ANTI-SEMITISM WITHOUT JEWS

Presentation at the conference on the "New Anti-Semitism" organized by the Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam, April 8, 2003 by Ruth Ellen Gruber

http://www.annefrank.nl/ned/news/news.html

More than a dozen years ago, when I was carrying out research
for a Jewish travel guide to eastern and central Europe, I visited
the remote Polish farming village of Krynki, on the border of what
was then still the Soviet Union and is today Belarus.
We visited Krynki's large, abandoned Jewish cemetery, where
horses were grazing, and we looked at what was left of the three
synagogues. One was a pile of rubble; one was used as a warehouse and
one was the local cinema.

At the end of our visit, we had a run-in with a group of drunks
who were guzzling vodka on the steps of the local restaurant.
They kept hassling the Polish friend we were traveling with, and
he was shocked and embarrassed to translate what they were saying:
They wanted to know if we were Jews, because if so, they were going
to torch the car.

Now, the car we were in happened to have Dutch license plates.
Our friend took the drunks to the car and showed them the yellow NL
sticker. "See the 'N'," he told them. "That means NO, we were NOT
Jewish."

It is a measure of how drunk these men were that they believed
him and went away.
It is also a measure of how little actual Jews may have to do
with anti-Semitism.
Before World War II, Jews had made up two-thirds or more of
Krynki's population. But no Jews had lived there in half a century,
and I doubt whether many had even visited in the decades since the
Holocaust.

The drunks who accosted us looked young enough that they would
scarcely have remembered first hand either the prewar years or
wartime. And I doubt whether any of them knowingly would even have
ever seen a living Jew.

They were, clearly, acting on visceral hatreds rooted in a
complex and potent mix of religion, politics, superstition,
handed-down stereotype and distorted, even manipulated, memory that
was oblivious to any living reality.
Their hostility, in fact, was directed against Jews as a concept
or a symbol. They were ready to set the car of Jews on fire, but they
did not even know what Jews were.

I've been asked to discuss the phenomenon of "anti-Semitism
without Jews" in historical terms, but also within the context of
what has been called the "new anti-Semitism" that has manifested
itself in Europe - and, indeed, elsewhere - in the wake of the Al
Aqsa intifada, the September 11 attacks, and now, the war with Iraq.
I have to say that I am not really comfortable with the term
"new anti-Semitism."

As the London Jewish Chronicle put it in an editorial last year,
anti-Semitism is a "light sleeper," easy to rouse. It is also often
referred to as a virus, a protean virus which, like disease-causing
viruses in the human body, is able to mutate in an opportunistic
fashion to defeat whatever defenses or anti-bodies have been built up
against it.

It has done so many times, even in post-Holocaust countries
whose Jewish population is practically invisible. And it is doing so
now.

More than 40 years ago, the Polish social scientist Aleksander
Hertz eloquently described the persistence of anti-Semitism, even in
the absence of Jews, in his book The Jews in Polish Culture.
This book was originally published in Paris in 1961, less than
two decades after the horrific destruction of most of European Jewry
Hertz described a "growing wave of anti-Semitism," aimed against
the scattered survivors of the Shoah who chose to remain in Poland.
Most of these people had had little or no contact with the pre-war
Jewish community, many had not identified as Jews, and most were
deeply embedded in mainstream society.

Still, he wrote, the old "Jewish question" existed and hostility
was directed toward these individuals as Jews.
Such persistent hostility, he wrote, demonstrated that:
"antagonism to certain people is not dependent on their numbers,
their objective role, or their 'alienness.' It is not the few Jews in
Poland who are the source of the anti-Semitism but certain deep and
wide-ranging diseases that eat away at the society in which those
Jews live. Jews become only a convenient means to facilitate the
polarization of certain feelings and reactions. Even if there were
not a single Jew in Poland today, or if no Jew were playing the
slightest part in Polish life, it is likely that some forms of
anti-Semitism would still exist. The living would be replaced by
their own ghosts. In Poland the traditions of anti-Semitism have left
such deep traces that the Jew as symbol could suffice entirely."
Hertz's voice resounds across the decades like that of a prophet.
Jews, the eternal historic "Other", as a symbol, an abstraction,
a concept, with Israel increasingly filling that role.

