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Fjordman:
The Causes of Anti Semitism THE
CAUSES OF ANTI-SEMITISM Fjordman from http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/06/atlas-exclusi-1.html Andrew
G. Bostom, author of the excellent book The Legacy of Jihad, has asked me to do
a review of his recent book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, which I will
publish on Jihad Watch. Before this I will talk a bit about the causes of
non-Muslim anti-Semitism. I have tried to debate this subject online, but have
found it difficult to have a reasoned debate about this. AMDG, a Spanish contributor to
the Gates of Vienna blog and writer at the website La Yijad en Eurabia, has
suggested that I should start with pre-Christian anti-Semitism, since
anti-Semitism is much older than Christianity. He has a point. Greeks and
Romans (Europeans, or proto-Europeans) could display real anti-Semitism. Jewish
and Greek civilizations clashed with regards to nudity in art, the
representation of man etc. Traditional Jews resisted Hellenization
successfully, which is some of the background for why Hanukkah, or the Festival
of Lights, is celebrated today. The Romans did destroy the
Second Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, but I would be careful with saying that
this was because of "anti-Semitism" in the modern understanding of
the term. The Romans could be brutal; you don't create the world's largest
empire by being fluffy little bunnies. However, they were "tolerant"
in the sense that they didn't much care about which religion their subjects
adhered to as long as they accepted the political supremacy of the Roman state.
Most religious communities did, but the Jews were different. Some of the same
applies to the early Christians, who were sometimes persecuted by Roman
authorities. They too were "different," and they were reluctant to
honor the emperors as semi-divinities because this was considered to be
idolatry and thus conflicted with the Ten Commandments (which they had
inherited from the Jews). Jesus of Nazareth himself was executed (according to
all four canonical gospels) at the hands of the local Roman Prefect, Pontius
Pilate.Although Jews have sometimes been vilified as "Christ
killers," those actually carrying out the crucifixion were Romans. So why
don't we hate the Romans? Among the more recent
accusations I've heard against Jews among the post-Christian crowd (who don't
care about who did or did not kill Jesus) is that Jews are overrepresented
among Marxists and Multiculturalists. It is true that there are quite a few
Jews among prominent Multiculturalists. That's not "anti-Semitism,"
it's a factual statement. I've never been able to understand why American Jews
vote so overwhelmingly for the Democrats, even for Obama, but they do. I don't
see how that makes Jews substantially different from Christian or
post-Christian Westerners, though. There is a suicidal streak to Western
culture right now, and it's almost universally shared by all groups. Those who
think that Jews are "conspiring against us" should reflect over the
fact that Jews are disproportionately represented among those defending
European civilization (Andrew Bostom, Bat Ye'or etc.). Moreover, many of the
most prominent "suicide Jews" are suicidal on behalf of Jews, not
Gentiles. The prominent left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky has met on friendly
terms with leaders of Hezbollah, an Islamic terrorist organization that wants
to murder Jews and destroy the Jewish state of Israel. One possible reason for hatred
against Jews is plain old envy, and here there are parallels with ethnic
minorities elsewhere. The Chinese in Southeast Asia have been called "the
Jews of Asia." They do disproportionately well in the financial sector and
are occasionally distrusted and envied because of this. There were vicious
attacks against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in recent history, although this is
hard to separate from the fact that the majority population are Muslims whereas
the ethnic Chinese are not. There is frequently mistrust and envy directed
against distinct minorities who do better, on average, than the majority
population does. This also goes for Indians in East Africa. Still, there is
something special about Jews. There is a religious dimension here as well. In his book Eccentric Culture:
A Theory of Western Civilization, Rémi Brague explains how the Romans admired
the earlier culture of the Greeks. Christians also recognized that the Jews had
an older religious tradition than they did themselves and that they were
greatly indebted to it. Christian Europeans thus inherited a twin
"cultural secondarity" in relation to their Greek and Hebrew parent
cultures. Brague sees this phenomenon of cultural secondarity as the very
essence of the West, and dubs it "Romanity." As he says, Christians
recognize that the Hebrew Bible is still authentic, and Jews recognize that
Christians have adopted the entire Hebrew Bible unchanged. Muslims, on the
other hand, believe that Christians and Jews have falsified their texts, which
