Antisemitism

"It would be futile to deny that the Nazis built a vast mass of evil on a vast mass of prejudice. It would be equally futile to deny that strong prejudices against the Jews existed among Christians during the centuries before the Shoah. Since, moreover, the childhood of the European nations was passed under the tutelage of the clergy, we should not be surprised that these prejudices were, in part, ecclesiastically inculcated."

"The Holocaust was the product not of Christendom, but of Christendom's collapse. The destruction of Christendom effected (1) the rejection of Catholic natural law and (2) the rise of the absolute nation-state, previously impossible because popes could depose and counterbalance kings. Hitler, to be sure, contributed a neo-paganism and anti-Semitism all his own. But in mobilizing opinion and wielding power, he was helped more by these two innovations than by any Catholic doctrines."

""You don't know what we've been through," she explained. "You think things are good. You think we're all safe. And that's when it happens." "When what happens? Another Holocaust? Come on!" She just shrugged."

"We have to be clear that while antisemitism is a threat to Jews everywhere, it is also a threat to democratic governance itself. The antisemites who marched in Charlottesville don’t just hate Jews. They hate the idea of multiracial democracy. They hate the idea of political equality. They hate immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people, women, and anyone else who stands in the way of a whites-only America. They accuse Jews of coordinating a massive attack on white people worldwide, using people of color and other marginalized groups to do their dirty work."

"The forces fomenting antisemitism are the forces arrayed against oppressed people around the world, including Palestinians; the struggle against antisemitism is also the struggle for Palestinian freedom. I stand in solidarity with my friends in Israel, in Palestine, and around the world who are trying to resolve conflict, diminish hatred, and promote dialogue, cooperation, and understanding."

"The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc." Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side."

"Anti-Semitism, in a word, is fear of man’s fate. The anti-Semite is the man who wants to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, devastating lightning: in short, anything but a man."

"Following publication of the first edition of this book, some individual anti-Semites and anti-Semitic groups began to utilize parts of what Israel Shahak and I wrote about Jewish fundamentalists to justify their hatred of Jews. They alleged that by revealing ideas of Jewish fundamentalists we have confirmed generalizations about the "evil nature" of Jews. They have taken our criticism of Jewish fundamentalism out of context and have utilized it in an invalid manner for their ugly purpose. … It should be obvious that Israel Shahak and I abhor what these anti-Semites do but that we are not responsible for them or for what they do."

""I am a Jew." Those have been the words of the Jewish people for three millennia. Those were the words of the men, women and children of Masada. Those were the words of the followers of Bar Kokhba. Those were the words of Jews in Granada in 1066, and the Rhineland in 1096, and Khmelnytsky from 1648 to 1657, and Kishinev in 1903, in Hebron in 1929. Those were the words of Jews in Auschwitz and Treblinka. Those were the last words of Daniel Pearl. And those are my words, too."

"The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given. He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, he less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good."

"Anti-Zionism is all but indistinguishable from anti-Semitism in practice and often in intent, however much progressives try to deny this."

"Whenever a Jew is killed, it is for the benefit of Islam."

"Jews in Medina are singled out as "men whose malice and enmity was aimed at the Apostle of God". The Yahūd in this literature appear not only as malicious, but also deceitful, cowardly and totally lacking resolve. However, they have none of the demonic qualities attributed to them in mediaeval Christian literature, neither is there anything comparable to the overwhelming preoccupation with Jews and Judaism (except perhaps in the narratives on Muhammad’s encounters with Medinan Jewry) in Muslim traditional literature. Except for a few notable exceptions... the Jews in the Sira and the Maghazi are even heroic villains. Their ignominy stands in marked contrast to Muslim heroism, and in general, conforms to the Qura'nic image of "wretchedness and baseness stamped upon them.""

"As I always say, the "oldest hatred" didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt."

"In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the 19th and early 20th century, they were hated for their race. Today they are hated for their nation-state, and that is radically new, and that is what makes anti-Zionism. Not criticism of Israel. I mean, for heaven’s sake, I don’t know any Israeli who doesn’t criticize Israel, so criticizing Israel does not make you an anti-Semite. But anti-Zionism—the idea that Israel alone, among all nations, has no right to exist—that is the new mode of antisemitism."

"The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews."

"Of course it’s theoretically possible to distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism, just as it’s theoretically possible to distinguish segregationism from racism but, just as virtually all segregationists are also racists, virtually all anti-Zionists are also antisemites."

"Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

"For thousands of years, a clear sign of antisemitism was treating Jews differently than other peoples, from the discriminatory laws that many nations enacted against them to the tendency to judge their behavior by a different yardstick."

"Since this antisemitism [criticism of Israel] can hide behind the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel, it is much more difficult to expose."

"Moreover, the so-called “new anti-Semitism” poses a unique challenge. Whereas classical anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish people or the Jewish religion, “new anti-Semitism” is aimed at the Jewish state. Since this anti-Semitism can hide behind the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel, it is more difficult to expose. Making the task even harder is that this hatred is advanced in the name of values most of us would consider unimpeachable, such as human rights."

"We are up against a failure of Americans to take seriously the pitch Jewhating attained so quickly in Europe in the thirties, for example, because Americans think Europe and the thirties so far away. They know about evil Germans, sheeplike Jews, and heroic Americans, but are not taught to see the war against the Jews as a culmination to centuries of Jewhating. Americans are told lies about the base of Nazism, so that we imagine Jewhating goes with a lack of education: working-class people are-as with white racism in this country-blamed. We are not told of the doctors and doctorates trained in Europe's finest universities. For most Americans the Holocaust blurs safely, almost pleasantly, with other terrible events of the past, like Bubonic Plague in the Middle Ages. Nor have most Americans paid much attention to the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union, or Argentina, or Ethiopia, unless an ideological point is to be scored against these nations."

"The Jews were seen as the most immediate threat to racial purity inside Germany, and as the main motor of resistance outside the country. A policy of extreme anti-Semitism would accordingly be a central concern of the government in peace first and in war later. Furthermore, a key internal need was the urgency of increasing the birthrate of the allegedly better and reducing the birthrate of the supposedly inferior racial stocks within the German population, measures that required a dictatorial regime, which alone could in addition prepare for, and hope to succeed in, the wars a racial policy called for in external affairs. Measured by the criterion of feeding a growing German population with the products of its own agricultural land, the boundaries Germany had once had were almost as useless as those of the 1920s; and thus a revision of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 could be only a propaganda excuse and never a goal of German policy. The vast reaches of additional land to be obtained would never be granted peacefully, and war was therefore both necessary and inevitable."

"There is no official anti-Semitism in Russia; anti-Semitism in Russia is a crime against the State."

"Until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region. Jews had lived safely—although submissively—under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom, but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice. After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier."