A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (2 page)

Who could be crazy enough or malign enough to invent and disseminate as truth the odious fiction of a Jewish plot? And how did it convince so many people so fast? Following a lead by the investigative journalist Bryan Curtis, then at Slate, I tracked down the original disseminator of the conspiracy, Syed Adeeb, a Pakistani living in Alexandria, Virginia, who edits a website called
Information Times
(now
Information Press
). I asked him for his evidence and how he’d verified his story. He told me he had a reliable source. It was
Al-Manar
Television in Lebanon. He was not at all fazed when I pointed out that
Al-Manar
proclaims that it exists to “stage an effective psychological warfare with the Zionist enemy.”

Once upon a time, Adeeb and his like would be sending out smudged cyclostyled sheets to a handful of people. But
Al-Manar’s
story of a Mossad conspiracy and variations of it, endlessly recycled, had a big play in the Islamic world through the Web and word of mouth and made it into print. The newspaper
Ad-Dustour
in Jordan reported that the Twin Towers attack was “the act of the great Jewish Zionist mastermind that controls the world’s economy, media, and politics.”

The respected journalist Syed Talat Hussain was frank about the proliferation of the story in Pakistan: “In a country where there is a void of information, newspapers resort to rumors. In addition, there is an abiding tradition in the Pakistani print media deliberately to prove that whatever goes wrong is the work of Jews and the Hindus.” Tom Friedman, the
New York Times
columnist, reported an interview with an Indonesian from Jakarta who was worried that hostility toward Christians and Jews was being fed by what he called an insidious digital divide. The article said, “Internet users are only 5 percent of the population—but these 5 percent spread rumors to everyone else. They say, ‘He got it from the Internet.’ They think it’s the Bible.”
⁴

The technical accomplishment of the Internet, its speed, its reach, its infinite space, may indeed confer a spurious authenticity on nuttiness. It also, however, affords us an unprecedented degree of knowledge about what is being retailed, what people are being told, and what they may believe, especially when imprisoned by illiteracy. One thinks of Socrates’s allegory of a people who live all their lives chained to the blank wall of a cave. All they
ever see in the darkness are the play of shadows. Only Socrates’s philosopher, released into a bright day, can see that the shadows do not represent reality.

In doing the research for the Index lecture, I caught sight of many moving shadows on the wall that were alarming when seen in the light. I was looking at nothing less than the globalization of hate. There were thousands of antisemitic stories expressed with a vehemence as astounding as the contempt for history and scholarship, to the effect that the Holocaust was a Zionist invention, a “hoax,” a “lie,” a Jewish “marketing operation” (Hiri Manzour, in the official Palestinian Authority newspaper
al-Hayat al Jadida
), and a “huge Israeli plot aimed at extorting the German government… if only you [Hitler] had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief without their evil and sin” (a columnist in
Al-Akhbar
, an Egyptian government daily).

Much of the sewage had obviously seeped out from the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, the forgery concocted by the tsar’s secret police in 1903 that contrives to represent every disaster as a Jewish plot. The ignorant credulity of the peasants in Russia might be excused for believing their troubles were the result of a plot by Jewish elders, overheard by two Christians hiding in a Jewish cemetery at midnight. But how are we to understand educated Egyptians making a multimillion dollar thirty-part dramatic series based on this fraud? Or how do we equate our joy at seeing the thousands of Egyptians speaking up for freedom in the square in Cairo in 2011 with the fact that every corner bookstore in Cairo sells as “history” copies of this fraud in Arabic, French, and English?

I looked forward to the Index event as an escape from the effluent to the affluent. An address to educated, middle-class audiences normally found at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival sponsored by
The Guardian
was an opportunity to assess my anxieties and discuss what might be done. I called the talk “The View from Ground Zero” and made it clear I was as critical of Islamophobia as I was of antisemitism.

In the green hospitality room, the night before I was to speak, I was cheered to meet three friends of intellectual distinction, two women and a man I’d known since my days in London—let’s say a literary critic, a cultural innovator, and a novelist. “What are you going to talk about tomorrow?” asked the critic. I told them.

