75 years on, are Jews once again being treated as
‘different’?
BY FRANK FUREDI
It’s the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht,
the name given to the violent wave of destruction against German Jews on 9/10
November 1938 which unleashed a chain of events that would eventually culminate
in the Final Solution of the Nazi regime.
Across Europe, rituals of remembrance have been organised,
all highlighting the tragic consequences of the xenophobia embodied in Kristallnacht.
At the time of those events, a writer for The Times said the
‘systematic plunder and destruction’ was on a scale that ‘seldom had [its]
equal in a civilised country since the Middle Ages’.
Actually, what was really remarkable about Kristallnacht was
not so much the scale of the destruction as the almost casual manner in which
the pogrom was carried out. Some Germans were shocked by the sight of teenage
members of the Hitler Youth attacking Jewish women and elderly men in the
streets, but most people didn’t seem particularly bothered. Why?
Kristallnacht is, understandably, treated as a symbol of
politically organised mob violence. What is often overlooked is how much this
event, and the way it was justified by Nazi propaganda, expressed a very clear
statement about the nature of the Jew. The pretext for the pogrom was the
assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a minor German diplomat, by a German-born
Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. A few days after the assassination and the
eruption of Kristallnacht, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister for
propaganda, spoke of the ‘justified and understandable indignation of the
German people at the cowardly assassination of a German diplomat’. In other
words, it was ‘justified and understandable’ that punishment for the act of one
individual should be inflicted on any individual of Jewish heritage.
At the time, many Jewish community leaders protested
that it was wrong to penalise people who had no connection with the
assassination of vom Rath. In this vein, two leaders of the Jewish community in
England – Neville Laski and Leonard Montefiore – argued in The Times that
though a ‘cruel and detestable crime has been committed’, it is unacceptable to
‘avenge the crime on people devoid of any complicity therewith’. However, from
the viewpoint of Nazi dogma, and the intensely racialised anti-Semitism of the
interwar period, all Jews were, by definition, guilty. According to this
doctrine, the essentially malevolent character of Jewishness overrode any
individual differences between members of this tribe.
The narrative of European anti-Semitism had no place
for the individual Jew. Jews were Jews, and any perceptible differences that
may have distinguished one from another were of marginal significance. This
stripping away of the individuality of the Jew allowed for the dehumanisation
of an entire group, seen to consist, not of different persons, but of an
homogenous people. That’s what Goebbels meant when he talked about the
justifiable punishment exacted on the German Jewish community – the entire
Jewish race was responsible for the behaviour of anyone associated with it.
Much has changed since the terrible events of Kristallnacht.
The Nazis’ crimes are seen as deeply disturbing by almost everyone in modern
Europe, and crude manifestations of anti-Semitism have been marginalised and
discredited. There is considerable evidence that young people in Germany feel
completely estranged from their nation’s Nazi past and are relatively free from
the prejudices of previous generations.
And yet, many Europeans still regard Jews as
‘different’. This view does not necessarily imply hostility or hatred; it
merely expresses the sentiment that ‘they’, the Jews, are a unique, separate
group who share not simply a common identity but also common attitudes,
character traits and behaviour.
In some cases, this outlook is expressed through a
narrative of suspicion about ‘them’ or ‘those people’. Such euphemisms signal a
degree of moral distancing from a people deemed to be ‘cliquey’, strange and
unusually powerful. Inevitably, such attitudes provide a hospitable environment
for the flourishing of conspiracy theories about a Jewish-dominated media or
financial sector. The premise of these theories is that Jews who work in the
media are not simply individual businesspeople who happen to be Jewish, but
rather are an organised network who do things in a coordinated fashion. Hence
the assumption of Jewish influence over particular institutions. On a global
level, the belief in powerful Jewish influences can be seen in the increasingly
popular fantasy about there being an all-powerful ‘Jewish lobby’ that
orchestrates the foreign policy of the United States and other Western powers.
In most European circles, the old, poisonous idea of
guilt-by-blood, which was applied to earlier Jews for the crimes of individual
Jews, is no more acceptable than that of guilt by association. However, over
the past 10 to 15 years there has been an important shift in the evolution of
European attitudes towards Jewish people. One important development has been the
impact of Middle Eastern and Islamic politics and conflicts on European
societies. Since 9/11, Europe has become more sensitised to the corrosive
effect of these conflicts, and the growth of significant Muslim constituencies
in Europe has ensured that the crisis of the Middle East is not simply an
external issue but rather one that has great domestic influence, too.
Given the intense bitterness of the conflicts in the
Middle East, the hostility many Muslims in Europe feel towards Israel is
understandable. However, what is problematic is that their hostility towards
Israel often expresses itself in an attitude that regards every Jew as a proxy
for that country. From this standpoint, attacks on Jewish communities in France
or Belgium or Sweden are seen as somehow representing a blow against the
Zionist enemy.
The old idea of guilt by ties of blood has been
recycled in an unexpected form. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, the
individual Jew has come to be seen as a proxy for Israel. This prejudice has
its roots in the Middle Eastern conflict and has little in common with the
politicised anti-Semitism that was on full display during Kristallnacht.
However, Islamist hostility towards Israel and its presumed Jewish proxies has
also provided some Europeans with a narrative through which they can express
their disgruntlement with the modern world. It is as if the Islamic devaluation
of the moral status of the Jew has given permission to some Europeans to
express what they had suspected all along about some of ‘those people’ and
particularly the country that represents them.
The current de-individualisation of the Jew can be
seen in a subtle change in language. One of my colleagues, who is from a
left-wing family, said to me recently: ‘Look out for the word “they”.’ She was
caught unawares when, after a family discussion about Palestine, her father
kept on repeating the word ‘they’. ‘In the recent past, it would have been
unthinkable for him to describe Jews as “they”’, she told me.
At present, the shift in attitudes and language has
not hardened into a full-blown xenophobic worldview. But there are worrying
signs. One English woman, who is a member of a Palestine solidarity group,
recently wrote to me about her concerns that hostility to Israel sometimes
mutates into hatred for the Jews. ‘Getting so cross with Israel does lead
Gentile attitudes in the group to verge on anti-Semitism’, she stated.
The situation today in Europe has virtually nothing in
common with 1930s Germany. Despite the escalation of anti-Semitic attacks in
recent years, as revealed in a recent European study, the position of Jewish
people in Europe is relatively secure. What’s worrying is that in many quarters
Jewish people are regarded as a unique homogeneous entity rather than as a
normal collection of individuals. That, sadly, is always the first step towards
the dehumanisation of a people. Fundamentally, these developments, however much
they may have been catalysed by the rise of the Middle Eastern question in
European societies, speak to latent problems and prejudices here in Western
Europe. In short, developments in the Middle East and the behaviour of Israel
are no more responsible for current European attitudes towards the Jews than
the assassination of Ernst vom Rath was responsible for Kristallnacht.
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