
Cherie Brown for urging me not to leave out the double nature of Jewish
vulnerability: fear and seduction.
...an idea that got
institutionalized [by] Roman imperialism... The
The Romans, of course, were able to use
a pre-existing myth of "the Jews'" culpability for Jesus' death,
which came from developing Christian theology. Although early Christians had
been one of several Jewish factions involved in intra-communal conflict, by a
few generations after the crucifixion they had grown separate from the Jewish
community, and blaming "the Jews" had become part of the Gospels then
being codified. (An excellent resource that details this change is the chart in
John Dominic Crossan's "Loosely Based on a True Story," above.)
In this last sense, the blame-the-Jews
version of the crucifixion is also a proto-example of the other classic dynamic
of anti-Jewish oppression: how oppressed groups come to put their energy into
targeting Jews instead of confronting the ruling systems at the root of both
groups' suffering. It seems to me logical that the early
Christians would blame "the Jews," instead of the Empire itself, for
Jesus' death: after all, it was dangerous to badmouth the rulers, and as one
target of the Empire's repression, Christians knew it. It was much easier, I
presume, to blame another group being targeted by imperial repression.
Eventually, once the
Antisemitism as we know
it, with its images of special, evil Jewish power, began as a Christian,
European phenomenon... For the history of the foundations of anti-Jewish
oppression in the Church, see Constantine's
Sword: The Church and the Jews - A History, by James Carroll (Mariner Books, 2001). See
it at Google Books
This didn't mean that
non-Christian cultures couldn't oppress Jews, but that where it
appeared in those cultures it didn't initially come out of an ideology that
imputed the source of evil in the world to Jews, as Christian lore about the
crucifixion had come to do. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Bernard
Lewis distinguishes between "normal" prejudice against and
"normal" persecution of different nations or beliefs on the one hand,
and "antisemitism" on the other hand.[68] Lewis confines his definition of antisemitism to "the special and peculiar
hatred of the Jews, which derives its unique power from the historical
relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and the role assigned by
Christians to the Jews in their writings and beliefs".[69] As M. Shahid Alam and others would argue, Lewis can
scarcely be considered to be motivated by bias towards Islam. [See Alam's piece
in Al Ahram, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/616/op13.htm]
...though Jews faced
mistreatment in Muslim lands, it was a more generic 2nd-class citizenship
applied to all non-Muslims.The phenomenon of dhimma, a protected but inferior status, was hardly
utopic for Jews or other religious minorities, but it was quite different from
persecution experienced by Jews under Christian rule. As one Wikipedia writer
puts it, "[I]n general, the Muslim attitude toward dhimmis was
one of contempt instead of hate, fear, or envy, and was rarely expressed in
ethnic or racial terms." [19] See
discussion of dhimma and dhimmis, along with some sources, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhimma (viewed
...with European
colonization and inroads made by the Nazis... On colonization, as Wikipedia puts
it: "According to Mark Cohen in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies,
most scholars conclude that Arab anti-Semitism in the modern world arose in the
nineteenth century, against the backdrop of conflicting Jewish and Arab
nationalism, and was imported into the Arab world primarily by
nationalistically minded Christian Arabs (and only subsequently was it
"Islamized").[77] ...George Gruen attributes the increased animosity towards Jews in the Arab world to several factors, including the breakdown of the Ottoman
Empire and traditional Islamic society; domination by Western colonial
powers under which Jews gained a disproportionatly larger role in the
commercial, professional, and administrative life of the region; the rise of Arab
nationalism, whose proponents sought the wealth and positions of local Jews
through government channels; resentment over Jewish nationalism and the Zionist movement; and the readiness of unpopular regimes to scapegoat local Jews for political purposes.[78]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#Antisemitism_and_the_Muslim_world
When
modern antisemitism started to emerge in Arab countries, it tended to begin
within Arab Christian communities that had had contact with European Christian
communities. This is illustrated by the fact that the first major modern act of
antisemitism in Arab countries was the Damascus Blood Libel, which arose in
1840 out of a Syrian order of Capuchin monks that framed a Syrian Jew for the
murder of an Italian friar. [http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/reaction.html]
"According
to Mark
Cohen in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, most scholars
conclude that Arab anti-Semitism in the modern world arose in the nineteenth
century, against the backdrop of conflicting Jewish and Arab nationalism, and
was imported into the Arab world primarily by nationalistically minded
Christian Arabs (and only subsequently was it "Islamized").[77]" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#Antisemitism_and_the_Muslim_world,
viewed
On
Nazi efforts within Arab societies, a recent book is Among the Righteous:
Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands, by Robert
Satloff (Public Affairs, 2006). http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=9781586483999 Interesting reader reviews at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Among-Righteous-Stories-Holocausts-Reach/dp/1586483994
PAGE 5 - HOW COULD JEWS BE OPPRESSED? (cont'd.)
