Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
century, principled, political hostility to the Jews was largely associated with the church. In the later decades of that century, it became equally strongly associated with the Enlightenment in its revolutionary phase. In the nineteenth century, hostility shifted back to an association with social and religious conservatism but then in the second half of the century began to acquire equally powerful links with the rising forces of socialist reform. The first half of the twentieth century, on the one hand, saw political antisemitism take on new and this time even more savagely lethal forms in the hands of fascists and nationalists. The second half and the opening years of the twenty-first century, on the other hand, saw it shift its constituency yet again to become a standard element in the discourse of “progressives” and internationalists.
These eight questions are no doubt far from exhausting the puzzling features of political antisemitism. Nevertheless, if we can devise an answer to the question “Why the Jews?” capable of throwing useful light on even this modest collection of puzzles, we shall not have done badly. Let us, therefore, proceed to the chain of arguments that it is the main business of this chapter and the next to elaborate.
SEEING “THE JEWS” AS “A DISEASE”
Recently, in a paper on the causes of the Holocaust by the German sociologist and economist Gunnar Heinsohn (more specifically, on the motives underlying Adolf Hitler’s desire to get rid of the Jews), I came across the following communication from Hitler to Martin Bormann, dated February 3, 1945:23
I have never been of the opinion that the Chinese or Japanese, for example, are racially inferior. Both belong to old cultures and I admit that their culture is superior to ours. … I even believe that I will find it all the easier to come to an understanding with the Chinese and the Japanese, the more they persevere in their racial pride. … Our Nordic racial consciousness is only aggressive towards the Jewish race. We use the term Jewish race merely for reasons of linguistic convenience, for in the real sense of the word, and from a genetic point of view there is no Jewish race. Present circumstances force upon us this characterization of the group of common race and intellect, to which all the Jews of the world profess their loyalty, regardless of the nationality identified in the passport of each individual. This group of persons we designate as the Jewish race. … The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit. … Spiritual race is of a more solid and more durable kind than natural race. Wherever he goes the Jew remains a Jew … presenting sad proof of the superiority of the “spirit” over the flesh.24
Heinsohn argues, from this and other textual evidence, that Hitler’s antisemitism was not racially based (a judgment that I, as I have argued elsewhere, would be inclined to extend to antisemitism in general).25 Rather, Hitler believed that the Jews must be eliminated as the only way of eliminating the malign spiritual influence of Jewish culture. In what was this malign influence supposed to consist? Heinsohn marshals persuasive textual evidence to suggest that in Hitler’s mind, it consisted in the insinuation into European culture of ethical principles, notably that of the sanctity of life, which had sapped the capacity of the Nordic race (as it had historically sapped, Hitler seems to have believed, that of the nations of the ancient world) to achieve their goals through the merciless destruction both of enemy combatants and of entire enemy peoples. Three of the passages Heinsohn cites in support of this reading of Hitler’s motives are particularly telling. The first comes from an account by the Nazi leader of Danzig, Hermann Rausching, of conversations with Hitler at the start of the 1930s. Rausching represents Hitler as having said,
We terminate a wrong path of mankind. The tables of Mount Sinai have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention. … It is our duty to depopulate, just as it is our duty to provide appropriate care to the German population. … What do I mean by depopulation, you will ask. Do I intend to eliminate entire peoples? Yes, more or less. That is where it will lead to. … Natural instinct commands every living being not only to defeat the enemy but to destroy him. In earlier ages there existed the good right of the victor to exterminate whole tribes, whole nations.26
The second, from Hitler’s table talk, records his belief that the Germans lost World War I only because Jewish ethical inhibitions rendered them unable to pursue their aims with the absolute ferocity that he supposes (arguably falsely, given the actual outcome of such tactics in World War II) would have brought victory in its train: “We experienced it during the World War: the only country that was religious was Germany, and that was the country that lost.”27
The third supporting passage, dating from August 7, 1920, records Hitler’s conviction that it is because the Jew is, spiritually speaking, a disease of Western civilization that he must be treated as such: “Do not think that you can fight a disease without killing the causative agent, without destroying the bacillus, and do not think that you can fight racial tuberculosis without seeing to it that the nation is freed from the causative agent of racial tuberculosis. The influence of Judaism will never fade as long as its agent, the Jew, has not been removed from our midst.”28
Heinsohn has two aims in his essay: first, to elucidate Hitler’s motives as a means of challenging the common view that the Holocaust is simply “inexplicable” and second, to defend the idea that the Holocaust was indeed, in some sense, an utterly new and historically unique event. His proposal is that that what made the Holocaust unique—or “uniquely unique” as he puts it—was that “it was a genocide for the purpose of reinstalling the right to genocide.”29 Hitler wished to abrogate the doctrine of the sanctity of life that he considered the Jews to have introduced to Western civilization and to reestablish a supposedly ancient right to kill without limit in the service of national or racial self-interest: a right extending from the killing of the handicapped and the infanticide of surplus or unwanted children to the wholesale massacre of enemy populations.
The textual evidence that Heinsohn marshals, here and elsewhere, goes far to persuade me that he has much to teach us about the outlook and reasoning both of Hitler and of the party he founded. The main doubt I have concerning the paper under discussion is that it suggests the conclusion that if the Holocaust was indeed unique, it was so mainly because it was the sole creation of one man, Hitler, whose reason for hating the Jews—that they had introduced into Western culture the principle of the sanctity of life—was so singular as to be essentially sui generis.
That this is a direction in which Heinsohn wishes to move is evidenced by the fact that he quotes with approval the following sentence from an article in the New Yorker strongly criticizing Daniel Goldhagen’s (1996) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust: “Hitler was the culprit who gave all the other culprits their chance.”30
The doubts I feel concerning this are fueled by the fact that aside from the issue of the sanctity of life, Hitler’s thoughts on the Jews, as Heinsohn develops and documents them, seem not to have been in the least singular but entirely consonant with the broad current of European antisemitism as that had developed during the previous century. Take, for example, the thought that the Jews are the source of a spiritual disease that cannot be cured without getting rid of the causative agents through which the body—the body politic in this case—is continually reinfected. We find the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein committing to his notebook in 1931 an observation very much along these lines, which he plainly regards as so familiar an aspect of the history of the Jews in Europe as to go almost without saying.
Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated so circumstantially as their intervention in European affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, & nobody wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life. (& nobody wants to speak of a disease as though it had the same rights as healthy bodily processes [even painful ones]).
We may say: people can only regard this tumour as a natural part of the body if their whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes). Otherwise the best they can do is put up with it.
You may expect an individual man to display this sort of tolerance or else to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation, because