A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (52 page)

In 1948, with no solution to the refugee problem in sight, the UN took charge of Palestinian refugees, which it defined as individuals who had lived in Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 and had lost their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the conflict. That definition now includes the descendants of those individuals, regardless of where they live. In many respects, they became hostages in a political game in which they had little say.

In that sense, Palestinian Arabs had much in common with refugees in other parts of the world immediately after World War II. But in at least one way, they have been unique: they have never been repatriated or officially resettled. Instead, many have remained in camps administered by the United Nations for more than 60 years. The conditions in which these
Palestinians lived varied greatly. Jordan allowed Palestinians to become citizens, but Palestinians in Lebanon had no civil rights, access to public services, or the right to work in more than 70 trades and professions. In Syria, refugees had the right to education and employment but not to citizenship.

Much attention has been deservedly focused on the plight of these refugees over the years. Less attention has been paid to another group of refugees who were also forced from their homes as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict—the approximately 875,000 Jews who lived outside Palestine in the Middle East and North Africa. Most came from families that had lived in the region for more than 2,500 years. By the 1960s, all but a handful had been forced into exile, including the Jews of Iraq. Growing antisemitism in the Middle East intensified the problems these Jews faced, as did the Cold War—a fierce competition for military, political, and economic superiority between the United States and the Soviet Union.

(1945–2000)

The Cold War was a 46-year standoff between two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union. It began at the end of World War II and continued until 1991, the year the Soviet Union’s Communist government collapsed. During those years, the two nations and their allies competed fiercely for military, political, and economic superiority. Although there were many regional conflicts throughout this period, neither side was willing to risk a world war at a time when its opponent had weapons that could destroy the world.

The Cold War was a time of heightened nationalism. In the 1950s and 1960s, the great empires built by European nations in earlier centuries were crumbling. In their place, dozens of new nations emerged. Each of the two superpowers tried to bring those nations into its sphere of influence. That competition turned the Middle East into a major battlefield in the Cold War—and antisemitism was increasingly used as a weapon in that war.

Before World War II, Europe was home to most of the world’s Jews; by 1950, just five years after the Holocaust ended, the United States had the world’s largest Jewish population (between 4.5 and 5 million), even though the number of Jews in the nation grew only slightly during the 1940s. The Soviet Union ranked second, despite the fact that about half of the approximately three million Jews who lived there in 1939 had been killed during the Holocaust.

American Jews had been safe from the genocide, but many did not feel safe. Antisemitic attacks rose sharply during the war, and discrimination in housing, employment, and education continued to limit opportunities for Jews (see
Chapter 12
).

Yet by the 1950s, attitudes toward Jews were changing. More Americans now viewed Jews in a positive way; as a result, antisemitic violence fell sharply. Historians have attributed much of that shift to a growing prosperity in the United States in the postwar years. Many Americans were more confident about the future and less fearful of minorities, including Jews. Some historians have also credited the thousands of GIs who experienced discrimination in the American armed forces during the war and returned home, in the words of one veteran, “far less willing to tolerate the traditional, often dehumanizing, ethnic snobberies of the pre-war years.”
¹
Some, particularly African-American and Hispanic veterans, were now determined to bring the United States closer to its ideals by overturning discriminatory laws. Although neither racism nor other hatreds disappeared, they did become less socially acceptable.

Experiences with discrimination and persecution during and after World War II led many in the United States to demand equal rights for all Americans. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (center) and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (second from right) were among those who believed they had a moral responsibility to bring the nation closer to its ideals.

Antisemitism also increased in the Soviet Union during the war, but it did not decline after the war. Indeed, when Soviet Jews turned to the government for protection, officials refused to help. Instead they accused the victims of “unleashing Jewish nationalism.” Many Soviet Jews were shocked by the charge. During the war, they had shown great loyalty. About 500,000 Jews had served in the Soviet army, and 200,000 of them died in battle. More than 170,000 were awarded medals for their service.

Hirsh Smoliar, a Communist activist who was also a Jew, was proud of that history. And yet everywhere he turned in 1945, he saw signs of a fierce hatred for Jews—a hatred that the government made no effort to curb. Deeply troubled by what he saw and heard, Smoliar consulted Ilya Ehrenburg, a popular journalist who was also a Communist and a Jew.

Ehrenburg pointed to the huge piles of letters written by Jews that lined his office—letters from “all corners of the Soviet Union.” He suggested that Smoliar read a few at random. Each complained of a mindless, all-encompassing antisemitism. Smoliar recalled, “I felt as though an abyss had opened at my feet and each letter was pushing me deeper into the bottomless pit.”
²

A few days later, Smoliar spoke to a high-ranking official about the letters. The official explained that once Joseph Stalin had questioned the loyalty of Jews or any other group, government workers were free to treat them as unwanted outsiders.
³
Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. In a brutal dictatorship such as his, attacks on a group were allowed to continue only if they had the support of the nation’s leader. And Stalin considered what he called “Jewish nationalism” a crime.

