The Unrelenting Nature of Antisemitism by Alex Grobman, PhD
Antisemitism, sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred, has existed in one form or another throughout much of human history. The current increase in antisemitism throughout the world is a warning of the threats ahead if a vigorous response is not mounted.
If reasonable people are to act against the current surge of antisemitism not only on the streets in the United States and Western Europe but also in the halls of Congress and other government institutions, it may be helpful to examine some historical examples of this particular strain of hatred and review the pernicious libels used to incite hatred and violence against the Jewish people.
Some illustrations are well known. In the Biblical Book of Esther, the villainous Haman tells the King of Persia: “There are a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your realm. Their laws are different from those of every other people’s, and they do not observe the king’s laws; therefore it is not befitting the king to tolerate them.”
In the second century CE, Tacitus writes in his Histories Book V: “Among themselves, they [the Jews] are inflexibly honest and ever ready to shew compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies.”
Hatred of Jews
Since the third century BCE, when the Hellenists first advanced a case against the Jewish people, an underlying animosity towards Jews has remained constant despite the varying proffered grievances.
Pagans disliked Jews for being aloof, for refusing to worship the pantheon of gods, for practicing marital exclusivity, for observing dietary restrictions, and for missionizing. Christians accused Jews of killing Jesus, while, centuries later, Enlightenment theorists condemned the Jews for giving the world Christianity. For centuries, Islamists depicted Jews as the vanguard of Western ideas and values, a portrayal that continues to this day.
Populists, who supported the right of the people to struggle against the privileged elite, blamed the Jews for bringing about the modern banking system, viewed as the source of the common man’s problems. Communists blamed Jews as the source of Capitalism; Capitalists saw Jews as the founders of Communism.
During the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of poisoning Europe’s wells, thus initiating the Great Plague of the 14th century, the Black Death that resulted in the demise of approximately half of Europe’s population. Jews were charged with engaging in black magic, witchcraft, and profanation of Christian sacraments. They were denounced for scheming to destroy Christianity and attacked for committing ritual murders ostensibly to obtain the blood of non-Jews for use in Jewish religious rituals. This accusation became so ubiquitous, it earned its own name: the blood libel.
Blood Libels
Although the original blood libels against the Jews were proclaimed by Christians, the slander began to appear in the Muslim world during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (1432-1481) after the fall of Constantinople. The blood libels almost certainly emanated from the substantial Greek-Christian Community, part of the Byzantine Empire, where the calumny against the Jews was common.
For centuries under the Ottomans, blood libel accusations against the Jews were unusual, and when they did arise, they were normally denounced by the ruling establishment. In the 19th century, however, blood libels in Muslim lands reached epidemic proportions, leading to occasional outbreaks of violence throughout the Ottoman Empire. The slanderous accusations were made in Aleppo in 1810, in Antioch in 1826, and in Tripoli in 1834, just to name a few.
The Damascus Affair
The first such accusation to create an international uproar was made in 1840 and became known as the Damascus Affair. It began on February 5, when Father Tomaso, a Capuchin monk, inexplicably disappeared along with his servant. After an arrest followed by torture, a Jewish barber pleaded guilty.
The French consul at Damascus, Ulysse de Ratti-Menton, who supported Christian merchants and advisers over Jewish ones, persuaded Tomaso’s fellow monks to declare that the Jews had murdered him in order to use his blood to make matzos. The consul also pressured the Egyptian Governor of Syria, Sharif Pasha, to imprison 13 of the most notable Jews in the city. Four of them died under torture, and the local Muslim population staged a riot which led to the destruction of the synagogue and the burning of Torah scrolls.
To justify this series of events, the French consul launched a vigorous press campaign in Paris targeting not only the Jewish community in Damascus, but world-wide.
International Outrage
The affair drew wide international outrage, beginning with the efforts of the Austrian Consul in Aleppo, Eliahu Picciotto, and continuing with an exposé published in The Times of London. The resulting public indignation reached the United States, where the fledgling American-Jewish community demonstrated in six American cities on behalf of their Syrian brethren and persuaded President Martin Van Buren to order the US Consul in Egypt to file a formal protest.
When British politician and leader of the British-Jewish community, Sir Moses Montefiore, led a delegation of influential Europeans to Syria, it was the final straw for Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Egypt. He ordered the unconditional release and recognition of innocence of the nine Jewish prisoners who were still alive.
Montefiore then persuaded Sultan Abdulmecid I in Constantinople to issue an edict denouncing blood libel accusations as nothing more than an unfounded slander against Jews and that the Ottoman Empire was determined to protect its Jewish subjects and their property.
No Let Up
If the purpose of the edict was to halt the spread of blood libel accusations in the Ottoman Empire, it failed miserably. During the remainder of the 19th century and well into the 20th, blood libels were widespread throughout the Muslim world. In Aleppo, where a blood libel had appeared 30 years before the Damascus Affair, similar accusations were made in 1850 and 1875. In Cairo, there were blood libels in 1844, 1848, 1890, and 1901-1902. In Beirut (1862 and 1874); Istanbul (1870 and 1874); Jerusalem (1874); and Port Said (1903 and 1908). And those were just a few examples. There were even more such incidents in the Balkan and Greek provinces.
Though extensive antagonism against Jews existed in Iran and Morocco, blood libels in these countries were almost non-existent, probably because, early on, there was only a limited Christian presence and a general absence of European influence. This would change in the 20th century.
