This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In 1943 the remnants of the world’s most vital Jewish culture rose up in hopeless resistance to their German exterminators. Their heroism and defeat were part of the tragedy of three million Jews. As you well know, the anniversary event the Polish government has “planned” for this sad occasion is a new campaign of antisemitism. Since the Israeli defeat of the Arabs in June, the Polish bureaucracy and their literary henchmen have maintained a continuous assault against the twenty-five thousand remaining citizens of Jewish origin. Under the euphemistic title of “Zionists” .the Jews are accused of the now conventional crimes of cosmopolitanism, careerism, bureaucratic degeneracy, bourgeois reaction, patriotic deficiency, Trotskyite deviation, and any other nasty Marxist heresy you can think of. Jewish intellectuals and technocrats are being daily removed from positions of influence, with justifications so flimsy that they barely cover-up the naked prejudice. Every form of social protest, from student riots to pleas for intellectual freedom, are attributed to vicious Jewish nationalists while humiliating pledges to Polish patriotism are extracted from frightened community directors. Although the Communist party leader Gomulka has sought to soften the antisemitic blows, others who covet his job continue to multiply them relentlessly.
It is ironic that the party clique who utilize anti-Jewish feeling as a vehicle to power are anti-Russian and identify Jewish activity with Stalinist repression. For an older antisemitic campaign persists in the Soviet Union. Aggravated by the Israeli victory, this bigotry feeds on the understandable inability of the Soviet citizen to distinguish between Jewishness and Zionism. In a country where Jews are designated a national minority, to condemn Jewish nationalism is to condemn Jews.
Even China has joined the fray. As the friend of leftist Syria and Arab “progressives”, she offers to train and arm Palestinian guerillas and
to imbue them with the persistence of Che Guevara and the skill of the Viet-cong. In Maoist propaganda the Zionists are a reactionary bourgeois phenomenon, guilty of hateful imperialism as well as capitalist control. The Kibbutz communes of socialist idealists are indistinguishable in their minds from the Rothschild banks. All wreak of Jewish exploitation.
As for the Marxist claim that antisemitism is the tool of capitalist oppressors who wish to divert the attention of the masses from their real exploiters, the accusation rings hollow in 1968. The Western bourgeois countries have been the most hospitable to Jews and the least paranoiac about Jewish group solidarity. However, a half-truth linkers in this claim. An inefficient and ambitious managerial bureaucracy, who control the industrial capital of Communist countries, may indeed use antisemitism to cover up their mistakes and to justify their ambitions. The issue of private enterprise is beside the point.
The revival of a non-violent anti-Jewish prejudice in “Marxist” Eastern Europe forces us to revise the cliches about Jewish hatred that have circulated so long in liberal circles. The standard assertion that antisemitism is sustained by historic Christian propaganda becomes ludicrous in a bigoted setting where Christian doctrine is reviled. It may be true that the Church laid the groundwork for. the structure of persecution and strengthened it through centuries of relentless propaganda; but it is not true that its sustained bigotry is the principal cause of secular antisemitism. The Vatican may issue a million retractions of its libels, the Protestant leaders may grovel in abject denial of any Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ, and the Orthodox may shower endless praise on Jewish virtues yet it is all quite irrelevant. The present causes of anti-Jewish prejudice are quite independent of religious mythology. They have more to do with social needs than with any particular rationalization, whether theological or secular.
The facts are clear. In an environment which respects neither Christianity nor capitalism antisemitism flourishes. In a Chinese setting, where Jews are as exotic as a dodo bird, ritual denunciations of Jewish aggression persist. An “absurd” shift has occurred. The major purveyors of anti-Jewish propaganda are on the left.- not on the right. Like the American black militants who echo the Maoist line, the men of power in the socialist world have turned the Jew into a fascist bogey.
Of course, certain realities must be clarified. It is often maintained by all kinds of rabbis in America that the persecution of the Jew in Russia is religious persecution. However, no evaluation of the problem seems farther from the truth. Unlike America, the Jews in the Soviet Union are not primarily identified as a religious group. They see themselves, and others see them, as a distinct ethnic group. While traditional Judaism, like all religious ideologies, suffers state persecution, the vast majority of the Jews in Russia has long since been alienated from theological institutions. If on occasion like on Simhat Torah, they demonstrate outside the Moscow synagogue, their involvement has little to do with personal piety; it has everything to do with defiance of a society that denies them decent assimilation. Jewish identity in the Soviet Union is a function of birth. Personal convictions and religious belief are irrelevant.
