Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present

326 Pages·2002·1.383 MB·English

by  Marvin Perry, Frederick M. Schweitzer

PRAISE FOR ANTISEMITISM:
“This book is timely, useful, and admirably readable. Its voice needs to be heard.”
—Michael R. Marrus, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of
Holocaust Studies and Dean of the Graduate School,
University of Toronto
“A lucidly written work that reminds us that Man’s myth-making propensity
lives side by side with his rationality.”
—Henry L. Feingold, Board of Directors of the Center for Jewish History
“[A] tour de force [that] follows upon the late Edward H. Flannery’s ground-
breaking classic, The Anguish of the Jews.”
—John Pawlikowski, O. S. M., President, International Council
of Christians and Jews, Journal of Ecumenical Studies
“[W]ell-written and insightful... well researched and quite worthwhile.”
—Leonard Dinnerstein, Church History
“A substantial, comprehensive, and updated historical survey of the main anti-
semitic myths.”
—Leon Volovici, Antisemitism International
“Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present by Marvin Perry and
Frederick Schweitzer tells a story that must be confronted and overcome. Times
such as these put the Perry-Schweitzer book on the required reading list.”
—Editorial, Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Perry and Schweitzer navigate the history of anti-Semitism with a firm hand,
utilizing the latest scholarship and confronting controversial issues without fear.”
—Library Journal
“An extensive and informative survey and analysis of anti-Semitic myths...
Antisemitismshould be found upon the Judaic Studies shelves of every college
and community library in the country.”
—Midwest Book Review
“[The authors] have rendered an invaluable service... explor[ing] and
expos[ing]... anti-Semitism, a perennial plague of Western civilization.”
—Rabbi Israel Zoberman, The Virginian Pilot
“A wonderful read on a poignant topic. Highly recommended.”
—Zev Garber, Perspectives
“[A]n invaluable guide through the torturous maze of myth and lies propa-
gated by antisemites throughout the ages.”
—Anna Dogole, The Jewish Eye
“[A]n important contribution to the dialogue and the literature on the subject.”
—Chauncey Mabe,Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
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ANTISEMITISM
Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present
Marvin Perry and
Frederick M. Schweitzer
ANTISEMITISM
Copyright © Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, 2002.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in hardcover in 2002 by Palgrave Macmillan
First PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ paperback edition: August 2005
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Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
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and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-4039-6893-7 ISBN 978-1-4039-7912-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403979124
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perry, Marvin.
Antisemitism : myth and hate from antiquity to the present / Marvin Perry and
Frederick M. Schweitzer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Anti-Jewish propaganda—History. 2. Antisemitism—History.
3. Christianity and antisemitism. 4. Blood accusation. 5. Holocaust
denial. I. Schweitzer, Frederick M. II. Title.
DS145 .P415 2002
305.892’4—dc21
2002022035
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Letra Libre, Inc.
First PALGRAVE MACMILLAN paperback edition: August 2005
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface to the Paperback Edition vi
Preface xvii
Introduction 1
1. The Trial and Death of Jesus: The Myth of “Christ Killers”
and the “Criminal People” 17
2. Ritual Murderers: Christian Blood and Jewish Matzohs 43
3. The Diabolization of Jews: Demons, Conspirators,
and Race Defilers 73
4. Homo Judaicus Economicus:The Jew as Shylock, Parasite,
and Plutocrat 119
5. Denying the Holocaust: A Neo-Nazi Mythology 175
6. Antisemitic Myths Blackwashed: The Nation of Islam
Inherits a Devil 213
Conclusion 259
Appendix I Jewish-Muslim Relations in History 265
Appendix II Canada’s Attempts to Curb Ernst Zündel’s Antisemitic
Actions as a Public Danger 269
Notes 279
Index 303
PREFACE TO THE
PAPERBACK EDITION
In researching and writing Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the
Present, it was our intention to discuss the evolution, nature, and meaning of
historic and contemporary antisemitic myths that have denigrated Jews and
Judaism. While relying on the best scholarship, we tried to make the book ac-
cessible to students and the general reader. Since its publication in December
2002, Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Presenthas received nu-
merous favorable reviews, none more pleasing to us than Derek H. Davis’
generous assessment in The Journal of Church and State(9/2003):
In spite of the thousands of books that one can read on antisemitism, it is
often difficult to find a book suitable for students that describes lucidly and
competently antisemitic delusions and myths as both a logical absurdity and
also a force that has shaped much of the history of the last two thousand
years. This book qualifies in these respects unlike any book I have ever seen. I
am confident that others will find it similarly useful.