accordingly have no specific value in themselves: "One should be careful,
therefore, not to make an implicit analogy between what one calls, with an
expression that besides is quite superficial, the 'three monotheisms.' Islam is
not to Christianity (not even to Christianity and to Judaism) what Christianity
is to Judaism. Admittedly, in both cases, the mother religion rejects the legitimacy
of the daughter religion. And in both cases the daughter religion turned on its
mother religion. But on the level of principles, the attitude toward the mother
religion is not the same. While Islam rejects the authenticity of the documents
on which Judaism and Christianity are founded, Christianity, in the worst case,
recognizes at least that the Jews are the faithful guardians of a text that it
considers as sacred as the text which is properly its own. In this way, the
relationship of secondarity toward a preceding religion is found between
Christianity and Judaism and between these two alone." To name one example, the
leading medieval physician and philosopher Maimonides directed that Jews could
teach rabbinic law to Christians, but not to Muslims. For Muslims, he said,
will interpret what they are taught "according to their erroneous
principles and they will oppress us. [F]or this reason… they hate all
[non-Muslims] who live among them." But the Christians, he said,
"admit that the text of the Torah, such as we have it, is intact." Maimonides lamented the
aggression and humiliation Jews faced from Muslims: "You know, my
brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this
people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways
to harm us and to debase us… No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None
has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us
as they have… We have borne their imposed degradation, their lies, and absurdities,
which are beyond human power to bear." This is quite interesting,
since he lived in the Iberian Peninsula under Islamic occupation and we are now
told how Spain and Portugal under Islamic rule were beacons of tolerance.
Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong says that "until 1492, Jews and
Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain — a
coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe." The U.S. State
Department has proclaimed that "during the Islamic period in Spain, Jews, Christians,
and Muslims lived together in peace and mutual respect, creating a diverse
society in which vibrant exchanges of ideas took place." Nevertheless, it is certainly
true that Jews did suffer from repeated attacks and pogroms in Christian Europe
over many centuries, and they were expelled from Spain and Portugal after the
Reconquista. Because of this, Rémi Brague believes that although individual
Jews have been important throughout history and have in some cases been
intellectually influential (Maimonides, for instance), Judaism was forced to
play a low-key role in European societies: "Judaism as such has only
been able to exercise an influence on European culture from a rather late date.
The Jewish communities have been excluded for a long time from any
participation in political power that goes beyond the private role of certain
of its members. In order for Judaism to make itself understood publicly and get
away from the confidential character imposed on its written productions by the
exclusive use of Hebrew, one had to await the emancipation. This arrived in the
eighteenth century, first in Germanic countries (Austria and Prussia), and then
continued on in the wake of the French Revolution. During this period, Europe
was already a cultural reality, and it was already conscious of its unity on
this particular level. In this way, Judaism has been able to leave its mark, a
decisive mark, on an already constituted Europe, but it has contributed only a
little to making Europe." The emancipation led to an explosion
of Jewish creativity in nineteenth century and pre-Holocaust twentieth century
Europe. Jews had made their mark long before this, but not quite on the scale
we find from this period onwards. By far the most important reason for this was
the secularization of the Christians, which granted the Jews a more equal place
in society, but was it also a result of a secularization of the Jews
themselves? According to The Gifts of
Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy by Joel Mokyr, "the
failure of European Jews over many centuries to contribute to useful knowledge
(as defined here) in anything like a proportional amount in view of their
literacy and learning remains something of a puzzle." To Mokyr, the
creation of useful knowledge presupposes that the research agenda "is not
entirely dominated by knowledge with no conceivable immediate application (as
was the case, for instance, for Jewish rabbis)." He also writes that
"Many societies in antiquity spent a great deal of time studying the
movements of heavenly bodies, which did little to butter the turnips (though it
helped work out the calendar). For many generations Jewish sages spent their
