Those Who Forget the Past (7 page)

I wish I could share his optimistic certainty about the outcome of such a war. But what is most important is that Oz doesn't look away from the harsh reality shadowing the easy talk of a reasonable “two-state” solution: the holy war against Jews.

AFTER NEARLY TWO DECADES of reading the literature of antiSemitism—both the thing itself and the analysis of the thing itself—I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation for its persistence. Not a single-pointed answer, anyway. In
Explaining Hitler
I explored theological anti-Semitism with Hyam Maccoby, who believes it is not so much the Christ-killing accusation that kept the flame of Christian anti-Semitism burning— although it certainly has been a factor—but the more insidious Judas story, the Jew as betrayer and backstabber. (Hitler rode to power on the fraudulent “stab-in-the-back” myth, the one that had the supposedly near-victorious German armies in World War I stabbed in the back by Jewish Marxist Judases on the home front.)

I've explored Daniel Goldhagen's belief in the primacy of what he calls “eliminationist” anti-Semitism, the racially rather than religiously based anti-Semitism that arose in nineteenth-century Germany and helped mold Hitler. There's truth there as well. As there is in Saul Friedlander's contention that Wagner's fusion of religious
and
racial anti-Semitism was crucial in shaping Hitler's psyche.

But why the always ready market for anti-Semitism, religious and racial, medieval and modern, and now postmodern?
¹⁸
I gave respectful if skeptical attention to George Steiner's view that the world continues to hate the Jews for their “invention of conscience”—for what Steiner calls the Jews' threefold “blackmail of transcendence.” Which is how Steiner characterizes Moses's demand for perfect obedience, Jesus's demand for perfect love, and Marx's demand for perfect justice. Three demands for perfection made by Jews that are unfulfillable by fallible human beings—and thus, Steiner believes, the source of bitter and recurrent resentment toward the people who dreamed up these impossible demands. As I suggested, this can, even if it's not intended to, devolve into a blame-the-victims argument.

Others say it's because Jews have long chosen to be “a people apart,” with an unwillingess to assimilate or submerge their identity in modernity's universalism. Others maintain it was the Jews'
invention
of modernity. The explanations multiply and contradict one another.

And perhaps—and this might sound at first like a radical suggestion—
it
doesn't matter anymore
. The reasons, the origins, no longer matter. At this point anti-Semitism has become so embedded in history, or in sub-history, the subterranean history and mythology of hatred, that it will always be there, a template for whatever hurts need to find an easy answer, a simple-minded balm: the Jews are responsible. The explanation of renewed anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism: its ineradicable pre-existing history—and its efficacy. It has become its own origin.

What is to be done? One answer was suggested by Leon Wieseltier at a conference he helped organize under the auspices of YIVO, the New York–based Jewish cultural institution, in May 2003. The conference was called “Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West,” so apparently it was now no longer panicky to speak of such matters. And it brought together an impressive group of speakers.

In any case, although out of town at that time I was impressed by the tape I later heard of the opening address by Wieseltier. He said a number of very important things, I thought. Some had been said before by others, but he said them especially well.

One important thing he said is that those who consider that anti-Semitism is a problem only for Jews ought to reconsider: “If anti-Semitism is to vanish from the earth it will be from the transformation of non-Jewish rather than Jewish [ peoples]. . . . In this sense it is not a Jewish problem at all . . . it is a prejudice whose object is not its cause . . . if you wish to study racism, study whites, not blacks.” But he also said that the struggle against anti-Semitism is “a requirement of self-interest and of dignity” for Jews.

I'm pleased to cede virtually the last word in this essay to the “Ethnic Panic” author, because it seemed to me he had learned much from the events of the year that followed his “Ethnic Panic” polemic—and perhaps from Ruth Wisse's critique of it.
¹⁹

But I wouldn't say all non-Jews have abandoned that responsibility Leon Wieseltier spoke of, for anti-Semitism in our culture. I have been impressed by the seriousness with which some Christians and Muslims have addressed the question. Andrew Sullivan's “Anti-Semitism Watch” on his weblog has been invaluable in spotlighting shameful incidents. As has Glenn Reynolds's “InstaPundit” website and Jeff Jarvis's “buzz-machine.” So have George Will's columns and commentaries, and those of Stanley Crouch and Christopher Caldwell. Harold Evans and Oriana Fallaci were early and important voices. I'm sure there are more Christians on the Left who have spoken out, even if for some reason none come instantly to mind. (Unless you count Christopher Hitchens, who, while half Jewish—and only half Leftist now according to the more rigid ideologues—deserves credit for popularizing a brilliantly compressed polemical coinage for Jew-hating Middle Eastern terrorists: “Islamo-fascists.” As in, isn't the Left supposed to
oppose
fascism?)