Reviewers’ comments, recent literature in the field, and current outbreaks
of antisemitism, have led us to rethink sections of our work. We welcome the
opportunity in this preface to the paperback edition to provide a brief after-
word to some of the major themes treated in the book. In presenting the sensi-
tive topic of the relationship of Christian antisemitism with the Holocaust, we
took the position that a distinction has to be drawn between traditional Chris-
tian antisemitism, which attributed the evilness of Jews to their religion and
sought their conversion, and racial nationalism, which claimed that Jews, even
those who had converted to Christianity, were indelibly stained by their genes.
Nevertheless, along with other scholars, we concluded that centuries of Chris-
tian denigration and persecution of Jews had led many Europeans to accept at
face value the Nazi myth that Jews were inherently evil. In particular the two-
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION vii
thousand year old myth of deicide had poisoned the minds of Christians with
hatred against Jews, a necessary precondition for genocide. The Nazis cleverly
exploited this myth in their school curriculum. In one story assigned to ele-
mentary school children a peasant mother standing in front of a roadside
shrine to Christ says to her three children:
Children look here! The man who hangs on the Cross was one of the greatest
enemies of the Jews of all times. He knew the Jews in all their corruption and
meanness. Once he drove the Jews out with a whip, because they were carry-
ing on their money dealings in the Church. He called the Jews killers of men
from the beginning. By that he meant that the Jews in all times have been
murderers. He said further to the Jews: Your father is the Devil! Do you
know, children, what that means? It means that the Jews descend from the
Devil. And because they descend from the Devil, they live like devils. So they
commit one crime after another. Because this man knew the Jews, because He
proclaimed the truth to the world, He had to die. Hence the Jews murdered
Him. They drove nails through his hands and feet and let Him slowly bleed.
In such a horrible way the Jews took their revenge. And in a similar way they
have killed many others who had the courage to tell the truth about the Jews.
Always remember these things, children. When you see the Cross, think of
the terrible murder by the Jews on Golgotha. Remember that the Jews are
children of the Devil and human murderers.1
The recent furor over Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, has
focused renewed attention on the myth of deicide, the wellspring of all antise-
mitic myths.2Viewers of the film learn nothing about Jews, about Jesus’ Jew-
ishness—his Jewish upbringing and his commitment to his ancestral faith. Nor
are they made aware that Jesus’ moral outlook derives essentially from Jewish
prophetic tradition to which his fellow Jews were deeply committed. None of
these positive images are found in Gibson’s film. Instead viewers see a blood-
thirsty and jeering Jewish mob, incited by ghoulish, cruel, vengeful, scheming
priests crying out for more lashes and more blood—a combination of medieval
images and Nazi caricatures. In the tradition of medieval passion plays and
contrary to the judgment of biblical scholars, Gibson portrays Pontius Pilate
as a thoughtful and humane person who is reluctant to harm Jesus. In histori-
cal fact, Pilate was a cruel tyrant for whom Jesus was only one of many Jews he
had crucified. Yet we are to believe that cunning, unscrupulous Jewish priests
manipulated Pilate and were the real force behind the torture and execution of
Jesus. As if an imperious Roman prefect, who had supreme authority in politi-
cal and judicial matters, could be hoodwinked by a subject people. Gibson’s
viii ANTISEMITISM
anti-historical depiction reinforces the deicidal myth that bad Jews compelled
good Romans to abuse and kill Jesus.
The danger of The Passion of the Christ is that for millions of people
throughout the globe, and for future generations, Gibson’s film will be re-
garded as the authentic version of Jesus’ last hours, reinforcing old stereotypes
and hatreds. When The Passion opened in Cracow, Poland, it is reported, many
in the audience reacted with loathing. One viewer “felt afraid of the... Jews,
the people who killed him.” Comparing the film to medieval passion plays, a
Polish priest and editor of an independent Catholic journal worried that the
“film unearths an old and terrible view that Jewish people are a source of
evil....” The head of the Cracow Polish Committee of Christians and Jews
feared that the “film could spark an uprising of antisemitism.... The film tells
people that Jews are the ones to be blamed for Jesus’ death, and that they de-
serve to suffer as a result.”3
Already white supremacists and neo-Nazis are using the film in their cam-
paigns of hate. Nor is it surprising that the film has received a tremendous re-
ception in the Muslim world where it is used to buttress demonological
antisemitism. Recognizing the historical significance of the deicide myth,
leading Christian clergy and educators have reinvigorated their efforts to com-
bat the Jew-hatred that had drenched Christian lands with Jewish blood and
dishonored the faith that reveres a Jewish prophet.
