Denis Prager & Joseph Telushkin Newsletter 6th May, 2006
This article is largely based on a book I have just finished reading – “Why the Jews?” by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, from which I will be quoting extensively.
I sincerely hope that this resume will be faithful to the words and thoughts of Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin and will bring those words and thoughts to many who would not necessarily have had the time or the opportunity to read their book “Why the Jews?” And I hope that their ideas will be food for thought for you, my readers.
I am certainly not the only person to be intrigued by the reason for antisemitism and I doubt if there is a single group which I have guided where this question has not risen. You will note that I have not written “anti-Semitism”, although my computer automatically corrected my “mis-spelling”. That is because Prager and Telushkin (henceforth P&T) have based themselves on James Parker and Emil Fackenheim and the understanding that, as there is no defined entity known as “Semitism”, there can be no entity which opposes it.
In this book P&T attempt to answer the question “why, to begin with, do people hate Jews, and then invent reasons to do so?” And the answer is encapsulated in the words of the Reverend Edward Flannery: “It was Judaism that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world … and willingly or not … the Jew carries the burden of God in history and for this has never been forgiven“.
“The Jewish God is invisible … universal …demanding obedience and worship from all. … He entered history and listened to, argued with and chose the Jews … Most unpleasant, their invisible God …. developed into a moral God. .. The Jews have suffered from their own invention ever since; but they have never given it up, for it is, after all, what makes the Jews Jewish”. (Ernest van den Haag, The Jewish Mystique)
Almost two thousand years ago the Roman Emperor Caligula understood the threat of Judaism. Belief in one moral God gave a standard by which to judge the government. Addressing a delegation of Jews he said: “You are the only people who refuse to recognize my divinity and yet you worship a god whose name you dare not pronounce. … You make a sacrifice for me, but not to me”.
P&T examine the theory that it is the Jewish beliefs of the Jews, their Judaism, which has caused hatred of the Jews beginning with the first non-Jewish record of antisemitism in Alexandria in the third century BCE and up till the present moment. They list the four components of Judaism as being the denial of other gods, Jewish law (the biblical Torah), Jewish nationhood and choseness.
Four Components of Judaism
The 613 laws of the Torah, codified and expounded on in the Talmud, virtually regulate every aspect of a Jew’s life. The acceptance of monotheism ensured that the laws would be obeyed. The social laws ensured different ethical standards to those of their non-Jewish neighbors. The laws of sanctity and ritual set the Jews apart from those same neighbors. And finally, there was their choseness.
Social Laws
The basis to these laws is to be found in the Ten Commandments but the social laws cover every aspect of man’s relationship with his fellow man. In a time when slavery was universal Jews were directed that the maximum amount of time a slave could be held was seven years. Obedience to the law “you shall teach your children” (Deut. 6:7) meant that Jews were literate in a world where literacy was limited to the aristocracy and the clergy, and generally better educated in the modern literate world.
Obedience to the Talmudic declaration that “charity is as important as all the other commandments together” (Bava Bathra 9a)meant that Jews ministered to their poor, not that there were no poor Jews.
And how can we not draw a comparison between the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, whether remnants of the Holocaust in 1945 or expelled from Arab countries in 1948, who were absorbed by Israel and assisted by Jews all over the world, and the Palestinian refugees, ignored by their oil wealthy Arab brethren and still refugees almost sixty years later.
Contrary to common belief, “Jews give a higher percentage of their income to charities and public causes, both Jewish and non-Jewish, than non-Jews with comparable earnings”.
Laws of Sanctity
The dietary demands of kashrut meant that there were many foods that Jews were banned from eating thereby making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to eat at the homes of their neighbors. Strict observance of the Shabbat, when prayer and family gatherings replaced work and travel, further set them apart.
Nationhood
Jewish nationhood was a particularly puzzling issue. For two thousand years the Jews had no state or country of their own. They were dispersed among the nations of the world. How could they be considered a nation? However, just as a monotheistic God and the Torah are basic to Judaism, so to is nationhood.
“Towards the end of the eighteenth century Christianity’s domination of European life and thought was challenged. … many Jews welcomed the Enlightenment … they expected the secularization of Europe to lead to a dramatic improvement in their status. … it only changed its target from the God and Law (religious) components of Judaism to its peoplehood component”.