But to return to the question of optimism I first raised in regard to Amos Oz. I wish I could find an upbeat way of concluding this essay. As I write this draft, two Turkish synagogues and a Jewish school in France have just been bombed. The world is discussing whether the pronouncements of the retiring Malaysian prime minister that Jews rule the world is more than “merely anti-Semitic” but somehow a voice for reform in the Islamic world.

And a new cinematic version of the Passion Play, the depiction of the Gospel story of the death of Jesus, is upon us. By an auteur who claims he is not making a movie so much as presenting “history.” Perhaps it is history, perhaps not; there seems a certain amount of disagreement even among Christians, even among the Gospels, as to what is or what isn't “history.” But Mel Gibson thinks he knows.

But still, I was surprised by the savagery of his attack on Frank Rich for raising questions about the project. “I want to kill him,” taken alone, might be angry hyperbole, but the primitive specificity of “I want his intestines on a stake,” particularly in this context, could not help but recall the New Testament image of the death of Judas, who, in one Gospel at least, is depicted, after betraying Jesus, as taking a violent fall and literally spilling his intestines in what is later called a “field of blood.” The wish to see Rich's “intestines on a stake” sounds to me like more than an accidental coincidence of imagery.

Rich's response was both deft and dignified, but why the lack of outrage from others? A death threat, however rhetorical, because a Jew raised questions about a movie about the death of Jesus? Has the rhetorical bar been lowered that far?

History. One thing that is history—undeniable, documented, bloodstained history—is the effect if not the intent of the Passion Play in the past. For those unfamiliar with these effects, I recommend the scholar James Shapiro's book
Oberammergau:
The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play.
The deicide—or “Christ-killer—accusation lives to incite anew, in effect if not intent.

Once, I actually attended a Passion Play, the surprisingly elaborately mounted “Passion Play of the Ozarks” presented by the Christ of the Ozarks theme park in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. In addition to boasting it had the tallest statue of Jesus in the Northern Hemisphere, the theme park featured many miniature Shetland ponies that were the favorite of Gerald L. K. Smith, the anti-Semitic demagogue who founded the Christ of the Ozarks project and peddled his anti-Jewish propaganda through its gift store.

Smith had enjoyed some success as a “populist” acolyte of Huey Long after Long died. Populism turned to anti-Semitism, and watching the Passion Play, one could understand his enthusiasm for it.

For those wondering what I was doing there, it was the early 1980s and I had an idea for a novel (which I never wrote) in which the Passion Play of the Ozarks would be a setting. So it was “material” in a sense, and perhaps it's changed since then, but I found it discomfiting to watch the Passion Play, with its black-bearded Jewish caricatures in villainous makeup and sinister black robes scheming with Judas to get Christ killed through betrayal. It wasn't presented as “history” so much as the Gospel Truth.

I'm sorry for the digression. The question I was addressing —or avoiding—was optimism. As in: any hope for it? I'll admit I'm not constitutionally predisposed to optimism. The study of modern history is not a source of optimism.
²⁰
At the very least, though, I'm the sort of pessimist who seeks out sources of hope. This is something I did when I was preparing to give a talk on contemporary anti-Semitism—that fill-in talk for Jonathan Rosen in fact (to bring things full circle). I e-mailed Ruth Wisse at Harvard, where she is a professor of literature, and asked her if she saw any basis for hope for the situation in Israel. She replied that a distinction must be made between false hope and real hope. That false hope means trusting sworn enemies for your security. That for true hope, one has to draw faith from the continued survival of the Jewish people for three millennia despite anti-Semitism. From their continuing determination to fight for their survival, and not hide their faces from the truth.