and
AND WHAT EXACTLY ARE JEWS, ANYWAY?
Over its history,
antisemitism has shifted forms between religious, racial and political
persecution based on the times... See a
great tiny introduction to the history of anti-Jewish oppression at “The
Longest Hatred,” in New Internationalist 372 (2004) http://newint.org/features/2004/10/01/history
SIDEBAR: AND WHAT EXACTLY ARE JEWS, ANYWAY?
Jews are a globally-dispersed,
multi-ethnic culture which is linked by a shared history of diaspora, and a
religion (Judaism). Thanks to
Daniel Lang-Levitsky for articulating a key piece of this for me in a way I
haven't been able to do before.
For resources for and information about Jews
of color and global Jewish diversity, check out the following organizations:
Kulanu: All of Us, http://www.kulanu.org/
Ayecha Resource Organization, http://www.ayecha.org/
"B'chol Lashon," a great newsletter
put out by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, http://jewishresearch.org/newsletter.htm
Also see their book, In Every Tongue: The Racial and Ethnic Diversity of
the Jewish People, http://jewishresearch.org/Book-Tongue.htm
Forthcoming in 2007 is The Colors of
Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz http://www.diasporism.net/
Disguised as a feature article, this is an
excellent introduction to the topic: "Black Jew illuminates the diversity
of Judaism," http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20070405_Black_Jew_illuminates_diversity_of_Judaism.html
An awesome introduction to Mizrachi and
Sephardi experiences is The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of
North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage, edited by Loolwa
Khazzoom (New York: Seal Press, 2003), which also approaches the topic through
the eyes of women.
For an introduction to the Ibo Jewish
communities of
Ashkenazi Jews have a vibrant ethnic identity
that has also been pushed underground by genocide and pressures to assimilate.
The most active center of the movement to reclaim Ashkenazi culture is in the
Yiddish language revival. For resources on learning Yiddish language, see http://pinteleyid.com/yiddish/gofurtherwithyiddish.pdf.
Connect with the growing Yiddish cultural movement through these pages:
http://www.yiddishbreak.com/
http://www.yivoinstitute.org/about/index.php?tid=57&aid=146
...others are ethnic, secular
(=non-religious) Jews. Though a
majority of Jews in the
Workmens' Circle / Arbeter Ring, http://www.circle.org
Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations
(CSJO), http://www.csjo.org
(One of the more commonly-known
organizations, the Society for Humanistic Judaism, rather than promoting
actually secular culture, is more centered on creating religiously-styled
rituals and communities for Jews who do not believe in God. http://www.shj.org/)
...a growing number of communities
are “coming out” as Jews. Examples include the emerging community of b'nei anusim (children
of the forced ones) in Portugal [See an example in this letter, http://www.masortiworld.org/news/monthly-report/11-05/kehillot.htm],
or the many different communities throughout Latin America and the Southwestern
United States of descendants of anusim (also known as Marranos):
Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition, maintained hidden identities in their
new communities, and transmitted to the generations that followed them veiled
Jewish customs, which have in a number of communities lasted to the present
day. A cool book to read is The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot: Oral
Histories Exploring Five Hundred Years in the Paradoxical Relationship of Spain
and the Jews (since republished with a new subtitle). Inspired by her own
childhood escape from the Holocaust through
A fantastic memoir on this topic from an
Ashkenazi perspective is After Long Silence, by Helen Fremont (Random
House, 2000). http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385333702&view=excerpt
PAGE
6 - "BUT ARABS ARE SEMITES!"