The reforms steadily introduced by the church since 1965 constituted a
revolution in Catholic views of Jews and Judaism. No longer were Jews to be
disparaged as a people eternally cursed by God for the crime of deicide. Incor-
porated into Catholic education, this new and enlightened position, which is
abreast of modern biblical scholarship, has greatly improved Catholic-Jewish
relations, particularly in the United States. But it took the Holocaust to trig-
ger this about-face in Catholic theology. Had both Catholic and Protestant
churches not promulgated demonological myths about Jews into the twentieth
century—the Jews as deicides and agents of the devil—one wonders if Hitler’s
antisemitic ravings would have attracted as many German true believers in the
Nazis’ proclaimed war against the Jews and as many willing participants in
genocide. And would so many people have remained indifferent bystanders to
the Nazis’ brutalization of Jews? The relationship between Christian anti-Ju-
daism and the Holocaust is demonstrated in yet another telling way—the si-
lence of the churches, their failure to protest vigorously first against the
persecution of Jews after Hitler came to power and then their deportation and
mass murder during World War II. German Protestant and Catholic clergy,
many of them supporters of the Nazi regime and hostile to Jews and Judaism,
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION ix
turned a blind eye to the plight of the Jews. Not ignorance of the Jews’ fate or
fear that vocal protests would intensify antisemitism and lead to even greater
misery for Jews, the rationale advanced after the war, but indifference—and
for some divine punishment for a wicked people—explains their silence.4
In recent years, the exacerbation of the Arab-Israel conflict has generated
a resurgence of antisemitism in Europe, and in the Arab/Muslim world the
demonization of the Jews as an evil, criminal people has reached epidemic pro-
portions.5In the introduction we devote several pages to this phenomenon. It
is critical for an understanding of Arab-Muslim antisemitism that its founda-
tion is principally Christian, European, and Nazi-German. Its four basic texts,
available all over the Arab-Muslim world, are the Protocols of the Learned Elders
of Zion, forged by the tsar’s secret police6; Henry Ford’s International Jew,
which repeats the lies found in the Protocols; Hitler’s Mein Kampf; and August
Rohling’s The Talmud Jew, translated into Arabic as early as 1899 by a discred-
ited academic who was removed from his professorship and a priest who was
defrocked. This imported body of ideas has been effectively grafted onto a tra-
dition of Muslim hostility towards Jews that stems from the Qur’an, where
Jews are condemned as “a people cursed,” “apes,” and “pigs.”
Since our book’s publication, the disease has worsened, compounded by a
recycling of the ugliest elements of Nazi propaganda, leading several theorists,
notably Robert S. Wistrich, to stress the continuity between the thinking of
radical Muslims, known as Islamists, and Nazi ideology. Like the Nazis, Is-
lamists and jihadists perceive the Jews as a criminal people and a threat to their
civilization, blame the Jews for their misfortunes, and hold out the image of a
utopian future once Israel is eradicated and the Jews eliminated.
As in Nazi Germany, the media in the Arab world are often filled with re-
pulsive caricatures of Jews—dark, stooped, sinister, hook-nosed, devil-like
creatures. To demonstrate the Jews’ inherent evilness, some Islamists have
even revived the medieval canard that Jews are required to murder gentile
children in order to obtain their blood for ritual purposes. A government-con-
trolled newspaper in Saudi Arabia concocted an obscene fantasy of how Is-
raelis make pastry for Purim (a joyous festival celebrating the rescue of Jewry
from annihilation as described in the Book of Esther).
The Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare
the holiday pastries. In other words, the practice cannot be carried out as re-
quired if human blood is not spilled!!
... For this holiday, the victim must be a mature adolescent who is, of
course, a non-Jew—that is, a Christian or a Muslim. His blood is taken and