lives on the exegesis of the scriptures, adding much to wisdom and legal
scholarship but little to useful knowledge as defined here." There is not necessarily a
contradiction between being a religious person and a secular scholar. Many
Christians have managed this feat well, and so have quite a few Jews, both in
ancient and in modern times. Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that Jews
have in certain periods focused too much on religious scriptures, as opposed to
secular knowledge. A similar example on a much larger scale is to be found in
medieval and early modern China, where the imperial examination system ensured
that a significant proportion of talented men had access to literacy and
learning. However, these examinations tended to focus exclusively on classics
of Confucian philosophy instead of engineering, mathematics and science, and
thus added less to the development of useful knowledge than might otherwise
have been possible. According to Italian scientist
and historian Giorgio Israel, professor at La Sapienza University in Rome, the
Roman Jewish community, one of the oldest in the world having lived at the same
place since Julius Caesar, has traditionally suffered from cultural
impoverishment compared to Jews elsewhere in the Italian Peninsula: "The situation in the rest
of Italy was quite different, and may be considered a melting pot of extremely
fertile cultural interactions. Such interactions occurred with Spanish Judaism
as early as the 11th century and again very intensely after the expulsion of
the Jews from Spain in 1492, which made Italy a place of transit or new
residence for refugees. But significant interactions occurred also with Eastern
Europe, above all through the cities of Trieste and Venice. Italy is a country
where eminent Kabbalists, such as Abraham Abulafia or Moshe Hayim Luzzatto,
lived and prospered, and where fertile relations existed between the Jewish
Kabbalah and the Christian Cabala, as represented in particular by Pico della
Mirandola. In this sense, Jewish thinking made a significant contribution to
the development of Renaissance philosophy." . This split between the community
in Rome and those in the rest of the country still exists, in his view: "Even today, a century and
a half after Italian unification, the differences have by no means been
cancelled out and the diversity among the Jewish communities in cities like
Rome, Milan, Turin or Livorno is still quite apparent. For instance, smaller
communities distrust the larger communities of Rome and Milan, especially the
former, the overwhelming numerical size of which is perceived almost as a
threat. The establishment of a Napoleonic kingdom in Italy in the early
nineteenth century, a kingdom which immediately set about knocking down the
ghetto walls and introducing complete emancipation based on the French model,
encouraged Italian Jews quickly and wholeheartedly to embrace the principles of
democracy. Once again the case of Rome was different: the city had been
returned to papal ownership for a period, and the gates of the ghetto were
opened only in 1867 when the city was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy and the
temporal power of the [Roman Catholic] Church definitively ended." Giorgio Israel believes that
the Jewish community in Italy is in a better position than that of France,
where a large Muslim community has triggered a wave of violence, also targeting
French Christians but especially Jews: "[T]he Italian situation is without
doubt one of the most tranquil and favorable for Jews in Europe. The situation
is much more difficult in Spain and France. It is no coincidence that the
French Jewish community, the largest in Europe, is experiencing wholesale
immigration to Israel. In both absolute and percentage terms the actual figures
are relatively low. But they are nevertheless significant and betray a profound
malaise when it is considered that the French community is firmly anchored in
the national reality. Nothing of this kind happens in Italy." His most interesting comment,
however, is regarding the secular assimilation of Jews into mainstream society
from the European Enlightenment into the nineteenth century: "This process resulted in
a loosening of ties with Jewish religious and cultural roots. The Italian
Jewish community was subjected to that process that Gershom Scholem described
so accurately with reference to Jewish mysticism. When, towards the end of the
18th century, Western European Jews so resolutely chose the path of European
culture, the religious sphere, and in particular its mystical component, was
experienced as alien and disturbing, and so distant from enlightened
rationalism that it was abandoned as rapidly as possible. In my research work
on the history of Italian science after the country was unified under the
Savoyard monarchy, I have always been impressed by the fact that so many
top-ranking Jewish Italian scientists–above all in the field of mathematics, physics
and biology, but also in the humanities and philosophy–showed no trace of the
slightest influence from or attachment to their own Jewish roots. In the
