The foundation of modern Jewish identity is an ideological subscription to a presumed irrevocable omnipresence of irrational "anti-Semitism." Jewish defense to this threat is the common denominator that creates cohesion among even the most disparate peoples of worldwide Jewry. "Being Jewish"  -- above all else, as archaic religious convictions have fallen to the wayside -- is still conceived to be the noble bearing of special, continuous persecution at the hands of the rest of the world. This conviction -- traditionally understood by Jews to be borne as punishment by God for transgressions against covenantal law -- has been the core of Jewish religious belief in their diaspora. Non-Jews are an important part of this world view. To the traditional Jewish perspective, says Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog:

 

      "the goyim represent, quite literally, an act of God. When they are

       persecutors they are also instruments of justice, punishing the Jews

       for transgressing the Law, and in any case they do not know better."

       [ZBOROWSKI, p. 154]

 

The Jew, noted Israel Zangwill in 1893, "looks upon the persecutor merely as the stupid instrument of an all-wise Providence." [ZANGWILL, I.,1998, p. 62]

 

The notion that Jews, scattered throughout the world, are collectively victims at the hands of all others [i.e., today categorized as "anti-Semitism"), is a conceptual framework, originally religiously based, that actually precedes authentic history and is self-fulfilling. The foundation to understand the Jewish victim complex can be found in their Torah (the Old Testament), for example in Deuteronomy 28. What is today called anti-Semitism was originally conceived as God's punishment of the Jewish people:

 

     "And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people from one end of

     the earth unto the other ... And among these nations shalt thou find

     no ease, neither shall the sole of they foot have rest: But the Lord

     shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow

     of mind. And they life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt

     fear day and night and have none assurance of thy life ... and thou

     shalt be only oppressed and crushed always."

 

It is clear that the Jewish conception of being continuously "persecuted" originates in religious conviction. As Jewish psycholanalyst Theodore Reik notes:

     "The masochistic attitude of ancient Israel was recognized at least in their
      in their relationship with God, whose punishment they took as deserved
     without complaint. They considered also the cruelty with which they were
     treated by their powerful neighbors as punishment for their sins, especially for
     deserting their God. The paranoid attitude in the form of an idea of grandeur
     is obvious in the Jewish claim of being the 'chosen people.' There is even
     even a subterranean tie between the masochistic and the paranoid attitude in
     the idea that God chastises those whom He loves. Such an exceptional
     position has been claimed by the Jewish people since ancient time."
     [REIK, T., 1962, p. 230-231]

When emptied of purely religious content in modern times, the grand idea of "Jewish punishment by God" is reduced to its areligious backbone: "Jewish persecution by non-Jews." The deep belief of the omnipresence of this is held by even secular Jews with as much conviction as any religion. And for most modern Jews this secular worldview still subliminally clings to the original Judaic paradigm: among other things, Jewish insistence upon a moral superiority above others. Throughout history, hostility for Jews, noted Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, reinforced "their ethnocentric image as a 'chosen people' -- the special animus of non-Jews towards Jews demonstrate [d] the truth of the Jewish claim that they were different, privy to a special status in divine creation -- in short, superior to Gentiles." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p., 36] In Jewish eyes, the evidence for such a self-congratulatory perch is (aside from Old Testament referral) to be found most recently in the Holocaust -- the terrible fruition of traditional canon, the proclaimed "most unique" of human-inflicted atrocities for which all non-Jews are held to be, in abstract, guilty. And all Jews, innocent.

The combined post-Holocaust Jewish emotions of shame, guilt, fear, and anger have reconstituted a renewed and roiled Jewish identity that reaffirms and pledges its conceptual distance from the rest of the world. Yet Jewish canon, both religious and secular, now militantly demands the pseudo-religious interpretation of the Jewish Holocaust to be sacred, for everyone; the Jews who were murdered in the context of World War II (and not non-Jews) are likewise hallowed. The sheer gravity and allegedly incomparable scope of the mass killings of Jews is also proclaimed to render today's Jews -- genetic inheritors of the Tragedy of tragedies -- beyond moral reproach. Jews are held blameless, irresponsible. Then, now, and across history.

 

The framework for this Jewish moral dialectic against the non-Jewish Other rests upon "anti-Semitism," the age-old vehicle for Jewish punishment by God, still conceived as a metaphysical residue of hatred attested to by even secular Jews (post-Holocaust) in the ruins of an otherwise rejected Jewish religion. Underscoring the idea that it is the concept of Gentile hostility that most effectively binds Jews so tightly together, "When there is no anti-Semitism," candidly admits Menachem Revivi, director general of an Israeli support office, "it's much harder to maintain your Judaism." [HYMAN, M., 1998, p. 85] "[Jewish mythology declares that] anti-Semitism is a mystifying disease," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "one with perhaps many permutations and with diverse origins, but at root one that is fundamentally irrational. This irrationalism only compounds the innocence of the Jewish victim." These two authors, both Jewish, then feel obliged to add: "It is not our intention to challenge the truth of these myths, we subscribe in good part to most of them." [LIEBMAN/COHEN p. 33] "And who are the anti-Semites?" asked Milton Steinberg, "The mentally sick, the embittered, the frustrated, the sadists. And if they are not sick, then they are worse, they are unprincipled and conscienceless." [STEINBERG, M., 1951, p. 122]

 

In the political context of the modern nation of Israel, even its areligious state ideology -- Zionism -- includes Orthodox Judaism's old conviction of an omnipresent 'anti-Semitism" in all non-Jews to be central to its identity dogma. "Like the Nazi ideologues," wrote Jewish anti-Zionist William Zukerman in 1960, "the Zionists take it for granted the Jews are a foreign and inassimilable element in the body of all non-Jewish people ... [and] that hatred for the Jews is something instinctive and mystical, forever engrained in the subconscious of every non-Jew, which can never be eradicated or cured." [ZUKERMAN, p. 63]

 

"It is impossible to comprehend the largely irrational nature of [anti-Semitism], says popular Jewish polemicist Alan Dershowitz,  "...The important point is that Jews are not to blame for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is the problem of the bigots who feel, express, and practice it. Nothing we do can profoundly affect the twisted minds of the anti-Semites." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 102, 101]  In a 1995 book about anti-Semitism in Japan, scholar David Goodman noted that "since anti-Semitism as we are defining it has nothing to do with Jews, much less 'Semites,' we will neither hyphenate nor capitalize the term." [GOODMAN, p. 11] Another Jewish scholar, Daniel Pipes, in a book dismissing as nonsense a variety of conspiracy theories, outlined his own personal lens to understand the world, saying, "I spell [antisemitism] in lower case, without a hyphen (not anti-Semitism), to signal that it refers to an ideology and to imply that the phenomenon has almost nothing to do with the actions of Jews." [PIPES, D., 1997, p. 27]

 

"The term Jew has been used as a term of abuse, a curse and an accusation for centuries," says Irene Bloomfield, a Jewish psychotherapist, "It expresses the anti-Semite’s virulent and unreasoning hatred and contempt and has so often been the preliminary of attacks, pogroms, persecution, and death ... The Jews had thus been an archetypical bad object and universal enemy from time immemorial." [BLOOMFIELD, p. 26]  "Among most anti-Semites," adds another Jewish psychotherapist, Mortimer Ostrow, "we found that their irrational hatred was the expression of primary process thinking, that is, thought that is driven by feeling and not subjected to the discipline of reason, logic, and reality testing." [OSTROW, p. 176]  Early, and prominent, Zionist Max Nordau declared that "the anti-Semitic accusations are valueless, because they are not based on a criticism of real facts, but are merely due to the psychological law according to which children, savages, and malevolent fools make persons and things against which they have an aversion responsible for their sufferings. Pretexts change, but the hatred remains. The Jews are not hated because they have evil qualities; evil qualities are sought for in them because they are hated." [HERTZ, J., 1954]

 

"Anti-Semitism," says prominent (Jewish) historian Barbara Tuchman, "is independent of its object. What Jews do or fail to do is not the determinant. The impetus comes out of the needs of the persecutors." [CUDDIHY, p. 24] "We all know that anti-Semitism really has nothing to do with Jews," says scholar Susannah Herschel, "It can flourish even in places where no Jews live."  "The psychic needs of the Christians -- and not the actual characteristics of Jewish life," asserts Todd Endelman, "give anti-Semitism its power and appeal." "Jewish hatred is one-sided," adds Ruth Wisse, "... and functions independent of its object."  "Anti-Semitism is oblivious to Jewish conduct," declared the Jerusalem Post in 1990, "it is independent of the very presence of Jews." [all: LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xvii]  

 

"The existence of anti-Semitism and the content of anti-Semitic charges...," wrote Daniel Goldhagen in his best-selling 1996 book about Germany and the Jews, "are fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish actions ... anti-Semitism draws on cultural sources that are independent of the Jews' nature and actions." [Goldhagen's emphases; FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 11] "Let's face it," wrote Harry Golden, ""anti-Semitism can't possibly be explained; it can merely be recounted." "Understand and explain the problem [of anti-Semitism] as much as you may," said Lewis Naimier, "there remains a hard, insoluble core, incomprehensible and inexplicable." [LINDEMANN, p. 11]

 

In Jewish folklore, even intra-community jokes reflect the same theme of Jewish categorical innocence as the cause of anti-Semitism. In the following case, it is a Jewish-created defamation of Poles and Poland: a "Pollock" joke:

 

        "A few months after the end of World War I, the premier of Poland

     had a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. 'If you don't meet

     our nation's demands at the peace conference,' warned the premier,

     'I foresee great troubles ahead. The Polish people will be very

     angry, and they'll go out and massacre the Jews.'

         'And if your demands are met?' asked Wilson.

         'In that case,' responded the premier, 'my people will be delighted.

     They'll go out in the streets and get drunk -- and then they'll massacre

     the Jews.'" [NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 60]

     

"When it comes to the millions of Jews who faced liquidation in Hitler's Europe," says Jewish author Michael Medved,

    "historians make little effort to figure out what, precisely, the victims had done     
    to make Der Fuehrer so terribly angry. With racial and religious antagonisms,
    we understand that rage can flourish with no basis in reality." [MEDVED, M.
    11-12-01]

"Jews don't cause anti-Semitism," declares Jewish novelist Ann Roiphe, "nothing provokes it, it's always there ... The object of gentile racists and nationalist hate, chameleon-like, takes on the shape of that moment's Jew." [ROIPHE, A., 1992, p. 40] "The notion that anti-Semitism can be, in the slightest degree, the fault of the Jews," proclaims well-known Jewish author Cynthia Ozick, "is in itself -- even when it crops up, as it frequently does among Jews -- a species of anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 24] 

Eventual New York Times Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal and reporter Arthur Gelb put the standard Jewish theme this way:

     "The circumstantial evidence is that anti-Semitism is a mental disorder, because
     the anti-Semite sees certain human beings not as human beings but as objects. They
     are reflections of his own needs and passions and his inability to recognize them for
     what they are is such a severe form of irrationalism as to be a symptom of
     mental malfunction. The anti-Semite suffers from a fear of demons, but since he
     is not aware of his fear is convinced of the reality of demons -- a clinical example
     of paranoia." [ROSENTHAL/ GELB, 1967, p. 65]

"Not only does anything Jews do or refrain from doing have nothing to do with anti-Semitism," notes a non-Jewish scholar, John Michael Cuddihy, with incredulity and exasperation, "but any attempt to explain anti-Semitism by referring to the Jewish contribution to anti-Semitism is itself an instance of anti-Semitism!" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]

 

Such widespread Jewish Orwellian doublethink loops of logic to fend off blame and responsibility for their historical deeds stems from the old Chosen People syndrome itself, popularly secularized as an impenetrable fortress of denial against all non-Jewish (or Jewish) critical attack, an intellectual ghetto with locked gates: by self-edict declared separate, blameless, unaccountable, and completely untouchable. "This reductio ad absurdum," observes Cuddihy, "has stunning implications. It means that Jews have not been causal agents in their own history ... They did not act and interact causally and historically with other groups in history. Morally blameless, the Jews ... were outside of history, aspiring to ... 'angelism.'" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]

 

This outrageously ahistorical perspective is reflected in a comment by Elie Wiesel about the defining Jewish event of the 20th century: "The Holocaust is beyond politics and beyond analogies." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 76]

 

In the modern Jewish community post-World War II, notes Jewish critic William Zukerman, "criticism and self-criticism which were the basis of inspiration of the Enlightenment period, have been discredited as almost the equivalent of treason. By a kind of perverted chauvinistic reasoning, criticism of anything pertaining to Jews, whether it is of Israel, of the dominant nationalist party [of Israel], its institutions, or of its ideology, has been defined as anti-Semitism." [ZUKERMAN, p. 68] Irving Kristol calls it his peoples' "propensity to gloss over their own shortcomings and blame the always available anti-Semite for their misfortunes." [KRISTOL, p. 278] Milton Steinberg notes that:

 

     "Unfortunately Jews, like other human beings, are so constituted as

     to be reluctant to pass adverse judgment on themselves. Hence,

     whether with justice or not they will hold their Jewishness at fault

     for whatever goes wrong in their lives." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 78]

 

"The Cult of Victimhood," observes David Klinghoffer, "performs two valuable services for us Jews with guilty consciences. First, as it does for everyone else, it assures us that, whatever we know we are doing wrong, we are really angels ... But it does something else for us, which it may not do for other groups. We believe that any hostility we can detect on the part of non-Jews is entirely unmerited. We have done nothing to deserve it ... We American Jews are not as ignorant as we seem. We know, in our souls, that we have gone astray; but, to borrow a hackneyed phrase of psychological jargon, we are in denial." [KLINGHOFFER, p. 10-13]

 

Facing this suffocating shield, once defined as an anti-Semite for the crime of criticizing Jews, the offending individual is completely marginalized in modern America. "During the late 1950s and 1960s," says Benjamin Ginsberg, "anti-Semitism has been successfully defined by Jews as a form of extremism in which only politicians on the lunatic fringe engaged. As a result, any effort to make political cause of anti-Semitism seemed fraught with risk." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 187]  Once labeled an "anti-Semite," the stigmatized individual is even subject to the most preposterous of slanders, a virtual canon in much of the Jewish community. Criticizing Jews is anti-Semitism, and therefore equivalent to sending Jews to death camps. Says Konstanty Gebert, editor of a Jewish journal in Poland, :

 

      "The reality of [the Nazi death camp] Treblinka exists, irremovably, and

       contemporary anti-Semites do not have the option of stating that it is not

       their goal." [GEBERT]

 

Albert Lindemann notes such accusations with amazement: "Some writers go so far as to condemn the distinction ["between 'irritation' with Jews and calling for their systematic murder"] as morally dubious, thus making any irritation with Jews or criticism of them 'anti-Semitic,' a conclusion that takes on extraordinary dimensions when linked to such assertions as 'all anti-Semitism is essentially the same' or 'a little bit of anti-Semitism is a little bit of cancer.'" [LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xiv] 

 

(Professor Lindemann wrote an extraordinarily unusual work, Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge University Press, 1997), a volume that seeks to "understand" anti-Semitism largely in terms of Jewish belief and action that elicits it. Not unexpectedly, the reviewer for the American Jewish Committee's influential Commentary magazine decried the work in an article entitled "Blaming the Victim" as "deeply pernicious" and Lindemann's "knowledge of Jewish history ... [is] little better than that of the anti-Semites whose arguments he echoes." [WISTRICH, 1998, p. 60-63]  Likewise, John Landau reviewed Esau's Tears in the Zionist journal Midstream, linking Lindemann's reciting of the truths of history to Hitler fascism, warning readers that "It appears that anti-Semitism remains a respectable intellectual position on American and British college campuses, including history department, provided that it is expressed with a degree of good manners and restraint. We must not forget that the assault on Jews by German academics and intellectuals preceded, and helped to lay the groundwork for, the physical destruction of European Jewry." [LANDAU, J., FEB/MAR 99, p. 44-45]

 

Central to the modern Jewish world view is the so-called "Holocaust." "The Holocaust," says Joseph Amato,

 

       "serves as the point from which Jews can morally survey the entire past

       and classify all present society ... Some Jewish thinkers consider the

       Holocaust [as] providing a singular point of wrong innocence against

       which they can judge everyone else. It has consciously been chosen by

       Jews to be their crucifixion: the great sorrow they must mediate. Non-

       Jews are tried by two questions: What did they do (collectively or

       individually, directly or indirectly, by commission or omission) to further

       anti-Semitism? What did they do to stop the Holocaust?  The most

       severe judges find everyone guilty who did not risk his family's lives

       to save Jews in the Holocaust." [AMATO, p. 181]

 

Reflecting again the old Chosen People theme, Jewish convention also insists that anti-Semitism is a "unique" form of prejudice. Non-Jewish historian John Higham, who had written about anti-Semitism in the 1950s, defended himself against Jewish attack, saying:

 

     "[It is accused] that I have violated the uniqueness of anti-Semitism

     by comparing it with other exclusionary movements -- illustrating

     the unwillingness of some Jews to measure their own experience

     on a general human scale, unless anti-Semitism is presented ... as

     the very archetype of all prejudices and anti-democratic attitudes.

     For me the uniqueness of anti-Semitism was not a foregone

     conclusion but a question." [HIGHAM, J., 1986, p. 225]

 

(It is interesting to wonder what Higham might have said more freely about the subject if he was not so beholding to the Jewish community -- his basic studies in this subject had been "generously" supported by the American Jewish Committee -- [HIMMELFARB, M., 1986, p. 197])

 

Despite the long historical list of very legitimate complaints against Jews by people all over the world through history, the institutionalized self-celebration of the Nazis as a polar German "chosen people," Hitler's heralding of the ruthlessness of war as a noble enterprise, the Nazi determination to rid Germany of Jews via the clinically brutal scientism of mass murder, Eli Weisel echoes many Jews in completely mystifying the Holocaust in his introduction to The Encyclopedia of the Shoah: "Unlike other tragedies, there was no logical reason underlying the tragedy of the Holocaust, and all attempts to discover rational reasons have failed." [March of the Living, p. 5]

 

Jewish blameless innocence throughout history, framing itself as an eternal scapegoats for the old religious nemesis of Christianity, is elaborately and imaginatively expounded upon by Jewish critic George Steiner. Hyam Maccoby notes that Steiner's

 

      "theory of anti-Semitism [is that it] is caused by the atavistic pagan

      element in western religion by which Jews are regarded as a collective

      Executioner of a central human sacrifice. We have to do here with a

      shifting moral responsibility, by which the individual lays his moral

      burden firstly on Jesus himself, who dies to save him; and secondly,

      on the Jews who bring about the necessary death of Jesus ... In any

      event, the Jews have been elected, 'chosen' if you will, to the position

      of scapegoat so that all others can escape guilt into the innocence of

      childhood and recover the joy of Eden." [MACCOBY, p. 34]

 

Roger Aments notes his discomfort as a Jew when the beliefs he had been emphatically taught about the Holocaust were challenged by the Buddhist world view, that humans must take responsibility for their actions that effect their fate:

 

     "I had been shocked, a little outraged, by what I'd heard about

     the Buddhist view of the Holocaust. I could not accept that the

     suffering of the Jews was somehow a result of their previous

     actions. Wasn't the knowledge of shared victimization the source

     of Jewish identification with the Tibetans? Weren't we fellow

     victims, fellow innocent victims? ... In Buddhism, the whole

     notion of an innocent victim carried little weight in assessing

     how one responded to tragic circumstances." [KAMENETZ, R.,

     1994, p. 185]

 

Note the American Jewish Congress fury at Israeli rabbi and Shas party leader Ovadia Yosef ("who plays a critical role in coalition politics in Israel") when he dared to challenge modern Jewish convention about the Holocaust. In 2000, he suggested that it seemed to him that "Holocaust victims were punished for sins in an earlier life." However one might interpret this view, it is something considerably less than innocence. The AJC's reaction was outrage, and formally, that

 

      "Rabbi Yosef must be charged with knowing that his statements can

      be used as an excuse for Nazi barbarisms, as a kind of Nazi apologetics

      ...  He acknowledges the Holocaust but then claims God's justification

      for its horrors. If that is not blasphemy, then nothing is." [PR

      NEWSWIRE, 2-6-98]

 

Berel Lang looks upon the widespread Jewish effort to elude their own honest history and attendant moral responsibility for it with concern. In modern Jewish historical revisionism, "the reasonable ... concern to understand anti-Semitism has ...  nothing to do with Jews. This view ... has served as a premise in the most serious historical attempts to analyze the phenomenon of anti-Semitism ... This resistance to the possibility of a connection between anti-Semitism and Jewish history is ... pernicious." [CUDDIHY, p. 23-24] "Jews," notes Robert Segal, "fear that a historical explanation [of anti-Semitism] will make Jews responsible for anti-Semitism, and will thereby excuse it." [CUDDIHY, p. 34]   "It seems clear that Jews exhibit an all-too common human failing," says Albert Lindemann, "They actually do not want to understand their past -- or at least those aspects of their past that have to do with the hatred directed at them, since understanding may threaten other elements of their complex and often contradictory identities." [LINDEMANN, 1997, p. 535] "Jews come honorably to their paranoia," adds Cuddihy, "Nevertheless, when it comes to their own behavior, they go on a moral holiday." [CUDDIHY, p. 35]

 

This widespread Jewish "moral holiday," however secularly guised, is nonetheless rooted in the old rabbinical ghettos; as we have seen, many centuries passed with Jewish history self-understood to begin and end with itself, the sacred history of a "people apart" unrelated to the history of others around them.

 

There is also -- more importantly in a largely areligious age -- an entire "science" (albeit a newly-created, and distinctly Jewish, one, even built in some ways upon a rabbinical model; some have called it a "surrogate religion") [GAY, p. 19-20] to use in service to prove the modern Jewish theses of identity, an identity largely based upon an oppositional antithesis: lofty Jewish moral worth versus an omnipresent, generic, and irrational anti-Semitism. This controversial "science" to prove the major premises of Jewish self-conception is psychoanalytic theory, the invention of a Viennese Jew, Sigmund Freud, itself a field of endeavor and allegiance overwhelmingly populated, predominated, and propagandized by Jews to our own day.

 

Let us start with the fact that all 17 original members of Freud's Psychological Wednesday Society were Jewish and most of his patients, by which Freud developed his theories of human neurosis, were women from "eminent Austrian Jewish families." The original Society members, notes Dennis Klein, "were aware of their Jewishness and frequently maintained a sense of Jewish purpose and solidarity ... [Their] feeling of positive Jewish pride formed the matrix of the movement in the psychoanalytic circle ... it tightened the bond among members and powered their self-image of a redemptive elite." [KLEIN, p. vii] (Absorbed with notions of elitism and clandestine intrigues, by 1912, six die-hard loyalists to Freud were joined in a behind-the-scenes "committee," described by Freud as a "secret council composed of the best and most trustworthy among our men." This group, said The Master, "would have to be strictly secret [Freud's emphasis] in its existence and its actions." [MASSON, 1990, p. 113])

 

"Freud," says another Jewish author, Earl Grollman,

 

     "may also have experienced the 'essence of Judaism' through his

     community activities with other Jews. Many of his important

     theories were delivered before the Fraternity of Jewish Students

     and the B'nai B'rith organization. Most of the colleagues in his

     movement were Jewish ... But whatever the reasons -- historical,

     sociological, psychological -- group bonds did provide a warm

     shelter with other Jews, informality and familiarity formed a kind

     of inner security, a 'we-feeling,' illustrated even by the selection

     of jokes and stories recounted in the group. It is what Freud called

     'the clear awareness of an inner identity, the secret of the same

     inner construction.'" [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 41]

 

"All over the world," says Jewish psychoanalyst Earl Hopper, "Jews are drawn to the profession of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The 1990 roster of the International Psychoanalytical Association reads like the membership list of a synagogue." [HOPPER, p. 18]  "That vast apparatus of putative concern, psychiatry," wrote Roger Kahn in 1968, "is largely a Jewish monopoly." [KAHN, R., p. 53]  "An area of medicine which Jews have made almost their own is psychiatry." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 119] "Jews," says Ann Roiphe, also Jewish, "have rushed to psychoanalysis as lemmings to the sea." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 76] Psychotherapy is also in all respects so overwhelmingly a Jewish consumer domain that in a 1996 survey (in which nearly half of 17 psychoanalysts in a research project were expressly solicited as non-Jews), 75% of the patients for all of them (both Jewish and non-Jewish therapists) were found to be Jewish. [OSTROW, p. 27]

 

As James Yaffe observed in 1968:

 

      "There is little question that a comparatively large proportion of the

      patients undergoing psychoanalysis in America are Jewish. It

      also seems to be true that Jewish parents are more likely than

      equally affluent non-Jewish parents to send their children for

      psychiatric treatment. Those who can't afford analysis are just

      as enthusiastic about the blessings of less expensive psychiatry.

      According to one leader in the field, 'If you open a mental health

      clinic and don't advertise, Jews will be the only people who

      flock to it.' In some sections of the Jewish community, in fact,

      psychiatry has become a way of life, almost a substitute religion.

      In southern California it's hard to find a Jewish family that hasn't

      got at least one member in analysis." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 293]

 

With advancement out of the Jewish ghetto in the 18th century, and increased secular questioning about the religiously-based myths about themselves and how they fit into mainstream societies, over the last couple of centuries "the behavior pattern of assimilated Jews," says Hannah Arendt, "determined by this continuous concentrated effort to distinguish themselves ... created a Jewish type that is recognizable everywhere ... Judaism became a psychological quality and the Jewish question became an involved problem for every individual Jew." [ARENDT, p. 67]  The Jewish novelist Franz Kafka, for instance, once remarked that poet Heinrich Heine's "conflict with Jewry" was "exactly what made him so typically Jewish," [SILBERMAN, p. 63] i.e., being Jewish, post-Enlightenment, was a war within the psyche about being Jewish. 

 

"Whatever the reasons for their philosophical disarray and mental anguish," observes Gerald Krefetz, "Jews were among the first groups to seek relief from psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists ... perhaps psychiatry is today's secular rabbinate." [KREFETZ, p. 180] This theme is inverted from a negative to a positive and romanticized by Harriet Fromkin: "If we had no further illustration than the character of Freud, we should have a basis for suspecting some connection between the Jew and psychological genius." [KAHN, R., p. 72]

 

Freud eventually directed his projective obsessions towards his Old Testament Jewish heritage, asserting -- among other things -- that the revered patriarch, Moses, may not have even been Jewish.  And that Jews killed him. "Biblical religion, according to Freud," said Joseph Campbell, "had the character of a neurosis, where a screen of mythic figures hides a repressed conviction of guilt which, it is felt, must be atoned, and yet cannot be consciously faced." [CAMPBELL, MASKS, p. 126] Freud believed that Jews had a continuous anxiety and resentment about breaking the many laws of their Father God. Freud wrote that

 

          "In the religion of Moses itself there was no direct expression for the

           murderer's father-hate. Only a powerful reaction to it could make

           its appearance: the consciousness of guilt because of that hostility,

           the bad conscience because one had sinned against God and

           continued to sin. This feeling of guiltiness, which the Prophets kept

           incessantly alive ... cleverly veiled the true origin of the feeling. The

           people met with hard times... it became not easy to adhere to the

           illusion ... they did not observe the laws. The need for satisfying

           this feeling of guilt ... was insatiable, more exacting, but also more

           petty ... It [the feeling of neurosis] bears the characteristic of being

           never concluded ... with which we are familiar in the reaction-

           formation of obsessional neurosis." [KREFETZ, p. 181-182]

 

In the Freudian worldview, Richard Rubenstein explains that the blueprint to understand the troubled anti-Semitic mind (and everyone's, for that matter) starts here:

 

     "According to Freud, civilization and religion began with a 'primal

      crime' in which the father of the original human horde was

      cannibalistically murdered by his sons to gain sexual possession

      of his females. The unconscious memory of the deed continues

      to agonize the sons and their progeny, thereby causing the

      murdered father to be imagined as the ever-lasting Heavenly Father.

