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 17th century, English theatre often presented Jews as hideous
caricatures with hooked noses and bright red wigs. In 17th 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'ĂȘtre
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 17th 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
20th 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