“You’re not going to criticize suicide bombers, are you?”

I thought the question was satirical. It wasn’t. When I owned up that
I really thought so, and strongly, they were aghast. I appealed to their reverence for the English language. I argued that a
Guardian
headline I’d seen referring to suicide bombers as “martyrs” was surely a stunning corruption of the word. Was not a martyr someone who gives up his life to save others, not to randomly kill babes in arms, old men in wheelchairs, mothers and fathers going about their innocuous ways (19 were victims at a Passover seder)? To describe murderers as martyrs was to be emotionally complicit in what Islam itself regards as a double transgression, suicide and murder.

I only inflamed their emotions. Critic and cultural innovator joined in a duet of denunciation. Suicide bombs were all the poor Palestinians could do to protest the cruelties of the Israelis. What had happened to my conscience?

I demurred. I did sympathize with refugees. I began to say the suicide bombings were just pure evil, like the beheading of Daniel Pearl of the
Wall Street Journal
(that February) just for being a Jew. Another mistake. I was not in some academic seminar. I was swept away in a tide of emotion about Palestinians.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, Harry. You’ve lived too long in America! You should get back to America!”

I looked to the novelist to stem the flow. He kept silent throughout. Later the same evening, I mentioned the outburst to James (Jamie) Rubin, the former U.S. assistant secretary of state for public affairs, who was then living in London. “You’d better be ready for more of the same when you speak,” he said.

I guess there were 500 people in the tent the next day. I spoke for my allotted hour without interruption, and then there was silence. And silence. To my anxious state, it seemed to last forever. It was probably no more than seven or eight seconds. Then people stood, and they applauded, and they all kept on applauding. I was relieved and gratified, but I have no doubt the reaction was a deeply felt expression of empathy for the victims (67 of them were British) and a disgust at the political exploitation of the tragedy I’d described. Tolerance is a deep vein in British culture, so the intellectuals’ vote for suicide bombers troubled me. My assailants never uttered the word “Jew,” only “Israelis.” Were they antisemitic? Perhaps not, but a British Parliamentary inquiry reported in 2006 that antisemitism was no longer confined to the Far Right but was manifest in a variety of ways on the Left—in the media, on the Internet, among fringe and extremist Islamists (small in number yet radical), and on campuses where a few academics and
students defame Israel as an apartheid state.
⁵
Marie Brenner reported a similar trend in France.
⁶

Antisemitism is a very peculiar pathology that recognizes no national borders. It is a mental condition conducive to paranoia and impervious to truth. Its lexicon has no word for individuality. It is fixated on group identity. It is necessarily dehumanizing when people become abstractions. Once an emotional stereotype has been created—of the Jews, of blacks, of Catholics, of Muslims—it is readily absorbed in the bones like strontium 90, an enduring poison that distorts the perceptions of the victims. All minority groups have suffered, but none have been stereotyped more heinously and more durably than Jews.

One of the reasons
A Convenient Hatred
is such an important and timely publication is that we can see how the poison proliferates in receptive minds, where it congeals into an unyielding conviction. As the eighteenth- century author Jonathan Swift wrote, you cannot reason someone out of something he has not been reasoned into. Shock succeeds shock on so many levels in this book. I came to think of reading each chapter from the year 586
BCE
to our times as akin to entering a complex of caves and receding chambers, each harboring its own Minotaur demanding human sacrifices. We cannot summon the Theseus of myth to rid us altogether of a Minotaur that in one form or another has survived for centuries, this monster of antisemitism gorging on regular infusions of hate. But we can discern the dark and dangerous twists and turns of the labyrinth of men’s minds that mutate from fear of a difference—difference of faith, of economic status, of custom, of language, of ritual, of culture—to an atrophy of ethical sense and the abyss of unreasoning hate.