      For Freud, the supreme object of human worship [the Father God]

      is none other than the first object of human criminality." [RUBENSTEIN,

      p. 36]

 

From this bizarrely fictional speculation, a Judeo-centric argument can be, and is, often created that explains anti-Semitism in western tradition as Christianity's (psychoanalytically-based) conflict with Judaism. This includes Christian envy of God's favoritism of Jewry, traditional Christian belief that Jews were the killers of Christ (an echo of the "murder God" theme), Judaism itself as a "father" religion to Christianity, and on and on. In this scenario, Jews are scapegoated by Christians for the very death of God. Not surprisingly, the Freudian paradigm for the relationship between Christianity and Judaism is a violent one. "The Jews had a father religion," said Freud, "and the Christians a son religion, and the subconscious is to kill the father from time to time." [PERLMUTTER, p. 141]  Hence, in this view too, Nazi fascism was not really (as declared and practiced by them) an anti-Christian creed, but -- however incongruous -- an expression of it. "In a sense," declares Rubenstein, "the death camps [for Jews] were the terminal expression of Christian anti-Semitism ... [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 43] ... since the sins and guilts that beset the anti-Semites existence demands the death of the Jews." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 41]

 

Elsewhere in the psychoanalytic world, John Murray Cuddihy has even argued that the essence of Freud's unconscious "id" theory was really the Jewish "ordeal of civility," the struggle to "civilize," to acculturate into the interpersonal norms of Gentile culture. (Freud's name for frustrated human desire can even been seen as a pun on the Yiddish word for Jew: Yid). In this vein, Maurice Samuels reflected widespread social issues of the day when he suggested in 1932, however facetiously, that anti-Semitism was probably rooted in "a lack of niceness in the Jews. If the Jews would only temper their voices, their table manners and their ties, if they would be discreet and tidy in their enthusiasms, unobtrusive in their comings and goings, and above all reticent about their Jewishness, they would get along very well." [SILBERMAN, p. 30]  Albert Lindemann notes also the undercurrent of agitated Jewishness (antithetical to non-Jewish Others) in three major Jewish-dominated ideologies in the last 150 years: "Such modern ideologies as socialism, (both Marxist and anarchist), Zionism, and various forms of the psychiatric worldview (Freudian psychoanalysis and related schools) all emphasize the tainted or sick qualities of Gentile existence, be it in exploitive capitalism, aggressive nationalism, or repressive Victorian prudery." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 14]

 

On one hand deconstructing their traditional religious faith in terms of collective neurosis, the Jewish nature of the psychoanalytic community yet echoes the exclusivist tribal ethic -- the "chosenness" and "apartness" from others -- of classical Judaism. "Psychoanalysis from its origins," notes Kevin MacDonald, "has been a "science apart' from the rest of psychology and psychiatry, resulting in two separate and incompatible discourses about human behavior. Psychoanalysis was and remains a highly authoritarian movement in which group boundaries are rigidly maintained and in which heretics are expelled." [MACDONALD, p. 237] This ethos of a psychoanalytic chosen people was criticized by a Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, who was courted by Freud to join the early psychoanalytic movement. Bleuler resisted the absolutism of the Freudians, telling Freud that "this 'who is not for us is against us,' this 'all or nothing,' is necessary for religious and political parties ... for science I consider it harmful." [GAY, p. 145]

 

In 1990, a (Jewish) psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Mouisaieff Masson, former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London and thereby a member of the international psychoanalytic "inner circle," wrote a volume exposing the secretive behind-the-scenes foundations of the psychoanalytic community:

 

     "No book has yet told what it is like to undergo training as an orthodox

     Freudian psychoanalyst. Nor does any book tell what it is like to leave

     that profitable and prestigious profession -- those who have been part of

     the inner circle of psychoanalysis either do not leave, or have left in

     discrete silence. Thus, until now it has been almost impossible to get

     an internal view of the workings of this 'men's club' with its initiation

     rites; expectations of membership loyalty over truth; pressures to accept

     concepts handed down from the leader, no matter how irrational;

     xenophobic banding together against outsiders; and the punishment

     of anyone who poses questions or finally wants out. It is worth asking

     why no book like this has appeared before, since people have written

     accounts of leaving almost every other cult." [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p.

     1-2]

 

Many Jewish scholars these days are trying to more openly claim Freud as one of their own and find in psychoanalysis its distinctly Jewish foundation. (An important impetus in Freud's construction of his theories of psychoanalysis is anti-Semitism. See Eric Grollman's Judaism in Sigmund Freud's World, for example, for a dose of this perspective). [GROLLMAN, E., 1965] While Freud always presented himself as an atheist and a completely "assimilated" Jew in mainstream Viennese society, there is evidence and argument that Freud was hiding his traditionally Jewish background and conflict with his (now believed to be) religious parents. Freud was even, beginning in 1897, a member of the Vienna chapter of the Jewish fraternal order, B'nai B'rith. Concerning their roots in traditional Judaism, Emmanuel Rice believes that Freud and his family were -- to the public -- deceptive at the least. "The fact," says Emmanuel Rice, "that these people were lying either did not occur to or seem to bother them." [RICE, p. 254] "It appears," continues Rice, "the family environment of Sigmund Freud's formative years was far more involved with Judaic scholarship, theological beliefs, and ritual practices than has been traditionally thought to be the case." [RICE, p. 257] This has significant implications -- by the very dictates of psychoanalytic theory which demands an exploration of childhood experiences for the roots of adult psychological behavior-- to understand what were Freud's own "internal conflicts." And it inevitably leads more deeply to a Jewish specificity in the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory, something that Freud emphatically resisted through most of his life, publicly conceding.  Rice even asserts that Freud's last major work, Moses and Monotheism, which scandalized traditional Judaism, must be understood not as scientific theory, but "as a novel with autobiographical elements." [RICE, p. 235]

 

Freud was even married to a woman, Martha Bernaya, whose grandfather was the chief rabbi of Hamburg. Raised in an Orthodox household, after Freud's death she resumed traditionalist customs. [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 70-71]

 

As Jewish scholar Samuel Klausner notes:

 

     "Freud himself was a Jew, and most of the members of his immediate

     Vienna circle were Jews. Admittance to the psychoanalytic

      movement required analysis by a previous initiate, a sort of

      'apostolic succession.' The original Jewish group tended to analyze

      Jews. Unwittingly, psychoanalytic ideology may be couched in a

      Jewish ethic strange to individuals socialized in the Protestant ethic."

      [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 43]

 

Karl Abraham, a close disciple of Freud, took issue with the Master's reluctance to concede that his completely rationalist view of human psyche -- putting the human mind into square pegs -- was particularly Jewish. "After all," said Abraham, "the Talmudic way of thinking cannot suddenly have disappeared from us." [GAY, p. 131] Freud's technique, in its exegetical method, he suggested, was "essentially Talmudic." [OSTROW, p. 25] Aaron Rabinowitz has even written a recent article that "enumerates and discusses some halachic [Jewish religious law] principles and values which are exerting influence on the practice of psychotherapy." [RABINOWITZ, A., 2000, p. 193]

Here's a bizarre excerpt from the Jewish Chronicle revolving around the relationship between Freudianism/psychoanalysis and Orthodox Judaism, the origin of Jewish identity:

   "Alan Dundes, a leading academic folklorist, presents an avowedly Freudian account of the Orthodox propensity for 'circumventing halachic restrictions' as evidenced by the Shabbat elevator (one that stops automatically to allow Orthodox Jews to allow it on Shabbat). The argument is that Jews exhibit traits of an anal erotic nature -- that basically, pride in order and self-control, obsessions with cleanliness or purity, and even feelings of superiority (Jewish chosenness) can all be traced back to our potty training. There follows an extended discussion of such avowedly repressive anal components in halachah [Jewish religious law]; and an argument that circumventions are ingenious attempts to break out of the repressive restrictions while continuing to comply with them, attempts in which we delight like naughty children ... [I]f one is impressed by ideas like 'writing is an act of defecation' (as the book went on, I became more and more convinced) then this volume [is] the book for you." [RYNOLD, D, 11-22-02, p. 28]

(Speaking of "potty training," here's what Marsha Richman and Katie O'Donnell [in their satirical look at "The Jewish Man in the Bathroom"] have to say about it: "The door to his bathroom is always closed, even when he's not in there. He will lock the door when he is in there. If you should burst in, he will valiantly try to look like he's doing something else. He folds, never crumples, the paper. In his medicine chest you will find prescriptions to cover everything from hives to a slipped disc. The Jewish art of toilet training is accomplished with a lot of guilt; if he doesn't do the right thing in the right place, his mother might kill him, or herself or both. When he comes out of the bathroom you will see a great feeling of satisfaction on his face. You might be mistaken, but it often looks like he expects you to praise him for what he's done.") [RICHMAN/O'DONNELL, 1979, p. 39-40]

Later in life, Freud admitted in a private letter that "in some place of my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all my efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial." [HES, p. 232] In 1977, Freud's daughter, Anna, guest speaking at a psychoanalytic convention in Jerusalem, created a furor when she announced that the notion of psychoanalysis as a 'Jewish science' "can serve as a title of honor." [GAY, p. 118]

 

"Although Freud openly questioned all religion," says M. H. Goldberg,

 

     "including Judaism, he always thought of himself as a Jew and raised

     his six children as Jews. In a letter to his fiancé written in 1882, Freud

     concluded that 'something of the core, of the essence of this

     meaningful and life-affirming Judaism will not be absent from our

     home." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 30]

 

"Freud's Jewishness [was] ever present in his mind," suggests Benno Weiser Varon, "This mind, by the way, was a Talmudic mind, searching and speculative." [VARON, p. 9] Karl Krauss, a prominent Viennese leftist, journalist and baptized Jew, knew Freud and even declared psychoanalysis to be "the conquest of the confessional by the Jews of Vienna." [VARON, p. 9] He also asserted that "they have the press, they have the stock exchange, they also have the subconscious!" and that "psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure." [WINOKUR, J., 1992, p. 151-152]

 

Freud himself wrote a special preface to the Hebrew edition of his volume, Totem and Taboo, speaking of himself in the third person:

 

     "[He] has never repudiated his people, who feels in essential nature a

     Jew, and who has no desire to alter this nature. If the question were put

     to him: 'Since you have abandoned all the common characteristics of

     your countrymen, what is there left that is Jewish?' he would reply: 'A

     very good deal and probably its very essence,' though he could not

     express that essence clearly in words." [VARON, p. 9]

 

Freud once wrote to a Jewish friend that "racial relationship brings you closer to my intellectual constitution." [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 290] Willy Aron adds that "in his famous address, 'On Being of the Sons of the Covenant,' delivered on May 6, 1926, on his 70th birthday, Freud spoke of 'the irresistible attraction of Judaism and Jews' and 'of the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the intimacy that comes from the same psychic structure.'" [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 293] Freud further noted his link to the "racial" dimension of Jewishness, that "I can say that I am as little an adherent of the Jewish religion as of any other religion, i.e., I consider them all important as objects of scientific interest, but I do not share the emotional attitudes that goes with them. On the other hand, I have always felt a strong feeling of kinship with my race and have fostered it in my children." [ARON, p. 294]

Nathan Ackerman cites the following quotes by Freud about his Jewish identity: "A Jew must create a compensating culture or take the gamble of going stark crazy." ... "What bound me to Judaism ... was not belief, and not national pride ... There were other considerations which made the attractiveness of Judiams nad Jews irresistible ... many obscure forces and emotions, all the more powerful the less they were defined in words: ... Only to my Jewish nature did I owed the two qualities which had become indispensable to me on my hard road. Because I was a Jew, I found myself free of many prejudices and being a Jew, I was prepared to enter opposition and to renounce agreement with the compact majority." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xii] "However abused," adds Ackerman, paraphrasing Freud, "the Jew must remain true to his people; there is no other way: 'It always seemed to me [said Freud] not only shameful but downright senseless to deny it." [ACKERMAN, N., 1965, p. xiii]

"Psychoanalysis is widely thought of as a 'Jewish science,'" says Arnold Jacob Wolf,

     "Indeed, Freud took pains to avart just such a notion, though he himself was,
     the chief reason for it. The enemies of depth psychology still dismiss it as
     peculiarly relevant to Jews; its friends note with gratifiation the biblical roots of
     the new wisdom. Not only are many practitioners of the art, like the very first
     analyst, Jews by descent if not conviction, but there is a widespread conviction
     that the method, the spirit, and even the conclusions of psychoanalysis are
     para-Judaic ... [Freud's] ancestry and the impact of his ancestry upon his deepest
     feelings are clearly and profoundly Jewish. His affinity for the Jewish style
     both mystical and rationalist is unmistakable. His newly emphasized prudishness
     together with his pioneering honesty in sexual matters is Talmudic."
     [WOLF, A. J., 1965, p. 133]

Earl Hopper, who acknowledges that "my identity as a Jew is inseparable from my identify as a psychoanalyst," understands psychoanalysis to be of course a "Jewish science," but ascribes its roots to Freud's view that psychoanalysis represents the revolutionary insights of a "marginalized" people, i.e., Jews had been in the past conceptually lumped by gentiles together with thieves, lepers, and misfits of all kinds. [HOPPER, p. 19] The insightful Jewish world view, this argument insists, has therefore keener "outsider" perceptions of the norms of mainstream cultures of the Jewish diaspora. And Jewish genius is to criticize and deconstruct them. (It is interesting that this "marginalized victim people" concept emerges from the minds of rich, elitist Jewish psychoanalysts who imprint their paradigms of victimhood upon usually affluent patient-sponges, Jewish or not).

 

Arnold Meadow and Harold Vetter even argue that Freudian theory is based on the "Judaic value system" including Judaism's "this life" (not afterlife) orientation, a "rationalist control over ... sexual urges," the "hidden meaning of words," and the presence of the "Oedipus complex ... in Jewish culture, perhaps in peculiarly intense form." [MEADOW, p. 164] This includes Freud's notion, claim the authors, that a woman tries to make her husband her child to "act the part of a mother to him." Furthermore, the authoritarian nature of psychoanalysis emphasizes "rationality as a basis for authority [which] closely parallels the authority relationship found in Jewish culture." [MEADOW, p. 163] The patient's resistance to the psychoanalyst's insights into the patient's troubles "is diminished by the analyst's rational interpretation, or by the patient's positive transference toward the analyst." [MEADOW, p. 162] To follow the logic of psychoanalysis as an intrinsically Jewish revelation and world view, the patient's "transference" is ultimately -- whatever else it is claimed to be -- a sensitization to "being Jewish."

 

Economist Peter F. Drucker -- whose parents knew Freud -- has argued that one of the major reasons for the early resistance to Freud was not only his strange theories, but his elitist and exploitive ethics:

 

       "Freud did not accept charity patients, but taught instead that the

        psychoanalyst must not treat a patient for free, and that the patient will

        benefit from treatment only if made to pay handsomely ... Medical

        Vienna did not ignore or neglect Freud, it rejected him. It rejected him

        as a person because it held him to be in gross violation of the

        ethics of healer." [TORREY, p. ]

 

Freud, notes Sylvia Rothchild, had an

 

       "inability to take any experience at face value. He treated his pupils as

        patients, urged them to 'absorb things, not argue back.' Freud had no

        wish to serve suffering humanity. He saw in that wish only sadism,

        'the apparent desire to help the sick a device to conceal from oneself

        the wish to do the opposite' ... He feared death, chased after money,

        position and reputation." [ROTHCHILD, S., 11-26-98, p. 24]

 

(Yet, in allegiance to his Jewish identity, "whenever any of his works were translated into Hebrew or Yiddish, Freud refused to accept royalties.") [ARON, W., 1956-57, p. 294]

 

In 1988, Jeffrey Moussaieff, the former Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and also Jewish, wrote one of his volumes attacking the psychoanalytic community, this book entitled Against Therapy, which outlines his enormous disillusionment with the principles and Thought Police practices of psychoanalysis. This includes Masson's outrage over the field's innately authoritarian manner, its manipulative control of patients, abridgement of ethical norms, and the systematic exploitation for personal profit of the emotionally vulnerable. Masson's observations of the psychoanalytic community include many general themes from Jewish history we have often seen before. "It is the world of therapy," he charges,

 

     "it is therapy itself that is at the core of the corruption I have described

     in this book. Every therapist, no matter how kindly and benign in

     appearance and behavior, is sooner or later drawn into that corruption,

     because the profession itself is corrupt. A profession that depends

     for its existence on other people's misery is at special risk. The very

     mainspring of psychotherapy is profit from another person's

     suffering ... [MASSON, p. 251] ... Abuse of one form or another

     is built into the very fabric of psychotherapy -- that power corrupts,

     that psychiatric power corrupts just as political power does and that

     the greater the power [over patients], the greater the propensity for

     corruption ... The psychotherapeutic relationship is a self-policing

     profession. The psychotherapeutic relationship is a privileged one,

     protected by a tradition of secrecy." [MASSON, 1988, p. 168]

 

In another volume, Masson observes that Freud's teachings became a "profitable profession with all the trappings of a jealously protected guild. The price for joining this fraternity is silence about its membership policy. Corruption is incorporated, not exposed; prejudice and bias have been accepted, even embraced." [MASSON, 1990, p. 4] In this volume, Final Analysis, Masson exposes the Orwellian, irrational, and totalitarian world of the psychoanalytic community. As part of his training to become a psychoanalyst, Masson was forced to undergo five years of psychoanalysis himself (at a 1971 cost of $75 an hour, five days a week). [MASSON, 1990, p. 21] Masson discovered soon that the psychoanalyst, Irvine Schiffer (also Jewish), for his sessions was a manipulative, unethical, maniacally sexist, two-faced and exploitive dictator/liar who eventually sought to exploit Masson to further his own career, insisting that a paper Masson planned on writing should be partially credited to his therapist. [MASSON, 1990, p. 69-70, 75, 82-83] This therapist was also the president of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute. [MASSON, 1990, p. 21] In telling one's most intimate and embarrassing secrets to another (with no parallel exchange), the confessor becomes profoundly vulnerable and beholding to the Listener. As in all of psychoanalytic terrain, the therapist ultimately holds the revelations of the Confessor as a potential weapon against him. Masson was also outraged when the therapist inanely decided that Mr. Masson's fundamental psychological problem was that he wanted to be a beautiful woman! [MASSON, 1990, p. 104] In his training to become a therapist in the secretive and authoritarian world of psychoanalysis, Masson was also told by a professor that copies of some psychoanalytic journals could not be exposed to the "lay public." [MASSON, p. 111] Another taught that spies should sometimes investigate patients' lives. [MASSON, p. 110]

 

In the early days of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was actually relieved to count Carl Gustav Jung -- a non-Jew -- as an adherent to the psychoanalysis bandwagon and was careful to keep him in the fold. "Gentile proselytes," notes John Murray Cuddihy, "could shore up [Freud's] self-doubt that psychoanalysis might not be, as its adherents claimed, a "science" at all ... but a social-cultural movement of Diaspora Jews." [CUDDIHY, p. 77] Without non-Jews in the psychoanalytic fold, Freud and his Jewish associates ran the profound risk -- with the emphasis on the likes of penis envy, the Oedipal Complex, strange sexual obsessions, the Death Wish, the focus on neurosis and anxiety, and all the rest of it -- of being mercilessly ridiculed and humiliated as merely participants in a bizarre Jewish cult, evidence, for anti-Jewish critics, of Jewish degradation.

 

Freud, in a letter to fellow Jewish psychoanalyst, Karl Abraham, wrote: "You are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship while he [Jung] as a Christian and pastor's son finds his way to me only against great inner resistances. His association with us is very valuable for that. I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair." [CUDDIHY p. 77]  Later, in another letter to Abraham, Freud added: "Our Aryan comrades are really completely indispensable to us, otherwise psychoanalysis would succumb to anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 82] There are those who even suggest that Sabina Spielrin, a Jewish woman (and, as one journalist put it, "a compulsive masturbator") who was Jung's patient and lover, was a "'honey trap' offered by Freud ... to keep Jung in the analytic movement." [KELLAWAY, K., p. 10]

 

Freud was a contemporary in Vienna of Theodore Herzl, the acknowledged "founder" of Zionism and modern state of Israel. "Freud had a high regard for Theodore Herzl and was closely acquainted with him."  [MEITLIS, J., p. 21] Herzl, remarks Cuddihy, believed that non-Jews are found "in two and only two varieties, namely ... overt and covert anti-Semites. Any wide reading in Freud puts it beyond doubt that he shared this conviction." [CUDDIHY, p. 78] "Freud "always gave a generous contribution" to the Zionist youth organization Hechaluz [the Pioneers] and in 1936 finally "openly aligned himself with the Zionist cause." [BERKELEY, p. 235, p. 191]  "Zionism," Freud wrote in a private letter in 1930, "awakened my strongest sympathies, which are still faithfully attached to it today." [GAY, p. 123]  "We are all of the same blood," Freud once told Jewish friend Jacob Meitlis. "Basically, all are anti-Semites. They are everywhere. Frequently it is latent and hidden, but it is there." [MEITLIS, p. 20]

 

Dr. Leo Goldhammar, a friend of Freud, noted an arresting dream Freud had in the early 1900s. Goldhammar

 

     "recorded a dream of Freud about Theodore Herzl. In this dream, as

     told by Freud, Herzl conveyed to Freud the idea of immediate action

     regarding Palestine if the Jewish people is to be saved. Freud remarked

     in his lecture on the dream that never before had he been interested

     in Herzl's ideas. Some time later he met the real person of his

     dream on a bus and was struck by the great resemblance of the

     real Herzl to the image beheld in his dream." [ARON, W., 1956-57,

     p. 294]

 

Freudianism proved useful in arguing Zionist theory. "The Zionist critique of assimilation ... [i.e., that Jews are perpetually destined to be a 'nation apart' as an inassimilable people in non-Jewish lands]," notes Donald Niewyk, "... rested on a certain conviction that all efforts to blend with non-Jews must lead unswervingly to deformed Jewish lives. The new discipline of psychoanalysis was mustered to demonstrate the neurotic effects of divided consciousness. Rootlessness and inferiority complexes were shown to generate everything from revolutionary activity to Jewish anti-Semitism, extreme German nationalism, and suicide." [NIEWYK, D., p. 126]

 

"Freud's Jewish identity," says Sander Gilman, "echoes throughout the history of psychoanalysis as part of its rhetoric." [GILMAN, p. 93] As such, it was  -- and is -- a warped and constrictive system for a non-Jew. "When one rebels within or against psychoanalysis," adds Gilman, "one seemingly natural rhetoric in which this rebellion takes place in articulation is an opposition to the 'Jewish' nature of the field."

 

What non-Jew would respond positively, favorably, to the inevitable manifestations of Freud's core belief about himself and his people, (an undercurrent of psychoanalysis), and how Jews traditionally treat those outside their own community? Freud wrote it this way: 

                        

             "We may start from a character of the Jews which

             dominates their relationship to others. There is no doubt that

             they have a particularly high opinion of themselves, that they

             regard themselves as more distinguished, of higher standing,

             as superior to other peoples. " [FREUD, p. 105-106]

 

This is the very paradigm of the foundations of psychoanalysis itself. As Freud wrote, the doctor-patient relationship is a "situation in which there is a superior and a subordinate." [MASSON, p. 3]  That subordinate, of course, is the patient who, by virtue of the very principle of psychotherapy, does not negotiate understanding with an overseer, but must entirely bend to the analyst's dictatorial will. And this dictatorial will, by conceptual origin, rationalist method, and omnipresent propagation, is Jewish-centered.

 

Freud's sense of Jewish superiority was documented a number of times, once expressed in the context of the death of a Jewish colleague. "We were both Jews," said Freud, "and knew of each other that we carried that miraculous thing in common which -- inaccessible to any analysis so far -- makes the Jews." [GAY, p. 133] One scholar notes that "Freud's undefined sense of Jewishness represents a special case of his obstinate belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics," as manifest in their "harsh, obsessive, self-punishing religion." [GAY, p. 133] Among Freud's later disciples, A. A. Roback, a Jew and Russian-American psychologist, sought "the actual causes of the Jewish birth and nursing of psychoanalysis in the peculiar makeup of the Jew." [GAY, Moment, p. 48]

 

Understandably, eventually Freud and Jung began having serious disagreements.  Jung, attributing many of the Jews' psychological problems to their own particular sense of rootlessness, decided that Freud's special Jewish hang-ups couldn't be generalized and universalized onto everybody else’s' psyche too.  Said Jung:

 

           "The Jewish problem is a regular complex, a festering wound...

            Are we really to believe that a tribe which has wandered

            throughout history for several thousand years as 'God's

            Chosen People' was not put up to such an idea by some

            quite special psychological peculiarity? If no difference exists,

            how do we recognize Jews at all? ... All branches of humanity

            unite in one stem -- yes, but what is a stem without separate

            branches? Why this ridiculous touchiness when anybody

            dares to say anything about the psychological differences

            between Jews and Christians?"  [HANNAH, p. 224-225]

 

Among Jung's earliest rebellions against his mentor was to challenge Freud's theory that children have incestuous desires for their opposite gender parents. And what, one wonders, of traditional Jewish obsessive concern with the prestige and pedigrees of their respective genealogical lineages (called "yicchus") in association with Freud's claim that all people reject their parents (Freud's were not well off) and imagine them to be "members of an aristocratic and/or royal family"? [RICE, p. 239] Jewish author Frederic Grunfeld dismisses Jung's disenchantment with the Jewish base of Freudianism thusly: "Freud was accused, not only by fools but even by C. G. Jung, of purveying 'Jewish psychology.'" [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 21]

Jung eventually defected from Freud and his Jewish circle, and became influential in the field of psychology in his own right. And what did this defection signify to Freud? "By the time Jung withdrew from Freud and others in the psychoanalytic community," says Stephen Martin, "the accusation [against Jung] of anti-Semitism spread with alarming rapidity." [MAIDENBAUM, p. 5]  Even in 1991, a Jewish student applying for a postdoctoral grant from Hebrew University to train in Zurich as a Jungian psychoanalyst was told "that Jung was an anti-Semite at best and was in fact quite possibly a Nazi sympathizer if not an active party member."  [MAIDENBAUM, Introduction]

 

     Early Freud follower Ernest Jones noted his sense of the nature of the Jewish psychoanalytic field:

 

    "I became, of course, aware somewhat to my astonishment of how

    extraordinarily suspicious Jews could be of the faintest sign of

    anti-Semitism and of how many remarks or actions could be

    interpreted in that sense ... Freud himself was pretty sensitive in

    this respect." [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 105]

 

One of the Freudian explanations for this anti-Semitism, "the deepest source of anti-Semitism," says Judy Cooper, is "the Jewish practice of circumcision ...  [Freud] considered this to be a primeval custom used as a symbolic substitute for castration and an expression of subjugation to the father's will." [COOPER, p. 7] 

 

Freud, like most Jews in our own day, saw in any resistance to his will the latent pulse of anti-Semitism. When "the first foreign [Swiss] recruits to psychoanalysis rejected Freud's 'theory of anal-eroticism,'" says Cooper, he saw it as an anti-Semitic attack on the Jews of Vienna. Freud complained that

 

       "There [in Switzerland] one hears just the argument I tried to avoid by

        making Zurich the centre [of psychoanalysis]. [They say that] Viennese

        sensuality is not to be found anywhere else! Between the lines you can

        read further that we Viennese are not only swine but also Jews."

        [COOPER, p. 6]

 

Freud, says Cooper, argued that Jews were "free from prejudice which restricted others in the use of their intellect," whereas "the Swiss [i.e., non-Jews] had to rid themselves of deep cultural attitudes, beliefs and prejudices to which they were profoundly attached, even though they considered themselves to be fully emancipated. "[COOPER, p. 6]  Other anti-Semites in Freud's eventual sphere, claims Cooper, included Virginia Woolf, one of Freud's publishers; Ernest Jones, one of his biographers; and much of the early French Psychoanalytic Society of the 1920's. [COOPER, p. 9]

 

A rare Pakistani psychotherapist, Masud Khan, who lived and worked in Britain, is afforded special attention by Judy Cooper (a Jewish psychotherapist who spent six years in therapy under him) as an anti-Semite. Khan complained that "the strength of the Jews is that they have no sensitivity about the contempt in which others hold them," "what makes Jews insufferable is that in order to love themselves they have to be hated by others first," and "the impact of the Judaic-Yiddish-Jewish bias of psychoanalysis was neither small nor slight to me." [COOPER, p. 11] None of these Khan comments of course have any verifiable basis in reality for Cooper except as evidence for his irrational anti-Semitism.

