A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (49 page)

J
EWISH
E
XODUS FROM
E
UROPE
(1945–1947)

Canada, the United States, Central and South America, South Africa, and Australia took in about 52,500 Jews after the Holocaust. The other 83,000 refugees went to Palestine.

Emil Draitser was a Jew born just before the war in Odessa, a city in the Ukraine then under Soviet rule. In 1945, he and his mother returned from Uzbekistan (where they had hidden from the Germans) and discovered that “the war was still giving off smoke in the hearts of those children who had grown up in it.” The parents of some of his classmates had aided the Germans. That collaboration, years of German propaganda (a media campaign that blamed the war on “the Jews” rather than the Nazis), and a deep-rooted antisemitism shaped the way many Ukrainians responded to Jews after the war. Draitser wrote:

For a long time after the war ended, in the quiet corners of Odessa streets, in the remote alleys of the parks, in the secluded places among the ruins, gangs of youngsters hunted for Jewish kids, survivors of the Holocaust, and harassed and beat them up, often till they bled.
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Emmanuel Mounier, a leading French Catholic theologian, described a similar attitude in Poland in the spring of 1946. As a result, the few Jews he encountered were “gripped with terror. Survivors think only about leaving.”
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Some people attributed the virulent antisemitism in areas once occupied by Germany to guilt—for turning a blind eye to the murder of their neighbors, aiding the Germans, or taking the belongings Jews had left in their safekeeping. Others attributed the rise in antisemitism to the fear that Jewish survivors would seek revenge on those who had betrayed them.

This new outburst of antisemitism was not limited to eastern Europe. The Holocaust was one of many events that Europeans in the late 1940s wanted to forget. By focusing on wartime hardships, some Europeans cast themselves as victims to turn attention from other, more shameful memories.

Opinion polls in the United States also suggested that people who disliked Jews before the Holocaust did not like them any better after the Holocaust. In 1942, just weeks after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, pollsters found that nearly 25 percent of Americans considered the Japanese the nation’s greatest threat, 18 percent believed it was the Germans, and 15 percent the Jews. In June 1944, 11 months before the war ended, 24 percent identified Jews as the greatest threat, 9 percent the Japanese, and 6 percent the Germans.
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In 1945, yet another poll showed that 58 percent of Americans believed that “Jews have too much power in the United States.”
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When asked about European immigration, only 5 percent of Americans favored
the idea of an increase.
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Opponents of immigration wrote letters to Congress expressing their fears that changes in the law would result in “a flood of Jews.” In their view, “we [already] have too many.”
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The story in Britain was much the same.

Antisemitism affected the way Jews were treated almost everywhere after the war, but feelings ran particularly high in Poland. In the nine months after V-E Day, more than 350 Jews were murdered there, and countless others were assaulted.

When Germany and the Soviet Union had divided Poland in 1939 (see
Chapter 13
), many Poles believed that the Soviet Union was the greater threat. Jews in Poland strongly disagreed. Indeed, most of the Jews who survived the Holocaust did so because they found a safe haven in the Soviet Union. Tensions between Poles and Jews intensified after the Soviet Union, which had liberated Poland from the Germans, established a Communist government there. One of its first actions was a “population exchange” with the Soviet Union in the spring of 1946. That exchange returned to Poland an estimated two million Polish nationals who had been living in the Soviet Union for years. Among them were more than 150,000 Jews. In return, Poland shipped its Ukrainian population to the Ukraine even though many of them had lived in Poland for generations.

Concerned by the growing violence, Joseph Tenenbaum, the president of the American-based World Federation of Polish Jews, traveled to Warsaw in 1946 to meet with Cardinal August Hlond, the head of Poland’s Catholic Church. He hoped to persuade the cardinal to aid Jewish survivors. The cardinal refused. He insisted that Jews were being killed in retaliation “for the murder of the Christian population by the Jewish Communist-run Polish Government.”
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Tenenbaum pointed out that most of the Jews killed in Poland in 1946 were not Communists or government officials. As proof, he handed Cardinal Hlond a monthly bill for funeral expenses sent to the Jewish community in Krakow. It listed, by name and age, every Jew murdered in the city. Among those killed were two small children, one an infant. Tenenbaum asked:

Now, can anyone think that these children were killed by the bandits because they were Communists? Or is the common procedure of pulling suspected Jews out of trains and buses and stripping them to
see if they are circumcised, and if proven to be so, murdering them on the spot, while non-Jews are returned to the train with apologies; is this political murder, or murder of Jews because they are Jews?
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The cardinal was not convinced. His stand confirmed what many Jews already believed: they had no future in Poland. Even before the war ended, a few young Jews who had led revolts in the ghettos made plans to take Jews out of the country. They organized an underground group known as
Brichah
—the Hebrew word for “flight.” With the support of Palestinian Jews, especially members of the Jewish Brigade (a unit in the British army made up of Palestinian Jews, similar to the one that fought in World War I),
Brichah
helped Jewish refugees reach Italy and from there sail to Palestine. The group had the support of many individuals—non-Jews as well as Jews—despite British opposition.

