The World's Oldest Hate Metastasizes

American Thinker ^ | 9/17/13 | Richard Baehr

[Nachum]

A review of Demonizing Israel and the Jews by Manfred Gerstenfeld, RVP Press, New York, 2013

In the six years 1939-1945, two thirds of Europe's 9 million Jews were executed by gunfire, starved to death, or incinerated in gas chambers during the Holocaust. While Nazi Germany was, of course the principal actor in this mass human slaughter, the Germans found many willing collaborators among the legions of Jew haters in countries they conquered, occupied, and recruited from for the slave labor and death camps. For a few decades after the end of the war, in part due to guilt for their complicity or stance as bystanders to the carnage, many Western European nations were supportive of the new state of Israel, and made the public expression of anti-Semitism verboten. Eastern European nations, in the orbit of the Soviet bloc, adopted the USSR's position on Israel, which turned sharply negative soon after Israeli independence.

As Manfred Gerstenfeld, a scholar of Jewish communities in Europe and anti-Semitism vividly portrays in this collection of 57 interviews with academics, politicians, and writers in Europe and a few other places as well, the brief time-out on thousands of years of anti-Semitism among Europeans has ended. The end of any tilt towards Israel occurred even earlier, dating to the end of the 1967 war, when Israel was transformed in the eyes of the leftist elites from besieged victim to colonial occupier. Some Europeans pay lip service to hating Israel, but also oppose anti-Semitism. But when you treat the one majority-Jewish state in the world differently than you treat all others and use the most vicious language at your disposal to condemn Israel, then you are singling it out not for its behavior, but for the makeup of its population.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Nachum.

Some Europeans pay lip service to hating Israel, but also oppose anti-Semitism. But when you treat the one majority-Jewish state in the world differently than you treat all others and use the most vicious language at your disposal to condemn Israel, then you are singling it out not for its behavior, but for the makeup of its population.

[9YearLurker]

Okay, I’ll bite. Why would Romans a couple of thousand years ago not have been Europeans as much as inhabitants of Africa or Asia were Africans or Asians,as presumably was the case, at that time?

[Gene Eric]

And I thought you were going to say Christ.

[Moltke]

Consider my comment a matter of semantics rather than geography.

An attempt to clarify:

1. The term 'Europeans' as it is used today is generally understood to include (short of 'consist of') north-of-the-Alps Europe where a Jewish population simply was not present thousands of years ago. Conversely, when we think of ancient Greece and Rome, we usually do not refer to those societies as European, but rather as ancient Rome or Greece. The modern designation 'European' does not date back to thousands of years ago (to quote wikipedia: A cultural definition of Europe as the lands of Latin Christendom coalesced in the 8th century, signifying the new cultural condominium created through the confluence of Germanic traditions and Christian-Latin culture, defined partly in contrast with Byzantium and Islam, and limited to northern Iberia, the British Isles, France, Christianized western Germany, the Alpine regions and northern and central Italy.[14] The concept is one of the lasting legacies of the Carolingian Renaissance: "Europa" often figures in the letters of Charlemagne's court scholar, Alcuin.[15] This division—as much cultural as geographical—was used until the Late Middle Ages, when it was challenged by the Age of Discovery.[16][17][why?] The problem of redefining Europe was finally resolved in 1730 when, instead of waterways, the Swedish geographer and cartographer von Strahlenberg proposed the Ural Mountains as the most significant eastern boundary, a suggestion that found favour in Russia and throughout Europe.[18]).

2. Have Jews in Europe been persecuted in the course of history due to their ethnicity or their religion? I had always thought that early persecution of the Jewish people was a matter of religion, not ethnicity. Forced conversion to the prevalent religion (Christianity or islam) seemed to be the main thrust back in the days of the Holy Inquisition, or the islamic conquest of Spain (which, again, was not *thousands* of years ago). Ethnic Jews that converted were pretty much tolerated. Which leads me to question the use of the ethnicity-focused term 'anti-semitic' rather than a religious 'anti-Jewish'. Jews were not persecuted for their ethnicity until very recently, relatively speaking.

To summarize, the combination of *thousands* of years ago plus 'anti-semitism' plus 'Europeans' struck me as somewhat incongruent as regards modern understanding.