On Eternal Strangers Critical Views of Jews and Judaism Through the Ages - Thomas Dalton

 

Poor Jews! Condemned by God and fate to be forever misunderstood, ne-glected, insulted, abused, envied, pitied—indeed, hated by all mankind. 

The subject of insult, calumny, slander, nay, even beatings, torture, and all manner of physical abuse. Such an unkind destiny. How did it come to this? How is it that throughout history, Jews have come to be detested, battered, and beaten down? Is it something about Jewish culture? Religion? Ethnicity? Values? And how does this long history relate to present-day abuse and hatred heaped upon Jews worldwide, and on the Jewish state? 

These are important questions, given the present condition of the world and the power and influence commanded by the Jewish community generally. Part of the current animosity is based, no doubt, on the mere fact that Jews, a small minority in every nation of the world save Israel, hold grossly disproportionate power to their numbers.1 Acting through the United States, Jews are more dominant than ever; we need only recall the statement of Malaysian president Mahathir Mohamad, who said, “Today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”2 People everywhere, no matter their religious or political context, understand an elemental fact of democracy: a small, wealthy minority of people should not exert disproportionate influence in the life of a nation. 

That the Jews do this is undeniable, and they would be disliked on this count alone. 

But there is much more to the story. Their present level of influence is unprecedented, but Jews have had access to power for millennia. Against this backdrop have been numerous pogroms, banishments, and outright massacres. Thus it was not strictly their influence that led others to detest them. Other factors have been at work. By recounting this history, and the observations of prominent individuals, we may better understand the Jewish phenomenon, and thus learn how to better deal with this most influential minority.

In the present work, I will trace the history of negative attitudes toward Jews and Jewish society, beginning in ancient times. The point is not to revel in abuse, but to give voice to the most articulate and insightful critics of Jews—and to draw plausible conclusions. 

In the academic literature, such a study would come under the heading ‘history of anti-Semitism.’ There are many such works; the library database WorldCat lists over 800 English-language books on this topic published in the past 10 years alone. But these books—the vast majority by Jewish authors—reflect a strongly pro-Jewish bias. Consequently, the critics are nearly always the source of the problem, never the Jews or Jewish actions.

The Jews themselves are almost uniformly portrayed as an innocent and beleaguered people, set upon by cruel and vindictive forces. The various “anti-Semites” are depicted as sick individuals, sadistic in nature, even downright evil. At the very least, they are severely mentally ill. Consider this impressive statement from a recent “anatomy of anti-Semitism”: 

In the 1940s and 1950s, students of anti-Semitism widely regarded that phenomenon … as a ramification of severe emotional or social disor-der. They realized that Christian prejudice… could not explain the fire-storm that had nearly obliterated twentieth-century European Jewry. … In the agonized post-Holocaust reassessment, … psychohistorians, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts tended to focus on flaws in the argument that anti-Semitism sprang from christological sources. … [American postwar studies] describe anti-Semitism as an emotional disorder produced by intrapsychic tensions and sexual and social anxieties and frustrations. … Jew haters accordingly exhibit grave personality disorders. They are asocial or antisocial, alienated, isolated, inhibited, anxious, repressed, rigid, regressive, infantile, narcissistic, hostile, punitive, conformist, dependent, delusive, guilt-ridden, paranoid, irrational, ag-gressive, and prone to violence. (Jaher 1994: 10-12) Frederic Jaher all but exhausts his thesaurus in seeking pejorative appella-tions for the insane “Jew haters.” And yet we must ask ourselves: Is this rational? Were there no other causes that might have motivated the critics of Jewry? Were all the notable ‘anti-Semites’ in history—and there were many, as I will show—really insane? All those prominent and brilliant in-dividuals, by all other accounts men of genius—were they closet lunatics? 

Or does the problem lie elsewhere? Is the psychosis, perhaps, resident in the Jewish personality, the Jewish psyche, the Jewish race? Is it a defense mechanism to reflect one’s own deficiencies upon one’s enemies? 

In the following assessment of historical attitudes, I will be seeking common and universal themes. Attitudes, criticisms, and other negative observations that persist over the centuries and across cultures are significant markers; they indicate a set of robust and persistent traits that are ap-parently embedded in the Jewish character. It is enlightening to examine such traits in an open and objective manner.