In general, it became axiomatic that blood libels against Jews in the Muslim world were, like in the case of the Damascus Affair, invariably instigated by the Christian community and frequently promoted in the Greek press. At times, these slanderous allegations were backed and even prompted by foreign diplomats, principally Greek and French representatives.
When the libels became threatening, Jews in the Muslim world could generally rely on Ottoman officials to help them, and, in cases such as the Damascus Affair, the British, Prussians, Austrians, and Americans could be counted on for active assistance.
Continuing in the 20th Century
By the early 20th century, the blood libel problem in the Muslim world had shifted from the Christian community and was being used by Egyptian-Muslim newspapers in anti-Jewish campaigns as well as in other media in the Middle East.
Among Christians, blood libel charges were often made during times of anxiety. Thus, at the end of the 19th century, charges of ritual murders swept through Eastern Europe, and between the two world wars, there were no fewer than 12 trials involving allegations of ritual murder of Christians, usually children, by Jews. Evan as late as 1930, Jews in Czechoslovakia were accused of having murdered two children, ages 10 and 11, in Subcarpathian Ruthenia.
Blood libel accusations continued to endure primarily in the backward areas of Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. The Russian government exploited this myth to incite pogroms, but the accusations eventually lost their potency, especially in secular urban areas. In rural regions, the legend persisted through the encouragement of the Catholic Church, whose local priests continued to attest to their veracity throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th.
The Wandering Jew
Just as the blood libel led Christians to view the Jew as “the harbinger of evil,” the myth of the Wandering Jew, sometimes called Ahasverus, represented to them the curse that Jesus had placed on the Jewish people. According to Christian tradition, the legendary Ahasverus was purported to have rushed Jesus to his crucifixion while denying him consolation or refuge. For this, Ahasverus was cursed to wander the rest of his life, loathed and disowned, without a place to live. In Christian folklore, his presence portends horror and emptiness.
It was a short hop from the Wandering Jew to the Wicked Jew, who became emblematic of the condemned destiny that, according to Christian tradition, Jews, who denied the deity of Jesus, had inflicted on themselves, their progeny, and all they encountered. The Jew became the image of the eternal rootless foreigner, forever without a home or developed roots.
For Christians, a living Jew was a much easier symbol of enduring treachery than a dead Judas Iscariot, identified by the Christian Bible as the apostle who betrayed Jesus. The existence of living Jews made it possible to view responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus as something different than the personal and pardonable transgression of Judas. Instead Ahasverus exemplified the collective culpability intrinsic in the nomadic Jewish nation.
In the 19th century, images like that were readily acceptable to a culture that already celebrated the romantic and unusual. Frankenstein and human vampires had captured the imagination of those enthralled with horror tales in which humans were the foil.
The blood libel coupled with the concept of the wandering, wicked Jew provided convincing explanations for societal problems at the time of budding industrialization, confusing social changes, and general upheaval, just as they had been used centuries earlier to account for plagues and natural catastrophes.
Racial Antisemitism and the Israel Lobby
In the 19th century, more sophisticated Europeans had moved beyond viewing Jews as responsible for causing Jesus pain or using blood to make matzos. It was an age of science, and although racists still viewed Jews as a satanic force and the source of practically all evil in the world, they gave the premise a sheen of social and political science.
Jews were accused of being involved in an eternal conspiracy to control the world using any nefarious methods they deemed necessary. Communism and Capitalism were seen as having been created as a means to manipulate the world and dominate its people. Jews were charged with infiltrating modern society and using their considerable skills to direct governments, stock exchanges, the press, and the arts, including theater and literature.
It is an attack that persists to this day in the accusations by the likes of John J. Mearsheimer, a professor of political science and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, that Israel unduly influences America’s foreign policy.
Holocaust Education
No one can deny that antisemitism has been a pervasive force in Jewish history. Therefore, whenever it raises its ugly head, it is important to determine when the level of hate has reached a danger point. George Mosse, one of the great historians of the 20th century best known for his studies of National Socialism, warned that it is time for serious concern when antisemitism becomes a “mass movement,” that is, when it becomes acceptable by the mainstream.
By that measure, we should be already past “concern.” With blatant antisemitism expressed openly in Congress and in the marketplace, all elected officials must be held accountable to denounce antisemitism unequivocally. Efforts to teach the Holocaust must be redoubled, not as an exercise to address bullying or as a plea for tolerance, but as an historical event marking the first time in history that an entire group—every man, woman, and child—was deliberately selected by a state for total destruction.
Henry Feingold, professor of history at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has stressed that European Jewry was not a dissident minority in some remote corner of the world. Rather, by virtue of its thinkers, people such as Einstein, Freud, Marx, Kafka, and Proust, they made up an important component of pre-Holocaust European civilization.
“What died at Auschwitz was not merely the corpus of a people, but Europe’s hope that its social system can endure,” said Professor Feingold.
Ultimately, the existence of antisemitism raises the question of whether Western civilization as we know it will accept the existence of Jews and other minorities living in its midst as distinct entities with their own group consciousness. It is clear that antisemitism and racism are still pervasive elements in American society and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. While the Jewish people have succeeded thus far in surviving antisemitism, the question now is whether the West can survive its own persisting nature.
Dr. Grobman is a Hebrew University-trained historian, senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
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