writings and letters of great personalities such as Federigo Enriques, Vito
Volterra (the eminent mathematician considered to be the greatest
representative of Italian science, who was indeed nicknamed 'Mr. Italian
Science'), or Tullio Levi-Civita, not once is the word 'Jewish' or 'Judaism'
used." Professor Giorgio Israel
laments the fact that "other" forms of knowledge have become largely
excluded from the public sphere, for Jews and Christians alike. For instance,
he attributes opposition to Pope Benedict's appearance at La Sapienza
University to fear of a dialogue between faith and reason: "This is just a
part of the secularist culture that has no argument, so it demonizes, it does
not argue as a real secular culture, but creates monsters." Israel feels that mathematics
is being hijacked by the technosciences: "In his Principia Mathematica,
Newton states that the mission of the philosophy of nature is to seek
causes." He fears the disappearance of this unitary system of knowledge,
which expired with the theory of relativity and quantum physics in the
twentieth century: "Today, only physics seems still to be bound to this
scientific model, but it is no longer at the heart of big science, being less
attractive to younger generations who prefer other fields close to the life
sciences or business sciences. Research in mathematics is drying up. A number
of my colleagues have adapted to this by undertaking practical research with
immediate applications, for which there is a demand." Instead of science we now have
technoscience, where science and technology are one and the scientist,
concerned mainly with ideas with immediate practical applications, is half
researcher, half businessman: "The worst thing would be to believe that
scientific rationality is reason's only means of perception. For me a novel by
Dostoevsky is just as much a manifestation of rationality as a work of history
or psychology. And science, which advances by means of trial and error as well
as seemingly irrational intuition, is just one form of many forms of
knowledge." The West has at least two
parent cultures, as Brague indicates: The Greek and the Hebrew ones. In my
view, the essence of the Greek achievement is rational debate as exemplified by
Socratic dialogue. The essence of the Greek achievement was rejected by the
Nazis (they were clearly not great believers in free speech and unfettered
debate), but also by the Muslims. This is one of the main reasons why Muslims
failed to fully internalize the Greek spirit, whereas Christian Europeans did. The essence of the Hebrew
parent culture is the moral component, which was transferred in a major way to
Christianity, a religion founded in the tradition of Judaism. According to his
architect Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler was fond of saying things such as:
"You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't
we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland
as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more
compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its
meekness and flabbiness?" Nazism was essentially a new
religion of Jihadism, which had more in common with Islam than with the silly
compassion of Christianity. Jews represented the moral dimension of Western
culture. By eliminating Jews, they could cut Christianity off from its roots,
and thus weaken it and make it more like Islam. The Nazis killed Jews because
they hated Western civilization and wanted to destroy it. If they thought that
by eliminating Jews they could weaken the West, this demonstrates that they
actually had a better grasp of what is "Western" than many
brainwashed university students do today. What is generally considered to
be the oldest still functioning parliament in the world is the Althing on
Iceland, founded in 930 AD by people of predominantly Norwegian, which means
northern Germanic, descent. The late Viking Age was a period when Christianity
grew rapidly in the Nordic countries, which enjoyed frequent contacts, peaceful
as well as not-so-peaceful, with continental Europe. Yet the blueprint for this
institution was not the Greek model of "democracy," it was an
indigenous, pre-Christian one. These Germanic societies had regional governing
assemblies called ting or thing already in the early Middle Ages. Some of the
parliaments in these countries, the Althing on Iceland, the Folketing in
Denmark and the Storting in Norway, have retained this legacy in their names to
this day. Creating a totalitarian state
is not a specifically "Germanic" thing to do. Traditional Germanic
societies, all the way back to Roman times, had more freedom for women than
some "civilized" cultures had at the time, and Islamic countries have
to this day. The repressive state the Nazis created has no precedent in
traditional northern European history, which means that the Nazis didn't just
attack the Greek and Hebrew components of Western civilization, but also the
Germanic one. Was the Nazi Holocaust during
the Second World War an extension of traditional anti-Semitism in Europe?