After 60 years of
fostering dictators and repressing democratic movements in Arab countries... If we mark the beginning of this history with
FDR’s deal with King Saud in 1945, in which
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=reutersEdge&storyID=2006-12-04T111959Z_01_NOA440670_RTRUKOC_0_USA-MUSLIMS-FEAT.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc=NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage3
As
See for example Stephen Zunes, “The Influence
of the Christian Right on U.S. Middle East Policy,” Foreign Policy In Focus (
Interhemispheric Resource Center,
Meanwhile,
New French laws purportedly aimed at
pacifying tensions have now outlawed Muslim dress in schools. The laws, based on long post-Revolutionary French
precedents of suppressing religious expression in the public sphere, fall most
heavily on Muslim students, but also outlaw religious Jewish students from
wearing their traditional headcoverings (called yarmulkes or kipot), or perhaps
Christian students who wear large crosses. See http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/12/11/france.religion.reut/
As one activist, Lila Charef, said against the ban, "'What really
struck me was the collective collusion against these children, who were forced
to choose between their desire to study and succeed, as many of these pupils
were brilliant students, and their religious convictions. I think this was the
hardest thing for these girls.'" http://www.redpepper.org.uk/europe/x-may2005-hijab.htm
PHOTO: Palestinian photographer
Nasser Ishtaya holds his newborn daughter, Dunya. See "U.N. envoy says humanitarian situation in
PAGE
7 - SIDEBAR: A TERM WE DIDN'T FREELY CHOOSE
...it was chosen as a chic, new
scientific word... The term
"came into use [in the 1870s] to describe hostility to the Jewish or
Semitic race, posing as a 'scientific' issue, as distinguished from earlier
'superstitious' or religious hatred." [Albert S. Lindemann, Anti-Semitism
Before the Holocaust, p. 8]. In a time when all things
"scientific" had become hip, and cultured Europeans were embarrassed
to be associated with anything so primitive as religion or superstition, it
became passe to be seen as being against Jews because of old religious
prejudices. Leading Darwinist intellectuals, like Ernst Haeckel, "felt
that the historical persistence of anti-Semitism must have a rational basis: he
could not believe that the highly evolved moral sense of the Aryan race was
capable of maintaining an irrational prejudice." [
...to show that Jews were an inferior
race (not a religion that they could convert out of)... Part of the motivation for this development in
anti-Jewish theory was that Jews had begun to be successful at breaking down
barriers and integrating themselves into German society by converting to
Christianity in large numbers.
They built an
organization to advocate discrimination against Jews, the Antisemites' League. The League (in German, Antisemiten-Liga)
was the first formal attempt at creating a popular political movement based on
anti-Jewish targeting. (In The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary
History, Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., [New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980] p. 272.) and which promoted a political platform
to expel Jews from
...they couldn't care less that they
were using it inaccurately by designating it for Jews specifically. "Eugen Duhring argued that anti-Semitism is an
inaccurate designation, [writing,] 'It [the Jewish people] is a specific tribe,
which has developed the characteristics of a race in the most marked opposition
to other human beings, and not the entire Semitic race that comes into question
in our modem culture and society." Nietzsche and the Jewish Question,
Robert C. Holub, New German Critique, No. 66, Special Issue on the Nineteenth
Century. (Autumn, 1995), pp. 94-121. (104-105) or http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0094-033X%28199523%290%3A66%3C94%3ANATJQ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W
...they [Jews] have accepted the term
to describe the historical experience of being targeted for being Jews. Jews, like all oppressed peoples, have the right to
reject this term and choose their own terms. But if a movement does grow among
Jews to choose a term for themselves that describes their oppression - be it
'anti-Jewish oppression' or another term - it remains offensive for anyone,
Jewish or non-Jewish, to refuse to discuss the targeting of Jews because they
reject the term.
