Part V Alex Grobman, PhD
Legal Emancipation
In Central Europe, legal emancipation was completed in the 1860s and 1870s, notes Israeli historian Shmuel Ettinger. The idea of equal rights of all citizens, regardless of one’s background and religious affiliation, was acknowledged as an irrevocable principle in European political thought. The Jews believed this meant the “Jewish Question” finally had been solved. When they realized it still remained an unresolved issue, they were surprised. Although Jews were now legally German, French or English, they had been mistaken to believe their “special status” had only been a legal problem, but it was much more than that.
The legal and political transformations that occurred in Europe did not erase the antisemitic social and cultural feelings that had existed. The hostility was exacerbated by Jewish attempts at integrating into German society and “its rapidity and perceptible success,” Ettinger declared.
While Europe was deliberating Jewish emancipation in the 18th and 19th centuries, their supporters argued that the Jewish way of life, their isolation, association with specific professions, trades and places of residence were a result of the discrimination and oppression they experienced at the hands of the church, rulers and towns for hundreds of years.
When bias and persecution against Jews would be eliminated and they would be accepted as equals, it was assumed their individual and communal distinctiveness would cease to exist and the “Jewish Question” would no longer remain a problem.
This did not happen. As Jews settled in urban centers and entered influential occupations and important areas of everyday life, they became more conspicuous. Their successes engendered jealousy, resentment and loathing.
Historical Roots of Modern Antisemitism
Modern antisemitism did not exist in a vacuum. Antisemitism, sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred, has existed in one form or another throughout much of human history.
Historian Daniel Pipes explains that 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.
Although the original blood libels against the Jews were proclaimed by Christians, historian Bernard Lewis makes it clear that 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.
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.
The Wandering Jew
Historian George Mosse said that 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 did not take long from being 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.
The Center of Global Antisemitism Shifted From Nazi Germany To the Arab World
In “Jihad and Jew-Hatred,” Matthias Küntzel, a German political scientist and historian, contends that antisemitism is part of the ideological center of modern jihadism and not simply an additional component. He argues that “during and after World War II, the center of global antisemitism shifted from Nazi Germany to the Arab world, above all to the radical Islamist currents in and around the Moslem Brotherhood of Egypt.” This shift did not occur only because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Quite the reverse. The “ideology of and policy of radical Islamists” actually made the clash worse.
Küntzel points out he was not alone in recognizing the parallels between German antisemitism and that found in the Middle East. Thirty years before, Bernard Lewis, an expert on the history of Islam and Islam’s interaction with the West, said, “Since 1945, certain Arab countries have been the only places in the world where hardcore, Nazi-style antisemitism is publicly endorsed and propagated.”
This profound German influence can be seen in a number of areas: the similarities between the Arab anti-Jewish caricatures and those found in Julius Streicher’s “Der Stürmer”; the millions of copies in Arabic of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; the many editions of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” and the pro-Hitler attitude among Arab youth. Israeli soldiers came across the Arabic “Mein Kampf” in many homes that were raided this past year in Gaza.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.