I do not suggest that the truth will set us free from antiSemitism; perhaps nothing will. But there are a couple of glimmers of hope, even to this pessimist. First is the fact that people are no longer denying there's cause for concern. In addition to Leon Wieseltier's YIVO conference, there was the turnabout of
New York
magazine, which, in that spring of 2002, when some people were speaking out, published a piece by Amy Wilentz that looked down its nose at those who did. A year and a half later, the same magazine published a cover story, “The New Face of Anti-Semitism,” which was subtitled “In much of the world, hating the Jews has become politically correct. How did this happen?” In addition, there were books by Phyllis Chesler, Alan Dershowitz, Abraham Foxman, Kenneth Timmerman, and Gabriel Schoenfeld which sounded an alarm. (Readers are entitled to ask why is this book different from all those other books, and I'd suggest that, while I certainly have a point of view, I wanted to include a multiplicity of perspectives, some of them clashing, on the questions within the question of antiSemitism. That and also the presence of Cynthia Ozick, who writes on this subject with the incandescent clarity of a biblical prophet.)

But perhaps the most surprising suggestion of an optimistic development in the situation itself (as opposed to the kind of attention paid to it) could be found in a May 7, 2003, article by Yigal Carmon, the founder of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, in Washington. It's a report entitled “Harbingers of Change in the Anti-Semitic Discourse of the Arab World.”

It's a startling document
²¹
because it suggests that the light MEMRI has thrown on the dark utterances of the most extreme Islamist anti-Semites is actually having some effect: causing
some
of the more responsible intellectuals, commentators, and political figures in the Arab Middle East to condemn the worst excrescences of such rhetoric as embarrassments to the image of Islam in the civilized world.

Carmon cites the following four developments:

“Calls to Cancel the Beirut Holocaust Deniers' Conference”: The conference “is, in effect, a conference against the truth,” a columnist in
Al-Hayat,
a London-based Arabic language paper, said scornfully. “This is a conference against consciousness.”

“Saudi Editor Apologizes for Publishing Blood Libel”: The editor of the Saudi government paper
Al-Riyadh
apologized for publishing “an idiotic and false news item regarding the use of human blood” in Jewish religious rituals, a practice that “does not exist in the world at all.”

“Criticism of Anti-Semitic Series [on
The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion
] on Egyptian Television”: The secretary-general of the Palestinian Ministry called the
Protocols
“a stupid pamphlet full of nonsense,” and important Egyptian government officials called the
Protocols
“a fabrication,” “an example of racist literature and hate literature.”

“A New Recommendation by Al-Azhar [University Institute for Islamic Research]: Stop Calling Jews ‘Apes and Pigs.' ”

“It appears,” Carmon writes, “that the increase in anti-Semitic propaganda in the Arab media since the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada . . . has led some Arab intellectuals to rethink the matter and reject anti-Semitic statements.”

While some of this may stem from opportunistic concerns about image, even such concern is a cause for some tempered optimism.
²²
Calling attention to this kind of incitement—facing rather than denying it—might help forestall it. It's too early to hope such a process might work, considering the crude and savage incitement of radical Islamist anti-Semitism. But the MEMRI report suggests that
memory
—not dismissing the phenomenon, not looking away out of some exaggerated panic over “panic”—might be at least a source of some hopeful change.

So any optimism I can muster comes from those who do face the facts and fight the good fight: the translators at MEMRI; those dedicated souls at the Anti-Defamation League, at CAMERA, and at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others, who deal with the depressing day-to-day reality of antiSemitism; intrepid reporters such as Jeffrey Goldberg; weblist media critics like Tom Gross; brave local cops like the one in the Paris
banlieue
s that Marie Brenner chronicles; “bloggers” like Meryl Yourish, Jeff Jarvis, and Roger Simon, to name a few; the “Exposing the Exposer” website guys Zachary and Mo; non-Jews such as Oriana Fallaci and Harold Evans who speak out because they understand that anti-Semitism
is
a problem of and for non-Jews as well. All people who refuse to look away. All people who believe that facing the threat directly will make a difference. I hope they're right.