...a larger oppression that both
groups experience: Orientalism. As two different pheonmena, Orientalism and specific anti-Jewish oppression /
antisemitism can conflict. For instance, Jews have at times been framed by
general Orientalist anti-Jewish visions of them as highly sexual,
"dirty," or sexually depraved. At other times, anti-Jewish oppression
has painted Jewish men as weak, "feminine" and asexual, or Jewish
women as prudes, sexually selfish, or disinterested, as is common in derisive
"jokes" about "JAPs."
FOOTNOTE: Millions of Jews are of Arab (&
Persian) descent... Learn more
about these Jews, who are called Mizrachim (from the Hebrew for
"East") at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews
FOOTNOTE: ...as well as racism in the Jewish
community. See a number of discussions
of these experiences in the essays in the anthology edited by Loolwa Khazzoom, The
Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern
Jewish Heritage (Seal Press, 2003).
PAGE 8 - MEET THE AMAZING,
DISAPPEARING OPPRESSION and INTERNALIZED
OPPRESSION
…it became government practice in Christian
society about 1,700 years ago… While
Christian thinkers had developed the textual base and theological arguments of
anti-Jewish philosophy earlier, anti-Jewish practices only began to be backed
up by the authority of rulers in the 4th century, when the Emperor
Constantine took on Christianity as his own religion. When the Emperor promoted
a vision of "the Jews, who have impiously defiled their hands with enormous
sin, and are, therefore, deservedly afflicted with blindness of soul," and
urged his subjects to "have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish
crowd; for we have received from our Saviour a different way," it gave common anti-Jewish beliefs a new
force. . Quote from Eusebius. "Life of
Constantine (Book III)", 337 CE, (viewed 4/17/07) [http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/25023.htm] This intensified when
succeeding governments made Christianity the official religion of empire and
installed laws against Jews; what began as laws against intermarriage between
Jews and Christians came by the early 400s to include laws
against Jews being allowed employment in the government or army; not being
permitted to build new synagogues, or being punished with death for advocating
conversion to Judaism. By the 600s much worse legal conditions were beginning
in different regions of Christendom. See a detailed list of legal codes at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/legislation300_800.html
...only stopped having
official
(To learn about the interfaith process that helped bring about Nostra Aetate,
see http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/presentations/features/details/2005-12-07/)
Partly it’s
that it allows Jews success. Jews have responded to this through their everyday choices. The insecurity of
Jewish life has led Jews to push hard for upward mobility; especially since
having money could sometimes cushion the blows of anti-Jewish attacks (money
could help in pleading with royal authorities to reverse anti-Jewish decrees or
expulsion edicts, when a land became dangerous for Jews and only those who
could pay passage out could flee, etc.) - and to adopt trades that could be
easily "carried" with Jews when they were pushed out of a land, or
which required great skill and so would be in demand wherever Jews had to flee
to (medicine, etc.).
This higher-than-usual professional status led to Jews being extremely visible in
many societies compared to their small numbers. For instance, today, many
people are surprised to find out that Jews, who number about 13 million people
worldwide, make up only 2/10ths of a percent of the world's population, and
1.8% of the U.S. Wealth and visibility for some Jews has not necessarily been
positive for Jews; money has tended to save individual Jews but not Jewish
communities, and visibility has meant that Jews were made even easier targets
of public scapegoating. [Figures based on population statistics from 2006.]
