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ANTI-SEMITISM WITHOUT JEWS
Presentation at the conference
on the "New Anti-emitism" organized by the
Anne Frank Stichting,
Amsterdam, April 8, 2003
By Ruth Ellen Gruber
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 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 be 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 thevenue 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
http://www.annefrank.nl/ned/news/news.html
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