To be sure, there are new elements in today's mutation.
Among them, importantly, is the social, cultural and political
impact of the millions of Muslims, many of them recent immigrants,
who now live in Europe. They form a restive, often marginalized, and
still to a large degree unintegrated segment of European society,
susceptible to the anti-Semitic message that has become an integral
part of anti-Israeli rhetoric in the Middle East. Most of the
physical attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions in Europe in
the past two and a half years appear to have been carried out by
disaffected Muslim youths.

Another new element is the way in which Israel is increasingly
identified with the United States, so that anti-Zionism, and thus
often anti-Semitism, become subsets of anti-Americanism -- and vice
versa.

Other new elements are round the clock cable television and,
above all, the Internet. Everyone can find a home or channel of
communication on the web, no matter how perverse, poisonous or
inflammatory the message. And every such message will find believers
who forward it along. Instant global and often anonymous
communications enable the wildfire spread of rumor, deliberate
disinformation and hate, which are kept alive on websites and
eternally circulating emails, with no differentiation in the way
fact, fiction and forgery are presented. There is no reality check in
cyberspace. 4,000 Israelis - or Jews - stayed home from work at the
World Trade Center on September 11? Right. The Jews were responsible
for the Space Shuttle disaster? Sure. Jews kill Christian babies to
use their blood? OK.

Still, many of the recent manifestations of anti-Semitism,
including anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism, a demonization of
Israel, and attacks on Jews and Jewish communal and religious targets
as surrogates for Israel, are motifs that unfortunately have come to
the fore time and again since the end of World War II.
Communist governments wielded "'anti-Zionism" like a club.
Almost all communist states broke off diplomatic relations with
Israel after the Six Day War of 1967, and some used that as a pretext
for anti-Semitic clampdowns. Most prominent of these was the
anti-Semitic campaign in the guise of "anti-Zionism" launched by
Poland's communist regime in 1968. This resulted in the forced exodus
of most of the remaining Jews left in the country, some 15,000 to
20,000 people.

Elsewhere, the armed police who guard the great synagogue and
other Jewish institutions in Rome were put in place more than 20
years ago, after Al Fatah terrorists hurled hand grenades and fired
on the crowd leaving the synagogue after services, killing a toddler
and injuring about 100 others.

This attack took place amid a groundswell of anti-Israel feeling
following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Throughout the
1970s and 1980s, Rome was the scene of other Palestinian terrorist
attacks - and synagogues and Jewish or Israeli institutions in other
European cities, including Brussels, Istanbul, Paris and Vienna, also
were targeted.

At the same time, what can be called "classic" anti-Semitism has
never really disappeared, either. Traditional anti-Semitic
stereotypes have long been a staple of the far-right fringe in
western Europe, though expressions of it, after the Shoah, tended to
e taboo in polite society.

Recently, however, widely held pro-Palestinian political stands
have contributed to a growing acceptance of traditional anti-semitic
rhetoric in more mainstream European public discourse and private
conversation; on university campuses and in society salons.
This acceptance can be quite unconscious. I have an acquaintance
in Rome, for example, whom I would not at all define as an
anti-Semite. Yet, I was taken aback recently when she started talking
about how Jews controlled business interests in Rome, how they stuck
together for their own benefit, and the like. Millions of people live
in Rome, but the city's Jewish population numbers just 15,000. Only
about 35,000 Jews live in all of Italy, out of a total population of
60 million. This friend grew up in a rural part of the country where
no Jews live and where the general term for "human being" is
Cristiano - Christian.

Another current example is an updated version of the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion slander that powerful Jews conspire together to
pull the strings of the world. This is manifested in attempts to
blame the war with Iraq on Israel - or, indeed, on "the Jews" in
general. We see this expressed in media editorials and cartoons, and,
more crudely, in placards carried at anti-war rallies. At a big peace
rally in Paris little more than a week ago, a French Arab protester
was reported to have voiced this quite explicitly. He pointed at a
group of fellow protesters, members of a French Jewish student
organization. "They are not welcome here," he said, "because of what
they did to our Palestinian brothers." "They"? These were young
French Jews, who, like him, had turned out to protest the war in Iraq.
In former communist states, the emergence of public expressions
of anti-Semitism has been facilitated by the new conditions of free
speech under democracy.
In Hungary, this has been documented by B'nai B'rith, which
established a center to monitor anti-Semitic discourse and published
a book detailing the phenomenon for the year 2000. An article in this
volume, by Gyorgy Tatár, described a situation in which far-right
publications often cited articles and reports in the western liberal
media critical of Israel, as a means of backing up their own, more
traditional, anti-Semitic positions, replete with coded innuendoes in
which the term "Jew" is never mentioned, replaced, instead, by
expressions such as "foreign heart," "divergence from the spirit of
the Hungarian nation," and the like.