Jews were now being offered equality on condition they abandoned their national identity. The difference between the religious antisemitism, which found the religion of the Jews to be the threat, and national antisemitism, anti-Zionism, is only “which component of Judaism, which aspect of Jewish distinctiveness, each found most intolerable”.
In 1789 France the call was “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as a religion”. This denial of opposition to Jews as individuals but a desire to destroy the Jewish nation has lead to a new definition of antisemitism – anti-Zionism.
As to the accusation of “dual loyalty”, the implication that Jews living outside of Israel may not be loyal to the country in which they reside, Jewish law, the Talmud, states very clearly “the law of the land is the law“.
Choseness
The “choseness” of the Jews is no less puzzling than their nationhood. That the early church accepted this concept is shown by the Christian belief that Christianity “took over this divine election from the Jews. … Church leaders did not deny that the Jews had been chosen. On the contrary, they so believed in it that they appropriated the doctrine for themselves. … The Koran did not deny the choseness of Abraham; it simply declared Abraham a Muslim. … Islam and pre-modern Christianity loved and believed in the idea of choseness
but hated the idea of the Jews claiming it for themselves”.
But how does Judaism define this choseness? “It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light unto the nations, that my salvation may be unto the end of the earth”. (Isaiah 49:6) This choseness conferred on the “descendants of the first ethical monotheist, Abraham”, offers no privilege or superiority but the obligation to spread that ethical monotheism to the world and to be its living example.
Any other understanding of this concept does not originate in Judaism and certainly the accusation of ‘racial superiority’ is baseless. “By no accepted definition of either Jew or race are the Jews a race“.
Non-Jewish Jews
In order to appear to be unbiased, most panels discussing the Middle East, Israel, Zionism or the Palestinian will have a Jew or an Israeli as a member of that panel. Often that Jew or Israeli is as antisemitic or anti-Zionist as the other members of the panel, if not more so.
P&T define these Jews as non-Jewish Jews, “Jews who do not feel rooted in anything Jewish, religious or national; their Jewish identity consists of little more than having been born Jews, and they affirm none of Judaism’s components (as listed above). They remain Jewish solely because they have not converted to another religion.”
When one defines antisemitism, correctly, as “a hatred of Jewish values, beliefs and choseness’ Jewish antisemites are not an anomaly.
Often these non-Jewish Jews join, and sometimes lead, radical and/or revolutionary movements. In a sense, this is a way for them to “escape their Judaism, to assimilate into a universalistic non-Jewish world. Any feeling of kinship to Judaism and the Jewish people is replaced by a responsibility to the more general and less defined “mankind”.
Probably the two best known examples of modern non-Jewish Jews are Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. “A reader of Noam Chomsky’s political writings would conclude that the world’s most evil nations are the United States and Israel. … He has denied that Israel is a democracy or could ever become one”. Norman Finkelstein lectures throughout Germany as the son of Holocaust survivors, calling Israel a Nazi state, and comparing Israeli actions to the Palestinians as what the Nazis did to his parents”.
Could it be that these “radical Jews, who, like other radicals, have no roots, have no national or religious identity and disdain Jews (and others) who do”, …may also “believe (even if only subconsciously) that if they side with those who hate Jews, they will not be hated by them?”
Strangely enough Chomsky has just fallen out of favor with his radical associates over his comments on “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy“, written by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. (see below).
According to Eric Schechter, in an article in the Jerusalem Post, he asked the “anti-Zionist firebrand and DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein what he thought of these unseemly attacks on his mentor. “I see no point in probing motives,” he told me, “One should judge any argument on its merits.” [T]he fracas with Chomsky proves that, if you’re Jewish, no matter what you say and do, you’re always just one essay away from being labeled a pro-Israel lobbyist“.
As a postscript to the non-Jewish Jew, P&T add “There is a related problem of Jews who do feel Jewish but who are rootless in terms of religion. These secular Jews, like non-Jewish Jews, feel more secure, much more rooted, when non-Jews become like them, secular. This is one of the reasons that secular Jews are so involved in contemporary movements to secularize America”.