 

Even Jeffrey Moussieff Masson, a Jewish critic of the "corrupt" foundations of psychoanalysis, blamed a Gentile (in training to become a psychoanalyst) for the death of a Jewish patient. Why? Because the non-Jew would not/could not bend to see the patient's very particular Jewish world, one which is singularly welded to the lens of an omnipresent anti-Semitism. This (and a non-Jewish irritation with Freud's compulsion for Jewish "themes"), decides Masson, is itself an act of anti-Semitism. To both the patient and Masson, the non-Jew learning to be a psychoanalyst is an anti-Semite. Masson's comments reflect the implicit Jewish/Gentile divisive undercurrent about anti-Semitism within the psychoanalytic, and any other, field. "One of my fellow candidates was Catholic," decides Masson,

 

     "and was preoccupied with a Catholic theology. He had the misfortune

     to have as a patient a Jewish survivor of the concentration camps. During

     one of the case seminars [at a Toronto university] he explained to the

     class that this patient suspected him of anti-Semitism. Since he had

     once complained to me that Freud was too preoccupied with 'Jewish'

     themes, I was sympathetic to her concerns. 'I am asking for help,' he

     said, looking miserable. I thought this only fair. No doubt he wanted

     to ask somebody else, somebody more sensitive to these issues, to

     take over the case. 'How can I get her to understand that this is merely

     a projection, and a paranoid one at that? She is being chased all right,

     but her tormentors, her persecutors, are inside her own head. She

     can't see that, and she thinks the worst problem is that she has fallen

     on a bad analyst.' She was right, I thought. The class and the

     supervisor all urged him to redouble his efforts to provide this woman

     with 'insight.' But from class to class, things got worse. 'She is

     convinced that she is locked into a life-and-death struggle with me,

     and if she cannot get me to change, she is going to kill herself. How

     do I get her to see that the change must be in her, not me?' I could

     not see how this attitude could possibly help her. One day he came

     to class and was crying, 'She killed herself.'" [MASSON, J. M., 1990,

     p. 106]

 

At root in this story here, Holocaust victim or not, there is indeed a profound therapist-patient struggle. It centers upon the Jewish demand that non-Jews sensitize themselves to the peculiar particulars of "being Jewish," especially an insistence that non-Jews are, virtually by nature, irrationally anti-Semitic and that to deny this alleged "fact" is itself an expression of the irrational "disease."

A clear example of this psychotherapy-induced Gentile sensitization to being Jewish is the case of non-Jewish journalist Ross Wetzsteon ("I was immediately drawn to the Jews because they seemed so attractive and because the WASPs seemed so repellent.") Wetzsteon, after asserting the truths of Jewish "pushiness" and "vulgarity" as verifiable social traits ("Jewish vulgarity, in short, became a kind of intellectual and moral critique of the WASP mentality"), as well has his alienation from his own family and WASP culture, turns to explain how psychotherapy has liberated him from the "deceitful facade" of WASP identity. "I'll never forget," he writes,

     "how much my therapy had to do with my pleasure. For me, therapy was
     primarily a means of liberating my inner vulgarity, of releasing a kind of
     pushiness and ostentation in my psychic life -- it was a way of discovering
     that the things I valued most were radically opposed to the WASP ideals I'd
     internalized ... The imporant point is that it was quite clear to me that the Jew
     and the psychotherapist joined forces in the abolition of WASP hypocrisy,
     WASP decorum, and WASP censorship. I even came to see a parallel --
     while obviously aware of the disparities -- between Jewish social liberation
     and my own psychological liberation. My ghetto was my head, my
     assimilation was through therapy ... So when I say that psychotherapy
     revealed to me the autheticity of feeling, I'm saying that the experience was
     a way of becoming a mensch [Yiddish for 'good man']. Thus, to me,
     psychotherapy became what Freud most feared -- a Jewish science ...
     I regard myself as an 'honorary' Jew."
     [WEZSTEON, R., SEPT 6-12, 1998]

Freud's broad version of psychoanalysis as a respected "science" to this day has a constrictive ideological foundation.  And what is the essential spirit of it? "The negative character of psycho dynamic theory," suggests Martin Gross, "with its emphasis on abnormalities ... is a magnificent legacy of Freud's own neuroses."  Freud's official biographer, wrote that for nearly a decade up to 1900 the founder of psychoanalysis had his own "considerable psycho neurosis, characterized by swings of mood from extreme exhilaration to profound depression and twilight states of consciousness." [EYSENCK, p. 38] Freud was also addicted to cocaine, and he prescribed it to others. [GROSS, p. 234-235; ROTHCHILD, S., 11-26-98, p. 24]

And, if one resists Freudian dictates? For the psychoanlytic Thought Police, it is evidence, of course, of anti-Semitism. "Even the 'normal' mind," notes Frederick Crews, "in a Freudian view, is thought to consist of encrusted reaction formations against hideously aggressive impulses that remain capable of eruption; and what target of philistine malice could be more suitable than Freud and Freudians themselves, the bearers of the frightening news about those subterranean forces? To such a mindset, irreverence toward the official though mythical account of Freud's triumphs takes on the appearance not just of a private neurotic ailment but of a pogrom in the making." [CREWS, F., 1998, p. xxi] Whether one addresses the Jewish dimensions of the field, psychoanalysis is so overwhelmingly Jewish that in some quarters critics of Freudian theory are considered instant anti-Semites, "not just allies of the Christian far right but as latter-day Nazis hunting down 'Freudian Jews'." [CREWS, F., 1998, p. xxi]

In recent years a firestorm of material has been published that attacks Freudian theory and "it's malignant affect ... on American thought and culture." [TORREY, Title Page] Freud, writes H. J. Eysenck, "was, without doubt, a genius, not of science, but of propaganda, not of rigorous proof, but of persuasion ... His place is not, as he claimed, with Copernicus and Darwin, but with Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, tellers of fairy tales." [EYSENCK, p. 208] "Freudians are finding themselves on the defensive," noted Frederick Crews in 1998, "and the strategies of special pleading that they adopt are themselves symptomatic of intellectual bankruptcy ... Thus it was Freud's closest friend Fliess who pointed out in 1901 that Freud was ascribing his own thoughts to the minds of his patients." [CREWS, F., 1998, p. xxviii]

   

Not unexpectedly, even Orthodox Jews have attacked Freudian theory and its perceived corrosive effect on traditional values. "The priesthood of Freud's cult," wrote Martin Kushner, "as a vested interest, tries to strengthen and perpetuate itself, not unlike any other vested interest." [GAY, p. 97]

 

Freud's influence in Western culture to this day remains incredible; it has permeated all facets of modern life, from literature to toilet training.  Psychoanalysts head over half of the departments of psychiatry at American medical schools. "I am bewildered," said Dr. William Sargent, a former head of St. Thomas Hospital in England, "at the way direction and control of American psychiatry has been taken over since World War II by psychoanalysis." [GROSS, p. 145]  And as Kate Millet has noted, "The prestige of Freud's sexual theories did not arrive at, still less maintain, such complete ascendancy [in Europe] as they achieved in the United States. In America, the influence of Freud is almost incalculable." [MILLET, p. 178]

 

So where does this all lead us, per the subject at hand: Jews, non-Jews, and the subject of anti-Semitism? This is what Freud had to say about the reasons for anti-Semitism:

      "With regard to antisemitism, I don't really want to search for explanations; I feel
      strong inclination to surrender to my affects in this matter and find myself confirmed
      in my wholly non-scientific belief that mankind ... by and large are a wretched lot."
       [ZUKIER, H., 1999, p. 118]

 

With the rigid conviction that anti-Semitism is an irrational, baseless animosity towards Jews, immediately after World War II and in the stormy months before the founding of Israel, American Jewish organizations began, quite literally, to plan their propaganda strategies.  The revelation of Hitler's atrocities against Jews publicly elevated Jews to widespread sympathy and an uncontested "higher moral ground," disarming to our own day any public criticism of Jewry and only rarely the rising Jewish state of Israel. The practical question for Jewish organizations (particularly, but not only, the Zionist ones) was: how do Jews best ride this wave of popular sympathy for their plight under Hitler into the far future? To deflect any argument from the historical record scathing of Jews, it was deemed extremely important to implant in American public opinion the notion that any criticism of Jews had no rational causal basis and was, by definition, originated in mental illness. And an entire "science," albeit a disguised Jewish one, was at their command to "prove" it.

 

As Jewish psychoanalyst Rudolf Lowenstein declared in 1951:

 

     "Inaccessibility to reason is also one of the most typical characteristics

     of the anti-Semite, who is unable to re-evaluate his opinions and

     prejudices in the light of factual evidence that refutes them. The

     passions and the unconscious motives and mechanisms involved

     in his anti-Semitic feelings are too powerful to yield to reason or

     experience. We find therefore that although anti-Semitism cannot

     be placed in any one of the well-known clinical categories it is

     nevertheless frequently an indication of some sort of mental

     disturbance that could be classified among the social mental

     diseases." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., 1951, p. 18-19]

   

Among the powerful Jewish lobbying organizations seeking to disseminate such notions was the American Jewish Committee, one of the many Jewish groups that actively support the state of Israel. (AJC's efforts to effect social change in America include "the elimination of expression of religion in the public schools with special reference to the observation of Christmas," opposition to quota-oriented affirmative action legislation (because it hurts Jews), and "continued campaigns ... to make people aware of Arab funding over American educational institutions." [DOBKOWSKI, p. 39] The AJC also was actively involved in the successful lobby of the Vatican to formally change traditional Catholic teachings that Jews killed Christ. [DOMBKOWSKI, p. 37]

 

Jewish communal organizations have long been active in socially engineering non-Jewish perceptions of the Jewish community against any instinct towards criticism (i.e., "anti-Semitism.") As Eli Ginzberg noted in 1949, "Today at least among large numbers of American Jews, the 'defense activities' have usurped a position of priority. This was more or less inevitable since many of these Jews have lost all interest in positive Jewish values; their entire adjustment is externally oriented. Finally, we are confronted with the amazing belief among American Jews ... that the basic attitudes of the Gentiles toward the Jews can be significantly altered, if only the right 'techniques' are discovered and employed." [HERTZBERG, A., 1989, p. 331]

 

A good example of this is the American Jewish Committee's efforts to use Freudian theory to explain, and diffuse, the anti-Semitic threat. "A recent conference called by the most outstanding Jewish defense agency  [AJC] in this country," wrote Max Horkheimer (head of an AJC committee) in 1946, "... was attended by experts from all over America. Many questions were presented: In setting up a defense program against anti-Semitism, what type of propaganda should be used? What should be said? ... Should there simply be an appeal for fair play, to a sense of justice in the individual, to the ideals of democracy? The psychoanalytic answer would be in the negative. A mere appeal to the conscious mind does not suffice, because anti-Semitism and the susceptibility to anti-Semitic propaganda spring from the unconscious." [HORKHEIMER, p. 2]

 

Here Horkheimer asserts that a rational appeal to democratic principles of fairness, justice, equality, and humanitarianism in an open and civilized forum to "clear the air" of anti-Jewish complaint will never work because the source of such complaint is -- by the psychoanalytic definition -- purely emotional and irrational. Jews, in this scenario, are always scapegoats for non-Jewish problems. A critique of Jewish identity and behavior is not, to the "normal" mind, even on the map. It is, by psychoanalytic definition, rationally impossible.  Criticism of the Jewish community is thereby merely a manifestation of human psychological sickness. The only option for Jews, as Horkheimer and his psychoanalytic colleagues see it, is a "propaganda" that entirely denies "anti-Semites" (generally broadly considered to be anyone who criticizes Jews or Israel) a forum for their grievances. Hence, no credence or attention is afforded whatsoever to the very materially concrete and well-documented socio-economic roles of Jews that oppressed others through history; the centrality of money-making and exploitation of others in the Jewish world view and the traditional Jewish double moral standard towards this task; public animosity towards Jews throughout history as financiers, economic middlemen, and money dealers; legal sanctions for unethical conduct towards Gentiles in the Talmud; religiously sanctioned Jewish separatism, racism, and contempt for non-Jews; and the implications of all this to international Jewry, Israel, and modern times. (Horkheimer, by the way, was a refugee from Nazi Germany where he had been the Director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, a school noted for its Marxist and Freudian foundations. "Most of the roughly 50 members of the institution's staff," notes Nachum Gidal, "were of Jewish origin)." [GIDAL, p. 354] "Germans of Jewish background," note Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "dominated another important group of intellectuals during the Weimar period, the Frankfurt-based Institut fur Sozialforschung, whose leading members became collectively known as the 'Frankfurt School.' This roster included some extraordinarily distinguished and inflential figures, including T. W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. With the exception of Karl Wittfogel, who left the Institute rather early to become an anti-Marxist conservative, all the inital members were of Jewish background (Adorno was half-Jewish). Most of the Frankfurt School were the sons of successful businessmen." " [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 86]

"In 1943," notes Stuart Svonkin, when the Institute for Social Research set up shop at Columbia University in New York City,

     "the American Jewish Committee entered into a contract with the ISR under
      which the institute was to investigate contemporary American anti-Semitism."
      [SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 33]

The fortification of the Jewish people and their influence over American public opinion by legions of committed Jewish psychoanalysts and their "science” in the hunt for the omnipresent anti-Semite and to eradicate its attendant irrational "prejudice" was begun in earnest.  "In the first week, and months, after the end of the second World War," notes J. J. Goldberg, "the organized Jewish community launched a broad ranging campaign to end prejudice and discrimination in America ... It was a huge, coordinated campaign, waged in the courts and the legislature, in the media and in the streets." [GOLDBERG, J.J. p. 119] The result of this profoundly powerful lobbying effort is a ruthless political weapon, a one-way dictatorship of accusation against any kind of critic of Jews. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin notes the situation today, even "the unfounded charge of 'anti-Semite' brands the victim and leaves the accuser absolved." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 285]

Jewish author Stuart Svonkin notes that in the late 1930s

     "the AJC and the ADL each launched ambitious programs aimed at unmasking
     rabble-rousers and 'immunizing' Americans against anti-Semitism ... Using the radio,
     the press, and other mass media, the AJC and ADL embarked on a joint
     campaign of public education that portrayed anti-Semitism as the opening
     gambit in a Nazi scheme to 'divide and conquer' the United States. Both
     agencies spent large sums of money producing and distributing leaflets,
     pamphlets, and books that provided a positive image of Jews while
     depicting Nazism as atheistic, antidemocratic, and un-American -- not
     simply anti-Semitic ... The Jewish agencies' propaganda campaign reflected
     the assumption that anti-Semitism was rooted in ignorance about Jews and
     Judaism ... Like their counterparts at the AJC, ADL staff members formed
     working relationships with reporters, publishers, newspaper columnists, radio
     station managers, and moviemakers, through which they were able to counteract
     anti-Semitic stereotypes and emphasize the importance of interreligious unity.
     The ADL and the AJC both obscured the Jewish origins of theeir efforts
     by unobtrusively subsidizing newspapers, church groups, labor unions,
     professional organizations, and German American organizations that spread
     anti-Nazi, pro-democratic propaganda." [SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 15-16]

Glen Jean Sonne describes one of the successful American Jewish prototypes to silence a critic of Jewry, this one a preacher and right-winger, Gerald K. Smith, in the 1940s:

     "Indeed there was a Jewish plan ('plot' is too strong a word); and it was more
      effective than many of Smith's opponents anticipated. The strategy devised was
      to deny Smith any publicity. This plan evolved after several years of spirited
      debate within the Jewish community; it required a herculean effort to convince
      and coordinate the press as well as fellow Jews. Although never completely
      effective, the strategy reduced Smith from a highly publicized public figure
      in the 1930s to a pariah in the postwar period ..." [SONNE, J., 1986, p. 153]

Popular Jewish convention also held --as one 1950s study of Jewish American colleges students found -- organized Jewish efforts to thwart anti-Jewish hostility should be accomplished "secretly." "The desire to please and appease the powerful Gentile," noted Joseph Adelson in discussing the results of his survey of Jews, "is reflected in the belief that organizational response to anti-Semitism, when it is necessary, should be of a quiet, secret, conspiratorial nature. Organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League should avoid stirring up public attention." [ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 478]

 

By 1950, the "Department of Scientific Research" (headed by Horkheimer) of the AJC sponsored an influential study, led by Dr. Nathan Ackerman of Columbia University, designed to equate mental illness and anti-Semitism. The resultant volume, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder (co-authored with Marie Jahoda), became an authoritative source and is cited in the bibliographies of many later books about anti-Semitism. Ackerman's research was not exploratory investigation per se. Cloaked beneath the robes of psychoanalytic scientism, it was closer in spirit to a McCarthy-inspired witch hunt, which entered American political life a few years later. Information was merely solicited from American psychoanalysts by open invitation in this study to prove the thesis that anyone who complains about any aspect of Jewish behavior is crazy. (In 1996, Jewish psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostrow reported upon his own 9-year research project sponsored by the "Psychoanalysis Research and Development Fund" on the same topic: "We anticipated that the psychoanalytic method could be usefully applied to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, since anti-Semitism seems to be largely irrational. Its ubiquity and presence cannot be explained by any realistic considerations.") [OSTROW, p. 3]

 

The bedrock for such a study originates here:  "[Freud's] historic neurotic personality," says Martin Gross," has had a profound effect on our culture. It has thrust Freud's worst indispositions into our language, our mental habits, and our psychology ... one trait was his bad-tempered insistence that secret hostility was paramount in the human psyche." [GROSS, p. 243] (Might this be a clue, one wonders, to distinctly Jewish "secret hostility.")

 

In the introductory statements to his study of anti-Semitism, Ackerman notes that he and his colleagues are Jews. He then bluntly confesses his emotional bias on the subject of anti-Semitism, dismisses objectivity and "detachment from the issue" as being "logically and psychologically untenable," declares that "value judgments enter into every step of social research," and then begins -- paradoxically and hypocritically -- a discussion of the evils of "prejudice" and "prejudgment" (as expressed by anti-Semites) on the very next pages! [ACKERMAN, p. 1-4] "Inherent," he boldly pronounces, " in the process of prejudgments is the danger of stereotypical thinking."  Lost in his zealous dedication to diagnose his preconceived world of endemic Jew-haters Ackerman somehow misses -- from the very start -- that his own "value judgments" are quintessential prejudgments.

 

Ackerman conjures up a broad definition of anti-Semitism, wide enough to catch virtually anyone in his "prejudicial" net (including plenty of Jews, as we shall see): "Anti-Semitism is any expression of hostility, verbal or behavioral, mild or violent, against Jews as a group, or against an individual Jew because of his belonging to that group."  [ACKERMAN, p. 19]  That's the entire definition. This net that even includes "any-mild-verbal-hostility" catches a lot of minnows, and anyone short of a saint.  In fact, it catches -- as intended -- everyone. Lest anyone dare to think that they are not themselves fertile grounds for the disease of anti-Semitism, Ackerman notes that "the difference between the 'sick' and the 'healthy' personality is one of degree and quantity rather than one of quality." [ACKERMAN, p. 18]

 

This professor, in consort with the American Jewish Committee, contacted a number of "accredited" New York city psychiatrists -- some were Jews, some were not.  He doesn't provide exact numbers or proportions. Ackerman only says that " a small number of psychiatrists were first approached." [ACKERMAN, p.11]  Later he says "the cooperation of psychoanalysts was then enlisted on a large scale," [ACKERMAN, p.15] and he leaves it at that, except to add that some case histories were further solicited from two social-welfare agencies. [ACKERMAN, p.16] Suspiciously, he does not ever note, other than in these vague terms, the number of psychiatrists who participated in his project, let alone how many were Jewish and how many Gentile.  Whoever they were, he asked them to submit case histories of patients who exhibited "signs of anti-Semitism" (the psychiatrists were to determine the "signs" as they wished -- "The psychoanalyst was completely at liberty to include any fact that seemed relevant to the patient's anti-Semitism)." [ACKERMAN, p. 11] Ackerman doesn't note if the patients gave consent to use their personal traumas, fears, and pains for this study, or even if they were informed of its existence.

       

Ackerman then decided that it was "essential" that those under his employ (who interviewed the New York psychiatrists about anti-Semitism) had to be themselves psychoanalyzed. "This," he says, "helped to establish quickly an atmosphere of confidence between the psychoanalyst and research personnel."  [ACKERMAN, p.15]  It would also, of course, be an invasive and authoritarian way to weed out anyone who might have questions about the direction, or methodology, of his project.

     

The conclusions reached by Ackerman and his colleagues from the collection of random case histories volunteered to them are self-fulfilling, and sometimes outright bizarre. Whose "prejudices and prejudgments" are we hearing about when Ackerman states that "some of the psychoanalysts said that they had not encountered a single case of anti-Semitism in all their practice, others declared that every patient they had ever treated, whether Gentile or Jew, showed some traces of it"?  [ACKERMAN, p. 20]  (Ackerman discreetly avoids telling us how Jewish and Gentile psychiatrists line up behind these opposite experiences).

 

A few highlights from his research conclusions are as follows:

    

                 *  "Anti-Semitic reactions are found in psycho neurotics in

                      various types; in character disorders, perhaps more

                      particularly of the sado-masochistic type."  

          

                  *  "All individuals ... suffer from anxiety.... In most cases

                      it was of a special nature: it was diffuse, pervasive,

                      relatively unorganized, and not adequately channeled

                      through specific symptom-formation."

 

                  *  "Plagued by a vague apprehension of the world at-large,

                      these patients seem to derive little, if any, strength from

                      their own identity."

 

                  *  "It is extremely difficult for these anti-Semitic personalities

                       to achieve satisfactory personal relationships."

    

                   *  "The very existence of the Jews ... is a constant and

                       painful reminder of the anti-Semites own emotional

                       deficiencies."

 

                   *  "The emotional deficiencies of these patients, extending

                       beyond the sphere of human relations, seem also to have

                       impaired their capacity to establish a satisfactory

                       relationship with external objects."

  

                    *  "At the psychic level, anti-Semitic hostility can be viewed

                        as a profound though irrational and futile defensive effort

                        to restore a crippled self."

 

                    * "In a pathetic and futile attempt at genuine acceptance

                       by other human beings, these persons are often driven

                       into a slavish imitation of habits and ideologies by those

                       who represent cohesive power in their community." [p.

                       69]

 

This is, of course, an entire volume of such material. But one of Ackerman's more summary insights into the generic, stereotypical enemy is this: "The tendency to blame the outside world rather than oneself accompanies all the reactions of the anti-Semite." This rebellious trait against the "outside world" and the refusal to blame oneself for the social, economic and political failings of the world would have to be considered endemic to the world's greatest social thinkers and revolutionaries, humanitarians, artists and intellectuals of all kinds (including Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote that "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members ... The base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul." Ironically, conversely, the tendency to "blame the outside world rather than oneself" has also always been a Jewish defense mechanism in denying Jewish responsibility for anti-Semitism.

   

Among the most extraordinary findings in Ackerman's research was the ethnicity of the "anti-Semites" he and his cohorts discovered.  Of the 40 case studies cited in the book, 8 individuals were themselves born Jews, another 3 were "half-Jews," one more was "part Jewish," another was married to a Jew, and yet another was "half-Jewish" and adopted by a Jewish couple. Only one of the non-Jewish anti-Semites, as Ackerman tells us, was "colored." [ACKERMAN, p. 95-129] (Ackerman, of course, decides that the Black woman's dislike of Jews was displaced. Didn't she know that she really hated Whites? "But," says the professor, "to admit hostility against all whites was realistically too dangerous, particularly since she was being advised by a white psychiatrist worker. She, therefore, displaced her hostility to the Jews.")

 

Does this tell us, as these kinds of researchers would propagandize, that evidence of such great Jewish self-disdain merely evidences that the scourge of anti-Semitism is so prominent in American society that even large numbers of Jews blindly absorb it like mindless sponges? Or might it indicate that being Jewish is not sacrosanct, and that some parts of the Jewish experience -- like any other people on earth -- warrant reasonable criticism? And, further, might it not be psychologically healthy for those troubled with their Jewish identities to give free vent to their complaints and concerns in an open forum towards resolution, rather than stifle and deny some of the uncertainties of Jewish identity in the real world.

 

The function of Ackerman's study was Orwellian in nature: its intent was to obfuscate real social, political, and economic realities regarding Jews and replace them with the world of Sigmund Freud: implanted illusions of personal inadequacies and mental illnesses. Such a "study" never once even remotely considered that the slightest "hostility" towards a single Jew, or Jews in general, was in any way legitimate. Rather, anyone who dares to question anything whatsoever about Jewry is categorized as a veritable species -- an "anti-Semite," this term itself a quintessential stereotype.

  

Ackerman even psychoanalyzed (by remote control) professional colleagues who refused to work with him on this study.  For those principled psychoanalysts who declined to participate in Ackerman's biased undertaking "for fear [that it] might detract from the more fundamental social and economic causes of anti-Semitism ... [Ackerman decided that] it appeared to us, in a few cases, as rationalizations for the wish not to be concerned with anti-Semitism at too close range, as an attempt to keep away from its horror and to avoid identification with its victims -- in short, it seemed to be an expression of self-preservation." [ACKERMAN, p.20]

 

The entire construct of this dubious scientific study would not merit the slightest attention 50 years later, except that its theses and conclusions remain the foundation of Jewish public opinion today. In this "study" we find one of the monster embryos for the vast Jewish propaganda machinery against what is generically known today as "anti-Semitism." Ackerman and co-author, noted the volume, "both are convinced that decisive social action should and can be taken to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism ... Indeed, one of the motives for undertaking this study was the concern for its potential pragmatic value." [ACKERMAN, p.2]  

 

There are precedents for such psychoanalytically-based manipulation which stretches to preposterous lengths in a socio-political context. Sigmund Freud himself turned into a naked political hack in using psychoanalysis in a book -- finally published 28 years after his own death -- to defame a U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson. It was, according to Martin Gross, "a classic of historical distortion" that was "greeted with an embarrassed apology from the psychological community." [GROSS, p. 72-73] Even Jewish historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that [Freud and his co-author] "have allowed emotional bias to direct their inquiry, which has led to undisciplined reasoning, wild overstatement, and false conclusions." [GROSS, p. 73]

 

It must be admitted, however, that widespread Jewish faith in psychoanalysis to explain the world for them, and sometimes impugn historical figures who are long dead, is not discriminatory. In 1993 a Jewish psychoanalyst, Avner Falk, turned his probe for neurosis onto Theodore Herzl, the Jewish Zionist hero. Falk's book, subtitled "a Psychoanalytical Biography," declares, according to one Jewish reviewer, that Herzl was "inwardly dependent on his parents, stunted emotionally, extremely arrogant and supercilious, completely self-obsessed, and [was] ... never really able to sustain close personal relationships." [ADLER, p. 44] Herzl had a miserable personal life. He had three children. Pauline died of drug addiction, Hans converted to Catholicism and later committed suicide, and Trude spent a "lifetime of mental illness." Of these Herzl children, only Trude had a child, Stephan, who also committed suicide. [STEWART, D., Genealogical chart, 1974]

 

Another Jewish psychoanalyst, Jay Gonen, even takes Freudianism so far as to explain the core of collective Jewish neurosis like this:

 

      "Because of their covenant with God, because of their obedience to Him,

      the sons of Israel end up with shorter penises. Having yielded to

      circumcision, they will never be endowed with the same phallic prowess

      as the Gentiles, and will never have as good and big a penis as their

      mighty father. Thus, they have to be careful that Jewish women do not

      learn that Gentiles are more satisfying and they have to continue to love

      the God-Father whom they also unconsciously hate." [GONEN, p. 14]

Prominent Jewish author Erica Jong undescores in the Jewish psyche a Freudian fear of castration as an important effect of circumcision -- the defining rite of Jewish maleness: "After all, what does the ritual of circumcision say to a Jewish son? 'Watch out. Next time I'll cut off the whole thing.' So Jewish boys are horny, but also full of fear about whether their cocks will survive their horniness." [JONG, E., 1994, p. 60]

And what does the greatest symbol of anti-Semitism -- the Nazi swastika -- mean to a Freudian? Bizarrely enough, copulation! As Frederic Grunfeld describes it:

     "Since the swastika is a schematic yet recognizable representation of two
     human figures in coitus, it acts as a powerful stimulus in deep layers
     of the psyche, according to the [also Jewish] psychoanalyst Wilhelm
     Reich --- 'a stimulus that proves to be much more powerful the more
     dissatisfied, the more burning with sexual desire, a person is.'" [GRUNFELD,
     F., 1996, p. 71]

In 1981, a feminist, Susan Griffin (not Jewish?), wrote a book about pornography. Using a broad arsenal of Freudian frameworks, she linked pornography and anti-Semitism to the same sources of the sick mind, even dragging Holocaust heroine Ann Frank into the recipe. Adolf Hitler is of course the epitomy of the Jew-hater. "In his book on the history of anti-Semitism," Griffin tells us,

     "Vamberto Morais records Hitler's repeated mention of 'Jews in caftans' and the
      'filth' and 'stench' of those caftan-wearers. He tells us 'this becomes all the more
       ironical when one learns 'that according to companions of Hitler who knew him
      when he was a younger man, and an artist, he himself 'wore a long, shabby overcoat
       very much like a caftan, which had been given him by a Hungarian Jewish dealer in
      old clothes.' And from Hitler's fellow artist Ganisch we learn that he 'had a dirty,
            unkempt aspect.' But of course, we have known all along who 'the Jew' really was.
      We have known all along that this 'Jew' was Hitler himself." [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p.
       197-198]

(Where might such a world view for Ms. Griffin have come from, that, on Freudian terms, Adolf Hitler -- the consummate "anti-Semite" -- sought to destroy himself through a scapegoat of innocent Jewry? In her dedication page to her work, Griffin notes that "I discussed the ideas in this book from the beginning with [Jewish feminist] Kim Chernin and we read one another's manuscripts. She led me toward essentially psychological insights ... Tillie Olsen's Silences and Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born deeply affected my thought as did Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. [All these authors are Jewish] ... Although I take issue with certain of [Jewish author] Susan Sontag's idea on pornography, her work On Photography entered my thinking continually. I feel especially indebted to the scholarship and insights of Lucy Dawidowicz regarding the Holocaust ... ... In addition to reading the manuscript and giving me invaluable support, Lind Levitsky shared with me a collection of racist images which she compiled for a study of racist stereotypes ... My daughter, Becky Levy, shared her school research into images of women on television." [Did Mr. Levy dump her? No mention of him in the credits/dedication.] ) [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p. vii, viii]

 

With Adolf Hitler and the Nazis ever seen in the grim horizon, and with the dubious moral position of the state of Israel to prop up, the psychological breakdown of the sick "anti-Semite" has been, for decades now, a booming industry for Jewish psychiatrists and the Jewish community at-large. As always, an anti-Semite is defined extremely loosely for it is believed that anyone with even a seed of disenchantment towards Jews, left unchecked, could turn into an unwieldy monster.