Just last month (March 2003), we saw such coded anti-Semitic
innuendo used in Italy after the distinguished journalist Paolo Mieli
was nominated to head Italy's public broadcasting company, RAI.
Mieli's father was Jewish and he is supportive of Israel, but he
doesn't have any connection per se with the local Jewish community.
After he was nominated, vandals scrawled anti-Semitic slogans on the
walls of the RAI headquarters in Milan, demanded Mieli Raus. More
disturbing, however, a frontpage editorial in the Rome daily Il Tempo
complained that Italian television was being dominated "by
professionals of excellent quality but with non-Catholic culture and
sensibility." Besides Mieli, it mentioned two other prominent
journalists of Jewish origin. This, in effect, implied that
non-Catholics were not quite Italian.
I think we know where that can lead.

Nearly 20 years after Aleksander Hertz wrote the book I quoted
earlier, the French critic and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut coined
the term Imaginary Jew.
This term has many levels of meaning. To me, it connotes how
Jews are regarded as a "concept" rather than a living reality -- the
ways in which the image and memory of Jews and the Jewish world that
was destroyed in the Holocaust, has, in a sense, continued to haunt
Europe, whether or not there is an actual contemporary Jewish
presence. This haunting is also sometimes described as a persisting
"presence of absence" or "phantom pain" from an amputated limb.
For decades after World War II, memory of Jewish history and
heritage was often marginalized, repressed or forgotten. This was
particularly so in countries where the Holocaust took place, but it
also occurred in countries less directly touched by the effects of
the Shoah. Jews, their culture and their history were often viewed as
something distinctly apart, off-limits; with even the Holocaust
regarded as an internal "Jewish thing" detached from the general flow
of national history and national memory.
In Eastern Europe, communist ideology made the extermination of
the Jews a footnote to the overall suffering in World War II, and
communist governments suppressed both Jewish expression and open
examination of the past.

This created new layers of complexity and anguish in an intense,
if troubled, relationship: layers of communist anti-Semitism,
contradictory stereotype (Jews as communist string-pullers; Jews as
the capitalist rich), Christian anti-Semitism, Holocaust destruction.
Under communism, citizens of Soviet bloc states were denied what
the British historian Timothy Garton Ash has called a "normal access
to the national past." The postwar physical absence of Jews and their
own memories and historical viewpoint coincided with and indeed aided
in the implementation of the official communist agenda. Everything
unofficial was internalized or went underground, where it sometimes
festered. Moreover, the distortions vis-a-vis Jews decreed by
official ideology were often counterbalanced, or enhanced, by
memories, myths, rumors and ambivalent feelings which themselves
contributed to further distortion.

Without Jewish input to influence discussion or contradict
either the superstition or the general line, citizens of Communist
states were, in effect, as James Young has put it, "left alone with
their own, now uncontested, memory of events." The resulting vacuum
in knowledge could be profound and could lend itself readily to
manipulation.

A student I used as a translator in Hungary in 1992 knew
virtually nothing of the Jewish history of his home town, which was
once an important Jewish center and still had many Jewish traces. The
visits we paid to local Jewish cemeteries and ruined synagogues, and
the conversations we had with some of the few remaining local Jews,
opened up a new world for him. When I mentioned at one point that he
should know something of history, he responded, "But what history?"
The only book about Israel and Judaism he had ever read was a
crude anti-Semitic tract that had been given to him by an American
neo-Nazi in Germany. "How was I to know it wasn't true?" he asked. "I
had read nothing else. That's why I don't want to know about history
-- because how do you know what's true?"

Response to the "presence of absence" or "phantom pain" is not,
of course, always negative. And anti-Semitism in Europe exists side
by side with a widespread interest in, promotion and celebration of
Jewish culture and experience.