The need to help Polish Jews took on new urgency in the summer of 1946. On July 4, a nine-year-old boy in Kielce, a small city 120 miles south of Warsaw, falsely claimed that “the Jews” had kidnapped him. He told the police that he had been taken to a basement, where he witnessed the murder of 15 Christian children “for their blood”—a reiteration of the ancient myth of ritual murder (see
Chapter 5
). Within hours, about 5,000 angry protestors had surrounded a building owned by the Jewish community and attacked every Jew inside. When the rampage ended, about 75 Jews were injured and 41 were dead, including a number of very young children. Both police officers and soldiers were on the scene, but none of them tried to stop the violence. Indeed, some participated in the rioting.

Cardinal Hlond claimed that the Jews had provoked the violence by accepting jobs in Poland’s government in an “endeavor to introduce a governmental structure that a majority of the people do not desire.”
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And nearly 700 years after Innocent IV had become the first of many popes to confirm that Jews do not practice ritual murder, Hlond and his bishops insisted that the question had “not yet been definitively settled.” By the end of 1946, tens of thousands of Jews had left Poland, and thousands more were eager to join them.

Jews in Poland were victims of ethnic cleansing—the use of violence and intimidation to expel an entire group of people from a nation. The term was not coined until 1993, but the practice is centuries old. Sometimes ethnic cleansing has been the work of a dictator like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. At other times and in other places, ordinary people have carried out ethnic cleansing on their own, much as the Poles who terrorized Jewish survivors did in 1946.

Jews were not the only group to experience ethnic cleansing after the war. In just 18 months, Czechoslovakia stripped nearly three million Czechs of German descent of their citizenship and then expelled them from the country, though some came from families that had lived in Czechoslovakia for generations. Germans were also forced out of Romania (nearly 800,000), Yugoslavia (500,000), Hungary (623,000), and Poland (1.3 million). When the Allies reduced the size of Germany, about seven million Germans suddenly found themselves living in Poland. They, too, were expelled. These governments treated all Germans as enthusiastic followers of Hitler and his Nazi Party. Although many had been supporters, some were not. Unlike Jews, however, these refugees were not victims of genocide. Moreover, they had somewhere to go; Jews did not.

By the summer of 1947, many people feared that the rise in antisemitism since the war had reached a crisis level. Among them were 65 Christian and Jewish leaders and scholars from 19 nations. At a meeting in Seelisberg, Switzerland, they expressed their concerns:

We have recently witnessed an outburst of antisemitism which has led to the persecution and extermination of millions of Jews. In spite of the catastrophe… antisemitism has lost none of its force, but threatens to extend to other regions, to poison the minds of Christians, and to involve humanity more and more in a grave guilt with disastrous consequences.
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The meeting the group held at Seelisberg was not the first interfaith conference. Some Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic leaders had been meeting formally as well as informally since the early 1900s. In the 1920s, for example, a group of Americans founded the National Conference of Christians and Jews in response to the threat posed by the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized Jews and Catholics (as well as African Americans regardless of their religious affiliation). Events in Germany in the 1930s also prompted interfaith efforts to aid Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. However, the Seelisberg conference was the first to examine the roots of antisemitism by using as its starting point a critique written by a Jew. His name was Jules Isaac.

Before the war, Isaac had been France’s inspector general for education and the respected author of the nation’s official textbooks on French and
world history. But once the Germans invaded France in 1940, he became a hunted man. Isaac and his family moved from one hiding place to another in a desperate effort to avoid arrest. Although he was never found, his wife, son, daughter, and son-in-law were discovered and shipped to Auschwitz. Only Jules Isaac and his son survived the Holocaust.

During his years in hiding, Isaac tried to understand why so many people in France and elsewhere collaborated with the Nazis. With the help of several Christian scholars, Isaac studied hundreds of church documents. In those documents he found what he called “the teaching of contempt” for Jews and Judaism in Christian churches. As a result of those findings, he came to believe that Christians had knowingly or unknowingly been spreading ideas that not only “departed from historical truth” but also distorted and contradicted truth to the point that those ideas “may justly be termed myths”—ideas “more appropriate to legend than to history.” He traced those myths to “passionate controversies which took place, during the first centuries of the Christian era, between the scholars of the old Law [the rabbis] and those of the new Church, the men referred to as the Church Fathers [see
Chapter 2
].” He explained:

Christian theology, once started in this direction, never stopped. Utterly convinced of its rights, it has repeated and [spread] these mythical arguments tirelessly, with methodical thoroughness, through all the powerful means that were—and still are—at its disposal…
.

The result is that the myths… have eventually taken on the shape and consistency of facts, of facts that have become incontestable. They have ended up by being accepted as though they were authentic history. They have become an integral part of Christian thinking; nay, of the thinking of all educated people living in a traditionally Christian civilization.
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Christians at the conference responded to his concerns by creating a document called the “Ten Points.” The first four reminded Christians that their faith is deeply rooted in Judaism: “One God speaks to us all through the Old and the New Testaments.” They also noted that “Jesus was born of a Jewish mother” and that the “first disciples, apostles and first martyrs were Jews.” And they reiterated that “the fundamental commandment of Christianity, to love God and one’s neighbor,” came from the Hebrew scriptures and “is binding upon both Christians and Jews in all human relationships, without any exception.”
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The six remaining points made it clear that Jews and Judaism must no longer be presented negatively in Christian teaching. For example, the fifth warned against praising Christianity by disparaging or mocking Judaism.
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