Stop obsessing about Jew-hatred

Published in the Jewish Chronicle

So I return after a couple of weeks on holiday to what has become a familiar routine, starting with the now-obligatory announcement from my email account: “You have 455 new messages”. (The genuine figure, since you ask.) I scroll through them and they, too, are familiar: assorted press releases, announcements, the odd invitation. And a good portion are all on the same theme.

They are either filled with antisemitism — “Arm Iran, Bomb International Jewry” was the delightful title of one such missive, while “The Jew world order” was the subject of another — or they are about antisemitism. I’m on enough mailing lists to get the full range: warnings of increased Jew-hatred in Europe, in the Muslim world, in the press, in academia; denunciations of antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism; meetings called to discuss the gathering threat. And, of course, that specialist subset: Jews accusing other Jews of Jew-hatred.

Believe me, if I filtered out everything else and only allowed in those emails connected with antisemitism, my inbox would still fill up. It’s not just the email. A quick scan of the Jewish press turns up the same theme, over and over again.

This week, for example, kicked off with the death at age 96 of Maurice Papon, the most senior French collaborator with the Nazis ever to be jailed for his crimes. Papon once headed the Vichy administration’s Service for Jewish Questions, deporting 1,600 Jews between 1942 and 1944. Despite a 10-year prison sentence meted out in 1998, Papon insisted he had no “regrets nor remorse.”

The commentators and obituarists wondered if Papon’s death meant France would at last lay to rest the ghosts of the Nazi era. Not likely, said most, in part because of Papon’s refusal to acknowledge his crimes. What’s more, France has only begun to face up to its collusion with the Final Solution relatively recently: Papon, shielded by the French elite for so long, from de Gaulle to Mitterand, was deep into his eighties before the law caught up with him.

But there is another reason why Papon’s death does not represent a chance to bury the European antisemitism he personified, and it’s this: that form of Jew-hatred lives on.

For this was also the week when a Polish member of the European Parliament defended a pamphlet he had written arguing that Jews had no place in Europe, whose culture and morality had to be Christian. Maciej Giertych of the League of Polish Families said that Jews are unethical, obsessed with separateness and a “tragic community” doomed by their refusal to accept Jesus as the son of God.

Over in Croatia, meanwhile, the authorities were investigating how a factory in the small town of Pozega had come to distribute sugar packets bearing the image of Adolf Hitler and a string of Holocaust jokes. Apparently the packets were a big hit in the local cafes and restaurants. At the same time, in the Ukraine, state officials were seizing Torah scrolls from a Jewish school, even as the children sobbed before them.

And that’s just this week. Scan the websites next week and you will doubtless see more evidence that the old hatred lingers on, not a historical relic but part of the 21st century. No wonder my inbox keeps spilling over.

Many Jews react to this by charting every new outbreak of antisemitism, reading up on every instance of it, searching for it between the lines of this article or that speech. In a way I’m glad they do it, just as I’m glad to receive in the post the latest annual report of the enticingly named Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 170 pages full of analysis, footnotes and distressing cartoons. It’s good to know that somebody somewhere is keeping tabs on all this stuff.

But that shouldn’t mean the rest of us have to do it as well. It’s not good for our collective health if too many of us spend too long obsessing about our enemies and their loathing of us — just as it wouldn’t do for an individual to sit at home, dwelling endlessly on all the slights and insults that have been hurled his way.

So, yes, let’s remain vigilant, protecting ourselves from genuine threats when they appear. Let the Community Security Trust continue doing its vital work, securing synagogues, protecting schools. Let the think-tanks and monitoring groups immerse themselves in all the ugly details.

But, with that task duly delegated, let’s not allow others’ hatred of us to become the centre of our identity, defining who we are. We should channel our energies elsewhere, in directions altogether more positive. We have a great civilisation to celebrate and enjoy. So go on: let’s bombard each other with email about that.

Posted on February 23, 2007 10:08 AM

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