 

Over the years, the Department of Scientific Research of the American Jewish Committee has in fact funded not only Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder, but a series of academic studies and volumes about the subject, including Dynamics of Prejudice, Prophets of Deceit, and the most referenced, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Such studies had their conceptual origin during World War II. The motivation for them, and their sweeping judgments, must be understood in the context of their root, fear and paranoia. In the 1940's Jewish organizations were extremely apprehensive of the possibility of a spreading Nazism.

 

The Authoritarian Personality is a thousand page tome stuffed with largely impenetrable statistical evaluations of American sample categories from interviews the authors conducted: college students, psychiatric patients, merchant marine officers, prison inmates, Unitarians, members of the United Electrical Workers Union, the PTA, the Kiwanis Club, and others. The volume elaborates similar premises and findings as Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder; criticism of Jews is equated with "the superstitious belief in witchcraft" which was eradicated thanks to "the results of modern science." [p. ix] The authors likewise "hold the belief that anti-Semitism [which they never define] is based more largely upon factors in the subject and his total situation than upon actual characteristics of Jews ... " [p. 3] And, of course, "For theory as to the structure of personality, we have leaned most heavily on Freud..." There are even chapters on the "ethnocentric ideology" of the generic anti-Semite, most peculiar since the Jewish tradition of the Chosen People has, throughout history, refined ethnocentrism as tightly as any people can to perfection. Essentially, notes sociologist John Higham, "the Authoritarian Personality "assigned to anti-Semitism an extraordinary importance by arguing that critical attitudes toward Jews reveal a basic personality type that threatens the survival of democratic society." [HIGHAM, p. 174]

 

Gordon Allport, a Jewish psychologist and author of the influential The Nature of Prejudice (1954) remarked in 1981 that The Authoritarian Personality "stirred up the social sciences, particularly social psychology, perhaps more than any book published in this century ... There are some 500 studies based on this work ... The very fact that they called the authoritarian person "F," measured by the F-scale which stood for Fascist, reflects the historical times ... everyone was anti-Hitler and everything he stood for, and it was to some extent a cultural product ... " [EVANS, p. 63, 64]

In 1958, based upon the dubious Freudian premises of The Authoritarian Personality, another Jewish academic, Joseph Adelson, published the results of a survey of 242 Jewish American college students. The study examined Jewish acceptance of the reality of negative Jewish social traits or, as Adelson phrased it in political academeze of the era, it was "a study of minority group authoritarianism." What Adelson was interested in was to what degree "anti-Semitic" attitudes were reflected in Jews themselves. (This is popularly known as "self-hatred" in the Jewish community and will be discussed a little later). The Jewish college students were asked to response to a variety of sentences. They were given the choice of six numbered responses to each question. A "7" represented complete agreement and a "0" complete disagreement with the statement. Here are the Jewish scores for acceptance of some of the most "anti-Semitic" questions: (the "Mean for Total Group" follows each statement):

"There are many Jews to whom anti-Semitic statements do apply." (4.49)
"I feel personally ashamed when I see Jews making themselves conspicuous." (4.31)
"The Jewish group in this country would get along better if many Jews were not so clannish." (4.12)
"I have often been embarrased by the anti-social conduct of certain Jews in public life." (4.05)
"Too many Jews try to intrude themselves into circles where they're not wanted. (3.33)
"Most Jews who meet a great deal of anti-Semitism bring it about by their own obnoxious behavior." (3.20)
"A lot of anti-Semitism is caused by the number of Jewish radicals." (3.19)
[ADELSON, J., 1960, p. 481, 484]

In other words, a lot of Jews put some stock in "anti-Semitic" beliefs as part of verifiable reality. So how does Adelson (and his kindred apologists) explain this away? (-- which was the ultimate purpose for this study). By ascribing JEWISH criticism of Jewish behavior -- in psychoanalytic terms -- as identification with a hostile, more powerful, Gentile society. "Prejudice [against the genre of Jew who is criticized by other Jews]," says Adelson,

      'is viewed as 'rational'; its cause is the deviant behavior of the 'bad kind of Jew.'
      Still further, the definition of the self as a 'good' Jew permits a kind of identification
       with the aggressor, a sense of affiliation with the Gentile ... Perhaps it is unnecessary
      to note that the authoritarian image of the outgroup [Jews in Gentile society]
       incorporates the essential elements of the anti-Semitic stereotype; even the
       contradictions are retained, as in the attribution of both seclusive and intrusive motives.
       One important component of Gentile anti-Semitism is omitted; the Jews is never
      seen as a sinister or dangerous force. The theme of Jewish power, when it does
       appear, is greeted not with hostility, but with pride and admiration." [ADELSON, J.,
       1960, p. 477] (In other words, Jewish "power," a staple of the anti-Semitic charge
       which is publicly denied always, is secretly celebrated]

In essence, Adelson's study attempts to explain widespread Jewish admission to truths about popular stereotypes about Jews as merely Jewish distancing efforts to gain acceptance to the world of the prejudicial, irrational, "authoritarian" Gentile majority culture.

 

Along with this, and many AJC-sponsored titles about anti-Semitism, we can find on the library shelves other such titles as Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, Anti-Judaism: A Psychohistory, and still flowing, in 1990, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, and, in 1996, Myth and Madness. The Psychodynamics of Anti-Semitism (i.e., the "anti-Semite's" myths are expressed by "madness"). At one major Midwestern state university library a computer subject search of "anti-Semitism" coughed up 719 titles. By comparison, the generic word "flowers" only had 632 listings and "anatomy" 1110. The word "Polish"  (including anything whatsoever about Polish people anywhere, as well as the word's other potential meanings, including car wax) had 1361. Even the generic word "racism" (any kind, anywhere, at any time in history, of everyone else on earth) had 802 listings, only about 80 more than those texts that focused solely on injustices to Jews, a minuscule part of the world's population. In our American society that has, even by many scholarly Jewish accounts, anti-Semitism "under control," The Index of Jewish Periodicals listed 196 new articles on the subject in 1996 alone.

   

While a pair of Jewish psychiatrists write that "the higher the income of the father, the greater the proportion of anti-Semite," (Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford, p. 103] in the same book a colleague writes that anti-Semitism is found "in those places where ... the pariahs of society meet. By this I refer to the cheap locales where chronic alcoholics, addicts, and psychopathic criminals gather. These are the psychological slums ... [that are used] as strategic positions in which to spread anti-Semitism.; they need mental sanitation..." [SIMMEL, p. 75]

"At some point in the course of analytic treatment," says Rudolf Loewenstein, "almost all non-Jewish patients will manifest varying degrees of anti-Semitism." [PERLMUTTER, p. 64] Moshe Leshem, joins in to note that "Freud attributed Christian resentment of the Jews to the son-father tension in the superego."  Maurice Samuel out-Freuds Freud in suggesting that anti-Semitism is an outlet for the yearning of Christians to free themselves from the inhibitive yoke of Jewish morality inherited in their faith and to open wide the gates to the pagan, orgiastic "id." [LESHEM, p. 62-63]

 

Freud himself said, about his own invention: "Nor is it perhaps entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psychoanalysis was a Jew." [THE JEWISH MYSTIQUE, p. 55]  "Freud believed," says Richard Bank, "in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and that in some unknown fashion, his Jewishness became part of his phylogenetic heritage. Thus, Freud identifies certain Jewish traits in himself and his adherents which provided a predisposition towards psychoanalysis." [BANK, p. 21]

 

Some studies have even suggested that Jews are "prone" to "have fast and frequent mood swings ... alternative periods of elation and depression ... manic depressive psychosis, neurotic symptoms, and somatic complaints (nervousness, feeling uneasy, shortness of breath)." [MACDONALD, p. 211]  In the 1970s a University of California study of 421 therapists "revealed that they feel irrepressibly superior [to others] ... [yet] one concern among professionals, whispered within the establishment, is that [the psychoanalytic/psychiatric field] attracts people who are particularly anxious about their emotional stability ... Psychiatrists appear at the top of the [occupational] list [of suicides]." [GROSS, p. 45]

   

Even one of Freud's earliest disciples, Isidor Sadger, once ventured that "the disposition of the Jews to obsessive neurosis is perhaps connected with the addiction to brooding ... characteristic of them for thousands of years." [GAY, p. 135] Molly Katz jokes that

 

     "Natural-born Jews leave the womb with a worry reservoir that is

     filled early and replenished constantly. We worry about everything.

     Worrying is as essential to our well-being as a balanced breakfast.

     It is our duty, our birthright, and our most profound satisfaction.

     There are no exceptions to this rule. All Jews worry all the time. If

     there is nothing handy to worry about, we are breath-stoppingly

     creative at finding something." [KATZ, M., 1991, p. 47]

 

James Yaffe blames Jewish neurosis largely on the Jewish family: "Psychoanalysts ... see a great many Jewish neurotics. The conditions of family life, both its virtues and its weaknesses, go a long way toward accounting for this." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 294] In an article on Jewish family life, Fredda Herz and Elliot Rosen also observed that "hypochondriasis is a common Jewish syndrome." [HERZ/ROSEN, p. 367]  Rudolph Loewenstein also makes note that it "occurs frequently in Jews." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., p. 131-132] Other "possible" common "neurotic" Jewish traits he also cites are extremes of miserliness and ostentation -- "[Some Jews] are spendthrift to the point of extravagance, driven in their spending by a compulsion to efface their sense of inferiority, an exaggerated terror of anti-Semitism," and a "feeling of terror at being Jewish."  [LOEWENSTEIN, R., p. 132-133] 

 

Indeed, more often evident than the proposed mental unbalance of the generic anti-Semite Everyman in the many volumes about the generic mental illness of anti-Semitism are hints of their Jewish authors' own peculiar neuroses:

        

                "The anti-Semite is often both envious and suspicious

                of Jewish talking."   -- Theodore Rubin, p. 75

        

                "Reference is often made to the opinion once expressed

                by Freud that anti-Semitism is connected with the Jewish

                custom of circumcision ... Even today, we find deep in the

                unconscious of man the fear that his penis may be cut off

                if he sins ... "          -- Otto Fenischel, p. 27

 

                "We have come to know that in certain cases the basic

                complex at the bottom of the individual obsessional

                idea of the anti-Semite is the latent homosexual complex,

                that complex which produces hate as a defense against

                the dangers of homosexual love ... "

                                                 -- Ernest Simmel, p. 35

 

                "In the mind of [some anti-Semitic] patients ... the Jewish analyst

                is conceived as alternately as a mephistophelean personage

                or as an effeminate, emasculated man. The fact that

                Jews are circumcised and so in a sense mutilated stirs

                up in them superstitious horror, thereby revealing their

                unconscious fear of being mutilated or castrated as a

                punishment for forbidden desires. In some patients the

                analyst can observe at first hand the sadistic satisfaction

                derived consciously or unconsciously from the idea of

                Jews being tortured and massacred. Neurotics who

                suffer from an intense sense of guilt and who live in

                anticipation of punishment protect themselves by projecting

                their faults onto the Jewish analyst or onto Jews in general."

                                         -- Rudolf Loewenstein, 1951, p. 34]

               

                "The anti-Semite sees in the Jew everything which brings

                him misery -- not only his social oppressor but also his

                own unconscious instincts which have gained a bloody,

                dirty, dreadful character from their socially induced

                repression."               -- Otto Fenichel, p. 29

 

                "The anti-Semites most buried and unconscious secret

                 -- from himself and others -- is to be a Jew ... He believes

                 that to be a Jew is to be able to transcend everything

                 material, religious, and racial; to be a Jew is to be free;

                 to be a Jew is to be the ultimate individual ... "

                                                -- Theodore Rubin p. 79

 

                  (This bizarrely narcissistic conviction is not unusual

                  in Jewish psychoanalytic circles. Another therapist,

                  Herbert Strean, suggests that this secret desire to be a Jew

                  is "an envy which lies buried deep behind all

                  anti-Semitic attacks." [COOPER, p. 14]  

 

                  "Norman Cohn ... stresses the role of the Jews as

                  the castrating father in the paranoid fantasies of the

                  anti-Semite. There is merit to Cohn's hypothesis...

                  For a balanced evaluation of the attempt to understand

                  anti-Semitism primarily in terms of castration anxiety,

                  see Erickson, Childhood and Society."

                                                 -- Richard L. Rubenstein, p. 313

 

                  "The historical facts are that the anti-Jew trying to free

                   himself from the pangs of anxiety, turns the tree of life

                   into the tree of death, the cross, nailed his Christ onto it,

                   and transformed his anxiety to this product of his perverse

                   sado-masochistic imagination."

                                                 -- Ernest Rappaport, p. 282

 

                   "It is a strange thing that the Jews have always been

                   attacked -- even before the rise of Christianity. The

                   attacks have been so stereotyped, they have always

                   followed the same pattern so closely that one is tempted

                   to say that though the Jews, who have changed much

                   in the course of history, are certainly no race, the anti-

                   Semite in a way ARE a race, because they always use

                   the same slogans, displaying the same attitudes, indeed

                   almost look alike."   -- Max Horkheimer, [in Simmel,

                   p. 6]

 

Here Horkheimer declares the most preposterous of stereotypes, that "anti-Semites" across history, language, and culture are "in a way" racially linked. John Murray Cuddihy is on the right track when he raises up the obvious mirror to all the Jewish "analysts" who entirely obfuscate Jewish history, identity, religion, and deeds in their bizarre inventions of the roots of anti-Semitism: "The ideology of the Jewish intellectual is frequently a projection onto the general Gentile culture of a forbidden ethnic self-criticism. Shame for 'one's own kind' is universalized into anger at the ancestral enemy." [CUDDIHY, p. 5] 

In 1951, Milton Steinbeg put Jewish "shame for one's own kind" (very common in the Jewish community and called "self-hatred" -- to be discussed a little later in this chapter) like this:

     "[A Jew's] association with the Jewish group is likely to touch him more
     intimately, at the very core of his being. For, as a Jew he is subject to certain
     psychic influences, of which he may be unaware but which may affect his
     personality adversely nonetheless. Thus, he tends to regard himself as not
     altogether wanted by the majority society of which he wishes to be a part,
     the approval and acceptance of which he desires earnestly. Again, he is inclined
     to feel that his Jewishness exposes him to a speical set of insecurities beyond
     those which are the lot of all men of his station ... The anti-Semite when he talks
     about Jews rarely addresses himself to them, but Jews overhear and may quite
     readily be convinced that the criticisms are quite justified by the facts, and applicable,
      not to them, of course, but to their fellows. The upshot of all this is that many an
      American Jew is in mortal peril of losing his sense of worth, his self-respect, his
     dignity in his own eyes. He may feel secretly ashamed of his Jewishness ... He may
     be haunted by the misgiving that, by the very virtue of the fact that he is Jewish,
     he is somehow a human being inferior to the Gentile." [STEINBERG, M., 1951, p.
     87-88]

 

There are, of course, other angles on the "all non-Jews are automatically anti-Semites" theme. Reflecting millennia-old Jewish hostility, special targets for odium are those who define themselves, or were raised, as Christians. There are no protective multi-million dollar Christian lobbying organizations and no generic word, like "anti-Semitism," to brand Jewish hatred of, and prejudice against, Christianity into a defensive slogan that can be thrown in the face of critics.  So Jews have a completely open field.

 

Some Jews go so far as to believe that, according to David Novak,  "hatred and murder of Jews is something particularly Christian. Those that assert this position claim that the Nazi program for the extermination of the Jews is the direct historical consequence of Christian contempt for Jews. They thus hold that all Christians -- whether actual perpetrators of atrocities against Jews or not -- are considered to be eo ipso incorrigible anti-Semites. Dialogue with such incorrigible enemies can hardly be regarded as anything other than group masochism." [NOVAK, DIA. p. 5]

 

There are many innovative angles reflecting Jewry's contempt for Christianity. Maurice Samuel, for instance, decided that "the basic factor in intense anti-Semitism is hatred of Christianity -- a hatred that cannot be openly acknowledged and is therefore projected onto Jews. When this factor enters, according to Samuel, an essentially unique phenomenon, not just another prejudice, is created." [SIMPSON/YINGER, p. 330]

 

In the emphatic context of the Holocaust, Christians and Christianity itself are bitterly condemned today by many Jewish thinkers. Those Christians in good stead are considered to be only those who revise traditional Christian texts towards support of Jewish "particularism" and its modern political expression: Zionism. Any "Christian dialogue with Jews," demands Emil Fackenheim, is predicated upon "the 'destructive recovery' of the whole Christian tradition." [p. 282] Among Christian obligations to Jews, he declares that "Christians after the Holocaust ... must be Zionist on behalf not only of Jews but also of Christianity itself." [p. 303]

 

Mark Gelber echoes this common Jewish blanket condemnation of Christianity in the Jewish Journal of Social Studies: "The widespread acceptance of anti-Semitic legislation and the nearly ubiquitous complicity of Gentile populations in the attempted Nazi destruction of the Jewish people is totally incomprehensible without the extensive background of the centuries-old phenomena of Christian anti-Semitism." [GELBER, p. 4]

 

There are a number of Christian activists for Jewish/Zionist causes who have subsequently absorbed a guilt-laden notion about the Holocaust, accepting the presumption that Christianity and an innate anti-Semitism within it were a major part of the Holocaust's cause. Among the most important to this movement of Christian Zionism were two authors of German heritage, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, whose apparent shame of their German link was reconfigured along Christian lines. An ideological descendent, Robert Everett, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, goes so far as to say

 

         "I see the Christian response to Israel and her survival as a sign of

          whether or not Christians care about Jews. The forces of Ultimate

          Evil seem again ready to strike against Jews ... Only those voices

          that speak of solidarity with Israel and her right to exist are able to

          call themselves servants of Life." [p. 11]

 

There are a number of books that have appeared over the years that argue Christian culpability in the Holocaust.  Christian Zionist writers have sometimes served as honorary Jews to more diplomatically deliver the hatchet blows of condemnation to other Christians. "As a Methodist minister," says Richard Libowitz, "[Franklin Littell] maintains a credibility of Christian witness which make his charges far more difficult for Christian audiences to refute." [LIBOWTIZ, p. 73]

 

Franklin Littell, founder and chairman of the Zionist-oriented Christians Concerned for Israel, focuses on indicting themes in his book, The Crucifixion of the Jews. His central thesis is that Nazi fascism was the natural expression of Christianity which, he argues, has always been "contemptuous or demeaning" of Jews. He argues this despite the fact that German Nazism was expressly anti-Christian and murdered masses of clergy in its extermination programs.  (In Poland alone the Nazis murdered 1,932 priests, including six bishops, 850 monks, as well as 289 nuns. [BART, Convert, p. 150] Littell then goes for maximum slander against the rival faith by claiming that "Christendum ... led directly to genocide." [p. 1] If that's not contemptuous and demeaning enough of Christians, he stuffs his whole volume full of this venomous, libelous hysteria, including "Before the Holocaust, the spirit of murder ... was well advanced in Christian circles." [LITTELL, p. 49] and "Adolf Hitler ... and the death camps ... were legitimate offspring of a 'Christian civilization ... [which] was formless and heathen at heart." Littlell's questionable conclusions were published by a major publisher, Harper and Row in 1975, and his "research" was funded by a faculty research grant at Temple University and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

 

Another non-Jewish writer, Alan Davies, in Anti-Semitism and the Christian Mind: The Crisis of Conscience, demands "that every Christian owes to every Jew [an apology] for the part which historic Christendom has played in the shaping of modern anti-Semitism." Others of this ilk include a Jewish convert to Christianity, John Oesterreicher, Director of the Institute for Judeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University. As Alfred Lilenthal noted in 1983:

 

     "Oesterreicher makes support for Israel 'a test for every Christian,'

     advocates arms aid for the Zionist state; rejects as 'absolutely ridiculous'

     the proposition that Palestinian self-determinism is essential to

     peace; and has publicly rhapsodized that 'we must shout from the

     housetops that this state [Israel] has a right to live.'" [LILIENTHAL, A.,

    1983, p. 494]

 

The continuous trashing of Christianity for crimes against Jews is a veritable cottage industry these days. Rosemary Ruether, described as a "female theologian,” worked with the Jewish lobbying group, the Anti-Defamation League, and one of its rabbis on her book Faith and Fraticide.  Reuther is so Judeo-centric (as a guilt-ridden Christian) in her appraisal of Christianity that she claims that her faith would virtually collapse without its alleged basis of anti-Semitism: "Possibly anti-Judaism is too deeply embedded in the foundations of Christianity to be rooted out entirely without destroying the whole structure." [RUETHER, p. 27] (Curiously, this is a counter-echo to the notion [often raised in scholarly circles] that modern Jewish self-identity needs the threat of omnipresent anti-Semitism to ensure its very survival against assimilation).

 

Widely heralded by the Jewish community as a splendid blow against Christian anti-Semitism, ironically, Faith and Fraticide didn't protect Reuther's later writings from the charge of anti-Semitism. Reuther was publicly word-whipped by a fellow feminist (Jewish of course) for making the sinful inference that the undeniably wrathful, dictatorial, and patriarchal Jewish Old Testament God was considerably more harmful to women than the Christian's Jesus, patient champion of the dispossessed and downtrodden.  [PLASKOW, p. 102] The publishing of the fact that the ancient male-centered Israelites exterminated people (including the Canaanites) whose religion included the worship of goddesses is also not appreciated.  Reuther's (and others') allusion to the ideology of male domination enforced by the Jewish God was deemed by many Jews to be "anti-Jewish." One guilt-ridden feminist of German-Christian heritage noted that [the criticism of Reuther] made clear to me once more how very necessary constant external [i.e., Jewish] correction is to us and how wrong it is to think we can finally rest at the present level of awareness.") [WACKER, p. 113]

 

Not only was Reuther harangued for attacking Jewish male-centeredness, she reversed field since Faith and Fraticide and dared to attack in another book -- with her husband -- the holiest of Jewish holies, Israel. Denounced as a "liberal," she came under attack from the aforementioned Christian Zionist, Franklin Littell, for her book, The Wrath of Jonah, which Littell calls "one of the most viciously partisan tracts to appear in the 'Palestinian' cause in the English language." [LITTLE, Judaism, p. 518]

 

Reuther's fall from Jewish grace is sharp. Her book about Israel, wrote David Biale, "is an anti-Zionist diatribe cloaked in the sweet light of Christian universalism; as such it stands as a singular warning of how a Christian critique can slide unwittingly into the swamp of anti-Semitism. [BIALE, p. 406] ... [The Reuthers'] wild and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, which inflate Zionist power beyond recognition, smell suspiciously like the older myths of a world Jewish conspiracy." [BIALE, p. 409] Reuther, it seems, successfully confirmed the Jewish myth that all non-Jews -- no matter what they say or do to defend Jews -- are, inevitably at root, sooner or later, revealed to be vile anti-Semites.

 

Traditional Jewish martyrological canon insists that the most hated anti-Semites by Jews must be generic Christians because of their reputed persecution through the ages and the fact that the Holocaust happened in Christian Europe.  "The crime against the Jewish people," declares Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz, "is the cancer at the very heart of Christianity... [HALBERSTAM, p. 232] ... In order to pacify the Christian conscience it is said that the Nazis were not Christians. But they were all the children of Christians ...  [p. 226] ... Without Christianity's New Testament, Hitler's Mein Kampf could never have been written." [HALBERSTAM, p. 238] "Let's not shy away from the hard truth," says Joshua Halberstam, "For many Jews, the unspoken lesson of the Shoah is that they cannot trust Christians with their children. Tens of thousands of Christians with crosses around their necks sent millions of innocent Jews and millions of other innocent men, women, and children to their horrid deaths while many of their fellow Christians cheered." [HALBERSTAM, p. 226]

 

Stanislaw Krajewski, a Polish citizen and a Jew, writing from a land of firsthand experience, has argued that the common "Christian anti-Semitism is central to the Holocaust" theme is ridiculous. Krajewski writes that

   

          "[Polish Christians] perceived their bond of common suffering [during

          the Holocaust] with Jews to be stronger than the bond of common

          Christianity with Germans. This is one reason why arguments to the

          effect that in Auschwitz Christians were murdering Jews sounds very

          strange in Poland, and to me as well. There are also other more

          objective reasons. For one thing, Christians were killed in Auschwitz

          too, and moreover there were anti-Semites among the victims. For

          another, Nazis attempted to revive paganism, not to express

          Christianity. Priests imprisoned in Auschwitz were treated with extra

          cruelty. Finally, as Jews were killed because they were Jews,

          homosexuals were persecuted and imprisoned because they were

          homosexuals. Yet to say that homosexuals were victims of

          heterosexuals in Auschwitz seems most inappropriate. The

          moral is that looking for the answer to the question who was killing

          whom in Auschwitz, we should take facts at face value. Nazis were

          the perpetrators and it was of supreme importance for them that they

          were Germans. That is why Germans have to share the responsibility.

          Not Christians: most of the Nazis at least neglected their nominal

          Christianity." [KRAJEWSKI, p. 40]

 

"To put excessive emphasis upon anti-Judaic strictures of Christianity," says Oliver Cox, "is to obscure the critical tribal form and meaning of Judaism ... Judaism has remained essentially a tribal religion..." [COX p. 185]  In other words, Christian chauvinism has always been a reaction to the seminal Jewish version of the same thing. And if one is to make the leap that blames the tenets of Christianity for the Holocaust, then one might better leap to a more evidential source for championing genocide, that explicitly evidenced in the Jewish Old Testament [See Holocaust chapter].

 

One of the pillars of Jewish belief that Christianity has served as a foundation for modern anti-Semitism is the "blood libel" tradition: in the Middle Ages a widespread belief circulated amongst Christians that Jews needed Christian blood -- particularly from children -- for their rituals. In 1993 an Israeli scholar, Yisrael Yuval, published an article in the Israel Historical Society's journal that undermined Jewish interpretive convention about the blood libel tradition. Among other things, Yuval suggested that medieval Christian notions that Jews killed Christian children for their blood might have origins, however misconstrued, in authentic Jewish practice. Jews in Europe had been known to commit suicide en masse, with parents killing their children "as an act of piety," when under forcible threat to convert to Christianity in the Middle Ages. Yuval also wondered if Jewish circumcision rites could have been mistakenly perceived and distorted by Christian observers as a quest for blood.

 

Yuval doesn't mention this, but would not, to medieval peasant eyes, the sight of a Jewish mohel (circumcision specialist) cutting an infant's penis, and then sucking its blood at the wound, as part of the traditional circumcision ritual, be a strong factual basis for sensational rumors? And how might the ancient Sephardic Jewish "folk practice" of eating parts of ancient human bodies be construed by local peasants in understanding Jewish tradition? As Raphael Patai noted in 1971:

 

     "One of the most popular remedies among the Sephardi Jews was the

     mumia (i.e., mummy). This consisted of a piece of mummified human

     body which was pulverized and taken internally (often with honey-

     water, as a cure against all kinds of complaints. Its origin goes back

     to antiquity ... By the twelfth century, in response to growing demand,

     the Jews of Alexandria had developed a lively mummy trade. Among

     the Sephardi Jews mumia continued to be taken internally down to the

     present time, even among the Sephardim living in Seattle, Washington."

