throughout most of the history of antisemitism, up until the invention, in the nineteenth and twentieth century, of the idea that the Jews constitute a biologically determinate race (rather than—like the English, say—a racially heterogeneous but religiously and culturally coherent people), has it generally been possible for a Jew to avoid persecution and in effect cease to be regarded as a Jew simply by converting and abandoning Judaism?
A sixth, closely related question is this: Why, when ordinary social prejudice strives only to maintain the despised outsider in an inferior social position, should political antisemitism appear to its adherents to require the elimination of the Jews, whether by conversion, emigration, or extermination?
A further question concerns the strange combination of stability and variability displayed over the centuries by the content of antisemitic belief. On the one hand, certain very general beliefs, as that “the Jews are faithful only to one another and to their own laws, and are otherwise enemies of all humankind” remain constant from Haman to Goebbels. Once such generalized grounds of resentment descend into concrete specificity, on the other hand, the charges historically leveled seem bizarrely arbitrary. These charges range from child murder to well poisoning; from the imagined consumption of gentile blood in the Passover matzo (despite the fact that the consumption of blood per se is forbidden to Jews by the laws of kashruth) to the murder of gentiles for their body parts; from usury in pursuit of private interest to usury in support of (hated but non-Jewish) kings and states; from obstinacy in avoiding contact with others in order to hug to themselves a despised religion to threatening the Judaization of the non-Jewish majority faith; from secret control of states of whose citizens they comprise a minuscule minority to plotting to subvert the very states they supposedly control; from responsibility for the rise of capitalism to responsibility for its overthrow. The dreamlike heterogeneity displayed by these alleged depravities of the Jews is matched only by their internal incoherence.
Eighth and finally, there is the question to what strange processes political antisemitism owes its power to shift its constituency over time from one end of the political spectrum to the other. Prior to the eighteenth century, principled, political hostility to the Jews was largely associated with the church. In the later decades of that century, it became equally strongly associated with the Enlightenment in its revolutionary phase. In the nineteenth century, hostility shifted back to an association with social and religious conservatism but then in the second half of the century began to acquire equally powerful links with the rising forces of socialist reform. The first half of the twentieth century, on the one hand, saw political antisemitism take on new and this time even more savagely lethal forms in the hands of fascists and nationalists. The second half and the opening years of the twenty-first century, on the other hand, saw it shift its constituency yet again to become a standard element in the discourse of “progressives” and internationalists.
These eight questions are no doubt far from exhausting the puzzling features of political antisemitism. Nevertheless, if we can devise an answer to the question “Why the Jews?” capable of throwing useful light on even this modest collection of puzzles, we shall not have done badly. Let us, therefore, proceed to the chain of arguments that it is the main business of this chapter and the next to elaborate.
SEEING “THE JEWS” AS “A DISEASE”
Recently, in a paper on the causes of the Holocaust by the German sociologist and economist Gunnar Heinsohn (more specifically, on the motives underlying Adolf Hitler’s desire to get rid of the Jews), I came across the following communication from Hitler to Martin Bormann, dated February 3, 1945:23
I have never been of the opinion that the Chinese or Japanese, for example, are racially inferior. Both belong to old cultures and I admit that their culture is superior to ours. … I even believe that I will find it all the easier to come to an understanding with the Chinese and the Japanese, the more they persevere in their racial pride. … Our Nordic racial consciousness is only aggressive towards the Jewish race. We use the term Jewish race merely for reasons of linguistic convenience, for in the real sense of the word, and from a genetic point of view there is no Jewish race. Present circumstances force upon us this characterization of the group of common race and intellect, to which all the Jews of the world profess their loyalty, regardless of the nationality identified in the passport of each individual. This group of persons we designate as the Jewish race. … The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit. … Spiritual race is of a more solid and more durable kind than natural race. Wherever he goes the Jew remains a Jew … presenting sad proof of the superiority of the “spirit” over the flesh.24
Heinsohn argues, from this and other textual evidence, that Hitler’s antisemitism was not racially based (a judgment that I, as I have argued elsewhere, would be inclined to extend to antisemitism in general).25 Rather, Hitler believed that the Jews must be eliminated as the only way of eliminating the malign spiritual influence of Jewish culture. In what was this malign influence supposed to consist? Heinsohn marshals persuasive textual evidence to suggest that in Hitler’s mind, it consisted in the insinuation into European culture of ethical principles, notably that of the sanctity of life, which had sapped the capacity of the Nordic race (as it had historically sapped, Hitler seems to have believed, that of the nations of the ancient world) to achieve their goals through the merciless destruction both of enemy combatants and of entire enemy peoples. Three of the passages Heinsohn cites in support of this reading of Hitler’s motives are particularly telling. The first comes from an account by the Nazi leader of Danzig, Hermann Rausching, of conversations with Hitler at the start of the 1930s. Rausching represents Hitler as having said,
We terminate a wrong path of mankind. The tables of Mount Sinai have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention. … It is our duty to depopulate, just as it is our duty to provide appropriate care to the German population. … What do I mean by depopulation, you will ask. Do I intend to eliminate entire peoples? Yes, more or less. That is where it will lead to. … Natural instinct commands every living being not only to defeat the enemy but to destroy him. In earlier ages there existed the good right of the victor to exterminate whole tribes, whole nations.26
The second, from Hitler’s table talk, records his belief that the Germans lost World War I only because Jewish ethical inhibitions rendered them unable to pursue their aims with the absolute ferocity that he supposes (arguably falsely, given the actual outcome of such tactics in World War II) would have brought victory in its train: “We experienced it during the World War: the only country that was religious was Germany, and that was the country that lost.”27
The third supporting passage, dating from August 7, 1920, records Hitler’s conviction that it is because the Jew is, spiritually speaking, a disease of Western civilization that he must be treated as such: “Do not think that you can fight a disease without killing the causative agent, without destroying the bacillus, and do not think that you can fight racial tuberculosis without seeing to it that the nation is freed from the causative agent of racial tuberculosis. The influence of Judaism will never fade as long as its agent, the Jew, has not been removed from our midst.”28
Heinsohn has two aims in his essay: first, to elucidate Hitler’s motives as a means of challenging the common view that the Holocaust is simply “inexplicable” and second, to defend the idea that the Holocaust was indeed, in some sense, an utterly new and historically unique event. His proposal is that that what made the Holocaust unique—or “uniquely unique” as he puts it—was that “it was a genocide for the purpose of reinstalling the right to genocide.”29 Hitler wished to abrogate the doctrine of the sanctity of life that he considered the Jews to have introduced to Western civilization and to reestablish a supposedly ancient right to kill without limit in the service of national or racial self-interest: a right extending from the killing of the handicapped and the infanticide of surplus or unwanted children to the wholesale massacre of enemy populations.
The
