Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
troubling thing about this chapter, to me, is the fact that it needed to be written. Its origins go back to a talk I gave to a university audience in Seattle in 2011. The discussion inevitably turned to the topic of the Holocaust, at which point a former colleague in the audience whom, as a literary critic, I knew to be widely read and deeply insightful, and as a man, utterly devoid of any form of bigotry, raised the question whether commemoration of the Holocaust, dreadful as was the extent and nature of the suffering the Holocaust involved, and understandable as is the Jewish desire to see that suffering commemorated, was not nowadays serving to deflect attention from the sufferings—considerable, even if not as considerable—of other, non-Jewish groups.
In my reply, I made on the hoof the obvious point that I have been laboring in this chapter. The object of Holocaust commemoration was not, I said, to perpetuate the memory of Jewish suffering, suffering being the property of no particular people, but inseparable per se from the experience of humanity in general. Rather, I suggested the object of Holocaust commemoration was to perpetuate the memory of a crime unique not in the amount of suffering it caused but rather in its nature: as murder inflicted on grounds of ancestry alone. The task of commemoration, I said, was to perpetuate among other things the memory of the nature of that crime, of its historic unfolding and bleak fruition, and of the essential and central part played in that process by an irrational hatred of Jews—a hatred that survived the downfall of the Third Reich and remains with us today.
I should not have thought that there was much deserving to be thought original, or even surprising, about that as a reply: a host of Jewish writers and thinkers, after all, have said as much. But my reply seemed to strike my ex-colleague as astonishing—as unheard of in its startling originality, in short as some sort of thunderbolt. “Well, that may be a good point,” he said, “but I have to say it’s new to me. Who says this? Where did you read it? Where is it in print? I’d like the reference.”
I had to tell him, lamely, that so far as I knew it was not in print anywhere, at least precisely in that form—that I had just said it off the cuff, for no better reason than that it had happened to occur to me just at that moment, on my feet, in the stress of discussion. On the other hand, the nature of his response was such as to have made me think it, since then, eminently worthwhile to say it again and this time in print.
What was puzzling and a little distressing to me about this exchange was that my reply should have seemed so new and surprising to my former colleague. On the one hand, he is a man of both goodwill and high intelligence. On the other hand, the point that struck him as so original and unheard of is, I would have thought, once stated, not only obvious but trivially and unanswerably so. The distinction between the nature of a crime and the suffering it produces is in itself, after all, neither obscure nor difficult to grasp. The idea that the Jews use the extent of their sufferings in the Holocaust to obscure and devalue the sufferings of others remains plausible, as we have seen, only as long as that distinction can be ignored or somehow made to seem irrelevant.
So what could explain my colleague’s surprise? I in no way suspect him of conscious antisemitism. On the other hand, I do think him deeply sensitive, like all good literary scholars, to the subtleties of Western culture. And lurking deeply in that culture is the conviction that Judaism is a deeply particularist culture. Bound up with that conviction is the subordinate and plainly fatuously antisemitic proposition that the Jews characteristically use their sufferings to gain illicit advantages over non-Jews. One can find that proposition assumed as axiomatic in a host of literary sources. It can be found, for example, in Alphonse Daudet’s Algerian sketch “À Milianah” in which Daudet says of the plight of an elderly Jew struck and injured by a French settler in a dispute over land, “a large indemnity is alone capable of curing him; so don’t take him to the doctor, take him to the man of business.”29
Any mind that, however unconsciously, takes as axiomatic the proposition that Jews use their sufferings as a lever to gain advantage will naturally be inclined to pass with dizzying speed, without touching ground at any intervening point, from it to the closely allied thought that the “Holocaust industry” offers a case in point.
It is when thought moves like that, too fast, too easily, over rails locked into one position by long cultural familiarity, that we are led to overlook obvious distinctions and the possibilities of alternative interpretation opened up by them. I should like to think that this is not the explanation of my colleague’s ability, and that of others since, to find “original” and “surprising” the arguments presented in this chapter. But sadly, I think that that probably is the explanation.
NOTES
1. See G. D. Rosenfeld 2014, 78–121.
2. Rosenbaum 2009.
3. Stevenson 1944, 212–13.
4. For an excellent examination, complementary to the present chapter, of the operation of this principle in current political discourse, see Pascal Bruckner, “Antisemitism and Islamophobia: The Inversion of the Debt,” in A. H. Rosenfeld 2015, 7–20.
5. See A. H. Rosenfeld 2011; Harrison 2011.
6. Including, for instance, those of CODOH (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust), Davidduke.com, Focal Point Publications (a site devoted to the writings of David Irving), and jewwatch.com.
7. See Harrison 2006, chap. 2 and passim.
8. A. S. Rosenbaum 2009.
9. David E. Stannard, “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 295–340.
10. Both citations from the section “Wiesel Resources” on the PBS website, www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/resources/.
11. Bauer 1978, 7.
12. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 301, emphasis mine.
13. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 299, emphasis mine.
14. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 299.
15. Gershon Weiler, “The Jewish Establishment,” New York Review of Books, letters section, March 17, 1966, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/03/17/the-jewish-establishment-3/.
16. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 324.
17. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 325.
18. See, for example, Samantha Power, “To Suffer by Comparison,” Daedalus 2 (Spring 1999): 31–66; Alan Steinweis, “The Auschwitz Analogy: Holocaust Memory and American Debates over Intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Fall 2005): 276–89; John Torpey, “Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: Reflections on Reparations,” Journal of Modern History (June 2001): 333–58. Further instances to be found in A. H. Rosenfeld (2015).
19. See Cooper 2015.
20. Conway 2015.
21. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 300.
22. Stannard in A. S. Rosenbaum 2009, 325.
23. Edward Alexander, “Stealing the Holocaust,” in Alexander 1998, 101 (originally published in Midstream: A Monthly Jewish Review, November 1980).
24. Alexander 1998, 99.
25. Alexander 1994.
26. Alexander 1994, 102.
27. See endnote 5. The passage cited here is from p. 16.
28. Several of the essays in the A. S. Rosenbaum (2009) volume, including one by Professor Ben Kiernan, director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale, explore the question of possible analogies between the Holocaust and other genocides. Am I committed to regarding this as an illegitimate activity? Clearly not. The only claim I am committed to is