Recent
events in France have brought the seemingly somnolent monster of anti-Semitism
to the forefront of national consciousness. On Friday two Muslim terrorists
killed 4 Jewish hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris, in addition to
massacring 12 people at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
In a Wall Street Journal article covering news of the attack, a Parisian
resident Hervé
Laurent stated somberly: "Clearly something is broken in
France."("Deadly Raid Ends Terror Spree in France," Meichtry,
Gauthier-Villars, & Bisserbe, 2015). In response to the murders of Yoav
Hattab, Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen and Francois-Michel Saada,
France ramped up its security on Jewish schools and synagogues in the
vicinity, deploying up to 10,000 soldiers around the country to protect Jewish
children.
So. The Holocaust is over, the Jewish
blood libel has been ridiculed and summarily dismissed, the horrors of the
Spanish Inquisition lie 500 years in the past. And yet the hate and
prejudice that perpetrated these tragic events is still alive and
well today. A few months ago the former chief rabbi of England, Rabbi Jonathan
Sacks, wrote an essay in the Wall Street Journal discussing this phenomenon, stating
that, however much the media and other nations may attempt to mask
the ugliness of its features, anti-Semitism continues to be prevalent and that,
"Never again has become ever again." He cites recent examples from
all across Europe: "In France, worshipers in a synagogue were surrounded
by a howling mob claiming to protest Israeli policy. In Brussels, four people
were murdered in the Jewish museum, and a synagogue was firebombed. In London,
a major supermarket said that it felt forced to remove kosher food from its
shelves for fear that it would incite a riot. A London theater refused to stage
a Jewish film festival because the event had received a small grant from the
Israeli embassy."("Europe's Alarming New Anti-Semitism," Sacks,
2014).
What is this monster, and how can Jews
and non-Jews stop its evil and hate from infecting the world?
However, to define the term
“anti-Semitism”, examples serve better than any dictionary definition, and they
exist in abundance. A few years after my family moved to the small Dutch
farming town where we currently live, several of my little brothers were
playing outside, and some boys their age rode by, yelled “Heil Hitler”, gave them
the Nazi salute, and told them to go back to the ovens of Aushwitz. When my
parents visited Israel they were walking in an Arab neighborhood and several
small Arab children came out of their house and began pelting my parents with
small stones: simply because they were Jews. These are examples of
anti-Semitism on a very small scale, perpetrated by children bearing weapons no
larger than tiny rocks and hurtful words... yet this attitude had to have come
from somewhere. This is where anti-Semitism starts – in the minds and souls of
young children, who grow up thinking that hatred for another race is not only
normal, but is right and just.
The
history of this monster is a long and tragic one. But nowhere in the pages of
history can we find such a horrendous and tragic example of anti-Semitism on a
mass scale aside from the Holocaust. A brief look at the statistics of the
Holocaust should somewhat suffice to convey its utter horror: in 1933, about
nine million Jews lived in Europe. By 1945, an estimated 5,830,000 Jews were
completely wiped out. In a little over ten years after Hitler’s rise to power,
two out of every three European Jews had been killed. An estimated 1.2 million
Jewish children were murdered, mostly in the six extermination camps established
in Poland where mass murder by gas was conducted systematically. Millions also
died in these ghettos and camps from forced labor, starvation, disease,
brutality, and execution (Leckie, 1987, p. 903-920).
During
the Holocaust, one of the darkest times in Jewish history, the true colors of
non-Jews all over the world were revealed when neighbors turned on neighbors,
and friends upon friends. Historian Martin Gilbert recounts such an incident in
the Ukraine his book The Righteous: A
Jew managed to escape from the ghetto of Dabrowica in Poland, and sought refuge
from a Ukrainian peasant whom he had thought his friend. But his “friend”
responded, “You come to me asking me to help and save you?…Hitler has conquered almost the whole
world and he is going to slaughter all the Jews because they crucified our
Jesus…Get
out of my sight, for the devil remains the devil, and the Yid remains a Yid”
(Gilbert, 2002, p. 9).
Yaffa
Eliach in his "Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust" tells the horrifically
ironic story of Holocaust victim Zvi Michalowsky who survived a mass shooting
near a church and climbed naked and covered in blood out of the pit after the
Nazis had gone. He made his way to a Christian home and knocked on the door.
When the widow saw him shivering on her doorstep she chased him away telling
him, "Jew, go back to the grave!" But then Zvi had an idea. "I
am your Lord, Jesus Christ," he told her, "Look at me - the blood,
the pain, the suffering of the innocent - let me in." The woman's demeanor
changed dramatically and she fell at his feet crossing herself - "My God,
my God!" she cried, and welcomed him into her home (Eliach, 2011, p.
54-55). Yes, the Jews crucified Jesus, and for that, they were persecuted,
tortured, and killed by the millions during the Holocaust. Yet in the name of
avenging Jesus' death many Christians somehow forgot that their Savior Himself
was also, in fact, a Jew.