Even the summaries of a cascade of cruelties that Phyllis Goldstein documents over centuries make one’s blood run cold. Jew or non-Jew, what sentient being could not but be appalled by just a few of the crimes against the innocent Jews? Eight hundred put to the sword in the Rhineland town of Worms (1096), some mothers and fathers choosing suicide for themselves and their children rather than face the butchery. Over thirty men and women burned alive in Blois (1171). Hundreds murdered in their homes in Seville, buried alive in Toledo, and drowned in the Tagus (1391– 1420). Two hundred thousand people expelled from their homes in Spain (1492), tens of thousands dying on the way out. Babies torn to pieces by frenzied mobs in Kishinev in what is now Moldavia (1903), 600,000 uprooted by the tsar’s army in 1915. Old men, women, children, and infants in arms massacred at
Proskurov (1919). A group of 33,771 men, women, and children shot and buried in the ravine known as Babi Yar near Kiev (September 29–30, 1941). And on into the nightmare years of the other Nazi programs of mass annihilation and to Auschwitz and beyond.

In addition to these better-known atrocities, one of the greatest shocks, for me, was the active antisemitism of the Christian church, both Catholic and Protestant, including Martin Luther. I feel shame that I was so little aware of it, never thought of how the stories and values I’d absorbed in the Episcopal church had to be reconciled with a barbarous history. As a schoolboy, I’d exulted in the adventures of the armored knights, banners flying with the cross of St. George, riding to free Jerusalem from the Turks. I didn’t know—how many people do?—that the crusaders, as they rode south through Europe to Jerusalem, were as keen to hunt down and kill as many Jews as they could find.

Oppression is a commonplace fate of minorities. The Jews are hardly unique in this regard: the majority has often had good cause to fear insurgency. Indeed, Jews, being not visibly different from the rest of the population, are generally exposed to less prejudice than members of more distinctive minorities. What I had not appreciated, however, until I read
A Convenient Hatred
, is how long Jews have uniquely been the subject of campaigns of intimidation and discrimination—since long before the creation of Israel, long before the Holocaust, long before the Spanish Inquisition, even before the Romans crucified Jesus. As striking as the persistence of the pathology is how Jews have maintained their identity, and many of them their faith, in the face of unparalleled defamation and assault. There are heroes in the story as well; more of their stories should be known.

Harold Evans is editor-at-large of Thomson Reuters, the world’s largest international multimedia news provider. He is also the author of two critically acclaimed best-selling histories of America:
The American Century
and
They Made America.
His most recent book is his memoir
, My Paper Chase,
which covers his early life and his years as editor of
The Sunday Times
and
The Times
of London. On the 50th anniversary of the founding of the International Press Institute, Evans was honored as one of 50 World Press Heroes
.

Having received a modern Jewish education more than a half century ago, I slowly came to realize that I, like almost all of my friends, had only the most limited knowledge of the history of antisemitism. Growing up right after World War II, with the horrors of the Holocaust exposed, we naively thought that the scourge of antisemitism would finally fade in our lifetime.

Yet, in our supposedly enlightened age, antisemitism has found new ways to assert itself, reviving old myths and inspiring new ones. I became haunted by the epigraph from Santayana quoted in William Shirer’s T
he Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.”

Thus, almost a decade ago, I started thinking about a different kind of book about antisemitism, one that would cover its entire history over the millennia. I convened a series of meetings with some of the foremost scholars of Jewish history, seeking advice and, perhaps among them, an author to write this book. Yet even these eminent experts demonstrated significant gaps in their knowledge of the subject. It was at that point that I turned to Facing History and Ourselves, a nondenominational organization dedicated to understanding and fighting not only antisemitism but also other evils of intolerance. The organization shared my belief in the need for an exhaustively researched, comprehensive history of antisemitism, clearly and simply written for the widest audience possible.

It has been my honor to commit the financial resources needed to support the research and writing of this important book. Neither Facing History and Ourselves nor I have applied any ideological or intellectual strictures to the project. The result, after almost a decade of work and careful scholarship, is the publication of an extraordinary book that threads its way through more than 2,000 years of uninterrupted antisemitism.