     [PATAI, R., 1971, p. 149] [Patai says that this medicinal practice became

    "popular" in the non-Jewish European community in the sixteenth

     and seventeenth centuries. One would imagine that to be inevitable,

     especially given the fact that Jews have been so numerous as

     physicians throughout the centuries: "The Jews as physicians have

     always played an important part in the life of the human race ... In

     Spain and Italy their only competitors were the Moors."] [OSBORNE,

     S., 1939, p. 22]

   

"The suggestion [by Yuval] that the Jews themselves," remarks David Biale, "might have been responsible, even if indirectly, for the blood libel fell like a clap of thunder on the Israeli academic community ... Yuval's opponents accused him of anti-Semitism and attempted to block his university promotion ... These intellectuals could not accept Yuval's implicit assumption that Jewish practice might have some influence, no matter how indirectly, on the formations of anti-Semitism. According to this view, anti-Semitism is a set of irrational paranoid fantasies that is utterly disconnected from the Jews." [BIALE, p. 39-40, 45]

 

So numerous are the Jewish academic ideologues who research and reiterate real and imagined victimization of Jews at the hands of non-Jews through history that Norman Davies, a British scholar with expertise about Poland, has sardonically labeled them not to be professors of history, but professors of anti-Semitism. [DAVIES, N.]

 

Jews who spend entire careers, entire lives, dreaming up new angles of anti-Semitism have broken it down into a multitude of possibilities. There is "religious anti-Semitism, Christian anti-Semitism, anti-Christian anti-Semitism, pagan anti-Semitism, economic anti-Semitism, social anti-Semitism, racial anti-Semitism, black anti-Semitism, pathological anti-Semitism, eternal anti-Semitism, political anti-Semitism, Jewish anti-Semitism, and literary anti-Semitism, to name some of the most common types." [GELBER, p. 13] Rudolf Loewenstein includes three of the above in his own demarcations, adding "xenophobic anti-Semitism." [LOEWENSTEIN, R., 1951, p. 64] Sylvia Rothchild says that "zoological anti-Semitism" is the "irrational behavior of the [Russian] government." [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 20]  Leon Poliakov "characterizes the anti-Semitism of late antiquity as social or political; the anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages as theological; and the anti-Semitism of the modern world as racial. The dominance of one form does not mean that the othrs are not present, but only that they serve a subsidiary function to the dominant expression." [STROM/PARSONS, 1982, p. 46]

Letty Pogrebin, a founding editor at Ms magazine, defines anti-Semitism in the women's movement into three types: "invisible" anti-Semitism, "insult" anti-Semitism, and "internalized oppression" anti-Semitism. The "invisible" genre is when non-Jews resist the Jewish propensity to incessantly rail about the Holocaust, as well as Gentile reluctance to accept "Jewish paranoia" and "Jewish self-centeredness." "Insult" anti-Semitism is the demeaning of Jews in commentary, often disguised. "Internalized oppression" anti-Semitism is Jewish self-hatred [KESTENBAUM, p. 30] (i.e., when Jews realize that non-Jewish criticisms about Jews have truth to them). "Every culture," Daniel Pipes informs us, "has its own brand of anti-Semitism." [GRENIER, R., 11-13-85, p. C21]

 

Ernest Volkman's own categorization of the "three major types of anti-Semitism" are "realistic anti-Semitism," "Xenophobic anti-Semitism," and "Chimeric anti-Semitism." [VOLKMAN, p. 53-54]  At the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, there is a department called the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism which publishes studies on "anti-Semitism, ancient or modern, from a broad range of perspectives: historical, religious, political, cultural, social, psychological, and economic." [MODRAS, TITLE PAGE]

 

A sure sign of anti-Semitism in Madison, Wisconsin, noted Evelyn Tornton Beck, was that "I heard someone say that Jews were 'taking over' the local chapter of the national lesbian feminist organization in Madison." [KESTENBAUM, p. 30] "I believe that Jewish lesbian feminists have internalized much of the subtle anti-Semitism of this society," declared Irene Klepfisz, "They have been old that Jews are too pushy, too aggressive; and so they have been silent about their Jewishness, have not protested against what threatens them." [KLEPFISZ, I., 1982, p. 46] Recent anti-Semitism in the Australian lesbian movement? There was a 1999 article written to keep us informed of the subject by Hinde Burstin. [BURSTIN, 1999]

 

At every turn Jews find offense and insult. For instance, notes Kayla Weiner, "For many Jews, to be wished 'Merry Christmas' is to deny their personal reality and uniqueness." [WEINER, p. 121]  And, "any lack of sympathy for Israel and its survival on the part of Christians," says Peter Medding, " is, for many Jews, indistinguishable from anti-Semitic prejudice." [MEDDING, p. 110]

It is unfathomable for such Jews that Gentiles are largely disinterested in undying Jewish crusades of self-pity and victimization as central themes in their own (non-Jewish) lives. For Ruth Wisse, Gentile silence is not just silence, it "may be [because non-Jews are] reluctant to confront the subject of Jew-hatred because they are worried about stirring up latent anti-Semitism in themselves or others." [WISSE, p. 48]

 

Complaining about the lack of sufficient homage by Gentile writers to "Jewish suffering," Guy Stern's obsession with Jewishness is probably the most audacious in blatantly encompassing the passively innocent as anti-Semites. It is what Stern calls "the anti-Semitism of silence. It is difficult to define ... Silent literary anti-Semitism is ... definitely an omission of a declaration of sympathy for Jewish suffering."  [STERN, p. 304]  In this genre of accusers who essentially demand everyone to be activists for Jewish causes (and those who do not are anti-Semites), is Ernest Volkman, who labels this the "anti-Semitism of indifference." In this view, there are those non-Jews who do not "attack Jews directly, but ...[they] assume that Jews do not even exist, that their concerns and survival are not even relevant questions." [VOLKMAN, p. 12] Even when Jews aren't even around to be anti-Semitic towards, the fact that they aren't present may, of course, be evidence of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the lack of Jews everywhere, always, for some, may evidence latent anti-Semitism. Jewish Exponent reporter Michael Elkin, for example, was concerned that there were no Jews in the first "Survivor" TV episode. Was this because Jews don't have enough of a macho reputation? "So 'Survivor' may be stereotyping Jews by having none?" he reasoned. [ELKIN, M., 7-13-00] (In a later Survivor episode, a Jewish man won the contest). Jewish lesbian Irene Klepfisz also declares that "the anti-Semitism with which I am immediately concerned, and which I find most threatening, does not take the form of the overt, undeniably inexcusable painted swastika on a Jewish gravestone or on a synagogue wall. Instead, it is elusive and difficult to pinpoint, for it is the anti-Semitism either of omission or one which trivializes the Jewish experience and Jewish oppression." [KLEPFISZ, I., 1982, p. 46] "The accusation of anti-Semitism against the [political ] Left," adds Arthur Liebman, "has not been limited solely to its critical or anti-Zionist position on Israel. Jewish liberals and Leftists have charged the Left with being anti-Semitic stemming from insensitivity to Jews and their problems, particularly anti-Semitism." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 353]

 

On the other hand, Alvin Rosenfeld turns with outrage to Gentile writers who dare to pay sympathetic attention to Jews and the Holocaust in an unacceptable manner, i.e., using poetic license to appropriate Holocaust imagery and Jewish victimhood to address (non-Jewish) personal suffering in their poems. Rosenfeld attacks the poet Sylvia Plath (ultimately a suicide) for this crime. He quotes this excerpt from one of her poems:

 

            An engine, an engine

            Chuffing me off like a Jew.

            A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

            I begin to talk like a Jew.

            I think I may well be a Jew.

 

            The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

            Are not very pure or true.

            With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

            And my Tarok pack and my Tarok pack

            I may be a bit of a Jew.

 

This literary evidence moves Rosenfeld to proclaim that Plath's lament of personal suffering, is at "its deepest level  a poem about  ... 'what-I-do-to-you, you-Jew." [ROSENFELD, p. 180]

 

In the silent -- and, hence, unsympathetic and, hence, anti-Semitic -- vein, George Steiner expresses outrage that T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards a Definition of Culture failed "to face the issue [of the Holocaust and Nazi anti-Semitism], indeed to allude to it in anything but an oddly condescending footnote ... It is acutely disturbing. How, only three years after the event ... was it possible to write a book on culture and say nothing?" [STERN, p. 304] Probably, one suspects, in the same way Eliot neglected to mention Hiroshima, the Japanese "rape of Nanking," the sack of Rome, the Irish Potato Famine, or non-Jewish concentration camp victims in the same volume. Not only that. As Peter Novick notes in his critical book The Holocaust in American Life, about how the Holocaust has evolved into a strong social and political tool (and obsession) for the Jewish community,

     "Between the end of the war and the 1960s, as anyone who has lived through
     those years can testify, the Holocaust made scarcely any appearance in
     American public discourse, and hardly more in Jewish public discourse --
     especially directed to gentiles ... The memories and autobiographies of many
     highly committed Jews bear out the contemporary evidence that suggests the
     Holocaust wasn't much talked  about [until the late 1960s]. Alan Dershowitz,
     growing up in an intensely Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn in the forties and
     the fifties, recalls no discussion of the Holocaust either with his schoolmates or
     at home." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 102-103]

 

This demand by Jewish critics for gentiles to pay requisite homage to Jewish victimhood mythologies (the neglect of which, to such complainers, is a symptom itself of anti-Semitism) is reflected also in Norma Rosen's disdain for Eliot's essay, The Idea of Christian Culture. "Though this book," says Rosen, "... no where slanders Jews, it nowhere mentions them, either as contributors to, or victims of, ... modern society." [ROSEN, p. 10] Would Rosen argue that books and essays about "The Idea of Jewish Culture" would be similarly lacking without references to Christian accomplishment and Jewish anti-Christian sentiment?

 

"There is no consensus," adds Anthony Julius, "on the number of references to Jews in Eliot's work. Sometimes in the absence of any reference to Jews in an essay, or the refusal to acknowledge the anti-Semitism of a favored writer, [this] may be anti-Semitic." [JULIUS, p. 6]  

 

Jewish outrage for the lack of non-Jewish support towards Jewish self-absorption and their obsession with victimhood is manifest in other ways. During Israel's 1973 Yom Kippur War against the Arabs, Adolphe Steg, a "leader of French Jewry," complained that French Jews' "anxiety" over Israel's battles "found only a faint echo in their [French] environment, and the silence of their [non-Jewish] colleagues during those terrible days was painful. Not only did their colleagues remain silent, but when appealed to they could not help sharing irritation with the problems of the Jews, which they defined as an obsession ... By uncovering the extent of the lack of comprehension shown by these circles to [the Jews'] deepest concerns, the Yom Kippur War may have slowed the rush towards [Jewish] assimilation in France." [HERMAN, p. 41-42]

 

Steg is clearly stating, hardly veiled, that a lack of French sympathy to transnational Jewish war aims was grounds for withdrawing French Jewry's full commitment to their own (French) country, which accentuates the recurring cycle of accusation: Jews in the Diaspora are accused of holding dual national loyalties -- one for Israel (possibly the foremost loyalty), and another for the Diaspora nation. Jews, in turn, as always, accuse their accusers of anti-Semitism.

 

Under such a world view, based on the infectious and omnipresent nature of anti-Semitism, Jews must be wary, to this day, of non-Jews everywhere.  Covering all flanks in the political sphere, Abe Perlmutter warns that it's not only the right wing gentiles who are anti-Semitic: "Accustomed to the rumblings of anti-Semitism from the far right, (our social scientists) are alert in one direction ... Violence from the right, it would seem, is extremism. From the left it is social protest. To Jews, scapegoated by both, the difference is without distinction." [PERLMUTTER, p. 101] "Take, for example, "says Arthur Liebman, "the following which apeared in the U.S. Communist party's Daily World on June 5, 1979: 'Has nationalism wrapped in money turned all the 'leaders' of the Jewish people into stone?' This type of language, the Left's critics contend, either is anti-Semitic itself and/or contributes to anti-Semitism through reinforcement of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 350]

 

Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing Jewish journal Tikkun, confirms this fear of leftist non-Jews in his book, The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left, which was advertised in his own publication with a drawing that connotes crowds entering the gas chambers of the Holocaust. The "Socialism of Fools" phrase is credited to August Bebel as a description of anti-Semitism in the leftist community. It refers to traditional socialist animosity towards prominent Jewish European bankers, capitalists, and war profiteers -- major symbols of class oppression since the development of Marxist theory in the nineteenth century.  Many socialists were also hostile to transnational Jewish "nationalism" and its attendant chauvinism. Even "Bebel, the socialist leader who stood in the vanguard of the fight against anti-Semitism in Wilhelmian Germany, called Jewish socialists brilliant but pushy, difficult to subject to party discipline." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 67] "Long barred by anti-Semitic laws and customs from agriculture, guild occupations, and the professions," says apologetic Jewish scholar Arthur Liebman, "in the nineteenth century Jews were largely to be found in middlemen occupations: merchants, hucksters, estate managers, loan and mortage collectors, and money lenders. These were popularly considered (and by segments of the Jewish community like the labor Zionists as well), to be non-productive or 'parasitic' occupations ... Many late nineteenth- and twentieth century Leftists obviously shared this economically rooted hatred of Jews as well as the long-engrained religious prejudice against them." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 331]

 

Illustrating the all-encompassing latitude of the charge of "anti-Semitism," a term that is applied by Jews -- as the need for it suits them -- in any direction, an influential Russian Jewish Zionist and socialist of the early twentieth century, Ber Borochov, even proclaimed that "we must strike at the anti-Semitism of the Jewish capitalist." [BOROCHOV, p. 82]

 

And what of this specifically Jewish socialist tradition, of which there was so much, with its origins in Eastern Europe?  Says Israel Shahak,

 

      "[Many] East-European Jewish socialists ... were themselves tainted with

       a ferocious anti-peasant attitude inherited from classical Judaism ...

       A typical example is their opposition to the formation of peasant

       cooperatives promoted by the Catholic clergy, on the grounds that

       this was an act of anti-Semitism." [SHAHAK]

 

Jewish obsession with anti-Semitism in all directions has even afforded them their own share of draconian book burners. E. L. Dachslager argues for a ban of all books in American public schools that "defame, vilify, or otherwise promote a negative image of Jews." [GELBER, p. 8]  A lot of book shelves for classical Western literature would have to go empty.  "Anti-Semitic" works cited here to be banned or censored could include books by William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Marlowe, Charles Dickens, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway (especially The Sun Also Rises), Celine, Henry Adams, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, E.E. Cummings, Henry Miller, Byron Scott, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Dostoyevsky, Trollope, Thomas Wolfe, and Ezra Pound. [GELBER, p. 8, 12] "I cannot resist the opportunity," wrote Jewish author Richard Lewontin in the New York Review of Books in 1990, "... of making a remark about the anti-Semitism of American intellectuals during the early decades of this century. It was pervasive, if in a somewhat genteel form." [LEWONTIN, R., 10-25-90]

Poet and literature critic Ezra Pound is among the most emphatic anti-Semites in the literature field. Sympathetic to Mussolini, Ezra Pound had regular radio broadcasts from Italy that "urged America to stay of of the war [World War II] and concentrated on anti-Semitism as his chief message: 'Clever Kikes,' he said, were 'runnin' ALL our communications system.'" After the war, Pound, an American citizen, was indicted for treason. Psychiatrists deemed him certifiably crazy and he was sent to the St. Elizabeth Federal Hospital for the Insane. There, in 1948, "he was awarded the prestigious $10,000 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Congress then ordered the prize's sponsor, the Library of Congress, to give no more awards." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 197, 198]

"The Jew is a persistent figure in [Henry] James' fiction," notes Jewish author Michael Dobkowski, "He appears in ten of twenty novels, in eight short stories, one critical essay, and several travel essays. The Hebrew symbolizes basically the same areas of human experience that James explored in other literary themes -- internationalism, bourgeois corruption, social stratification, genteel decline, the conflict between money and manners, and the exploitation of one human being by another for gain." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 85]

Dobkowski sites other Jewish critics to add Anthony Trollope, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others, as those who wrote anti-Semitic text about "the parasitic and usurious nature of the Jew." Still others writing objectionable passages about Jews include major 19th century American authors William Cullen Bryant (Jews' "unquenchable lust for lucre") and Oliver Wendell Holmes ("the principal use of the Jews seemed to be to lend money ..."). [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 79, 105]

William Faulkner? Dobkowski notes that:

     "In the beginning of Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay, (1926), we meet a salesman
     named Schluss who says to some returning soldiers of World War I: 'I would
     have liked to fought by your side, see. But someone got to look out for the
     business while the boys are gone.' In his second book, Mosquitoes (1927)
     another sad-eyed Jewish salesman is said to remark: "You can't ignore money ...
     It took my people to teach the world that ...' Faulkner does not use this major
     character's name, calling him 'the Semitic man' and 'fat Jew.' It is as if
     this anonymous entity -- the Jew -- represents something mysterious and
     pernicious that has infiltrated into American society." [DOBKOWSKI, M.,
     1979, p. 103]

Another Jewish critic, Daniel Walden, "would have [all of T.S.] Elliot's poetry placed under general suspicion." [GELBER, p. 10]   Doris Grumbach adds H. L. Mencken, Edith Warton, and Willa Cather onto the list of prominent literary anti-Semites. [GRUMBACH, p. A23] More current writers cited by Jewish critics who might qualify for censorial action include Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Katherine Ann Porter, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Richard Kostelanetz, and John Cheever. Alvin Rosenfeld sees in all authors writing critically of Jews "the dangerous possibility, gruesomely actualized in Europe between 1933 and 1945, of proceeding from literary Jew-hatred to literal murder of whole communities." [GELBER, p. 11] "[There is a] prevailing opinion," wrote Mark Gelber, a professor at Yale, in 1979, "that there is a 'risk inherent for world Jewry,' and by implication mankind, by 'exposing works like The Merchant of Venice, Oliver Twist, and certain poems by T. S. Eliot to high school and college students." [GELBER, Teaching, p. 1] "One could easily read [Chaucer's] 'The Prioress' Tale," noted the Jewish Bulletin in 1997, "as a virulent anti-Jewish tract." [STERLING, G., p. 30] )

Ann Roiphe turns (almost with hysteria) the Accusation upon William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice:

 

     "The book tells the story of a Polish woman who survived the

     [Nazi concentration] camp only to die at the hands of a Jewish madman

     in Brooklyn. I try to explain [to my non-Jewish friend] why I feel the book

     is so subtly anti-Semitic, why it offends me. The animus of the work

     seems directed at the Jewish literary establishment that Styron fears

     may steal his limelight or not allow him a piece of the pie ... As I talk

     I find I am trembling; my hand is shaking. My kind friend is looking

     at me, puzzled. 'You certainly feel strongly about it, don't you?'"

     [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 176]

 

British poet James Russell Lowell? He once wrote, says Stanley Weintraub "an anti-Semitic diatribe against [Jewish prime minister Benjamin] Disraeli in the guise of a novel critique for the North American Review." [WEINTRAUB, S., 1993, p. 601] Poet Baudelaire? By the year 2000, another scholar was writing an entire article about "Charles Baudelaire's anti-Semitism." [BOWLES, B., 2000, p. 195] And Sander Gilman, in a scholarly article about alleged Gentile interest in Jewish sibling incest declares that "[Edgar Allan] Poe's description of Roderick Usher, in 'The Fall of the House of the Usher' (1839), the last offspring of a highly inbred family, was visualized as degenerate and, therefore, as Jewish. Gilman cites as evidence Poe's description of Usher's "nose of a delicate Hebrew model." "In complex ways," decides Gilman, "the siblings [in the story] were Jews for no other reason than their incest." [GILMAN, 1-31-98]

 

Thomas Mann? "What is striking," says Gilman, "about Mann's text [in The Blood of the Walsungs, 1905] is that it is as much a critique of the Jew as parvenu in the (mocked) world of German high culture as it is a critique of the Jews as incestuous sibling." [GILMAN, 1-31-98] Aubrey Beardsley? "Beardsley in England," notes Jewish scholar George Mosse, "had satirized the fascination which the newest in art and literature held for rich German Jews through an opulent and corpulent Jewish audience in his black-and-white sketch of 'Male and Female Wagnerians at a Performance of Tristan and Isolde." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 23]

 

The great poet William Blake? Jewish professor Karen Shabetai looks with concern as she scans his work for anti-Semitism, foregrounding the usual categorical, angelic Jewish innocence as the lens before her:

 

        "Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno stressed the

        'blindness and lack of purpose of anti-Semitism' for often its targets

        'are interchangeable according to circumstances.' This underlying of

        anti-Semitism comes close to what occurs in Blake. Blake's shifting

        attitude, marked by shrill moments of intense hostility [against Jews],

        bespeaks at the very least classic symptoms of anti-Semitism ranging

        from demonological superstitions inherited from the Middle Ages to

        resentment and anxiety about the Jews as the chosen people. More

        importantly, Blake's anti-Semitism, while greatly at odds with his

        largely humanitarian program, casts a shadow -- a haunting specter,

        perhaps -- upon this received wisdom." [SHABETAI, p. 149]  

What about other titans of American literature? How about the great novelist Herman Melville (best known for Moby Dick)? Some of his "gallery of Jewish or judaised characters," says David Meier, "[are] disturbing." [MEIER, D., 9-2-99] Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Scarlet Letter fame? "In The Marble Fawn," says another Jewish scholar, Robert Michael, "Hawthorne refers to the Jews as the ugliest, most evil-minded people, resembling ... maggots when they over-populate a decaying cheese. Hawthorne's essay in his English Notebooks provides the clearest exprression of his hatred of Jews ... [He writes about the brother of the Jewish Lord Mayor of London, that] 'for the sight of him justified me in the repugnance I have always felt for his race.'" [MICHALE, R., 9-4-99]

Social critic Frank Norris, author of the classic The Octopus? His McTeague, says one Jewish critic, has "one of the most anti-Semitic portrayals in American fiction." This is Norris' description of a Polish Jew, Zerkow:

     "He had the thin, eager catlike lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown keen as
      those of a lynx from long searching amid muck and debris; and clawlike,
      prehensile fingers -- the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses.
     It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that greed -- inordinate,
     insatiable greed -- was the dominant passion of the man. He was the Man with the
     Rake, groping hourly in the muck heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold. It
     was his dream, his passion; at every instant he seemed to feel the generous
     solid weight of the crude fat metal in his palms." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979,
     p. 91]

What about George Orwell, creator of the great novel 1984 -- the indictment of totalitarian thinking? "No doubt many Jews who read his first, autobiographical book, down and Out in Paris and London (1933) which, like Homage to Catalonia, did not sell, suspected he was anti-Semitic," says Milton Goldin. "This was not a far-fetched assumption, given three Jewish characters in the book, the first of whom owns a second-hand clothing shop and swindles his customers." [GOLDIN, M., 9-4-99]

J. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings) and James Joyce (Ulysses) have also come under Jewish scrutiny for signs of anti-Semitism. Both, barely, at least in the following Jewish magazines, evade the smear. But the Cleveland Jewish News asks:

     "Was J. R. Tolkien antisemitic? ... Most troubling for many is Tolkien's love for
      and use of the Norse pagan myth -- the same ones the Nazis (and many present-day
      White Supremacists) turned to for inspiration. Also the Roman Catholic Church of
      his era (he was born in 1892), which he loved so fiercely, was known to harbor
      many with anti-Jewish sentiments ... Tolkien once said: 'The Dwarves [in my fiction],
      of course, are quite obvious -- wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you
      of the Jews? Their words are semitic obviously, constructed to be semitic. The
      Hobbits are just a rustic English people.' That well may be his only recorded
      comment linking Jews with the Lord of the Rings. The stereotype is there if one
      wants to use it. The dwarves' primary weakness, as revealed in the saga -- to their
      own detriment as well as harm to the quest of the Fellowship -- is a lust for gaining,
        protecting and hoarding jewels, gold and silver."

The author of this article ultimately spares Tolkien the indictment of antisemitism, especially since the author is also on record as having rejected Aryan Nazism and praising Jewry. [BIRD, C., 12-14-2001, p. 56-]

The Jewish ethnic magaizne Shofar, in the case of James Joyce, says:

     "Joyce was both praised and condemned by critics for creating so prominent
      a figure in literature [Leopold Bloom, a Jewish character in Ulysses] either for
      putting Jews once more on the literary map or for venting his own inherited
       antisemitism." [BOWEN, Z., 4-3-2001, p. 171-]

Even influential writings in the lesbian and feminist worlds have come under attack from Jewish lesbians as being anti-Semitic. When Z. Budapest, in her The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Part II, blames Judaism for destroying a goddess cult and instituting patriarchy, Jewish lesbian Evelyn Torton Beck can't stand it. Budapest's offending passage is this:

     "The Jews carried a deep burden of guilt about what they had done to Lilith,
     the Great Goddess, and to cherubs in general. Lilith cursed them as a result,
     and in effect told them that nothing would go right for Jews again until her
     worship had been reinstated. Could this be the final solution to the Middle
     East crisis?" [BECK, E., 1982, p. xx]

"This passage," says Beck,

     "which is blatantly anti-Semitic, not only blames the Jewish people for
     bringing Jew-hating upon themselves, but it also suggests that they
     deserve it. Even worse, Budapest seems to support Hitler's 'final
     solution' to the Jewish question -- the annihilation of all Jews. The
     fact that several of Budapest's coven sisters and supporters are
     themselves Jewish in no way mitigates the anti-Semitism of the passage;
     in fact, it serves to highlight the ways in which some Jewish women
     have internalized anti-Semitism." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xx]

"Leading" lesbian fiction writer Rita Mae Brown is also accused of anti-Semitism for this passage about a Jewish character in her novel Rubyfruit Jungle:

     "[Barbara Spangenthau] always had her hand in her pants playing with
     herself, and worse, she stank. Until I was fifteen I thought that being Jewish
     meant you walked around with your hand in your pants." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv]

Lesbian author Bertha Harris? Her "novel lover," continued Evelyn Torton Beck, "shocked me by its reliance on Jewish stereotypes, associating Jews with violence, sex and money." [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv] What about Norta Koertge's Who Was That Masked Woman? "This is a book," says Beck, "in which most of the Jewish characters are ostentatiously rich, superficial, and sexually promiscuous." Koertge also dares to write the following "anti-Semitic" passage:

     "Take the Jews -- they aren't very well liked but they do okay -- get into Who's Who
     and all that stuff while the Poles stay down in Chicago and work in the steel mills
     -- and the blacks -- they're even worse off. What makes the difference? Is it a
     case of native intelligence or cultural heritage or what?" [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxiv]

Even Black feminist Judy Simmons is singled out for attack for this part of one of her poems:

     "Mine is not a People of the Book/taxed
     but acknowledged; their distinction is
     not yet a dignity; their Holocaust is lower case. " [BECK, E., 1982, p. xxvii]

For those Jews who might be squeamish with the ominous implications of outright book banning of authors who write critically of Jews, advises Mark Gelber, "sensitive teachers should consistently exclude 'anti-Semitic literature' from syllabi in the hope that this literature will be practically eliminated from the canon." [GELBER, p. 12] As a last resort, we are advised, teachers could always present the offensive text with addenda materials flattering to Jews, thereby turning a literature class into an advertisement for pro-Jewish ideas about Jewish history.