Robert Spencer in Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't
argues that it was not, although the Nazis certainly tapped into traditional
anti-Semitism to shore up support for their actions. According to Spencer: "Historian Daniel Jonah
Goldenhagen minces no words: 'The main responsibility for producing the
all-time leading Western hatred [of Jews] lies with Christianity. More
specifically, with the Catholic Church.' However, Rabbi David G. Dalin, a
historian of the Catholic Church's relations with the Jews, says this is 'bad
history and bad scholarship.' Malcolm Hay, who chronicles in searing detail the
mistreatment Jews suffered in Europe at the hands of Christians, notes also
that the most basic right, the right to live, was 'one which no Pope, no
Catholic theologian, has ever denied to the Jews — a right which no ruler in
Christendom ever denied to them until the advent of Adolf Hitler.' Clearly,
however, the Nazis sought justification for their actions from Christian
anti-Semitism." Dalin points out that the papal
record is not monochromatic: "The historical fact is that popes have often
spoken out in defense of the Jews, have protected them during times of
persecution and pogroms, and have protected their right to worship freely in
their synagogues. Popes have traditionally defended Jews from wild anti-Semitic
allegations. Popes regularly condemned anti-Semites who sought to incite
violence against Jews." Pope Leo X ordered the entire
Talmud to be printed by a Christian printer in Rome so as to discourage
anti-Semitic rumors about its contents. This is good, but it is indirectly a
testimony to the fact that anti-Semitism was widespread enough to constitute a
real problem in many parts of Europe. In early Christian times, clear
anti-Semitism was expressed by some Church leaders, for instance John
Chrysostom. According to Robert Spencer,
"the Nazis reprinted John Chrysostom's words in support of their
activities. There is nevertheless a large gulf between the anti-Judaism of
Chrysostom and other Christian leaders, and that of the Nazis, who were for the
most part anti-Christian and certainly anti-Catholic. Their anti-Semitism was
rooted in Darwinian racial theories that posited the Aryans as the master race
and the Jews as untermenschen." Spencer points out that "While
Christian anti-Semitism has been minimized, it still exists, particularly in
the Middle East where some Christians have absorbed the anti-Semitism of the
Islamic culture which surrounds them." The rabid rhetoric of the Nazis
regarding Jews is widely supported by Muslims today. The Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Jewish state of Israel a "filthy
bacteria." This is too often presented as something Muslims have
"imported" from Europeans. Historian Bernard Lewis in his book What
Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East states
that "The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East
occurred among the Christian minorities, and can usually be traced back to
European originals." This is clearly nonsense.
Hatred of Jews among Christians does exist, but Jew hatred has a much stronger
scriptural basis in Islam than it has in Christianity. The Australian Jihadist
David Hicks, who has trained with Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan, writes
that "Muslims fight against Jews and they kill them." He can base
this directly in Islamic religious scriptures, both the Koran and the hadith.
For instance, one authentic (according to Sunni Muslims) hadith states that:
"Allah's Apostle said, 'The Hour will not be established until you fight
with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say.
"O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'" (Bukhari
4.52.177) There is nothing like this in
the Christian Gospels. After all, Jesus of Nazareth was himself as Jew, as were
many of his early disciples. Muhammad was not. He spent his days murdering many
Jews, among them the Medinan tribe of Banu Quraiza. Jesus never killed anybody,
nor did he encourage others to do so for him http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=222 |
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