Reflection On Anti-Semitism

Whenever a student asked (after encountering the term in a textbook), What is anti-Semitism? I would reply: anti-Semitism is when you hate Jews of all kinds: Tomato Jews, Orange Jews, Pineapple Jews, Cranberry Jews, and on and on. Making light of a horrible human phenomenon? Mocking the anti-Semites? Anti-Semitism is as American as applie pie (to paraphrase H. Rap Brown). If this be (fair & balanced) revulsion, so be it.

[x Straits Times]
Name the Person Who Made These Anti-Semitic Remarks
by
Janadas Devan

The former Malaysian prime minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, said recently that Jews rule the world by proxy. Opinion polls in Europe show a majority of Europeans feel Israel is a threat to world peace. Anti-Semitic 'hate speech' and 'hate acts' seem more frequent lately. But as Janadas Devan finds out, anti-Semitism has a long, persistent and troubling history.

CONSIDER the following examples of anti-Semitism:

1. 'Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.'


2. 'You may as well do anything most hard/ As seek to soften that - than which what's harder? -/ His Jewish heart.'


3. 'How I hated marrying a Jew.'


4. 'Down in a tall busy street he read a dozen Jewish names on a line of stores... New York - he could not dissociate it now from the slow, upward creep of these people.'


5. 'Jew York'. 'Jewnited States.' 'Franklin Delano Jewsfeld.'

Who uttered these statements?

Dr Josef Goebbels? Some Nazi poet? A blond Aryan, expressing regret for marrying a Jew during the Holocaust? A member of the lunatic Ku Klux Klan?

None of the above.

They were made by some of the most prestigious figures in Anglo-American culture:

1. T.S. Eliot


2. William Shakespeare


3. Virginia Woolf (who, of course, married Leonard Woolf, a Jew)


4. F. Scott Fitzgerald


5. Ezra Pound.

Similar examples of anti-Semitism can be easily multiplied.

In French literature - Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Maurice Barres.

In English literature - Rudyard Kipling, Hilaire Beloc, G.K. Chesterton.

In American letters - Henry Adams, H.L. Mencken. Among industrialists - Henry Ford.

Among 'All-American heroes' - Charles Lindbergh. Among royalty - King Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor.

And on and on, ad infinitum.

But these are only examples of 'hate speech'.

The list of 20th century anti-Semitic 'hate acts' is more gruesome.

The Holocaust, when six million Jews were exterminated by Hitler, was only the final act.

Pogroms during and after the 1917 Russian Revolution resulted in the death of 75,000 Jews.

In Germany, after World War I, Jewish communities in Berlin and Munich were terrorised by anti-Semitic organisations.

After the Munich Soviet was crushed, all foreign-born Jews were expelled from the city.

The Holocaust didn't happen out of the blue; Europe was well-primed for the 'Final Solution'. And it was not the work of only a few decades, but of centuries.

As historian Paul Johnson points out in his History Of The Jews, though the term 'anti-Semitism' was not coined until 1879, anti-Semitism, 'in fact if not in name', undoubtedly existed from 'deep antiquity'

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