Bizarrely, in the relentless Jewish search for "anti-Semitic" books and authors that -- by the above standards -- literally merit censorship and vilification, sinister culprits are to be found in the most astonishing of quarters: Jews themselves. This genre of literary anti-Semitism must be somehow excused by the Jewish Thought police, however, or their very logic of oppression implodes.  Modern Jewish authors like Philip Roth, for example, whose unflattering stories about his people make his "Jewishness suspect," [GELBER, p. 11] pose special problems to Jewish critics; as a Jew, however, he is generally afforded more anti-Semitic slack. The "anti-Semitic" genre in American literature includes a significant number of Jewish writers in the early and mid-twentieth century. In-house Jewish self-critical commentary is one thing, but when it leaks into the non-Jewish world it can be an embarrassing problem. Charles Angoff and Meyer Levin note that such authors

 

     "began to produce 'realistic' portraits that, in a closed ghetto world,

     might have been accepted as self-critical, ironic, and satirical, but

     that in an open English-reading world had the unhappy effect of

     confirming from Jewish sources the most strident anti-Semitic

     summations of 'Jewish character.' Thus, Ben Hecht's A Jew in

     Love was about a name-changed Jewish publisher who put all his

     energy into seducing young women, usually Gentile. This bestseller

     was followed by Jerome Weidman's I Can Get It for You Wholesale

     and Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, two skillfully

     written novels about Jewish business cheats ... A host of lesser

     works pictured Jews as gangsters and exploiters, to the point

     where the Jewish community began to ask, "Is there anything

     decent to write about?" [ANGOFF/LEVIN, p. 10]

 

Across the world, Jewish literature contributing to anti-Semitism by today’s' Jewish standards even includes Theodore Herzl, the revered "father" of Zionism and the modern state of Israel, who was also a playwright. Bernard Avishai notes that "in 1894, Herzl wrote what he thought was his best play, The New Ghetto, which was full of anti-Jewish stereotypes -- lives revolving around social climbing, marriage made for profit, stock-market manipulations." [AVASHAI, p. 36]   Herzl also loved the music of 19th century German nationalist and vehement anti-Semite Richard Wagner. So inspired was Herzl by Wagner's music, he wrote: "Only on those nights when no Wagner was performed did I have any doubts about the correctness of my [Zionist] idea." [RASKAS, p. 11] Likewise, in the literature tradition of Israel, there is the traditional Zionist condemnation of the European "ghetto Jew," condemnations that closely parallel classical anti-Semitic attacks. [See chapter on Israel]  In Shalmo Golan's novel, The Death of Uri Peled, for example, an indigenous Israeli tells a Diaspora Jew who has moved to Israel that "the fighters of our War of Independence died for you, so that this land could absorb the likes of you -- refugees who arrive from many exiles. We spilled our blood for this country, and you, I'm telling you, don't you turn it into a pigsty with your swinish galut [exilic/diaspora] wheeling and dealing." [RUBINSTEIN, A, p. 135]

In Germany, prominent Jewish author Kurt Tucholsky had "created a character called Herr Wendriner as the protoype of the Jewish German businessman. Wendriner was interested only in money. He was egocentric, petty, cruel, and stupid. As Harold Poor, Tucholsky's biographer, notes, these sketches were extremely popular in Germany during the [pre-Hitler] Weimar period." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 124]

 

Books about the Holocaust are especially delicate for the Jewish Thought Police. "The fact of the Holocaust and the anguish of its victims are not items for conjecture or debate," demands professor Richard Libowitz, "To legitimate these materials [controversial books about the Holocaust, most which argue that the Nazi mass murder of Jews was not as large as popularly claimed], and to suffer their continuing presence within our libraries is to provide passive support for anti-Semitism in its latest guise. Individuals should check the periodical contents of their own institutions and should these items appear, initiate the procedure for their removal." [LIBOWITZ, ASKING, p. 72]

 

David Gershom Myers, a Jewish associate professor of English at Texas A&M University, was also busy banning books within his reach in 1996. There were ten that drew his attention and ire. As the Austin American-Statesman editorialized about this censor in academe,

 

     "[Myers] is on a crusade to remove from the college library books

     that deny the Jewish Holocaust under Nazi Germany ... Once works

     denying the Holocaust are prohibited, what's next? Many, many

     books are offensive to someone, and banning any of them is a slippery

     slope indeed." [AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN, 4-12-96, p. A14]

 

Myers successfully lobbied the university library to add new subheadings ("Errors and Inventions") to the books' listing under "Holocaust, Jewish History." Some volumes were even cross-listed to his satisfaction under "anti-Semitism."

 

Some of the early violence-threatening poems of the African-American poet Imamu Baraka -- which in later years he publicly repudiated -- expressed extreme hostility towards the Jews and were, by anyone's standards, malicious. Rooted in a Black man's perceptions of Jewish exploitation of his community, such poems are direct attacks of Jews; a resultant discussion, not of Jews per se, but of Jewish-Black relations are not only necessary but inevitable. Such poems are expressly about that subject. The still broader context of such work is the common 1960's rise of "Black rage," rooted in African-American frustration and disillusionment, and reckless expressions of hopelessness and anger. Baraka's ravings against Jews were no more severe than his (and many other Black writers’) bitter writings against "white society" in general. (Interestingly, Baraka, formerly Leroi Jones, was once married to a Jew, Hettie Cohen).

 

There are various means to thrust the Jewish Thought Police's self-obsession of their alleged misportrayals across history onto center stage of classical works of English literature. In an introduction to a reissue of Charles Dickens' classic novel, Oliver Twist, for example, published by Bantam Books in 1981, Jewish author Irving Howe was afforded space to force the reader's attention (for nearly four pages) to modern Jewish polemics surrounding Dickens' character 'Fagin,' an "archetypical Jewish villain." As preface to the novel, readers are served a mini-history of Jewish objection to the Fagin persona -- a Jewish woman, it seems, had even written a complaint to Dickens that the character was too negatively stereotypical. Dickens actually wrote back to her, saying, "Fagin is a Jew because it is unfortunately true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was Jewish." [HOWE, p. 369-373] (A real life model for Dickens may have been Ikey Solomon who had undergone a much publicized trial in England a few years before the book was written). The disturbing precedent Howe's framing of the novel sets, of course (for those who have the power to enforce such things), is that any literature must be subject to polemical rebuttal in a kind of aggrieved "class action" to begin (and essentially merge with, and reframe) the original writing itself. Hence, a novel becomes -- first and foremost -- a polemical course on Jewish history and identity.

 

In 1962, Oliver Twist was recreated as a British musical comedy. Reflecting the revisionist times, the actor who played Fagin expressed the character, as one reviewer observed, "as the dottiest old dear imaginable." [BELTH, p. 56]

 

This strategy of revisionism has become common. In 1997, for example, bowing to Jewish pressure, the Marin Center Showcase Theatre in San Rafael, California, agreed to a Jewish Community Relations Council question-and-answer discussion after each performance of Geoffey Chaucer's "Prioress' Tale," from his famous Canterbury Tales. "Hotly debated," noted the Jewish Bulletin, "is whether the 'Prioress' Tale' is indeed a satire of ... violently anti-Semitic attitudes or merely an expression of them." [STERLING, 1997, p. 30]

 

One of the most famous negative portrayals of Jews in English literature is the character Shylock in Shakespeare's play, Merchant of Venice. Written in 16th and 17th century England, Shylock reflects the Christian perceptions of the era; he is depicted as usurious, villainous, fraudulent, exploitive, and cruel. "The most effective way of making the play acceptable to post-Holocaust sensibilities," notes Jewish critic John Gross, "in the view of many directors, is to underscore the prejudices of the Christian characters, and generally show them in an ugly light." [GROSS, p. 329] In some productions of the play, Shylock is even completely reconstituted, as in Arnold Wesker's version, where Shylock became "scholarly, impetuous, and warm-hearted." [GROSS, p. 335] One French critic, Pierre Spriet, has even went so far as to dismiss the play entirely, suggesting that the work is so anti-Semitic, "it must be abandoned." [GROSS, p. 345] In 1999, an actor on tour from South Africa, Percy Sieff, was portraying Shylock as "a worldly, successful businessman who has become embittered by discrimination and compensated by focusing on money." [BLOCH, F., 9/10-16/99]

 

In 1994 Rabbi Richard Litvak spearheaded a protest of a performance of the Merchant of Venice by a Shakespeare theatre group in Santa Cruz, California. Jewish lobbying resulted in a plan for "discussion groups" and "program notes" about Jewish concerns about the Shylock character. Rabbi Litvak noted the effect of Jewish protest, turning the performance of a Shakespeare play into quite something else: "The director and the festival have expressed a commitment to try to make the play a vehicle for raising awareness of anti-Semitism." [ROSENBERG, N., 5-27-94, p. 35]

"It was with great trepidation that I agreed to undertake the responsibility of commenting on yet another production of William Shakespeare's 'The Merchant of Venice,'" wrote censorial Jewish professor Racelle Weinman in 2001,

     "In this instance the venue is the PBS Masterpiece Theatre series ... I have come
      to the conclusion that the Holocaust negates the untenable premise of 'The
      Merchant of Venice.' It should not be produced ... [T]he bottom line is that the
      text remains the text ... [Director Trevor] Nunn tries to make the character of the
      Jewish usurer, Shylock, more palatable by casting a Jew, Henry Goodman, in the role."
      [WEINMAN, R., 10-4-01, p. 23-]

   

As early as 1912 Jewish American organizations were successfully lobbying the College Entrance Examination Board to remove the Merchant of Venice as a required reading for its tests. "School superintendents in all cities of 10,000 population or more" were then lobbied by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith to remove the text from study. "Between 1917 and 1920 many school systems discontinued study of the play." [BELTH, p. 51-52]

 
Mother Goose was censored of its Jewish contents by the late 1930s:

     "Jack sold his egg
      to a rogue of a Jew
      Who cheated him out
      of half his due.
      The Jew got his goose,
      Which he vowed he would kill
      Resolving at once
      His pockets to fill. [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 104]

A curious angle to all this, in view of the fact that the Shylock stereotype of the Middle Ages -- a figure that symbolizes classically Orthodox Jewish separatism from non-Jews, exploitation and manipulation of Gentiles, communal resistance to defense obligations to the country in which they live, double moral standards for Jews and non-Jews, cheats, liars, ghetto-loving, et al -- is held to be totally groundless today, yet it is a fact that the closest parallels in our own time to the Orthodox Jews of Elizabethan England are the black-dressed, self-cloistered Orthodox Hasidim of which there are today hundreds of thousands in Israel and America. (Eventually, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic movement, which was created in the 1700s and represents a particular back-to-basics strand of Judaism, numbered about half of the Eastern European Jewish population. [LEVIN, M., 1966, p. xi] David Berger notes that "with the dawn of the 19th century, Hasidism .. became the dominant form of Judaism in much of Eastern Europe, the heartland of 19th-century Jewry." [BERGER, D., 2001, p. 24] Jewish scholar Solomon Poll even notes, for example, that, according to a Hungarian government report in 1914, Orthodox Judaism dominated the Jewish community in that country. And the attitude of Hungarian Jews not part of this traditional community? "Among the less observant and nonobservant Jews," says Poll, "... they considered the observant Jews "old-fashioned," "bigoted," and "unreasonable.") [POLL, S., 1969, p 14-15]

 

Not surprisingly, the perception by many secular Jews today -- most particularly in Israel --  of the self-segregated Hassidim (also called Haredi) communities is extremely similar to the classical non-Jewish Shakespearean-era perception of Shylock. An Israeli professor, Menachem Friedman, notes the characterization of these Ultra-Orthodox talmudists by secular fellow Jews in Israel: "The alienation and isolation of the Haredim, their eagerness to claim exemption from service in the Israeli army, their demands for increasing allocations for their society of scholars and sometimes unrestrained use of political power arouses resentment and even hatred among large sections of the Israeli public." [FRIEDMAN, M, p. 190] [See also former, and later, chapters].

 

"Hatred of the ultra-Orthodox has deep roots [in Israel]," noted Israeli critic Laor Yitzhak in 1998,

 

     "There is no offense so great that one cannot tag it on the Haredim --

      especially the guy with the black hat, frock coat, and side curls beloved

      of modern anti-Semites ... 'Death to the black hatters' is scribbled on

      toilet doors at the Tel Aviv School of Humanities; if fliers showing

      Haredi children and screaming 'Kill them while they're young!' are being

      distributed in Kfar Saba, then it is those who participate in fomenting

      hatred against the Haredi minority who must prove there is not something

      behind their behavior frighteningly like anti-Semitism." [LAOR]

 

Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz notes the conflicts between secular Jews and the Ultra-Orthodox, and that "Perhaps we will reluctantly arrive at a separation into two nations [in Israel], with a differentiation not only from the aspect of marriage, but also with each going his historic way imbued by intense hatred [of the other]." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 40]

 

In 1986 the Jerusalem Post reported an Israeli poll that found one-fourth of its secular Jewish respondents called the Ultra-Orthodox  -- who like their ancestral counterparts have retreated into self-created ghettos, even in Israel -- "opportunists, liars, and charlatans." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 24]  "There is much hostility to the Orthodox rabbinate among the majority (about 70% of the Jewish population) of secular Israeli Jews," says Adam Garfinkel, "They see the rabbis as coercive and intolerant ... excessively political and unspiritual ... seeming never to have a word to say about kindness, humility, and God's love for humanity ... To be blunt, some secular Israelis see the haredim as fanatical atavistic freeloaders who have yet to discover modern hygiene." [GARFINKEL, p. 140]

 

In 2000, the results of study by Jerusalem's Hebrew University about "hate" in 168 secular Israeli schools indicated that "47% of the Jewish students hate haredim." [PRINCE-GIBSON, E., 9-17-2000] A Jewish religious organization, Ahavat Israel, has even posted an entire section at its Internet site about what it calls "anti-Semitism in Israel":

     "Today, the attack upon the religious Jewish population is most heavily felt
     in the Israeli media, including newspapers, radio and TV ... In a recent 9 (Dec
     98) column, Israel Eichler charges that many of the stereotypes used by the
     Nazis against Jews have been translated into Hebrew and employed to
     delegitimize the haredi (religious) public ... [Meretz political party founder]
     Shulamit Aloni described the haredi population as 'suck[ing] from the
     same sinister passions which nurtured the Nazis' ... 'We have to storm Mea
     She'arim [a famous Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox enclave] with machine guns
     and mow them down,' recommends left-wing darling Uri Avneri. 'I would
     take all those weird people from Shas, Aguda, and Degel Hatorah and tie
     all their beards together and light a match,' says Popolitika's Amnon
     Danker. Yonaten Gefen announces his wilingness to cast the first stone
     in the intifada [uprising] against haredim, and Prof. Uri Arnon tells a
     Kol Ha'ir interviewer, 'Haredim should be suspended on an electricity
     pole' ... Today 'bloodsucker' is a favored term for haredim ... 'Parasite'
     has become used so frequently in connection with haredim that the
     two have become virtually synonymous ... 'When I see the haredim
     surrounded by their large families, I understand the Nazis,' wrote
     sculptor Yigal Tumarkin -- a statement which did not prevent him
     from being honored by Yad Vashem [Israel's Holocaust memorial
     center]. And Tommy Lapid sees the haredim as having usurped
     the traditional Jewish role of 'taking advantage of the gentile,
     trading in his blood, and laughing at him,' only this time with
     the secular [Jewish] public in the role of the gentile."
     [AHAVAT ISRAEL, 2001]

At another site, the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, a Jewish author sites a list of anti-chasid charges compiled by the editor of the Israeli magazine NATIV:

     "'Black ants.' 'Dogs tied up in the back yard, barking psalms all nights.' 'Humming
     locusts.' 'Forces of darkness and kidnappers of Souls.' 'Vulgar baboons.'
     'Barbarians, the Black Front ... representing the magical, bewitched and
     most primitive ... whose schools are colleges of darkness.' 'The darkest and
     and most horrible phenomena (sic) of our age,' (by a senior Israeli diplomat
     in the United States). From two different members of the Knesset: 'Leeches,
     snakes, suckled on the same evil urges as Nazism, greedy and domineering,
     evil and primitive, corrupt, parasites, ambitious.' 'A horrible evil, a black
     devil.' Finally, Arie Stav quotes one of Israel's best known writers: 'A
     band of armed gangsters comitting crimes against humanity, sadists,
     pogromchiks and murderers." [WINSTON, E., 10-98]

"Stav [the editor of NATIV]," says Emmanuel Winston, "quotes even worse examples of statements and caricatures that are actually blood libel by the self-styled 'intellectual elite of the Israeli Left. They are authors, members of the Knesset, senior journalists, diplomats and professors." [WINSTON, E., 10-98]

In 2000, the Cleveland Jewish News reported that, in Israel, "there have been many instances of anti-haredi graffiti on haredi synagogues, and even, in 1998, the torching of two haredi classrooms in Pardess Hanna, where local secular [Jewish] residents tried to keep haredim from moving into their neighborhood." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-2000, p. 10-]

Robert Eisenberg, whose parents are Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, even notes what a Holocaust survivor had to say about the ultra-Orthodox. Here Eisenberg speaks to an older Jewish couple in New Jersey:

    "My [husband] Morris was in Auschwitz. Ask him what he thinks of the Hasidim.
     Morris, come here,'' she orders. He shuffles in like a Foghorn Leghorn auditioning
     for a part, cigar clenched firmly between his teeth. 'What do you think of the
     Hasidism?' Without missing a beat in he begins to intone,
         Huset Ganef
         Geh Ka' Chrzanow
         Koif a fayert
         Lieg in drayert.
         (Hasid, you crook
         Travel to Chrzanow, for a look
         Buy a horse
         Then drop dead, of course.)
     It's a child nursery rhyme my grandmother used to chant on
     those rare occasions when she saw a Hasid in Nebraska."
     [EISENBERGER, R., 1995, p. 158]

In a 1982 book Jewish American author Earl Shorris noted the Hasids in a chapter about Jewish shame ("anti-Semitism?" "Self-hatred?") for the behavior of other Jews. Here Shorris is troubled by an encounter with Hasidic salesmen at a photo shop in New York City:

     "As we neared [the sale counter], now sweating like everyone else in the
      salesroom, I saw that the salesmen were all young Hasidic Jews. A fat boy
      in his twenties -- his white shirt smudged; his fly partly unzipped below
      his bulging belly; his spotty, untrimmed beard curling with sweat --waited
      on the customer next to me. When my turn came, he said, Well?
         I want an AM-FM portable radio, one that sounds reasonablly good.
        You want ten dollars? A hundred dollars? what?
        Somewhere in the middle. Fifty.
      He thrust a catalogue in front of me, opened it to the pages devoted to portable
      radios, and said, When you know, you'll tell me.
      The Hasidim have given up ritual bathing, I thought, for I could smell him
      from across the counter. He stank of the gruel of seat and detritus that collects
      in the creases of the body and sours. His clothes stank. He eyeglasses were
      smudged. His hands were pale and dirty ... He went to another customer. I
      could not think of the radio, only of him, of this Jew who had presented himself
      to me. I chose a radio ... [A second Hasidic salesman comes over to help him]
      ... We stared at each other for a moment, as if to compare our lives. I , too,
      wear a bear, a curly Jewish beard, once black, now turning gray. He knew what
      I was thinking. Well, what? he said. He did not hide his irritaion at my
      examination of him ... Hostility grew between us. He saw in my eyes what the
      Ostjuden [Eastern European Jews] had seen in the eyes of the German Jews. He
      could dance, he could fly, he could tell stories of the Baal Shem Tov that even
      Martin Buber did not know. How dare I look at him with scathing eyes! ... [As
      he left, he paid a female cashier for his purchase] ... I gave her the money. She
      gave me the package. We did not speak. She told me that she knew what I was
       thinking and that she had known similar thoughts. She smiled. It was not a real
      smile. It seemed to belong to a prisoner ... It's difficult to be in a place like that
      ... I'm so put off by them. I have to keep reminding myself that we're brothers."
       [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 67, 68] ... Is it possible that Jews could rise completely
      above the pain of disapproval that we call shame?" [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 72]

In the 1990s, secular Jewish professor Stephen Bloom tried to connect to his Jewish heritage via a Chabad Lubavitcher (ultra-Orthodox/Hassidic) community in the little town of Postville, Iowa. He went there with the legends of Jewish historic identity and was stunned with what he found. "Many of the Hasidim I had encountered in Postville pretended to be holy," he wrote,

      "but their actions displayed bigotry and racism of the worst degree. The book
      [Bloom wrote, entitled Postville] explored taboo topics such as bargaining, poor
      hygiene, atrocious manners, disrepair of homes, Jewish elitism, sexism, crime
      and prejudice directed a gentiles. In response, I've received dozens of hate letters,
      all from Orthodox Jewish readers, who essentially pose the same question as my
      father's. To these readers, to criticize any aspect of Judaism is patently unacceptable.
      To them, I wasn't a journalist doing my job. I was a self-loathing Jew, the worst
      kind of anti-Semite. I was embarrassing the family ... When journalists parachuted
      into Postville, if the locals said anything bad -- or even neutral -- about the Hasidic
       Jews, the response was swift and to the point. Mayor John Hyman was labeled an
      anti-Semite when he told a reporter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the
      Jews in Postville don't pay their bills on time [which Bloom found to be a true
      assessment]." [BLOOM, S., 2000, p. 355, p. 340]
     

What does all this mean? The foundation of animosity (defined as "anti-Semitism") towards "traditional" Jewish behavior, as best manifest today by the cloistered, seclusionist, Jewish haredim/hasidic communities -- a behavior that was a mainstay for centuries by all Jews in Europe and throughout the world,  is so great that even other (secularized) Jews today express vehement disdain and outrage towards their obsessively "particularist" -- and exploitive -- fellows. And this is crucial: today's haredim merely reflect meticulous attention to the ages-old religious laws of Jewish orthodoxy. As Michael Govrin notes, living under the Halacha -- Jewish religious law -- "until two hundred years ago was the only way a Jew could define him or herself." [GOVRIN, M., 2001]

 

As Israeli Amos Elon notes, more mildly, about the tensions within the secular Jewish psyche when they visit Mea Shearim (the hasidic ghetto in Jerusalem):

 

      "Modern Israelis ...are attracted to the notion of encountering their

      own roots and at the same time they are repelled ... When they gaze

      now at these bearded men, with their alarmingly pallid faces, at their

      ringlets and strange clothes, so unsuited to the climate, and at their tired

      looking wives, modern Jews are torn by conflicted feelings ... They see

      their own grandfathers and grandmothers, who went up as smoke

      through the chimneys of Auschwitz and Treblinka. 'Because of Hitler

      you have no right to oppose this kind of Judaism,' the [Israeli] novelist

      wrote in 1982." [ALON, 1991, p. 189]

 

Melford Spiro, in a study of the Israeli kibbutz system (known for his socialist system), has the following commentary:

 

     "Religious Jews -- or more accurately, orthodox Jews whose 'visibility'

     is pronounced -- are the objects of similar attitudes [among residents of

     the kibbutz]. A fourth-grade girl, asking her father if he had ever prayed,

     proceeded to describe with much laughter how the 'Jews in Europe' had

     prayed. Her description, accompanied by grotesque gestures, was in

     the tradition of anti-Semitic caricature. And from the other end of the

     age scale came this comment from an adult sabra [native born Israeli]:

     'I hate them (the orthodox Jews), and when I see them I can understand

     why people are anti-Semitic." [SPIRO, p. 388]

 

Yet another angle on all this is Israeli Ashkenazim (Jews from Europe) views of their Sephardic (Jews from Arab countries, Iran, et al) fellow citizens. As Raphael Patai notes: "In addition to instability, emotionalism, impulsiveness, unreliability, and incompetence, the Oriental [Sephardic] Jew is accused [by other Israeli Jews] of habitual lying and cheating, laziness, uncontrolled temper, superstitiousness, childishness, lack of cleanliness and in general 'primitivity' and 'lack of culture.'" [PATAI, in Selzer, p. 58]  (This, of course, probably also reflects racist Jewish views of Arab culture, by which the Sephardic were inevitably tainted). In former centuries, "in some countries and places Ashkenazim and Sephardim refused to intermarry. At one time in the eighteenth century the Sephardic Jews in the town of Bordeaux in France tried to persuade the Christian authorities to forbid Ashkenazic Jews to live there. Here was the unbelievable spectacle of one group of Jews urging the government to banish another group of Jews!" [GITTELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 32]

In the early years of the 20th century, German Jews ostracized Jews from Eastern Europe. For example, "[In a small midwestern town] a student rabbi," says Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn,

     "there for the Holydays, was interested in discovering why the women of his Reform
     congregation seemed to be antagonistic to Hadassah, the women's Zionist
      organization. After questioning several women and receiving answers which he knew
     were merely excuses, he finally found a young woman, new to the community,
     who explained the situation honestly. 'Our women stay away from Hadassah,'
     she said, 'because the present members of the organization are mostly Russian    
     and Polish Jews. Most of them are rather poor, and some of them haven't
     completely lost their foreign accents. Because these women were the organizers
     of Hadassah here, our women, who are mostly German Jews, wealthier and more
     Americanized than they, rarely join Hadassah." 'GITTLELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 34]

Incredibly, intolerant ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel are themselves guilty of what one Israeli newspaper called "Jewish antisemitism." While a graffiti-laden Jewish tombstone in, say, Bulgaria is international news, the following kind of story never gets beyond in-house Jewish ethnic news circles. As part of inter-religious conflicts between Orthodox and Reform/Conservative Judaism movements in Israel, the Cleveland Jewish News noted the following in 2000:

      "The Israeli political and religious establishment condemned Saturday night's
      arson at a Jerusalem Conservative synagogue, but something was missing from
      their statements -- any hint that the fire might have been started by Jewish
      extremists, or Jews at all ... Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who in the past
      compared Reform Jewry (the term Israelis use for all non-Orthodox Jewry) to
      Hezbollah terrorists, condemned the arson, but couldn't bring himself to use the
      term 'synagogue.' Instead he called it a 'building specified for prayer by a stream,'
       without specifying which religion the stream belonged to. In an editorial about
      the arson titled 'Jewish antisemitism,' The Jerusalem Post said of Lau's remarks:
      'This type of refusal to recognize other legitimate streams of Judaism creates an
       atmosphere that may have led to the attack.' The fire, which got within a few yards
      of the Torah ark, was the second arson in three weeks at the synagogue located in
       Ramat, a sprawling, increasingly haredi (rigorously Orthodox) area of Jerusalem ...
      While Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, who visited the synagogue two days after the
       arson, declined to point a finger in any direction, a senior municipal offical said, 'Of
      course this was done by Jews ... In the past, arson and attacks of vandalism against
       Reform and Conservative synagogues have gone unpunished. No one has ever been
       arrested for the 1997 burning of a Reform nurse school in Mevasseret Zion, a
      suburb of Jerusalem, even though local Shah (Sepharid rigorously Orthodox)
      Party supporters had threated the lives of Reform Jews in town only months
      before. Likewise, no arrests were ever made in the 1997 attacks on the Har-El
      (Reform) synagogue in Jerusalem, which included pouring acid on the synagogue
       garden, smearing excrement on the front door, painting swastikas and religious
      curses. The Eshel Avraham (Conservative) synagogue in Beer Sheva, which has
      woman rabbi, Gila Dror, can 'expect to have its windows broken every couple of
       weeks,' said Masorti (Israeli Conservative) movement spokesman Yonatan
      Liebowitz. The above, of course, is only a partial list."
      [DERFNER, L., 6-30-00, p. 10-]

"As for the political and religious establishment's refusal to accuse anybody of the crime -- even when the enemies of the Conservative and Reform are only too well-known," remarked Israeli rabbi David Rosen in response to these arsons and the fact that no one was ever charged with crimes for them, "This is an unfortunate reflection of the political intimidation carried out by the religious extremists." [DERFNER, L., 6-30-01, p. 10-]

But let's return to the easier, less complicated target of the Gentile version of "anti-Semitism."

In the American literature world, more peculiar as a literary anti-Semitic source for Jewish outrage are E. L. Dachslager's selected examples from the work of T.S. Eliot. Dachslager writes:

 

          "Let us say, for example, we are teaching the poetry of T.S. Eliot

           and discussing specifically "Gerontion" and "Burbank with a

           Baedeker: Blestein with a cigar." What do we say about the

           references to the "Jew" who "squats on the window sill" or to

           Bleistein "with palms out / Chicago Semite Viennese?" Or to

           Eliot's intention by such references and our reaction to them,

           to Eliot's and to the poem?" [DACHSLAGER, p. 317]

 

These relatively innocuous lines are the most forceful that this Jewish scholar chooses from Eliot as evidence for endemic literary persecution of Jews? 

 

Many Jews hold T. S. Eliot in special opprobrium. Norma Rosen argues that although anti-Semitic references in Eliot's voluminous work "are not many, they are prime." [ROSEN, p. 10] Among the most widely highlighted by Jewish critics are these three lines from an Eliot poem:

 

      The rats are underneath the piles

      The Jew is underneath the lot.

      Money in furs ...

 

Let's put this into some perspective. A lot of Eliot's poetry was lamenting the materialist decadence and emptiness of modern society. Jews played -- and play -- their strong part in this.  And unless the Thought Police are to seize complete control, artists have been generally afforded the latitude to criticize all and everything they so please; the best ones are expected to be controversial. Modern art, by its very nature, steps on toes. Even sacred ones. If not, shall all peasants, Poles, and non-Jews generally light their torches and assail the equally sinister stereotypical defamations of them in the distinctly Jewish Holies of literature? Take, for example, the great Jewish-Zionist poet Bialik, who wrote that "while Jacob [Jews] spends his time praising the Lord, Esau [Gentiles] spends his time drinking and beating his wife." [GONEN, p. 135]  Or Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote, "The peasants are extremely sound sleepers but the devil does not permit their young women to rest but leads them down back paths to barns where the [Jewish] peddlers wait in the day." [SINGER, The Spinoza, p. 195] 

 

Many American Jews charge Polish society with anti-Semitism. In 1980, their opinions were seemingly, to their eyes, confirmed when Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. Singer, born in Poland, moved later to the United States. The gripe was that he was not widely recognized, nor highly regarded, in his homeland and his works were difficult to find there. But, as a young Jew living in Poland told Jewish American author Laurence Weschler, Singer's work has nothing to do with Poland or the Polish people. It is completely Judeo-centric: "Singer didn't concern himself with the Poles. Read those stories, as I have -- I read them in English. Poles hardly appear in them and when they do they are portrayed as shadowy, alien figures. In a fundamental sense, Singer is not a Polish writer." [WESCHLER, p. 35]

 

In another of Singer's short stories, a non-Jewish doctor, Yaretzsky, seduces his deaf-mute maid, teaches obscenities to a parrot, and treats his female patients "outrageously ... Before they could say what was wrong, he made them disrobe." [SINGER, The Spinoza, p. 7] Do we let such recurrent slurs of violence and lechery against non-Jews pass in the name of Art, despite the fact that there is a recurring, institutionalized pattern of such defamation in Jewish literature?

