The Roots of Antisemitism
Many people are asking the question as to why the sudden, dramatic, grotesque surge in antisemitism around the country and the world? There are those who blame it on Israel’s current fight for survival against the fundamentalist Jihadist distortion of Islam. Conspiracy theorists on both the left and right develop fantasies which are borderline funny, except for the fact that many people believe it.
The other day I was in a doctor’s office, and the physician asked me the question, “Why the Jews?” He was upset by all the antisemitism that he sees and reads about.
Antisemitism has not only surged on college campuses, largely emanating from the left, but also on social media which tends to be hatred from the right.
Examples of hatred of the Jews are painful to recount. Sometimes antisemitism has been characterized as, “the world’s oldest form of bigotry.”
Many books have been written on the subject of antisemitism. The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. has devoted a considerable amount of space to the subject. To Google the roots of antisemitism yields a plethora of excellent studies, books, and research on the issue.
When I was in college, I took a course in Biblical Hebrew. Sitting next to me was a priest who was interested in learning Biblical Hebrew and who wrote one of the leading books on the roots of antisemitism. His work, like many others, blamed antisemitism on a very simple principle: the Jews believed in one G-d, an invisible, spiritual, gender natural entity unlike anything the world had known. This caused a tremendous amount of anger, jealousy, and suspicion. The leader of the Jews, Moses, was not divine. In fact, he was excluded from seeing the Holy Land for what seemed like a relatively minor transgression. Moses struck a rock to produce water for his thirsty people, when he was told by the one G-d to “speak” to the rock. Judaism does not know where Moses was buried and that was deliberate. Moses was always to remain human.
It did not take long for Christianity to give up on converting the Jews and instead turn its attention to the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks and Romans had fought many wars against the Jewish people, who were very independence minded. Judea fought four major wars against the Roman Empire and suffered almost a million dead from the war which Israel lost in the year 125.
The Church, devoted to seeking converts, abandoned its initial embrace of Judaism and instead adopted the attitude of the Graeco Roman Rulers. The Jews were considered to be demons, devils, G-d killers, and the very incarnation of all that is negative. Early Christianity conceived of a battle between good and evil, dark and light, all borrowed from Zoroastrianism.
In the Six Century, Islam came along and offered “conversion or the sword.” There were Muslims in the early Middle Ages who had a very close relationship with the Jews. Those Muslims who relied heavily on Greek philosophy, science, and mathematics were not the fanatics who founded the religion and later on promoted Jihad.
One of the greatest thinkers in all of Judaism was known by the moniker, Maimonides. The great physician had to flee Spain where war ensued between the Muslims and the Christians. He ultimately made his way to Egypt where he became the physician to the Sultan. When Richard the Lionheart, leading the First Crusade, arrived in Israel, he wrote to Maimonides and asked the great physician to serve as court physician in England. Maimonides wrote a letter that he would rather be subservient to the Mohammedan rather than killed by the Christians. That was the world for the Jews during the First Crusade. King Richard had murdered his way to the Holy Land, filling many cities with streets full of blood belonging to Jews and Muslims.
It was not until 1962 that Pope John XXIII changed Catholic doctrine towards the Jews. His reforms did not take hold immediately and, in some places, have not been accepted at all. Nevertheless, the Pope was a Saint and did try to change the way Christians think about Jews and Judaism. His impact was monumental on the Jewish community.
Unfortunately, today Western Europe and the United States is guided not alone by a religious fanaticism, not even by those on the right, but by a secular faith. As a friend of mine in Philadelphia has pointed out, modern politics and hatred of the Jews have taken on a form of religious fanaticism. The secular religion today is for political factions to hate one another and to practice the ancient art of antisemitism. While Muslim antisemitism may originate from religious principles of extremists, for the rest of the world it is more an outgrowth of political divisions.
Whatever the origin, modern antisemitism is dangerous. When a group, a tiny group, is hated by a large majority of the world, it is going to be bad for those few in number. As noted by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: “Whether the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits pitcher, it goes ill with the pitcher.” 1856, “Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha,” p. 466.
It is true that the Jews have survived for approximately 3,500 years, maybe longer; and have always claimed the land of Israel as their own and have contributed greatly to every society where they have lived. However, the hatred of the Jew does not know any rational bounds or reasoning.
What is the answer? Days of Remembrance, with which I am affiliated, runs an essay contest on the Holocaust against the Jewish people in middle schools and high schools. Approaches such as that show some promise. Ultimately, it will take each one of us to reject hatred, bigotry, and irrational behavior to stem the tide.