Much of this emanates from Jewish communities themselves. But
much, and in some places most, is targeted at, embraced, and even
produced by the non-Jewish mainstream - a sort of philo-Semitism
without Jews.

Jewish culture festivals, exhibits, study programs and workshops
abound. Klezmer music - performed by Jewish groups and local
non-Jewish groups - draws enthusiastic audiences, mainly non-Jewish.
Scores of thousands of visitors each year take part in European Days
of Jewish Culture held simultaneously in nearly two dozen countries.
Jewish museums proliferate, with new ones planned in Milan, Munich,
and Warsaw. Once-abandoned synagogues and Jewish quarters are under
restoration as tourist attractions, or even, again, as houses of
worship.

In the 1990s, the Paris-based historian Diana Pinto coined the
term "Jewish Space" to describe the place occupied by Jews, Jewish
culture and Jewish memory within mainstream European society. It is a
space, she notes, that is universal and that exists regardless of the
current size or activity of the local Jewish population.
Mainstream interest in and promotion of Jewish culture form a
complex, ambiguous phenomenon that cannot be described in simplistic
terms of black and white.

For some, the process has been a way of filling in the blanks of
a communist-era agenda that made Jewish issues taboo. For others, it
is a means of coming to terms with, or even atoning for, the Nazi
legacy. For others it is a key to building (or rebuilding) a
democratic and tolerant state. These are unfinished processes, still
going on amid the complicated new conditions that have arisen since
Sept. 11, 2001.

There are many troubling aspects, too - to the point where some
observers see philo-semitism and anti-Semitism as two sides of the
same coin.

Like anti-Semitic hostility, the interest and sympathy, and the
embrace of Jewish culture (or what is perceived as Jewish culture)
may have little to do with actual Jews and their concerns, including
their concern for the welfare of Israel; Jews can be perceived as
cherished museum objects rather than as living, vital entities.
Some of the response is downright schizophrenic.
Let me quote here an email I received a few weeks ago from a
researcher and performer who spends time each year in Spain. This
year, she said, she was struck by the intensity of the double
standard:

"Spanish folk groups record Sephardic songs and tourist offices
promote 'old Jewish quarters," she wrote, "while the anti-Jewish
feeling is skyrocketing. Yesterday, I received a message [from
someone] threatening to organize a boycott of my upcoming concerts
and workshops in Galicia (which are not even ON Jewish music!)
because, this person says, 'everyone is saying you will be talking
about the fascist Zionist pigs and supporting them, along with
supporting the war against Iraq."

This schizophrenia, however, long pre-dates the current crisis.
Non-Jewish European interest in Jewish culture began gaining momentum
in the 1980s. This was a decade, as I noted earlier, in which, like
today, Israel was reviled in the media and Jews were targeted by a
spate of terrorist attacks.

Graffiti I found more than five years ago scrawled outside the
venue of the annual summer klezmer music festival in Ancona, Italy
summed it up: "Yes to Klezmer, No to Zionists".
Despite these disturbing elements, there is much to applaud. And
in conclusion, I think I have to mention this, as well - in order not
to drown in pessimism.

A dozen years ago it would have been difficult to imagine that
Jewish culture would have such a prominent and popular place in the
European mainstream.

What's more, for the first time, Europeans, and European
countries, are recognizing Jewish culture, Jewish history and the
Holocaust itself as part of their own narrative and not a separate
"Jewish thing."

It is important, too, to note that the trends I have mentioned -
both positive and negative, anti-Semitism and philo-semitism -- are
going on hand-in-hand with a remarkable revival inside European Jewry
itself: in education, religious practice, and artistic and cultural
expression. Much of this, however, takes place well out of public
view.

Things may change, of course. They always do. And positive interest in Things Jewish does not by any means mean that the anti-Semitism can - or should - be dismissed or belittled.

On the contrary! Perhaps, though, the broader context can help put into
perspective the nature of the threat.
Jews don't, and never did, create anti-Semitism. But perhaps
they can, today, help strengthen positive attitudes by further
opening out Jewish culture to the wider society, rather than circling
the wagons.
--

Ruth Ellen Gruber
author of: Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe
University of California Press