 

Arnold Eisen observes the same themes of defamation against Gentiles among other Jewish authors:

 

       "When the Jewish protagonist in [Saul] Bellow's The Victim accuses the

        gentile protagonist of being a drunkard, and the latter responds that all

        Jews see gentiles in this way, or when the honest Jew of Malamud's The

        Victim is the victim of a sexually driven gentile who despite himself

        cannot master his own cruel urges -- then, as Philip Roth has noted,

        we confront head-on the imagery of the [Jewish] folk imagination. Here

        one finds the rabbinic voice of the chosen people re-emergent. The

        moral Jew must separate himself from the licentious ways of the

        pagans, accepting responsibilities for the world (as in The Victim)

        against gentiles, who would lay the blame on powers beyond our

        control." [EISEN, p. 142]

 

Here too Eisen, as a Jewish scholar, frames for us his own (and his community's) typical double-standard: the Jewish anti-Gentile equivalent (at least) of stereotypical anti-Semitism is mildly described as the Jewish "folk imagination."

 

This "folk imagination" is poignantly demonstrated in yet another Singer (Bellow too is a Nobel Prize winner for literature) short story, where Gentiles are (per long-standing Jewish tradition) portrayed as generically/genetically violence prone:

 

         "A Jew should have a beard," Haim replied. "You have to be

         different from the Gentiles in some way."

         "The way you have lived, you're a Gentile too," Genia said.

         "As long as I have never beaten or killed anybody, I can call

         myself a Jew." [SINGER, The Spinoza, p. 284]

 

Looking elsewhere, the New York Times called Michael Gold's 1930s-era fictionalized autobiography about life in the Jewish section of Manhattan, Jews Without Money, a "masterpiece." Here's how he treats the non-Jewish Other:

 

        "My mother sighed with relief ... Christians did not seem like people

     to her. They were abstractions. They were the great enemy, to be

     hated, feared and cursed ... We children heard endless tales of the

     pogroms. Joey Cohen, who was born in Russia, could himself

     remember one. The Christians had hammered a nail into his uncle's

     head, and killed him. When we passed a Christian church we were

     careful to spit three times; otherwise bad luck was sure to befall us.

     We were obsessed with wild stories about how the Christians loved

     to kidnap Jewish children, to burn a cross on each cheek with a red-hot

     poker. They also cut off children's ear, and made a kind of soup. Nigger

     [a Jewish friend] had once seen Jewish ears for sale in the window of

     of a Christian butcher shop.

        'In the old days,' my mother said, 'the Christians hunted the Jews like

     rabbits. They would gather thousands in a big marketplace, and stuff

     pork down their throats with swords, and ask the Jews to be baptized.

     The Jews refused, of course. So they were burned in great fires, and the

     Christians laughed, danced and made merry when they saw the poor

     Jews burning up like candles. Such are the Christians... I would spend

     long daylight hours wondering why the Christians hated us so, and form

     noble plans of how I would lead valiant Jewish armies when I grew up,

     in defense of the Jews." [GOLD, M., p. 164-165]

 

In Jewish circles, of course, this kind of "folk imagination" is not considered absurdly exaggerated prejudicial stereotypes, nor nakedly stereotypical racism, stemming from their religiously-based victimology mythos, but history.  In the late 1970s a Russian Jewish émigré to America, summarizing Jewish life in Russia, told the American Jewish Congress that "to understand the problem of the average Jew in Russia, you had to understand a rabbit surrounded by wolves, trying somehow to live with them in the same forest." [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 48] (Popular Jewish convention holds that the Soviet Union has long been a bastion of anti-Semitism and Russian Jewry a disadvantaged people. Reviewing 1989 Russian census data, and the profound representation of Jews in the upper occupational strata in that country, Jewish scholar Michal Paul Sacks conceded in 1998 that "the occupational data do not show discrimination against Jews in high-level positions." Indeed, Sacks' 1998 article about the subject even noted the Jews of Russia to be, occupationally, a "privileged" group.) [SACKS, M., 1998, p. 260]

And the fleeing "rabbit" motif is actually part of ancient Jewish folk/religious legend. "That rabbit is called the YaKNHaZ," notes David Gilner,

     "That word is an acronym to remind Jews of the order of blessings in Passover
     rituals. But in German it sounds like 'jag den Has' or 'Hunt the hare,'
     and so it became a familiar image in Haggadahs to represent the persecution
     of the Jews." [SULKES, S., 4-21-97]

Of course Eastern Europans, in the Jewish "collective memory," were/are rapists. Based upon the ages-old Jewish martyrological tradition, left-wing Jewish author Earl Shorris noted his racial hatred of Russians as he toured the country in the 1970s:

      "We had no common ancestors [with Russians]. Tony [Shorris's son], I said
      softly careful not to wake him, you will discover one day that you are not
      descended from Russians but from Jews who happened to live in Russia.
      And if you do have Russian blood, it entered the line when a Cossack fell on
      a Jewish woman and raped her. It's either history or racial memory, but I know
      it's true. This is not home. And where is home? On his mother's side Tony is
       descended from Sheikh Sason ben Saleh, who is descended from Abraham
      Sason, the Venetian mystic who claimed to be a direct descendant of Shephatiah,
      the fifth son of King David. I laughed aloud at the thought of traveling with royalty,
      and a Marxist-Leninist king at that!") [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 149]

 

Howard Jacobson, in 1993, noted the "invidious" captions defaming non-Jews that he found beneath photographs at an exhibition at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. The photographs and accompanying texts romanticized Jewish Eastern Europe, but, typically, as one caption proclaimed:

 

     "The peasants around were so uneducated that you could not speak

     with them about anything. Their interest was just vodka, only

     alcohol to drink. But a Jewish peasant -- he was a wise man who knew

     about life, without having a radio or a newspaper or any information,

     nothing but his own thoughts and understanding." [JACOBSON, H.,

     1995, p. 193-194]

 

"Sound like any Jew you know?" writes Jacobson, sarcastically,

 

      "Sound like anyone you know? But even if there were such a paragon

      of [Jewish] peasant wisdom, gleaning understanding from the closed

      university of his own thoughts, is it necessary to rub the vodka-peasant's

      nose in the disparity? Must the rest of humanity be humbled because a

      Jew is bright? Hasn't a Carpatho-Ukrainian-gentile eyes? If you prick

      him does he not bleed? What a mix and what a mess it is, this dreaming

      nostalgic hotchpotch of misery and pride, arrogance and schmaltz.

      Who can wonder that it leads at last to the moral confusion of being

      proud of your misery, of being half in love with the cruelties that have

      been visited on you." [JACOBSON, H., 1995, p. 194]

 

And what about celebrated Jewish Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosinski, whose book "The Painted Bird" zoomed to fame in the 1960s? He has long since been exposed as fraud and chronic liar, committing suicide in 1991. The Painted Bird was understood by most readers and admirers as an autobiography of Kosinski's escape from Nazi-occupied Poland. It was commonly referred to as an "account," "confession," or "testimony." Fiction or not, the book was an indictment of Poland and the Polish people. As James Park Sloan notes:

 

     "In stark, uninflected prose, 'The Painted Bird' describes the

     disasters that befall a six-year old boy who is separated from

     his parents and wanders through the primitive Polish-Soviet

     borderlands during the war. The peasants whom the boy encounters

     demonstrate an extraordinary predilection for incest, sodomy,

     and meaningless violence. A miller plucks out the eyeballs of

     his wife's would-be lover. A gang of toughs pushes the boy, a

     presumed Gypsy or Jew, below the ice of a frozen pond. A

     farmer forces him to hang by his hands from a rafter, just out

     of reach of a vicious dog. In the culminating incident of the

     book, the boy drops a missal while he's helping serve Mass and

     is flung by angry parishioners into a pit of manure. Emerging

     from the pit, he realizes that he has lost the power of speech."

     [SLOAN, JP, 1994, p. 46]

 

The Painted Bird is merely a vicious caricature reflecting traditional Jewish folklore about the (omnipresently anti-Semitic) Other. It is as racistly "anti-Other" as any literature can possibly be. The Other is always a subhuman beast, meandering about in their animal instincts. (Kosinski, darling of the New York Jewish intelligentsia, was rewarded with a National Book Award for his next novel!) Early in the volume, The Painted Bird's lead character, hiding among Christian peasants (with their help!) from the Nazis, is self-described as being from an elite class -- he "spoke a language of the educated class, barely intelligible to the peasants of the east." [KOSINSKI, p. 2] All and every peasant the boy meets in the book is a caricature of bestiality and brutality while the innocent boy himself is even afraid of farm animals. [KOSINSKI, p. 4] Nonetheless, he first finds refuge with an old Gentile lady who "looks like a green-gray puffball," [p. 3] he watches brutal non-Jewish boys set squirrels on fire, [p. 6] he accidentally (?) burns the old lady's house down with her in it, [p. 10] and he passes one of the many Christian shrines in the area which is described as "a rotting crucifix." [p. 13] At the next village, the boy is attacked by a crowd, dragged by the hair, knocked unconscious, and carried home in a sack by a peasant to where "small children crawl out like cockroaches." The peasant turns to whip the boy so "I would hop like a frog." [p. 14-15]

 

The Jewish character is then purchased by a superstitious local folk healer (p. 16). The boy eventually ends up in a loft watching a miller below "lashing his naked wife with a horsewhip." When these two sit for dinner, the boy equates them with two copulating cats that mate near them as they eat. [p. 36] The miller soon gouges a young man's eyes out with a spoon [p. 37] Later the innocent Jewish child runs across a beastly, hyper-sexual woman called "Stupid Ludmilla:" 

 

     "It was said that Stupid Ludmilla lived with this huge dog as with a

     man. Others predicted that someday she would give birth to children

     whose bodies would be covered with canine hair [subtle reference to

     the classical Gentile character, Esau, in Jewish tradition who was the

     beastly hairy one?] and who would have lupine ears and four paws." [p.

     47]

 

An "entire herd of drunken peasants" soon raped Ludmilla "until she lost consciousness." [p. 47] Another peasant, Lekh, delights in catching birds, painting them different colors, and releasing them so that they are pecked to death by their own kind. [p. 50] Sexually attracted to Ludmilla the beast-woman, two shepherds soon contribute their own savagery upon her, raping and beating her. Then comes peasant village women who "sat on her hands and legs and began beating her with rakes, tearing out her hair, spitting into her face ... One of the women now approached, holding a corked bottle of brownish-black manure. To the accompaniment of raucous laughter and loud encouragements from others, she kneeled between Ludmilla's legs and rammed the entire bottle inside her abused, assaulted slit, while she began to moan and howl like a beast." [p. 52-54]

 

The boy is soon beaten by a carpenter who "threw me down on a pile of manure. He delivered one more blow to my head and I fainted." [p. 62] The carpenter intends to drown the boy in a sack, but the man falls into a vat, devoured by rats. [p. 64] Then there is the barbaric blacksmith's wife who rolls lice into a medicinal dough with horse and human urine, as well as cat excrement. [p. 67-68] The boy is soon attacked and "lashed" by partisans, who cruelly murder dogs, horses, and cats. A peasant is stabbed in the back at a Christian wedding; and "in the dusk, village lads were grabbing girls and pushing them into the barn ... Drunks stumbled across the threshing yard, cursing to each other and vomiting, harassing the lovers and waking the snorers." [p. 87] Also, "while the adults usually left me alone, I had to watch out for the village boys. They were great hunters; I was their game." [p. 90]

 

Soon peasants are pulling the clothes off dead Jews [p. 102] and lusting over family photographs of young Jewish women found on dead bodies. [p. 105] A Jewish woman, found alive, is raped. During the rape, the offending peasant "appealed loudly to the Virgin Mary for help" to attain a satisfying violation. Then he beat his victim. [p. 106-107]

 

Yet another peasant, Garbos, regularly beats Kosinski's protagonist "for no reason." [p. 123] The boy is also tossed into a manure vat by angry churchgoers (where he listens to Christian organ music from the excrement,  [p. 146] and is seduced by a farmer's daughter.) [p. 151-152] Kosinski eventually voices the recurrent Jewish revenge motif: "I myself hated many people. How many times had I dreamed of the time when I would be strong enough to return, to set their settlements on fire, poison their children and cattle, lure them into deadly swamps. In the sense I had already been recruited by the powers of Evil and made a pact with them. What I needed now was their assistance for spreading Evil." [p. 160]

 

This despicable defamation of the Polish people has been challenged in recent years to be complete fabrication, the product of Kosinski's sick mind. As early as 1982, an article in the Village Voice alleged that Kosinski needed help to write his own books and that some of his accounts of his past were contradictory. (Kosinski, widely beloved in the New York literary world, and rewarded for the vicious racism in The Painted Bird; he was twice the president of the writers' organization, PEN. He won the National Book Award for another novel in 1968. And, as biographer Sloan notes, this pervert's "celebrated nightly forays to Plato's Retreat and S&M clubs the New York piers helped make those establishments fashionable.") [SLOAN, 1991, p. 47] Edwin Diamond also notes the influential behind-the-scenes pro-Kosinski politics of the New York Times: "[C]ritics also trashed [Times chief editor A. M.] Rosenthal for his role in the Kosinski affair, a bizarre episode that roiled the New York literary-social-media world in the early 1980s ... Rosenthal and ["his chief deputy Arthur] Gelb [both Jewish] were both friends of Kosinski ... Barbar Gelb [Arthur's wife] wrote a glowing literary appreciation of Kosinski in the Times Magazine four months before the Village Voice attack appeared." Rosenthal also encouraged smears of the Village Voice article.) [DIAMOND, E, 1993, p. 178-180]

 

Sloan, in the course of writing his volume about Kosinski, even journeyed to the Jewish author's Polish hometown. There he found that Kosinski's stories about his life in Poland were completely fraudulent. And that Kosinski was a betrayer of the good people who had saved him from the Nazis. Local villagers who knew him were even united today in stating that, after the war, Kosinski's father had turned local people over to the Soviet secret police. The maniacal defamations in The Painted Bird, a major betrayal to Kosninski's real-life protectors, also hurt people. As Sloan notes about his interviews with those in the village,

 

     "The Painted Bird ... came as a shock. 'We saved their lives,' [one

     old peasant] said, brushing away tears with the back of his hand.

     'And he turned us into monsters' ... Kosinski was never separated

     from his parents for any significant period. The local peasants,

     living in a culture suffused with anti-Semitism, were scarcely free of

     its grip, but by all accounts these particular peasants did something

     brave and good for the Kosinski family during the war. 'The Painted

     Bird' is fiction. Kosinski borrowed the atrocities from other accounts,

     or made them up." [SLOAN, 1991]

 

Sloan concludes his investigation thusly, echoing a theme that is extremely familiar:

 

     "If the novelist trimmed his experiences to accord with a personal myth,

     the narrative that resulted fell on receptive ears. Certainly it was a myth

     that the world, demanding purity and innocence of its victims, was all

     too ready to appropriate. Now all must profess to be shocked -- that

     a practitioner of the liar's profession, a man who survived the war by

     living a lie, told lies." [SLOAN, JP, 1991, p. 53]

 

Kosinski is not an anomaly in the Jewish world; his accounts of the beastly Gentile Other is rooted in the norms of the Jewish folk tradition. "Jewish belief in Catholic anti-Semitism," wrote Jewish author James Yaffe in 1968,

 

     "has something irrational about it. Jews cling to it in spite of

     evidence to the contrary ... Many Jews have an emotional reaction

     against Catholics which goes deeper than logic. I. B. Singer writes

     about the twinge of uneasiness he used to feel as a boy whenever he

     passed a nun on the street. Few Jews are unfamiliar with this twinge.

     And Bruce Jay Friedman, American-born and much younger than Singer,

     says that the Catholic school across the street from him, when he was a

     boy, seemed like 'the battlefield -- a scary mysterious place." Yet he

     admits that he never got into fights with the Catholic boys -- in fact,

     nothing ever actually happened." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 50]

 

In a similar vein, in one of Philip Roth's novels, the main Jewish character, Alexander Portnoy, fantasizes a conversation with his father about striking his mother, "Deck her, Jake. Surely that's what a goy would do, would he not?" [BRODKIN, p. 161]  And what conclusions might we make about the bizarrely racist Jewish world view in the collection of legends about Baal Shem Tov, the revered 18th century founder of Hasidism? :

 

          "I heard once that they put a turnip on Besht's [the holy man's]

           table, but he refused to eat it. They asked him why, and he

           said, 'This turnip grew in a gentile cemetery.' [BEN-AMOS, p. 197]

 

           "When the Besht came to the inn they offered him an

            upholstered bed. When the Besht came and saw the bed

            he cried: 'Vey! There has been sexual intercourse with a

            gentile woman on this bed. How is it possible for me to

            sleep on it?" [BEN-AMOS, p. 223]

In a religious story about the Baal Shem Tov, by Menachem Gerlitz, the generic Gentile is, typically, rendered to be dull, stupid, robotic, barbaric, unfeeling, and a veritable animal -- in fact, even less than one. The story is actually intended as an illustration of the some of the reasons for the traditional Orthodox daily prayer that thanks God for not having been born a goy. In a chapter actually entitled The Gentile Peasant, the Jewish hero -- the Baal Shem Tov as a young boy named Yisraelnyu -- watches with fascination as an old peasant, "uncombed, sloppy, only half awake," enters his barn yard. The boy is stunned when the old peasant drinks from a pail of water intended for his horse: "He slurped the water down noisily, his wild, long hair falling into the pail, the water dripping and slopping over the sides onto his clothing. He paid no attention, just continued to drink." The peasant then pulled out

      "a hunk of old, moldy black bread" and "crammed it into his mouth ... The
      farmer was absorbed only in his food and didn't even give a thought to thanking
      the One Who had given him a mouth and food to eat [God] ... Even the fowl --
      Yisraelnyu was thinking -- hopped about, cackling happily as if singing their thanks
      to the Creator of the world ... Even the horse neighed happily ... Only the farmer,
      queer creature, gave no thanks, made no bracha, said no prayer, did not even lift
      up his eyes to the heavens. Yisraelnyu lowered his eyes. He was ashamed to speak
      to this man. He turned around and went back into the forest where he loudly
      exclaimed: "Baruch ata ... Blessed are you, Hashem [God] ... for not having made me a
       goy."
       Yisraelnyu thanked Hashem with his whole heart, understanding the meaning of
     that blessing and being grateful for it for the first time in his life. Thank G-d
     that he was not like that rough, coarse farmer who did not even know how to say
     a word of thanks to Hashem, who was even worse than his own animals and
     fowl!
       The horse greeted the morning joyfully, so did the rooster. Even the birds in
     the forest sang their thanks. The entire world offered praise and song while that
     lowly farmer seemed to have been hitched up to a wagon. All he knew was how
     to run.
       That goy -- thought Yisraelnyu -- is his own slave, whose only reward is a pail
     of water and a hard lump of bread. As this thought crossed his mind, he
     suddenly remembered the next wonderful morning blessing: 'Baruch ata ...
     Blessed are You, Hashem ... for not having made me a slave.'
       A wonderful feeling enveloped his whole body. 'I am not a goy! I am not
     a slave! Baruch Hashem!
       Yisraelnyu felt like jumping and dancing, like running, to express his thanks
     to Hashem, the Creator of the world, for all the kindness. He had shown him
     by not making him a goy or a slave." [GERLITZ, M., 1983, p. 50-58]

 

Traditional Jewish views of the hated Christian is also reflected in a story by Sholem Asch, one of the most famous Yiddish novelists. In a tale about Jewish martyrology in the face of attacking Cossacks, painted as Nazi-like exterminators, Asch also writes:

 

      "Shlomele opened the church for the priest and ran away swiftly so

      as to not touch the walls of the church. He stopped at a distance so

      as not to become 'unclean' from hearing the singing in the church.

      And when the priest's bass voice reached him none the less, he

      covered his ears with his hands in order not to hear the sounds, which

      would stupefy his mind against the study of the Torah." [ASCH, S.,

      1959, p. 48]

 

"Many folk songs ... used to be sung in the shtetl [the Eastern European Jewish village]," notes James Yaffe,

 

      "songs which declared that all the goyim are drunkards and lechers,

      and thick-headed muzhiks. By implication, of course, this made the

      Jews a finer breed; the element of contempt in the song was

      accompanied by an element of self-congratulation ... Though the shtetl

      is far behind American Jews, it's extraordinary how much of those old

      folk songs are still part of their consciousness ... It will be objected that

      the ... inhabitants of the shtetl were unsophisticated people with little

      experience of the gentile world. I can only say that in the course of my

      interviews [with fellow Jews], I found the same opinions held by people

      with wide experience of the gentile world." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 66]

Here's one of famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal's contributions to Jewish (folk) history:

     "[Wiesenthal's] own father used to tell him how a [Ukrainian] village priest, who
      loved his schnapps, but couldn't always pay for his drinks, left his church key as
       security with a Jewish tavern-owner one Saturday night, promising to settle his
      debt out of Sunday's collection. Next morning, when his Ukrainian parishioners
       couldn't get in to attend mass, he told them: 'The dirty Jew at the pub has locked
      you out. Go get the key from him!' They did -- by beating the Jewish pub-keeper
       within an inch of his life, smashing or drinking everything in his tavern, celebrating
       mass, and then extending the celebration with a little local pogrom, amen!"
      [LEVY, A., 1993, p. 24]

 

In Yiddish/Hebrew "folk tradition," Romanians are called "amolek" (an analogue to the despised Biblical "Ameleks"), the Irish called "beytzimer" (a pun on the word testes), the Germans the pejorative "deitshuk," the Italians "loksh" (noodle), the Moldevians "moldevan" ("a boor or lout, yokel"), and the Prussians "preissn" (cockroaches). Armenians were called "timkhe." "This Hebrew word in the Bible," noted Jewish scholar A. A. Roback, "with reference to Amalek, the hereditary foe of the Israelites, curiously enough, is employed by Jews in Galicia [Poland], as a nickname for the Armenians, whom, for some reason, they look upon as descendants of that eternally despised people." [ROBACK, p. 141]  "Goy" (the categorical term for non-Jews), of course, means "an illiterate, coarse or lowbrow person." A "goyische kop," continues Roback, is a "Gentile head. A dunce, bonehead. It may be noted that the Gentiles referred to here were peasants, but the Jewish folk mind denies far-sighted, sensitive intelligence, understanding, and brilliance even to highly trained and distinguished non-Jews." [ROBACK, p. 139-140] (Traditional Jewish defamations of those of African descent will be discussed more extensively elsewhere). (Emanuel Levy notes the following about the family of famous Jewish Hollywood film director George Cukor: "Although the Cukors did not speak Yiddish, the common tongue of Eastern European Jews, later in his life he learned some phrases from his friends actors Paul Lukas and Fanny Brice. The vulgar and suggestive phrases in Yiddish intrigued him.") [LEVY, E., 1994, p. 22]

Here's a Jewish joke about their Italian neighbors (in Brooklyn, New York):

      "Why do Italian men leave their fly open? To help them count to eleven."
      [REIDER, J., 1985, p. 44]

 

A joke from Jewish circles (published in 1981) celebrating Jewish intelligence, Gentile stupidity, and Jewish fraud, runs like this:

 

        "On a train in czarist Russia, a Jew is eating a whitefish,

     wrapped in paper. A Gentile, sitting across the aisle, begins to

     taunt him with various anti-Semitic epithets. Finally, he asks the

     Jew, 'What makes you Jews so smart?'

        'All right,' replies the Jew, 'I guess I'll have to tell you. It's

     because we eat the head of the whitefish.'

        'Well, if that's the secret,' says the Gentile, 'then I can be as

     smart as you are.'

        'That's right,' says the Jew, 'And in fact, I happen to have an

     extra whitefish head with me. You can have it for five kopecks.'

        The Gentile pays for the fish head and begins to eat. An hour

     later the train stops at a station for a few minutes. The Gentile

     leaves the train and comes back. 'Listen, Jew,' he says, 'You sold

     me that whitefish head for five kopecks. But I just saw a whole

     whitefish at the market for three kopecks.'

        'See,' replies the Jew, 'You're getting smarter already.'"

        [NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 91]

 

"Not surprisingly," note William Novak and Moshe Waldoks about the above joke, "anti-goyism is rarely stressed in public discussions of Judaism ... But centuries of hostility between Gentiles and Jews have led to a large body of aggressive and unpleasant feelings on both sides." [NOVAK/WALDOKS, p. 91] Another extremely disturbing joke circulated in Jewish circles (one directly paralleling the vicious "Too bad Hitler didn't get all the Jews" tone) is noted by Jewish authors Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, who cite the work of Jewish psychoanalyst Theodore Reik:

     "Reik explains Jewish wit as a safety valve that transforms perceived hostility
     toward non-Jews in a manner designed to reduce the danger of retaliation.
     Sometimes, however, Jewish jokes (told, of course, among Jews only) reveal
     the anger quite directly:
          'Little Moritz sees an historical film showing the early persecutions
          of the Christians. During a Roman circus scene in which many
          Christians are thrown to the lions, Moritz breaks out in sobs and
          says to his mother: 'Look at that poor lion there, it has not got
          any Goy to eat!' Under the guise of duty for the neglected beast
          is an old hatred and repressed cruelty towards Gentiles. It breaks
          through here, surprisingly, and reaches the emotional surface.'"
          [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 122]

While such Jewish defamations of the non-Jew, as part of the Jewish world view, identity, and folk history, are never foregrounded for popular analysis and discussion, Jewish attacks upon Gentile writings about Jews is omnipresent. Another Jewish attacker of T.S. Eliot, Anthony Julius, has recently published an entire volume assailing the non-Jewish author: T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Among the most hated Eliot lines, again, by Jews, are from the pre-World War I poem, "Gerontion":

      My house is a decayed house

      And the jew squats on the window

            sill, the owner

      Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp

      Blistered in Brussels, patched and

            peeled in London.

 

"[This] passage," declares Julius, "breathes hate ... The words (squat, sill, spawned, estaminet, blistered, etc.) intimate is 'spit' ... spitting at the Jew in this opening stanza is one of the few moments of passion in a poem that is animated by despair and exasperation ... " [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 332]

 

For Julius, Eliot's image of a Jew who "squats at the window" is not only an image of being spit at, but also equated in Julius' mind with defecation. "'Going to write to the Jews,'" explains Julius, "was slang in France for announcing a trip to the lavatory." [KATZ, D. p. 11] Elsewhere, says the Jewish critic, Eliot evinced "indifference to Jewish pain" and edited a journal that had an unsigned review of a book about claims about the murder of Jews in Dachau. Among other things, the questionable review wondered why Jews, "among all unfortunates of the world, have a first claim on our compassion and help."  "Here," says reviewer David Katz (himself Jewish), "Julius makes his most serious charge, suggesting that Eliot promoted the Holocaust by disputing the claims made by the victims." [KATZ, D, p. 11]

 

Ultimately, notes Katz, "Eliot's is a talent Julius cannot fully grasp outside of anti-Semitism. Julius has little patience for our appreciation of the supple ways of Modernism, linking its conscious fragmentation to an irrationality that courts anti-Semitism ... He finds Browning's 'Rabbi Ben Ezra' a superior poetic monologue to [Eliot's] 'Gerontion' solely because the former evinces a more favorable attitude toward Jews." [KATZ, D, p. 11]

 

Another of the recent articles defaming Eliot, by Norma Rosen, reflects the same dictatorial idea, i.e., whoever criticizes Jews is by definition an anti-Semite and, hence, by this sole criteria, a bad artist. "It falls to those," says Rosen, "who are willing to risk it (not only Jews, one hopes) to protest to the world that a writer cannot be great so long as anti-Semitism mars the work." [ROSEN, p. 14] (This kind of censorship -- if the author has ever in his/her life criticized Jews, all artwork from, or regarding, the artist is deemed qualitatively marred -- was echoed in 2002 at the Academy Awards. Jewish online journalist Matt Drudge featured a report about a film nominated for a number of Oscars. The movie, A Beautiful Mind, is based upon the life of mathematical genius John Nash, who, according to the book upon which the film is based, was extremely critical of Jews. "The root of all evil, as far as my personal life is concerned (life history) are Jews," Nash is quoted as writing. The prospect of an Oscar for the film now seemed doomed. "Three Academy members have come forward to reveal how they've switched their votes," reported Drudge. "Why am I voting for this Jew hater?' a veteran Acadmy Award member said earlier this week before voting. 'I am a Jew! I fell sick to my stomach.") [DRUDGE, 3-5-02; DRUDGE 3-9-02]

 

Jewish fanaticism in defaming non-Jewish literary traditions in a fine-toothed combing for anti-Semitism is noted by H. M. Daleski in his review of S. S. Prawer's volume about (non-Jewish) British author William Thackeray:

 

        "In Israel at Vanity Fair, S. S. Prawer deals exhaustively -- and

        exhaustingly -- with the representation of Jews in Thackeray's writings.