Anti-Semitism has
existed as a social evil for centuries, it still exists today in the modern
world, and Jews and Gentiles alike need to stand behind Israel and the Jewish
community to prevent anti-Semitism using their words, their deeds, and their
overall attitude of support. It is prevalent everywhere, even in
the free, democratic, culturally diverse country of America, as my brothers’
personal experience above demonstrates. The authors of Encyclopedia Judaica point out that anti-Semitic rhetoric and
behavior has been more pronounced in some periods of American history than
others, such as during the Civil War, when General Grant expelled all Jews from
military territories in December of 1862. (Heinemann, Gutmann, Poliakov,
Weissman, Toury, & Hertzberg, 2007, p. 206-246). A significant
increase in reported acts of anti-Semitism in America has been recorded during
the last few years, as Jeffrey Ross explains in his Jerusalem Post article, Campus
Anti-Semitism Grows In the U.S.; “In 1984, the "Annual Audit of
Anti-Semitic Incidents" of B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League showed
incidents on six campuses. This figure doubled to 12 in 1985 and increased to
19 in 1986. In 1988, the number jumped to 38, the highest ever recorded by the
ADL” (Ross, October, 1989, Jerusalem
Post). Ross reports that a Holocaust memorial adjacent to the Yale campus
was desecrated on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, and
swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans were spray painted on the walls of New York
State University. The next morning a philosophy professor told his class that
the Jews had brought these incidents upon themselves (Ross, October, 1989, Jerusalem Post).
“Here? In America?” you might ask in
disbelief. The answer is yes, anti-Semitism still exists in America – and not
only do these incidences point to its existence, they demonstrate the fearful
truth that an anti-Semitic attitude is growing in the United States.
Today
anti-Semitism’s most powerful and frightening voice is not Germany, but Islam.
Islam’s very ideology is based in hatred of the Jews and the belief that the
entire Jewish race should be wiped off the map. “The Jews are said to have
always abused the generosity and hospitality of the Moslems by stirring up
unrest against them - from the Jews of Medina who betrayed the Prophet Mohammed
to the Jews in today's Arab and Moslem world” (Israeli, 1990, The Jerusalem Post). Leaders of the Arab
world such as Khomeini and Iran’s president Ahmadinejad are very vocal in their
hatred of the Jews. If we wish to avoid yet another Holocaust, we must take
measures to stop Muslim aggression on the Israel.
How
can one individual hope to combat such a prevalent social evil, such widespread
hatred of a people, such racism and violence? More can be done than one
would think. One man's stand for the Jews, one solitary voice of support for
Israel, one person speaking up against any expression of anti-Semitism, is a
powerful, unquenchable light in a dark world. Think how
differently the Holocaust might have turned out if all the non-Jews had banded
together and stood against anti-Semitism in the 30s and 40s. An entire
generation of European Jewry might not have been lost. A great many Jews were
saved because of the bravery of righteous men and women. Over 19,000 non-Jews
have been recognized as Righteous “Among the Nations” By Yad Vashem, the
Holocaust museum in Jerusalem (Gilbert, The
Righteous, dust cover).
In the preface to his work The Righteous, where he recounts the
stories of the noble Europeans who helped save the Jews during the Holocaust,
Martin Gilbert describes this scene: “On 28 October 1974, while walking on
Mount Zion in Jerusalem, I saw… a procession on
its way to one of the city’s Christian cemeteries.” Surprised that most of the
procession seemed to be Jewish, Gilbert asked one of them whose funeral it was,
and was told that it was that of a German Christian, Oskar Schindler, who had
helped save the lives of more than 1,500 Jews during the Holocaust (Gilbert, The Righteous, p. ix).
The solution to the problem of
anti-Semitism is not to passively stand on the sidelines and allow Jews to be
attacked. To prevent anti-Semitism, you must support Israel, support your
Jewish friends and neighbors, support the entire Jewish community. Stand up
against anti-Semitic slurs and jokes even when the situation may be awkward or
uncomfortable. Support Jews with your
words, your attitude, and most of all through a united stance against all forms
of anti-Semitism. Support them to turn the tide of hatred that they have
endured for so many thousands of years as a nation. Support them because God
has called us to show love towards every race and people and to stand against
racial hatred and prejudice. The massacre of the 4 Jewish men in Paris on
Friday is the brutal culmination of more subtle forms of anti-Semitism: indifference, apathy, and silent betrayal.
This is not an ancient or outdated
social problem – this monster is not asleep or dead or forgotten in the past -
its ugliness is alive and well in today’s modern world, as evidenced by
America’s apathetic and even hostile attitude towards Israel and Islam’s
violent and unwarranted acts of hatred towards the Jews. We must never let
another Holocaust happen again in a civilized country, as it did in Germany of
1939. We must stand with the Jewish people and declare, as did the citizens of
Billings, Montana in 1939 when the Klu Klux Clan was waging their anti-Semitic
hate campaign: “Not in our town” (Ross, Dec. 4th, 1995, Columbian).
References:
Eliach, Yaffa. Hasidic Tales of
the Holocaust. 2011. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Gilbert, Martin. The Righteous. 2002. Doubleday Publishers: Great Britain
Gilbert, Martin. The Righteous. 2002. Doubleday Publishers: Great Britain
Heinemann, J.; Cutmann, J.;
Poliakov, L.; Weissman P.; Toury, J.; and Hertzberg, A. et al. Antisemitism, Encyclopaedia Judaica. Ed.
By Berenbaum, M. and Skolnik, F. Vol. 2. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference
USA, 2007. P. 206-246.
Israeli, R. 1990, Aug 09. Antisemitism and Israeli Islam.
Jerusalem Post. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/320997884?accountid=12085
Leckie,
R. Delivered From Evil: The Saga of World War II. 1987. Harper and Row
Publishers, New York, N.Y.
Ross, J. 1991, Jun 25. U.S. Campus
Antisemitism Grows. Jerusalem Post. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/321023782?accountid=12085
Ross,
L. (1995, Dec 24). Not in our town. Columbian. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/252751995?accountid=12085
An Editorial From the New York
Times. Oct. 20th, 2003. Islamic Anti-Semitism, Loud and Clear.
Pittsburgh Post - Gazette. Retrieved from
http://search.proquest.com/docview/391022693?accountid=12085