Partly it’s that it
moves in cycles. A
great activist resource on this issue is the skit, “The Cyclical Nature
of Jewish Oppression,” by Progressives Challenging Anti-Semitism Among Progressives (1998),
excellent to stimulate conversation in groups and as a participatory exercise
in workshops. [http://www.pinteleyid.com/readings/cyclical_skit.htm]
A Jew coping with internalized oppression might believe stereotypes about Jews,
point undeserved blame at other Jews, feel shame or disgust at parts of their
looks or behavior that they think of as Jewish, feel general low self-esteem,
find it hard to take a stand against antisemitism, or feel a desire to
emphasize to others how different or separate they are from other Jews.
Internalized Jewish oppression manifests itself seriously within Jewish
communal groups in the disrespect and harshness with which Jews treat one
another, which goes beyond the often endearing and healthy cultural Jewish
mannerisms I've experienced among my Ashkenazi communities of bluntness,
willingness to argue, frank honesty, loud interactions and unsubdued emotions.
Like all oppression, internalized oppression can be an
unaware process; one we don't perceive ourselves as buying into or
committing.
Some comments on internalized oppression as it affects:
Native women: http://www.letswrap.com/nadvinfo/internal.htm
People with disabilities: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/archiveuk/Mason,%20Michelene/mason.pdf
African-Americans: http://www.blackcommentator.com/134/134_black_identidy_1.html
Asian/Pacific Islanders: http://preventiontraining.samhsa.gov/cti06/HEALACT4.HTM
Jewish people,
especially men, often perceive themselves as physically weak… It was internalized oppression and the
assumption of weakness that led Jews like Walter Rathenau to write inspiring
messages like the following to his fellow German Jews: "Your east Mediterranean
appearance is not very well appreciated by the northern tribes. You should
therefore be more careful...[not to become] the laughing stock of a race
brought up in a strictly military fashion [Note: Rathenau is referring to the
non-Jewish German nation]. As soon as you have recognized your unathletic
build, your narrow shoulders, your clumsy feet, your sloppy, roundish shape,
you will resolve to dedicate a few generations to the renewal of your outer
appearance." [quoted in Lindemann, Anti-Semitism Before the Holocaust,
p. 77]
Partly as a reaction against
that self-image, Jews in the 20th century have had what sometimes amounts to an
obsession with becoming physically strong and embracing sports. Jews in the
We were legally banned from being allowed to carry weapons
European society did not
permit us in mainstream professions (farming, etc.)… "More and more, Jews were restricted to
those economic activities considered the least desirable, such as moneylending,
and to those that did not engender competition for Christian guilds. For
instance, medieval merchant guilds successfully blocked Jews from selling their
goods in shops or at the marketplace, while craft goods prevented Jews from
manufacturing goods. Ironically, before the clergy and Christian guilds
successfully enlisted the support of the royal authority to restrict Jews from
manufacturing activities, many early medieval European Jewish artisans had
distinguished themselves as metal and gold workers, dyers of cloth, and
glassblowers. Consequently, Jews were left to peddle goods in the street or
countryside and to buy and sell secondhand wares, particularly clothing. Prior
to the Holocaust, much had been made of the fact that Jews rarely pursued the
farming profession. The dearth of Jews in farming in
…often feel disgust about ourselves and our bodies,
because, as the main racial ‘Other’ in Europe, European society and
popular culture systematically based its images of what was ugly and disgusting
on our Jewish faces, and its fantasies of what our bodies looked like. The
classical European images of both the witch and the devil invoke stereotypic Jewish
facial features; Jews, in turn were believed to have horns, like the devil. See
for example Mortimer Ostow, "Myth And Madness: A Report Of A
Psychoanalytic Study Of Antisemitism," International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis
,
77
:
15-31
(1996).
