The Jewish Question: Part Two

Some people wrongly think Israel was created as a Jew homeland because of the holocaust in the Second World War. As part of Hitler’s strategy brutally named the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question, 6 million out of 9 million European Jews were killed; many of them ghettoed, starved, tortured and gassed. It is natural to imagine the creation of Israel as a goodwill gesture to Jews who survived the holocaust. However, as we saw earlier, the Jew homeland was announced through the Balfour declaration in 1917, much before the rise of Hitler. Jews had been persecuted everywhere, for nearly 2000 years.

This is curious. I can understand the big religions wholeheartedly and militarily hating one another. But Jews are and have always been too small a number. Today Christianity has more than 2 billion followers, Islam more than 1.5 billion; there are more than 1 billion Hindus, but only 14 million Jews worldwide. At its peak, before the holocaust, Judaism had 17 million adherents, minuscule in comparison to the three big religions. Why, then, such strong feelings towards a minor community - so much so as to profile, persecute and annihilate it? Why create a special word, Anti-Semitism, to articulate Jew hatred. In my reading, I found four key reasons.

Responsible for the death of Jesus

For centuries, provoked by their religious zealots, Christians have believed that the Jewish people were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. The crucifixion story talks about Pontius Pilate who could have stopped the execution, but instead washed his hands – literally and metaphorically – to let Jesus be killed.

Saint Hippolytus (170-236 AD) in his Expository Treatise against the Jews has this to say:

“Now then, incline thine ear to me and hear my words, and give heed, thou Jew. Many a time does thou boast thyself, in that thou didst condemn Jesus of Nazareth to death, and didst give him vinegar and gall to drink; and thou dost vaunt thyself because of this. Come, therefore, and let us consider together whether perchance thou dost boast unrighteously, O, Israel, and whether thou small portion of vinegar and all has not brought down this fearful threatening upon thee and whether this is not the cause of thy present condition involved in these myriad of troubles.”

The king of Jews was crucified, and the religion formed in his name declared Jews to be responsible for the crucifixion.

Blood libel

The blood libel superstition insists that Jews kidnap and kill pre-pubertal Christian boys to bake special bread (Matzoth). This is a religious ritual during the Jewish holidays. An American historian Walter Laqueur says there have been 150 such cases (not to talk about thousands of rumours) reported in the Middle Ages. In those cases, Jews were arrested and usually killed by a mob.

My favourite author Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, has this passage. The girl is asking Alexie Karamazov (Alyosha), the priest:

“Alyosha, is it true that at Easter the Jews steal a child and kill it?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a book here in which I read about the trial of a Jew, who took a child of four years old and cut off the fingers from both hands, and then crucified him on the wall, hammered nails into him and crucified him, and afterwards, when he was tried, he said that the child died soon, within four hours. That was ‘soon’! He said the child moaned, kept on moaning and he stood admiring it...”

Conspiracy theories, when propagated by a Church, can influence masses for generations. Parents pass on these beliefs to their children. The beliefs are reinforced by what you read and trust. If you are told that a community executed the founder of your religion, you get a lifelong licence to hate that community.

Racial prejudice

Just by looking at a person, we can’t pinpoint his religion or language, because both are man-made phenomena. However, we can tell the gender and broadly speaking the race of a person. Sometimes, race and religion can be visibly distinct, e.g. the Bangladeshi Muslims and the Arab Muslims or the European Christians and the African Christians. Christianity and Islam, the two biggest religions, have expanded through large-scale conversions. Judaism is a small religion, and in most cases Jews were identified as belonging to another race.

Somerset Maugham, another favourite writer of mine, in his celebrated story Mr Know-all, describes the main character Mr Kelada as having a “hooked nose”. In the 17^th century, English theatre often presented Jews as hideous caricatures with hooked noses and bright red wigs. In 17^th century Venice, Jews were required to wear a red hat at all times in public. The punishment for not wearing a red hat was the death penalty. As we know, the Nazis required them to wear armbands. In short, the haters made sure Jews could always be identified so as to persecute them.

Moneylenders and usury

Christianity and Islam traditionally prohibited money lending for profit. Charging interest was a sin, if not a crime. Money lending for profit was the exclusive territory of Jews. Here again we can quote from literature, a well known example in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.  The character of Shylock is capable of creating hatred towards Jewish moneylenders for ever.

The profiteering by the Jewish moneylenders seems like a realistic reason for the money-borrowers to hate them. (Even today, most of us distrust bankers).

Money and commerce are a part of the Jewish blood. When I lived in Poland, I took friends and relatives who visited me to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Feeling miserable and gloomy, we would then return to Krakow and visit the Jewish Kazimierz- the historical district of Krakow. (Spielberg’s Schindler’s list was shot here). In the synagogues, I was shocked by the crass commercialism shown by the Rabbi - pay for entry, pay for viewing of documentaries, pay exorbitant prices for the DVDs. Commerce rather than religion was the raison d'être of that synagogue, and its custodians didn’t hide it. 

Settler colonialism

Hated, ostracised and persecuted for 2000 years, later facing the threat of extinction in concentration camps, the Jews naturally fought for their own home. Zionism succeeded in getting that home in Palestine, and the settlements started.

Colonialism is of two types. When the British Empire ruled over India, it was only to plunder India’s wealth and exploit its labour, rather than for the British people to settle there by kicking the Indians off. This type of colonialism generally ends, as it ended in the case of India in 1947.

The settler colonialism, on the other hand, is to capture the land so as to settle there by throwing or destroying the original residents off that land. The United States of America and Australia are two well-known examples of settler colonialism.

The settlers go to the new place, depopulate the locals, start living there, and give the place names borrowed from their home country. Today’s New York was first captured by the Dutch in the 17^th century. They named today’s Manhattan ‘New Amsterdam’ and the larger area ‘New Netherland’. At the end of the second Anglo-Dutch war of 1665-1667, the English captured it. They renamed New Amsterdam as ‘New York’ to honour the then Duke of York (who later became King James II). (Any place that has new in its name smells of settler colonialism). Over the next couple of centuries, Christian Europeans of all kinds emigrated and settled in America. Today, except a few historians and Wikipedia, nobody knows who the original people in that land were. It was as if a new (or additional) national home was declared for Europeans, and they all flocked to the new land called America.

The story of Israel is similar – the only difference being that it happened in the 20^th century. Next week, in the third part, I will argue why this issue is important in predicting the Israel-Palestine future.

(Continued next week)

Ravi