Denial
In order to deny the universality and timelessness of antisemitism and its roots solely in Judaism we are witnessing an attempt to de-Judaize antisemitism, especially as, since the Holocaust, antisemitism is not politically correct. P&T give the following example.
In her diary, written in hiding in Holland in 1944, Anna Frank wrote: “Who has inflicted this on us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now. It is God who has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and, if there are still Jews left when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason only do we suffer now.”
In the Broadway version of The Diary of Anna Frank, acting on the advice of the radical (non-Jewish Jew) Lillian Hellman, these words were replaced with “We are not the only people that have had to suffer … sometimes one race sometimes another”, words she never used and which are contrary to her beliefs.
History of Antisemitism and Blood Libel
The first recorded antisemitic persecution of the Jews was that of Antiochus Epiphanes in 167 BCE as recorded in the Book of the Maccabees. The Roman historian Tacitus “regarded the Jews attachment to the own God, laws and peoplehood as a challenge to Rome’s highest values”. Pagan antisemitism was directed against Jews who remained true to their Judaism.
When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, “church leaders could not ignore the Jews’ denial of the validity of Christianity. .. if it were not for the Jews there would be no Christianity. Jesus was an observant Jew. All his disciples were Jews. The Jewish Bible was the entire basis for the messianic claims made for Jesus. …
“Therein lie the origins of Christian antisemitism. Since the existence of Jews and Judaism challenged the legitimacy of the church, the church had to deny the legitimacy of the Jews and Judaism…. The New Testament did not depict the Crucifixion as the Roman execution it was, the Jews were depicted as having had Jesus killed … thereby giving rise to the most repeated Christian accusation against Jews and the greatest source of Christian Jew hatred: every Jew in every age is a ‘Christ-killer‘”.
Long before the Nazis and the Crusaders, the first recorded burning of a synagogue was instigated by St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan in 388. The first recorded accusation of ritual murder, Blood Libel, killing a Christian in order to use the victim’s blood in a Passover ritual, was made in Norwich, England, in 1144. So ingrained and believed was this utterly false accusation that it influenced the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Lamb and could even be found in a 1973 book of Ozark Mountain folk songs.
Blood libel evolved into the accusation that the Jews poisoned the wells thereby bringing on the Black Death of 1348-1349. It has further evolved and in an1988 address to the Nation of Islam an aide to the mayor of Chicago charged: “The AIDS epidemic is the result of doctors, especially Jewish ones, who inject AIDS into Blacks.”
Not to be outdone, 1997 the permanent observer of Palestine to the UN Commission on Human Rights testified to the UN in Geneva: “The Israeli authorities have infected by injection 300 Palestinian children with the HIV virus”. In 2002 the government-controlled Saudi Arabian paper, Al-Riyadh, described in great detail just how Jews extract the blood the use for Purim pastry and Passover matzo.
The Holocaust
Although “without Christian antisemitism the Holocaust would have been inconceivable” and many of the Nazi laws against the Jews enacted from 1933 onwards have exact parallels in Catholic Christian antisemitic laws passed from the sixth century onwards, “Nazi antisemitism differed from Christian antisemitism in at least two manners … it did not allow the Jews the choice of conversion or death, but only death . .. and it called for the murder of all Jews, not merely their suffering”.
However, the Christian population of Germany was equally divided between Catholics and Protestants and it was to Martin Luther that the Nazis dedicated the “large-scale pogrom throughout the country (Kristallnacht) in which they destroyed almost all of Germany’s synagogues.”
Unsuccessful in converting the Jews to his Protestantism he turned against the Jews and in Concerning the Jews and Their Lies, Martin Luther had advised “burn all synagogues, destroy Jewish dwellings, confiscate the Jews’ holy books, confiscate Jewish property”.
“At the Nuremberg trials Julius Streicher argued in his defense that he had never said anything about the Jews that Martin Luther had not said four hundred years earlier”.
Shortly before his death Pope John XXIII composed a prayer which included these words: “Forgive us the curse which we unjustly laid on the name of the Jews. Forgive us that, with our curse, we crucified Thee a second time”.