Still, though Stalin attacked Zionism within the Soviet Union, he supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1947, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviets’ chief delegate to the United Nations, reminded the General Assembly that Jews in German-occupied Europe had been subjected to “almost complete… annihilation.” He added, “[N]o western European State was able to provide adequate assistance for the Jewish people in defending its rights and its very existence.”

That “unpleasant fact,” Gromyko argued, “explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own State. It would be unjust not to take this into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration.”
⁴
With those words, the Soviets acknowledged the Holocaust and recognized the right of Jews to have a state. Stalin’s support for Israel as a Jewish state did not mean that he had changed his mind about Zionism or Zionists. His treatment of Soviet Jews strongly suggests that he simply saw an opportunity to undermine British influence in the Middle East.

While Gromyko and others defended the idea of a Jewish state at the UN, Stalin was on the hunt for so-called “Zionist traitors” at home. Among the first to be attacked were members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), a group Stalin created during the war to improve the image of the
Soviet Union and raise money abroad for the war effort. The JAC was one of five anti-fascist committees; the others appealed to women, youth, scientists, and Slavs.

The JAC was a success, but its members quickly learned that the more successful they were, the more certain Stalin was of their disloyalty. The fact that they were all devoted Communists made no difference. Although they had no ties to Judaism as a religion, many had been deeply affected by the mass murder of Jews at places like Babi Yar (see
Chapter 13
). The group documented those murders by gathering eyewitness accounts in the hope of bringing those responsible to justice after the war. The accounts were collected into a volume known as
The Black Book
. Stalin refused to allow it to be published, even though the information was used as evidence at international trials of Nazi officials held after the war in Nuremberg, Germany.

Stalin may have feared that the book would reveal that the Germans were not the only ones involved in the genocide. A number of Russians, Ukrainians, and other Soviet citizens had taken part in the mass murders. Stalin may have also feared that the book would promote “ethnic nationalism.” He insisted that everyone had suffered equally during the war. In fact, however, they had not: Jews accounted for about half of all Soviet civilians murdered by the Germans, even though Jews made up less than 1 percent of the population.

The Black Book
was not the only reason the JAC was in trouble. Some of its members wanted to turn Crimea (a part of the Ukraine) into a Jewish “autonomous republic”; it would be a place where Soviet Jews could live without fear of antisemitism. Nikita Khrushchev, who headed the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1948, described Stalin’s reaction:

He had [committee members] arrested, arbitrarily and without any regard for legal norms, regardless of the important and positive role which the accused had played during the war in helping to bring to light the atrocities committed by the Germans. Theirs had been constructive work, but now it counted for nothing…. Stalin could have simply rejected their suggestion and rebuked them. But no, he had to destroy all those who actively supported the proposal.
⁵

In January 1948, Stalin began the process of destroying the JAC by ordering the “accidental death” of its chairman, Solomon Mikhoels. Then, one by one, other members were executed or shipped to forced-labor camps in Siberia on Stalin’s order.

Golda Meir, who was born in the old Russian Empire, returned in 1948 as Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. When she tried to attend services at a Moscow synagogue, she was mobbed by Jewish well-wishers. Stalin saw their pride in her as evidence of their disloyalty to him.

That summer, Golda Meir, who would later become prime minister of Israel, came to Moscow as Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. Meir had been born in Russia, and many Jews there were extraordinarily proud of her accomplishments. In early fall, when she arrived at one of the few synagogues left in Moscow to observe Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), she found nearly 30,000 Jews gathered just to catch a glimpse of her. She recalled that “within seconds they had surrounded me, almost lifting me bodily, almost crushing me, saying my name over and over again.”
⁶
Golda Meir later wrote of the consequences of that joyous outburst:

By January, 1949, it was apparent that Russian Jewry was going to pay a heavy price for the welcome it had given us, for the “treachery” to communist ideals that was—in the eyes of the Soviet government—implicit in the joy with which we had been greeted…. Within five months there was practically no single Jewish organization left in Russia, and the Jews kept their distance from us.
⁷

Stalin’s campaign against the Jews was not limited to those who welcomed Golda Meir. It also focused on Jews in the arts, particularly those who expressed themselves in Yiddish or used Jewish themes in their work. These artists were accused of being “rootless cosmopolitans”—unpatriotic people with no attachment to their homeland. Many lost their jobs or were expelled from the Communist party, while others were imprisoned.