Thinking About The Time A Professor Said The Phrase “it’s Just Like The Judeo-christian Concept Of

“For a thousand years the scapegoat of choice in Europe and the Middle East has been the Jews. They were the most conspicuous outsiders: non-Christian in a Christian Europe, non-Muslim outsiders in an Islamic Middle East. But this chapter is not primarily about antisemitism. It is about what gives rise to it. Antisemitism is only contingently about Jews. Jews are its victims but they are not its cause. The cause is conflict within a culture. It is the potential internal violence that, if expressed, has the power to destroy a society. Recall Girard’s point: the scapegoat is the mechanism by which a society deflects violence away from itself by focusing it on an external victim. Hence, wherever you find obsessive, irrational, murderous antisemitism, there you will find a culture so internally split and fractured that if its members stopped killing Jews they would start killing one another. That is what happened in Europe in the seventeenth century and again in two world wars in the twentieth, and what is happening today in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war-torn regions in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. To understand the emergence of the Jew-as-scapegoat we must focus on certain key historic moments. The first is 1095 when Pope Urban II delivered his historic call for the First Crusade. In 1096 some of the Crusaders, on their way to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in northern Europe: in Cologne, Worms, and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than be seized by the mob and forcibly converted to Christianity. It was a traumatizing moment for European Jewry, and the portent of worse to come. From this point onwards Jews in Christian Europe began to be seen by many not as human beings at all but as a malevolent force, as an evil presence, a demonic and destructive power that mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others. Jews were accused of desecrating the host, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. They were held responsible for the Black Death, the epidemic that in the fourteenth century cost many millions of lives. It was an age in which Jews lived in fear. That period added to the vocabulary of the West such ideas as public disputation, book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da-fé, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom. In duration and intensity it ranks among one of the most sustained chronicles of hatred in history… …Eventually Europe moved on, but not before two events that were to have significant consequences centuries later. The first took place in Spain, where, under threat of persecution, Jews had been living in fear from 1391, Spain’s Kristallnacht when synagogues were burned and Jews massacred, until their expulsion in 1492. Many, under threat, had converted. Some were suspected of maintaining Jewish practice in private and became victims of the Inquisition. Others, though, embraced the new faith and achieved positions of prominence in Spanish society. It was then that a new phenomenon appeared: the persistence of prejudice after its overt cause had been removed. The ‘new’ Christians were still hated by some, now not for their religion but for their race. Legislation was introduced to protect Limpieza de sangre, ‘purity of blood’. The first such statue appeared in Toledo in 1449. Originally opposed by the Church, it received the approval of Pope Alexander VI in 1496 and lasted well into the nineteenth century. It was the first appearance in history of the racial antisemitism that would flow through mainland Europe four and a half centuries later. The second significant development was Martin Luther. Initially favorably disposed to Jews, he believed that the reason they had not converted was the ineptitude and cruelty of the Catholic Church. Approached with love, he thought they would become Christians en masse. When they did not, his anger knew almost no bounds. In 1543 he published a pamphlet entitled On the Jews and their Lies that became a classic in the literature of hate. Synagogues should be burned. Jewish homes should be destroyed. Jews should be made to live in a single room or stable to know that they were no more than ‘miserable captives’. Their prayer books and Talmuds should be confiscated and their rabbis forbidden to teach. They should be forbidden to travel and given no legal protection until the world was rid of what he called 'our plague, pestilence, and misfortune’. The pamphlet was reprinted several times during the Nazi era, and its suggestions paralleled by the Nuremberg laws. Luther’s outburst ensured that hostility to the Jews would persist after the Reformation, and it left a lasting impression in countries where Lutheranism held sway. The striking Christian exception was John Calvin, who held the Hebrew Bible in high regard and was less inclined than most to denigrate the Jews. This had a lasting effect on Holland in the sixteenth century and England in the seventeenth, as well as on the Pilgrim Fathers in America. These were among the first places to develop religious liberty. It is at this point that the story takes a remarkable and tragic twist. Western Europe in the eighteenth century turned to the Enlightenment in the belief that reason could overcome the prejudices of the past. In the nineteenth century this was followed by Emancipation, through which minority religious groups, among them the Jews, were granted civil rights in the new nation states, held together not as in the past by religion but by citizenship and civil law. Yet prejudice persisted, as it had done in post-expulsion Spain. Among its practitioners were some of Europe’s leading minds. Voltaire called Jews 'an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by who they are tolerated and enriched.’ He added, generously, 'Still, we ought not to burn them.’ Immanuel Kant spoke of Jews as 'the vampires of society’, and called for 'the euthanasia of Judaism’. Georg Hegel saw Jews and Judaism as paradigms of a 'slave morality’, unable to conceive or practice a religion of love. By rejecting Christianity, Jews had been stranded by history and were left as a 'fossil nation’, a 'ghost-race’… …Friedrich Nietzsche castigated Judaism as the 'falsification’ of all natural values. His great originality is that, instead of criticizing Jews for rejecting Christianity, he blamed them for having given birth to it in the first place. Anyone who blames religion for creating hate should consider these examples…philosophical antisemitism from Voltaire to Heidegger is a little-known phenomenon but a devastating one. As European culture became secularized and religious anti-Judaism mutated into racial antisemitism, the consequences were lethal. Christians could work for the conversion of the Jews, because you can change your religion. But you cannot change your blood or your genes. Antisemites could therefore only work for the elimination of the Jews. The result was the Holocaust.”

— Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2015. (p. 76-80). (via eshusplayground)

The last Jews of Bukhara, Uzbekistan, 2019, photographed by Bruno Zanzottera

Located along the Silk Roads and the edges of several former empires, the city of Bukhara has been home to a big and unique Jewish community for over two millennia - one of the most ancient ethnic groups in all of Central Asia. Historically they spoke Bukhori a Judeo-Tajik dialect. In the 1970s, Jews began to leave the Soviet Union, including Uzbekistan, and the synagogues as well as other Jewish institutions were closed by the Communist government. In Bukhara, the community has declined significantly: if in the past it consisted of 46,000 people, now there are just over 100 Jews. Those remaining want to make sure that their history, language and traditions do not get lost.

Contrary to popular belief, that is not a cat but a single brain cell.

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