The first writer known to have made the outrageous accusation of ritual cannibalism against the Jews was a pagan Greek named Apion. But it was the Christians who established prejudice against and hatred for Jews as a fixture of Western civilization. The Christians’ animus against the Jews derived from the idea that “the Jews” had rejected and betrayed Jesus of Nazareth, engineering the Crucifixion. This was a charge originating in the embittered early relations between what were essentially two closely-intertwined religious communities (indeed, for at least a generation and perhaps a bit more the Christians were seen—and saw themselves—as merely one sect within Judaism; the definitive break only occurred after A.D. 70). Litvinoff in fact does not do as much as he could in discussing the complicated issues surrounding the Trial of Jesus. He might have pointed out that the Sanhedrin were hated collaborators with the Roman provincial administration (which could appoint—and dismiss—its membership); that Pontius Pilate was only the first of a very long line of tough Roman officials who saw the representatives of Christianity (rightly!) as troublemakers; and that even in the Gospel of John it is merely the High Priests and their flacks, not the Jewish populace as a whole, who are violently opposed to Jesus (see John 19:6). But Litvinoff does vividly point out the paradox of Christians consistently persecuting the ethnic group into which the Savior had been born: thus when the Rabbi Solomon Halevi was baptized in Spain in 1391 he adopted the name Pablo de Santa Maria because, as a member of the Levite clan, he claimed direct and literal descent from the family of the Holy Virgin.
Still, under the Christian governments of Europe down to the French Revolution, Jews were despised and penalized basically for what they did not believe, not for what they were. This meant that Jews could save themselves from persecution (which involved anything from extra taxation to mass expulsion to death via pogrom) by the simple act of converting publicly to Christianity. Many did precisely that. Meanwhile, certain popes sought to restrain the most virulent outbreaks of popular anti-Jewish hysteria. Hence Clement VI in 1348 dismissed as ludicrous the accusation that the Jews were spreading the Black Plague by poisoning Christian wells: he pointed out in a special decree that many Jews were dying of the Plague, while at the same time the Plague was spreading through countries uninhabited by Jews.
The Enlightenment of the 18th century went a long way toward defusing Christian hostility toward Jews on the basis of religion. (The same was true of Jewish hostility toward Christians: Litvinoff, ever balanced in his presentation, minces no words about this.) By the 1780’s the government of Louis XVI was organizing a literary competition on the subject “How to Make the Jews Happier [!] and More Useful in France.” In Germany in this same period the emblematic figure was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (grandfather of the composer). As an associate of the poet Gotthold Lessing, the real founder of German humanism, Mendelssohn proved the power of Jewish intellect once released from the bonds of the Christian-imposed ghetto. Mendelssohn is one of Litvinoffs heroes, and understandably so.
The 19th century was even better. In Western Europe the Jews were emancipated from the social penalties they had endured for hundreds of years, and were allowed to enter the mainstream of society for the first time. The impact of their arrival—in every field from commerce to political science to art and literature—was enormous. Yet the 19th century also witnessed the rise of pseudoscientific racist nationalism, a threat to the Jews far more deadly than Christian persecution or distaste. Racist nationalism, like its contemporary, radical communism, was in fact a desperate attempt to recapture the primeval sense of community that was being pitilessly torn asunder in the 19th century by capitalism, the greatest engine of social change and individual freedom. And with both racist nationalism and radical communism, the fevered search for primeval unity (of “nation” or “class”) led inevitably to the massacre of those designated as “outside the family.”
Hence the 19th century—”the Century of Progress”—paved the way, for the Jews, to the Holocaust. Nor did assimOation help. For now the problem was not, as earlier, what the Jews did not believe, or what they wore, or the way they spoke: it was what the Jews ineradicably were, namely (in racist eyes) “an inferior breed of Asiatics . . . condemned from birth” who threatened to infect the “purity” of the various European communities. Litvinoff carefully (and rightly) distinguishes medieval Christian anti- Semitism from this new form, for from this new form there could be no escape; any Jew—a poet, a scientist, a war hero, a totally assimilated descendant of a convert to Christianity—remained a “virus” that had to be expunged.
Europe, both medieval and modern, thus turned out to be a nightmare for the Jews. Nor has the post-Holocaust return to the Middle East, the refounding of the Land of Israel, turned out to be more than a qualified success at best, according to Litvinoff. There, the initial political-military problem of threatened destruction and genocide at the hands of the Arabs has been, for the moment, surmounted. But it has been replaced by a hideously ironic moral problem: Jewish control, by right of conquest, over a huge non-Jewish population that remains fundamentally hostile. This has already led to calls from some quarters for the expulsion of that non-Jewish population, in the name of Jewish “purity.”
In Litvinoffs view, in fact, there is only one region in the entire world where the Jews have actually been able to attain peace and almost total fulfillment: in America. Litvinoff rightly emphasizes that Jewish upward mobility and the ease of Jewish merging into the mainstream of American life was facilitated most by two facts not of the Jews but of the United States: first, the Constitution, which explicitly forbade official state discrimination on the basis of religion, and second, the fact that in America the Jews found a society that was already made up of a great variety of different groups, a polyglot society where the issue of “national purity,” if not absent, was greatly defused (at least as far as the white population was concerned). The result of all these factors has been that the Jewish experience in America has been the happiest Jewish experience of any society on earth.
And yet . . . there has recently emerged a new paradox. It is only in America in the post-Holocaust period that anti-Semitism has developed from a base of true populist mythology—found in the black community. In 1988 we witnessed Louis Farrakhan being invited by black college students throughout the country to come to their campuses to deliver his anti-Jewish diatribes (including the charge that evil Jewish businessmen were behind the drug problem in the black community). And in 1988 we also witnessed the incredible spectacle of an assistant to the black mayor of Chicago publicly accusing Jewish doctors of injecting AIDS into black babies: a return to the paranoid fantasies of the 14th century. Blacks, who have long served as scapegoats in American society, seem to have found a scapegoat of their own. I suspect that the sad story so well told by Barnet Litvinoff is not quite finished.
[The Burning Bush: Anti-Semitism and World History, by Barnet Litvinoff (New York: E.P. Button) 457 pp., $22.50]
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