        This includes all the writings, not only the author's many published

        books but also his manifold work as a journalist and his private letters.

        In addition, since Thackeray was a considerable illustrator and

        illustrated many of his own writings -- not to mention the sketches that

        he included in many of his letters -- Prawer provides numerous

        reproductions of his drawings of Jews ... [Prawer] quotes copiously

        and leaves us feeling reasonably certain that there is no mention of a

        Jew or an allusion to anything Jewish, no matter how recondite, that has

        escaped his capacious net ... The amount of material accumulated is so

        overwhelming that one might be led to suppose that Thackeray was

        obsessed with Jews; in fact most of the references, especially in the

        novels, are incidental, and when one comes across them in context,

        they do not draw quite the same attention to themselves." [DALESKI,

        p. 223-224]

 

How about the great Russian novelist, Doestoevsky (of Crime and Punishment fame)? A French Jew, David Goldstein, denounced him as an anti-Semite in a book called Doestoevsky and the Jews. American Jewish scholar Gary Morson also expressed concern, saying that "it disturbed me that almost no one talked about [Doestoevsky's] anti-Semitism." Yet Morson also criticized Goldstein, saying,

 

       "I was struck by how Goldstein handled the fact that earlier in his life

        Doestoevsky wrote in defense of the Jews. For me, such a turn of

        events raised the question of what made Doestoevsky change his mind,

        but for Goldstein, who began with the assumption that anti-Semitism is

        innate and that Doestoevsky was an anti-Semite 'a-priori,' the articles on

        behalf of Jews were dismissed as hypocritical, a devious attempt to

        appeal to liberals. Goldstein's model of anti-Semitism as a sort of

        congenital disease ... itself seemed perilously close to prejudice."

        [MORSON, p. 82]

 

More recently, Russian novelist and famous Soviet prisoner and refugee (to America) from communism, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, also is branded by some as an anti-Semite. Under particular scrutiny is Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheels, a novel based on historical fact, that described a Jewish assassin and financial sponsor of V.I. Lenin in less than flattering terms. "The facts are true," says Israeli scholar Abram Ben Yakov, in reviewing the book, " but the glue between them is anti-Semitic." [i.e., descriptions of the characters] [SINGER, N., p. 2]  Solzhenitsyn had come under Jewish investigation for "anti-Semitism" as early as 1972, when the Zionist journal, Midstream, published an article by Mark Perakh. Perakh, said the New York Times, felt that "a disproportionately large number of unattractive Jews appear in his work." Among those defending Solzhenitsyn against attack was his wife, Natalia, who is half-Jewish. [GRENIER, R., 11-13-85, p. C21]

 

French playwright and novelist Jean Genet?  "Whether or not Genet is an anti-Semite," says Edith Wyschogrod, "... comes to the fore in the content of the Arab-Israeli conflict in [his] Prisoner of Love. In teaching Genet, it will not do simply to cordon off bigotry and condemn it; rather, one must show how it seeps into his aesthetic." [Wyschogrod, p. 256]    

 

The work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger is also dismissed by many Jews as, ultimately, the expressions of a closet Nazi. "Jewish philosophy," says Robert Gibbs,  "... disavows Heidegger, seeing him a Nazi, even if a somewhat idiosyncratic one. It suspects that his philosophy was comfortable to Nazism, if not actually inclined to it." [GIBBS, p. 157] The Jewish philosopher Wittgenstein? There are some who think he too had an "anti-Semitic" streak. [SZABADOS, B., 3-99, p. 1-27]

In 2002, lobbyists succeeded in banning the Muslim holy book, the Koran (Quran), from the Los Angeles school system. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

     "Los Angeles city school officials have pulled nearly 300 translations of the
     Koran from school libraries after learning that commentary in the books was
     derogatory towards Jews. Copies of 'The Meaning of the Holy Quran' were
     donated in December to the Los Angeles Unified School District by a local
     Muslim foundation ... On Monday, [Jim] Konantz [director of information
     technology for the district] received a complaint from a history teacher who
     concluded some of the book's footnotes were anti-Semitic."
     [SMITH, D., 2-7-02]

 

With the modern world so hypersensitive to Jewish themes, in 1999, an eighth grader in Pennsylvania was even suspended from school for a week for turning in a fantasy paper about another planet entitled "Jewpiter," described by teachers as a "racist essay." The student denied that the paper was intended to be anti-Semitic and his outraged family launched a lawsuit against the school. [DUFFY, 4-27-99] In January 2000, a high school basketball coach at Seminole Presbyterian High School was fined $150 by the Florida High School Activities Association for violating a rule against the "use of profanity or other such gutter language by a coach." Coach Jan Bennett's reputed offense to officials was to say, "You can't line people up like Hitler did to the Jews during the Holocaust." [PURKS, S., 1-27-2000, p. 10C]

 

How about the world of visual art? Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton, in reviewing Degas' painting entitled "At the Stock Exchange," says

 

      "If this picture doesn't equate secretive, clever, and vulgar financial

      scheming with 'Jew,' I've never seen a picture that does." [LIPTON, p.

      289]

 

Even a Jewish author in England, Chaim Bermant, was taken aback by a fellow Jew's search for anti-Semitism in some paintings by John Singer Sergeant, saying,

 

        "Kathleen Adler, for example, in an essay on John Singer Sergeant,

        would have us believe that he was an anti-Semite because of his

        portraits of a Jewish art dealer, Asher Wertheimer, and family were less

        than flattering: Wertheimer is represented as looking slightly off to

        the side, in a manner which hints at furtiveness. This portrait could be

        and, indeed, often was, regarded as the very image of the stereotype

        of the rich Jew, excessively flashy and, since art dealing was viewed

        only slightly above money-lending, probably of somewhat dubious

        honesty. She points to the cigar in his hand and believes that it

        'indicates not only wealth but also vulgarity and sexuality,' and has

        similar misgivings about the portraits of his wife and daughters. The

        fact that they were a true likeness seems to be an irrelevance."

        [BERMANT, p. 7]

In 2001, Jewish lobbying groups expressed outrage that Swedish cartoonist Lars Hillersberg had received a governmental lifetime stipend. Nominated for the honor by the Swedish National Board of Artists, Hillersberg was declared by "Jewish community leaders" to be an anti-Semite. "I hate Jews," Hillersberg had once remarked, "but not only Jews -- I hate everybody." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 2-16-01, p. 7]

Classical music? Wagner is a given. How about Johann Sebastian Bach, particularly his masterpiece St. John Passion. As the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine noted in 2001:

     The idea that [Bach] and his St. John Passion may be anti-Judaic (against the
     religion, as opposed to the race) surfaced five years ago at Swarthmore
     College, and now seems clearly verified five years later by the academic
     community, as spelled out in a Temple University Jewish Studies-sponsored
     panel ... Even if the piece is only momentarily offensive -- the general
     opinion, and one with which I agree -- some in the financially fragile
     early-music world may not want to present it, for fear of protests
     already seen in some cities." [STEARNS, D., 2-27-01]

The witch hunt bandwagon to find anti-Semites, and the search to smear the dead, are so great that in 2000 a Chicago-based librarian sent the following query to a Jewish-led discussion about anti-Semitism on the Internet:

     "I am a reference librarian at a public library. My patron is an artist and
       amateur researcher who has been studying the work of French artist
       Marcel Duchamp. She believes she's discovered anti-Semitic references
       and images in his work, and she wants to know if anyone else has ever
       commented on this. Is there any evidence indicating that Duchamp was
       anti-Semitic or a Nazi sympathizer? I've looked through our holdings on
       Duchamp and checked a few article databases to no avail." [SLOANE, P.,
       10-27-00]

Alas, none of the scholars on the subject could help her (yet).

 

"The dilemma of appreciating the art of an anti-Semite," says Bernard Raskas, "is a matter that confronts every thinking Jew. Chopin, Degas, Kant, Rodin, Joseph Campbell, Ronald Dahl, etc., displayed forms of anti-Semitism." [RASKAS, p. 6]  And what of Jewish betrayers and works of art that celebrate Christian themes? "Should we play and listen to the works of Mendelsohn and Mahler, both of whom converted to Christianity? Should we conduct and play Handel's [Christian] Messiah? Should Shakespeare not be read because Shylock has entered the English vocabulary as an anti-Semitic word? Should Israelis stop using [German-made] Mercedes cars as taxis and American Jews refrain from driving Volkswagens? Ambiguities abound." [RASKAS, p. 11]

 

Ultimately, if aforementioned Jewish critics like E. L. Dachslager really want to censor all literature that criticizes Jewry, and others like Rosen want to at least demote them from greatness to unread obscurity, entire libraries will have to be burned down and/or trucked to inaccessible warehouses. Not only literature but American and world history will have to be totally reshaped  (as is happening) to accommodate an image entirely flattering to Jews. The problem is that some of the greatest and most respected authors in American (let alone worldwide) writing, associated with the best of the American democratic tradition and progressive values, as well as some of the foremost political strugglers for American liberty, published sometimes bitter condemnations about the facts of self-absorbed Jewish particularism and behavior.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, the great American essayist of self-reliance, transcendence of the material world, and the sacredness of individual expression and self-reliance (all anathema to traditional Jewish materialist collectivism) wrote that

 

         "the sufferance which is the badge of the Jew has made him, in these

          days, the ruler of the rulers of the earth." [EMERSON, p. 39]

As Jewish scholar Robert Michael complains,"[Emerson] saw Judaism, the Jewish idea, as a stumbling block to authentic human liberation. The Jewish God was cruel; the Jewish Law stifling. What was bad about Christianity was its Jewish substance. At the less ideological level, his work is also peppered with anti-Jewish sentiments ... In his journal entry for 3 July 1839, he wrote: In the Allston Gallery the Polish Jews are an offense to me; they degrade and animalize." [MICHAEL, R., 9-7-98]

The great British poet, Lord Byron, wrote "Tis gold, not steel, that rears the conqueror's arch ... Jews ... direct the world with all the spirit of their sect." [FELDMAN, p. 638]

 

Mark Twain, whose novel Huckleberry Finn is usually regarded as a pioneering classic of interracial compassion, was solicited by the American Hebrew magazine in 1890 for his views on anti-Semitism. Twain wrote a short reply, for the most part expounding the requisite platitudes for the Jewish journal. [TWAIN, FABLES, p. 445-448] Twain elaborated more openly upon the antisemitic theme nine years later in Harper's magazine:

 

      "In the cotton states, after the [Civil] war, the simple and ignorant Negroes

      made the crops for the white planter on shares. The Jew came down in

      force, set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the Negroes on credit,

      and at the end of the season was proprietor of the Negro’s share of the

      present crop and of part of his share of the next one ... The Jew is being

      legislated out of Russia. The reason is not concealed. The movement

      was instituted because the Christian peasant and villager stood no chance

      against his commercial abilities. He was always ready to lend money on

      a crop, and sell vodka and other necessities of life on credit while the

      crop was growing. When settlement day came he owned the crop; the

      next year or year after he owned the farm ...."

 

      "In the dull and ignorant England of John's time everybody got into debt

      to the Jew. He gathered all lucrative enterprise into his hands; He was the

      king of commerce; he was ready to be helpful in a profitable way; he

      even financed the crusades for the rescue of [Christianity's Holy]

      sepulcher [from the Muslims of Jerusalem] . . ... He had to be banished

      from the realm... For the like reasons, Spain had to banish him four

      hundred years ago, and Austria about a couple of centuries later. In all

      ages Christian Europe has been obliged to curtail his activities. If he

      entered upon a mechanical trade, the Christian had to retire from it. If

      he set up as a doctor, he was the best one, and he took the business. If

      he exploited agriculture, the other farmer had to get at something else.

      Since there was no way to successfully compete with him in any

      vocation, the law had to step in to save the Christian from the

      poorhouse, even ways to get rich. This history has a very, very

      commercial look, a most sordid and practical commercial look ... I

      am convinced that the persecution of the Jew is due not in any large

      degree to religious practice. No, the Jew is a money-getter  ...  With

      precocious wisdom [the Jew] found out in the moving of time

      that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship

      power, some worship God, and that over these ideals, they dispute

      and cannot unite -- but they all worship money; so [the Jew] made

      it the end and aim of his life to get it. He was at it in Egypt thirty six

      centuries ago; he was at it in Rome when the Christian got persecuted

      by mistake for him; he has been at it ever since. The cost to him has

      been heavy; his success has made the whole human race his enemy."

      [TWAIN, Conc. p. 360-363]

 

Curiously, a Jewish scholar bends the essay from which this excerpt comes, Concerning the Jews, to his own needs for Jewish confirmation. He sees in Twain's piece "remarkable praise for Jewish characteristics and virtue while at the same time striving for balance ... What is really noteworthy about Concerning the Jews ... is its effect to make judgments based upon reliable facts rather than perceived myths." [SARNA, p. 69]

 

In the mood of the Jewish martyr-hero tradition enforced upon modern America, in 1998 the Baltimore Sun decided that its readers would be interested not only in Twain's 1898 article, but specifically an examination of whether it was anti-Semitic or not. Kenneth Lasson quotes this excerpt from Twain to conclude his own piece: "All other forces pass, but the Jews remain. What is the secret of their immortality?" [LASSON, p. 18]

 

H.G. Wells, the great British novelist and social critic, commented that

     

         "A careful study of anti-Semitism prejudice and accusations might

         be of great value to many Jews who do not realize the irritation they

         inflict."

 

The novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote:

 

           "Why humanity has hated the Jews, I have come to the conclusion, is

           that the Jews have always taken religion -- since the great days, that is

           -- and used it for their own personal and private gratification, as if it

           were a thing administered to their own importance and well-being and

           conceit ... The material world dominates them with a base kind of

           fetish domination. Yet they know the truth all the while. Yet they

           cringe their buttocks to the fetish of Mammon [money] ...."

           [GOULD, p. 225]

 

Novelist Theodore Dreiser:

 

         "He [the Jew] has been in America all of two hundred years, and he

         has not faded into a pure America by any means, and he will not.

         As I said before, he maintains his religious dogmas and his racial

         sympathies, race characteristics, and race cohesion as against all

         types of nationalities surrounding him whatsoever."  [GOULD, p. 298]

 

George Sand, the French author who skirted gender prejudice by having a male pseudonym, noted that

 

     "I saw in the 'Wandering Jew' the personification of the Jewish people,

      exiled in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, they are once again extremely

      rich, owing to their unfailing rude greediness and their indefatigable

      activity. With their hard-heartedness that they extend towards people of

      other faiths and races, they are at the point of making themselves kings

      of the world. This people can thank its obstinacy that France will be

      Judaized within fifty years. Already some wise Jews prophesy this

      frankly." [1857]

James Fenimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans) ? "His 1831 novel The Bravo: A Tale depicts Jews as usurers whose shrewdness has enabled them to survive under oppression, but he hardly makes them likeable or sympathetic characters." Other passages critical of Jews, and subject to "anti-Semitic" investigation by Jewish researchers, may be found in the work of the "phenomenally popular Mrs. E. D.E.N. Southworth" (1959) and Julia Ward Howe, mid-19th century the activist reformer. Francis M. Crawford, "one of the most successful novelists of the late nineteenth century," also describes Jewish characters in unflattering terms and merits listing in a book about anti-Semitism. [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 82-83, 88-89]

 

In 1932, in response to a request by the American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune for sympathetic commentary about Jews on the occasion of their new year, the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw lashed out, saying

 

       "The Jews are worse than my own people... Those Jews who still want

        to be the chosen race -- chosen by the late Lord Balfour -- can go to

        Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being

        Jews and start being human beings. The day of races and nations are

        over. The future belongs to the citizens of the world who know

        they are not better than other people." [SHAW, B., 1932]

 

After the death of the eminent folklorist Joseph Campbell in 1987 (widely popularized in a series of interviews with Bill Moyer for PBS TV) "at least five people" came out on record to assail him as an anti-Semite. A former Jewish student, Eve Feldman, for example, claimed that in a meeting with her in 1968 Campbell "was sweating and pacing and running his fingers through his hair. He began spewing out this garbage, about how the college was going Jewish ... He said that the Jews had ruined 20th century culture and went through a list of Jewish artists ... It was horrifying. It was like watching someone have a fit or having them vomit uncontrollably all over you." [GOULD, p. 357]

    

The great Indian pacifist, Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) said in 1938

 

        The cry for a national home for the Jews does not make much appeal

        to me ...Why should they not, like other people of the earth, make that

        country their home where they are born and where they earn their

        livelihood? ... The Palestine of Biblical conception is not a geographical

        tract. It is in their hearts ... As it is, they are co-sharers with the British

        in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. [GOULD, p.

        397] (Indian leader Nehru and Chinese communist hero Mao Tse Tung

        also criticized the Jewish state). [MARX, K. /RUNES, 1959, p. viii]

 

Even some of the most celebrated heroes of American patriotism were critical -- even caustic -- about Jews, their clannish lifestyle, and their exploitive economic practices in America. No less a patriotic political figure than the first President of the United States, George Washington, singled out Jews for contempt when they, in their speculations in American currency, undermined the fragile early economy. In one account, Washington referred to the traditionally known "tribe" of Israel, dressed in the their uniformly black Orthodox clothing, as the "tribe of black gentry." In a second criticism, he made reference to their traditional hanging of an effigy of Haman (an arch enemy of the Jews in ancient Persia), a yearly tradition everywhere for Jews at Purim.

 

     "The tribe of black gentry work more effectually against us than the

      enemy’s' arms. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties

      and the great cause we are engaged in." (1779)

 

      "It is much to be lamented, that each State, long ere this, has not

      hunted them down, as pests to society, and the greatest enemies we have

      to the happiness of America. I would to God, that some of the most

      atrocious in each state, was hung upon a gallows, five times as high

      as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment, in my opinion, is too

      great for the man who can build his greatness upon his country's ruin."

      (1778)  [SCHROEDER, p. 125-126]

 

It is astonishing that Jews, as an entity, were so noticeable for such criticism when at this time in early American history they numbered only 2500-3000 people, about one-tenth of one per cent of the population. [DANZGER, p. 19] Washington, in later years, formally passed along the expected political expediencies to the American Jewish community; some of those texts are still cited by Jewish scholars to this day as evidence that Washington appreciated Jewish contributions to early America. (A 1790 letter Washington wrote to the Jews of Rhode Island is "still studied today in Jewish religious schools as a sort of founding charter of American Jewish freedom.") [GOLDBERG, p. 83]

 

Washington's exasperations with Jews as unscrupulous profiteers, detrimental to national interests, was similarly echoed by General Ulysses S. Grant (another future President) during the Civil War. Frustrated and enraged by incessant Jewish black market economic activity in the South, particularly in cotton, Grant tried to expel Jews as a group from Tennessee in 1862, stating that "Jews as a class violate every regulation of trade established in the Treasury Department, and also department orders." [WERTHEIMER]  This attempt by Grant, to single out Jews as an entity, during the pressures of the Civil War, is today considered by Jewish scholars to be one of the most profound acts of anti-Semitism in American history. Others who made similar charges about Jews were well-known Union army generals William T. Sherman and Benjamin Butler, as well as Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. As Jewish author Michael Dobkowksi frames it:

     "It was alleged by Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusets and Generals
     Benjamin Butler, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as
     others, that Jews were engaged in passing counterfeit money; that they
     fed the inflation by charging outrageous prices; that they were driving
     well-established Christian firms out of business by using unfair competitive
     methods and generally were parasites who thrived on the misery of
     others." [DOBKOWSKI, M., 1979, p. 83]
     

As we have more than amply seen already, an exploitive Jewish history during war conditions is not uncommon. Another testament, in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of Poland, is that of Chaim Kaplan who noted the reputation of immigrant Jews in the Soviet-Polish border areas: "The bad behavior of some of our people in the border towns which were annexed to Russia has made us all hated and unwanted ... Until the storm [war conditions] should subside, they occupied themselves with all kinds of ugly speculation, which has since become their livelihood and life's work. The émigrés created an atmosphere of profiteering." [KAPLAN, C., p. 90]

 

Another historical icon of American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, in a private letter, cited the works of others as his own opinion about Jewish ethics:

 

     "Ethics were so little studied among the Jews, that, in their whole

     compilation called the Talmud, there is only one treatise on moral

     subjects. Their books of morals chiefly consisted in a minute

     enumeration of duties ... What a wretched depravity of sentiment

     and manners must have prevailed before such corrupt maxims could

     have attained credit. It is impossible to collect from these writings a

     consistent series of moral Doctrine." [CAPPON, p. 383]

 

"Moses," said Jefferson elsewhere, ".... instilled into his people the most anti-social spirit towards other nations; the other [Jesus/the Christian] preaches philanthropy and universal charity and benevolence." [GOULD, p. 75]

 

John Quincy Adams, another early American president, visited a synagogue in Amsterdam and bitterly remarked in his diary:

 

     "I am sure [the Jews in Amsterdam] are all wretched creatures for I think

      I never saw in my life such a set of miserable looking people, and they

      would steal your eyes out of your head if they could." [ADAMS, p. 59]

 

Commenting on Jewish religious identity, Thomas Paine (1737-1789), author of the famous American patriotic pamphlet Common Sense, wrote that

 

       "The character of Moses as stated in the Bible is the most horrid that

       can be imagined. If those accounts are true, he was the wretch that first

       began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretense of religion;

       and under the mask, or the infatuation, committed the most unexampled

       atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation." [GOULD, p.

       76]

 

Henry Feingold suggest that Jewish dual allegiance (to both Jewish and American identities) can be "especially vexing for the Jewish-conscious historians" who are especially numerous these days. Feingold cites traditional American folk heroes like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Ulysses S. Grant as being first and foremost, to Jewish scholars, anti-Semites, as is rendered the entire American Populist movement at the turn of the twentieth century. [FEINGOLD, p. 36-37] Famed World War II General George S. Patton? Rabbi Marvin Hier's Holocaust documentary, The Long Way Home, says the Baltimore Jewish Times, "revealed that U.S. Army Gen. George S. Patton believed Holocaust survivors should be interned in Displaced Person camps. 'People did not know that Patton wrote in his diary that Jews are the lowest of the low and have to be kept behind barbed wire,' [Hier] said.'" [HIRSCH, R., 4-24-98, p. 38]

 

Throw Thomas Edison into the list. Although author Neil Baldwin's "editor thought Baldwin dwelled on Edison's relationship with Jews too much" in his book about the great American inventor, all of the Jewish-related material remained. Edison, says Baldwin, had a "Shylock complex" about Jews. "I wish," wrote Edison, "they would all quit making money." [EZOR, p. 46]

 

Modern Jewish anti-"anti-Semitic" discourse insists that all such historical and critical commentary should never be put to the test of open evidential debate but, rather, that such criticism is merely part of baseless, groundless, and irrational prejudice. It should therefore, the argument goes, not be seen in the first place; it is best, in fact, forbidden.

 

This attitude of free speech suppression is exemplified these days, in an institutional sense, by one of the best known and most powerful Jewish lobbying organizations, the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, which, in the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, waged "a campaign pressuring Internet Service providers to censor the Web page of right wing hate groups housed on their servers." [ACLU, Internet ONLINE, 1996] What exactly, one wonders, is a "right wing hate group?" Who decides its definition to bar their contribution to critical exchange? Would the former criticisms of Jews by Mark Twain, George Washington, and George Bernard Shaw rate as "right wing hate" material? If so, would we have to conclude that everything else they had to say was no doubt subtly contaminated by "hate" too? Does the Wiesenthal Center "hate" anybody? Would its director, an Orthodox rabbi named Marvin Hier, censor the great Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, when he called traditional Jewry "a hating people?"  What would Rabbi Hier say when publicly confronted with some of the most vile material in the Talmud? Should that be kept off the Internet? Should it be banned? Don't people have the right to explore all facts and opinions available to decide their own? Isn't that the most intelligent way to come to an opinion in the first place? Isn't it the beauty of the Internet that, by its very unedited nature, it has the potential to be a democratic forum of profound proportions?  

 

One of the Wiesenthal Center's stock-in-trades is a kind of Inquisition against whatever it defines as anti-Semitism.  High priority (by the Wiesenthal Center and virtually all other Jewish "watchdog" groups) are the so-called "Holocaust Deniers" espousing "Holocaust revisionism." Often (but not always) right-wingers, Holocaust deniers argue that the Jewish Holocaust is a conspiratorial myth and never (or in minor form) happened. Whatever the merits of their arguments, one would presume that they would have, in a free society, the right to state their case and then be thoroughly discredited in the open exchange of contesting evidence. Not so. The Wiesenthal Center, and other Jewish lobbying organizations, and sometimes non-Jewish sympathizers, have largely succeeded in internationally censoring them. (The Wiesenthal Center even had the audacity in 2001 to "initiate an international campaign to have YMCAs around the world stop funding the world center." Why does this Jewish lobbying group seek to fulfill anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and economically break a Christian organization? Because the YMCA's world center in Geneva dared to indict the state of Israel in a report for its "oppression" of Palestinians.) [WOHLGELERNTER, E., 2-16-01, p. 1A]

 

"Holocaust denial is not a serious scholarly debate," Antony Polansky, a Jewish professor and Holocaust survivor told a campus audience, "This is a new form of hate propaganda. This is not a form of first amendment issue." [RESPONSE, SPRING, 1994, p. 7]  Jewish critic Mary Lefkokwitz noted the case of a Northwestern University engineering professor, Earl Butz (author of a volume on the Holocaust entitled The Hoax of the Twentieth Century), in 1996:  "It is entirely appropriate that a professor's use of university property, even of something as tangential as a website, should come under scrutiny, if that professor uses it for the purpose of disseminating nonhistorical information as is claimed in the current controversy about a professor's placing of Holocaust denial propaganda on the Northwestern University website." [LEFKOWITZ, p. 186]

 

In 1994, Yale, Brown, and Harvard University were among those universities that refused to print an ad in the campus paper by "The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust." A few colleges did run the ad. Portland's major daily, The Oregonian, published the ad and ended up under Jewish assault, eventually apologizing for its decision. [RESPONSE, SPRING, 1994, p. 7]   In 1996 David Irving, an alleged  "holocaust denier," had a manuscript, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, accepted for publication at St. Martin's Press. Described by one reviewer as "soft pedaling ... German blame for the treatment of Jews," under massive Jewish pressure the publisher reversed its decision to produce the volume. [RESPONSE, SPRING, p. 1996, p. 12]

 

In Canada, "Jewish pressure" sought, via trials in 1985 and 1988, to send Ernst Zundel to prison for publishing a pamphlet that claimed the Holocaust never happened. [DERSHOWITZ, p. 171]  "Zundel was convicted in Toronto in 1988," notes the Toronto Star, "of spreading false news but the conviction was declared unconstitutional in 1992 by the Supreme Court of Canada." [TORONTO STAR, 4-18-95, p. A3] "Zundel -- producer of a British-based writing called Did the Six Million Really Die? -- was actually tried twice "on the charge of publishing views he knew to be false." [BAIN, p. 45] The first trial was well covered by the Canadian news media and afforded Zundel widespread publicity. "Media coverage," noted Sherri Aikenhead in MacLean's magazine, "was so intense that it provoked fierce arguments -- particularly among Jewish activists -- about whose interests the reports served." [AIKENHEAD, p. 44] For the second Zundel trial, none of the Canadian national news agency's 100 member newspapers covered the story. "What is curious," wrote George Bain in a MacClean's editorial, "is the quickness and near unanimity with which the media managers insist that no representations to them, no feeling of pressure, affected their editorial decisions on how to play -- or play down -- the second Zundel trial. Curiously, only Ian Urquhart of the [Toronto] Star, the newspaper that (though 'judiciously,' as he puts it) covered the second trial throughout, acknowledged that he received representatives from the Jewish community about publicizing Zundel's hateful views." [BAIN, p. 45]  Because of Jewish lobbying efforts, an El Paso, Texas, radio station cancelled its contract Zundel, and dropped his program there, "Voice of Freedom," [RESPONSE, Spring 1994] as did cable station in California. (Haters of Zundel succeeded in burning his house down).