Why the Jews? continued...

The anti-Judaism inherited in the modern West through Christian channels was a combination of suspicion of the stranger with a very specific and very dangerous religious tint. Modern European anti-Judaism was continuous with the old Christian dread but took a radical turn within the invention of racialism in the 19th century. There was no racism in the old Christian anti-Judaism. In what must strike us as an irony, the 18th-century Enlightenment gave Jews the rights of citizenship while the new Nationalism in the 19th questioned Jewish loyalty. The rising nations of the West had their question: Are you one of us? Are you from our stock—or are you a lesser sort of human being? Politically, the implementation of the Enlightenment was equality and class integration … but at a price: cultural assimilation. And so, there arose the threat of elimination of  Judaism at the very moment of the Jews’ political and social freedom. In the United States, assimilationist pressures were reduced by the invention of several new Judaisms that allowed them to belong to a Jewish community and be more or less integrated into the new American land of promise. Like Catholics, Jews in America found ways of having their cake and eating it too.

In the Enlightenment and in the industrial and financial revolutions of the 19th century what did European gentiles see? They saw Jews doing very well by social and economic measures. In spite of their reputation for traditionalism, they seemed a quintessential modern people. Many Jews were deeply moved by the egalitarianism and universalism of the Enlightenment ideals, and, so, headed in the direction of socialism and Marxism—both of which also transcended nationalism and demanded egalitarian community, at least in theory. Both Catholics and Jews had trouble with the Enlightenment and modernity. Catholics struggled with the ideology of modernity and its threat to hierarchy and traditionalism, the result being the Fortress Church of Pius IX  and Pius X, while Jews fought among themselves, trying to defend their families and synagogues against assimilationist and nationalist pressures. In fact, looking back now, it seems that Fortress Catholicism and Jewish Orthodoxy had more in common than they knew, especially in their responses to modernity.  

Modernity hit the Jewish communities with some basic questions: What is Judaism and who is a Jew? What is essential to the community’s life? Is Judaism a dispersed nation—a nation spread out among the nations? Is it a faith? Does Judaism demand certain basic beliefs? Is it mainly a religion—or a social practice and a particular form of memory? Or, is it a new and mysterious thing: a race? In Christendom there was only one human race, descended from Adam and Eve, with the particularities of peoples in that race constituted by sin, by historical accident and the grace of God. But in modernity, “race” was a matter of blood, and there was no human race embracing all.

In the 19th century, biblical monogenesis was taken to be superstition and the Genesis account of human origins was discounted. And so there were human races: Caucasian, Aryan, Negroid, Asian and Jewish. Were the Jews after all a race and, if so, just how human were they?

Hitler, a racist among racialists, was quite sure that they were in fact a race and one so inferior to the Aryan race that they were to be denied humanity altogether. Jews were untermenschen. They could have no national identity and, since they were not Aryans, they could not belong to the German nation. They were to be extruded. They were “cosmopolitan” and so posed a threat to nations which demanded loyalty based on blood. They were not a religion, but a race, which, by their mongrel racial status, threatened the purity of the higher races.

Hitler added an element from his reading in the arcane and esoteric literature of anti-Judaism, including the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.* To complete his myth of struggle between the highest and the lowest in the list of races he added the belief that Jews made two great historical incursions into Western culture in order to destroy it. According to Hitler, once in the advent of Christianity in the Roman Empire and once again in the form of Soviet Bolshevism, Jews assaulted Western culture under a guise. Christianity, the Catholic Church especially, is a gentile form of Judaism. So also the Russian revolution was fomented and led by Jews. He believed both of these must also be destroyed if Aryans are to achieve their proper racial ascendancy. 

Hitler was an obsessional racist, not just in theory but in practice. He took pride in distinguishing himself from the Romantic anti-Judaism of the likes of Richard Wagner whose essay on “the Jewish problem” he appreciated and whose music he adored. While Wagner was a Romantic anti-Judaist, Hitler thought himself thoroughly modern and practical. Wagner thought and worried about the Jews while Hitler himself acted. He killed Jews by the millions. Hitler did reach well over six million Jews—plus homosexuals and gypsies and a couple of million Soviet captives and a million or so Polish Catholics. And this figure does not include the 20 million Soviet citizens he killed in Operation Barbarossa, and the millions more untermenschen he killed in Central and Western Europe. He didn’t kill all the Poles. He ignored some of the homosexuals and some gypsies. But he wanted to kill every Jew alive. So deep was his hatred that his last words, addressed to the leaders of the West, were a plea to finish the destruction of Jews which he had begun.
 
Hitler answered the question, Why the Jews? by identifying Jews as a racial virus that undermines every facet of genuine culture, economy and religious devotion. They must be exterminated if the human races are to survive and prosper, he believed. Thus, the “real” (Nazi) history is the story of the struggle of the highest of humanity (Aryans) against the lowest (Jews).

So we are faced with two quite distinct answers to the question, Why the Jews? The historian’s answer and Hitler’s answer. The historian’s response is that anti-Judaism in the West combines xenophobia with the Christian charge of deicide. Hitler’s response is expressed in an elaborate theory of race with a veneer of Manichaean apocalyticism.
 
Permit me to add a comment of my own: I have told you why I went to Yad Vashem and something of what I saw and heard there. I sketched out why Hitler did the unspeakable, and touched on what that had to do with the Christian history of anti-Judaism. As I stood at the Wall and felt the Presence of the Holy One, so I stood in the museum at Yad Vashem and felt nothing but the absence of life and being—the black hole at the heart of humanity pulling life and being into nothing. What is there to be understood about that? It is absurd, a brute fact and nothing more. But I haven’t found a satisfactory answer to my question. I still don’t know, “Why the Jews?”  Maybe I should have asked, “Why the Nazis?”