An
interesting discussion of perceptions of the Jewish body is in Sander Gilman's The
Jew's Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Gentile European intellectuals, including thinkers who heavily
influenced the Left, like Hegel, taught that Jews were a people
‘outside’ of history... "Hegel saw
European culture as the core of world history, and as essentially a Christian
culture... According the Hegelian dialectic, every cultural form
makes some true, genuine contribution to world history...after which it is
sublated (aufgehoben) and disappears from the historical scene. Yet
the Jews continued to survive long after their raison d'etre [basic,
essential purpose; reason for existence] had disappeared - indeed, after they
no longer had a genuine history in Hegel's sense, but existed merely as the
corpse of their extinguished essence. [When Jews began to claim a place in the
modern world through the French Revolution, Hegel was willing for Jews to have
rights] but he did not know what to do with Jews in modernity as Jews, nor
could he explain their survival in terms of his system. ...Hegel went on to see
post-Christian Jewish life as a dead repetition of meaningless
existence[.]" (Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark
Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews [University
Park, PA: The Pennsyvania State University Press, 1998], xii-xiii.)
….that because Jews had no land of our own, we were a deformed group that could not play a role in history and revolution. The view that Jews, as a people without a nation, were outside of full people-hood and the ability to take part in history, played a huge role in the creation of Zionism, as Jews internalized that belief and assumed the correctness of the European thinkers who had written them off. For the results in Zionist politics, see the essay "Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some reflections on the Zionist notion of History and Return," by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, at http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:1bclMBwj89sJ:www.cjs.upenn.edu/meyerhofflecturepaper.doc+www.cjs.upenn.edu/meyerhofflecturepaper.doc&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
– "THE USEFUL JEW"
& INTERNALIZED OPPRESSION (cont'd.)
...European Jews, having been excluded from many
traditional trades, often didn’t fit neatly into those categories. On the other hand, in certain regions Jews were heavily
concentrated in industrial labor. In the Russian Empire, the massive numbers of
Jews in factories made them the base of the early Russian revolutionary
movement.
…Jews learned we didn’t matter; our only
meaningful role in changing the world would be supporting other peoples’
struggles… The example of leading
Russian Marxist Pavel Axelrod is instructive. Axelrod's politics became
universalist after he stopped believing in God and read the work of theorists
like Ferdinand Lassalle. "Persuaded that the term 'proletariat,' as used
by Lassalle, referred to everyone oppressed by the rich and privileged,
[Axelrod] concluded that once this broad class was liberated the Jewish
question would automatically be solved. 'And I decided,' he wrote, 'to devote
myself to work for the liberation of all the poor and oppressed of
It is
my belief that the common non-identification of 1960s and '70s Jewish radicals
as Jewish was a result of internalized oppression. It is fair and valid to say
that radical white Jews, observing the racism that brutalized people of color,
perceived their own people as simply a privileged group in comparison, and thus
were disinterested in Jewish identity and concerns. However, the renaissance of the New Left’s identity work took
place during the first generation born after the Holocaust. For the
non-politicized members of an oppressed group, it might be natural that
immediately after the greatest mass murder in their people's history, they
would primarily respond through seeking short-term safety by assimilating as
hard as possible. But presumably, the radicalized members of that group would
take on the role of calling for self-organization to end their group’s
oppression. Instead, Jewish radicals, like non-politicized Jews tended to cling
to the safety and anonymity of whiteness. This doesn’t seeem to be
healthy, normal behavior for the radical leaders of a group just emerging from
such obvious oppression.
SIDEBAR: "THE USEFUL JEW"
the Court Jew – "During the Middle Ages, Christian nobles frequently recognized the economic advantages of having Jewish financial advisers. This advantage always had to be weighed against the political upheavals created by the Church and the townspeople against the Jews. In the early 17th century, the use of special individual Jews by the nobility became almost institutionalized in
An incredibly eloquent piece about how the 'Court Jew' pattern continues today is Josh Ruebner's "An Open Letter to Paul Wolfowitz: To My Former Dean and Other 'Court Jews,'" http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0303&L=justwatch-l&O=D&P=50699