Moslem Antisemitism
Mohammed too thought the Jews of Medina would embrace his new religion which, in the early stages did not hide the influence of the Jews. “There is no God but God” totally “rejected the Christian trinity and the divinity of Jesus” (Sura 5:71-73)
When they failed to accept his new religion he accused them of “falsifying their Bible … for Jews who maintained their Judaism were a living refutation of Islam beliefs. Under Islam, as under Christianity, Jew-hatred was ultimately Judaism-hatred for any Jew who converted was accepted as an equal”.
“No fact better underscores the intensity of Moslem persecution of dhimmis” (second class citizens) “than the disappearance of so many Christian communities under Islam. The fact that under similar conditions the Jews survived bears witness to the Jews’ tenacious commitment to Judaism and not to Moslem benevolence to them. … The conversion of nearly every pre-Islamic Christian community in the Moslem world, excluding only the Copts of Egypt, eloquently testifies to what the Jews had to endure in their long sojourn in the Moslem world”.
Philosophy
“Hertzberg has shown that virtually every major figure of the French Enlightenment was hostile to Judaism. … Though the Jews numbered fewer than 1% of France’s population Voltaire was obsessed with them … and defined them as ‘the most abominable people in the world'”. (How then can we be surprised that merely a year ago the French Ambassador in London defined the Jews as ‘those shitty people’??) “Against this backdrop … the indifference to the fate of Dreyfus … becomes explicable. … Dreyfus was a Jew”.
“Immanuel Kant, the most influential German thinker of the eighteenth century called for the end of Judaism and its laws”.
“The stark antisemitism of On the Jewish Question by Karl Marx has proved an embarrassment to Jewish socialists who retained a Jewish identity and they refrained from translating his only essay devoted exclusively to the Jewish question into Yiddish or Hebrew. … he ignored the plight of Jewish workers and never commented on the pogroms that swept through Russia. … Marx identified Jews and Judaism with all that he hated in capitalism”.
Anti-Zionism
“Anti-Zionism is unique in only one way: it is the first form of Jewish hatred to deny that it hates Jews”. Contrary to the Jewish concept of four the components of Judaism the anti-Zionist holds that “as Judaism is only a religion and Zionism is a national movement … one can oppose Zionism without being an enemy of the Jews. …
But anti-Zionists themselves are sometimes confused by their own attempts to differentiate between Israeli-Zionist, whom they are against, and non-Israeli Jews, who they profess not to hate. Amira Baraka, the official poet laureate of New Jersey asked: “Who knew the World Trade Center was going to get bombed? Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay at home that day?” Of course she is referring to ‘Jews’, four hundred of whom perished in that terrorist attack.
“The Italian liberal daily La Stampa, in a cartoon supposedly directed against Israel but actually intended to arouse hatred against all Jews, harked back to the most damaging canard of Christian antisemitism: deicide. The cartoon showed the infant Jesus looking up from his manger at an Israeli tank and pleading: ‘Don’t tell me they want to kill me again'”. Further examples abound.
“The anti-Zionist advocacy of policies which would lead to the mass murder of Jews is, to put it as generously as possible, disingenuous. If anti-Zionism succeeds in its goal of destroying Israel, nearly all of Israel’s more than five million Jews , plus an untold number of non-Israeli Jews, would die in their effort to maintain Israel. Both the Israelis and their Arab enemies know this. Arab leaders … have repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel“.
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The debate on antisemitism continues unabated and the latest chapter is the article “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” written by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. About the Jewish-Zionist conspiracy, this article has generated many responses and comments, both for and against the ‘thesis’ they presented.
Benny Morris, professor Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University, in his article in The New Republic, which can be seen on the TNR website, has countered many of the accusations they make and he charges that. “[They] build their case mainly by means of omission: they tell certain facts while omitting others, sometimes more apt and crucial. And occasionally they distort facts and figures… Their work is riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity”.
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Related to this debate and to “Why the Jews?” is an article by Erik Schechter, entitled “Noam Chomsky, Champion of Israel?” which appeared in the Jerusalem Post on 22nd April, 2006 and was reprinted by CIJR, the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research on 5th May, 2006. Their web-site can be located at http://www.isranet.org/.