Nor does the issue of Yiddish culture seem particularly significant. It is often amusing to read the accounts of liberal rabbis who ignore the use of the Yiddish language in America, returning from their summer tour of Russia to denounce “the vicious persecution of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union.” Obviously, what is linguistically good enough for American Jews is not linguistically good enough for Russian Jews. Although in urbanize industrial America, where most Jews do not live in isolated communities but prefer the hectic living of metropolitan centers, the preservation of Yiddish or any other non-English dialect is socially impossible, the same reality seems incongruous in a Russian setting. But why should it be? Is not Soviet Jewry, which is presently concentrated in the major cities of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Odessa entitled to the same cultural assimilation we pride ourselves on in America. Hostility to Yiddish culture arises less from state bureaucrats than from social-climbing young Russian Jews who wish to succeed in management and the professions. If speaking Yiddish has no particular social advantage at the Chrysler Corporation, why should it confer any more benefits to the man who works for the Kiev City Planning Commission? Why should we bother to save Yiddish for Jews who don’t really want to save it?
In the case of Zionism, the specious distinctions which Russian and Polish apologists make between Jews and Zionists seem particularly deceitful. The Polish functionaries and ideologists who were removed in the recent purge because of their alleged Israeli sympathies, had long since toed the party line on the Jewish question. They had, in many cases, altered their last names, rejected Jewish identity for themselves and their families, and pleaded ad nauseam the purity of their Polish patriotism. Their anti-Zionism would have matched the fervor of even our domestic Council for Judaism. But to no
avail. Like the Englishman Phillips who was recently rejected as the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia because of his Jewish descent, the anti-Zionist Jew discovers that the bigot sees no difference between him and the ordinary varieties of Jews. It’s just that saying “a dirty Zionist” sounds much more respectable than saying a “dirty Jew”. If then, neither the demand for religion, nor the frustrated quest for Yiddish culture, nor the need to separate the “white” Jews from the Zionists, is the cause of the present problem, what is? What are the real causes?
Six reasons seem apparent.
(1) The need for a scapegoat is as indispensable to Marxist societies as to bourgeois countries. Impersonal social forces and external enemies are not easily attacked. Defenseless domestic minorities, however, are convenient prey. Given the normal paranoia most people feel with persistent frustration, a personal and easily frightened villain is psychically necessary. Aestrictions on political and economic freedom can only be sustained in the face of a real or imagined enemy. Since the real historic enemy of Polish nationalism is Russia, and Russia is too powerful to resist, the bureaucratic bullies allow the people to use the Jews for a cheap catharsis. The Ukrainianst Of the Soviet Union also play the same game.
(2) Guilt is an invisible but powerful factor. The six million Jews who were murdered in World War II were not only executed by German butchers; they were also the victims of the active collaboration of the Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Ukrainian peoples. The memory of this cooperation lingers in the psyche of these Eastern nations. Unlike the Germans who are allowed to publicly repent their collective crimes, the Slays have no such outlet. They must pretend to a heroism they never evinced; and they must plead a record of anti-fascism they never earned. The Jew, is, therefore, a painful reminder of their failure to prove that he deserved the suffering-he endured is to alleviate guilt. If Jews (as the Arabs say) are no better than Nazis, then they deserved to die.
(3) Jews are very good at starting revolutions; but they are very bad at enduring them. While the founders of Bolshevik Russia leaned heavily on Jewish support and personnel, successive purges eliminated the Jewish presence. Hungary, Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia have similar records. The hostility of the Jew to established political authority, bred through centuries of state persecution, manifests itself in a skeptical criticism of existing regimes. With their age-old bourgeois penchant for intellectual analysis, Jews can easily become questioning and unreliable servants. It is-by no mere coincidence-that leading figures in the Russian, Polish, and Czech literary resistance to state. censorship are Jewish. While long deprivation of power can make Jews overbearing masters when they achieve it (e.g. Trotsky, RakPsi, and Pauter), a prevailing skepticism makes them ideal for either humor- or freedom. Those who have a vested interest in docile political
obedience dislike Jews.
(4) While the success of the state of Israel has enhanced Jewish self-esteem, it has hardly reduced the incidence of antisemitism around the world. In fact, “Jewish Power” often makes countless lovers of the Jews uncomfortable, because their liberal sentiments are- merely a subtle cover-up for race hatred. Although many liberals, socialists, and “good” Christians can amiably deal with the Jew as a pitiable and destitute figure, or even as a frightened middle-class neurotic, they cannot comfortably confront the Jew as a self-confident master of his own destiny. To do so is to reverse the power roles that make them secure. A successful Israel is, in the end, emotionally intolerable. Eastern Europeans, with their long history of antisemitism, prefer pity to respect.
(5) Whether we wish to acknowledge the fact or not, the fate of the Jews of the world is inevitably tied up with the fate of America. The 1arg4t and most affluent national Jewish community lives in the United States. Without the financial support of American Jewry and the political support of the American government, the state of Israel would find it difficult to survive despite its bravery. In a real sense, Israel is a client-state of the United States and a dependent on her protection. The only condition that prevents massive Soviet military intervention in the Middle East on behalf of the Arabs is the threat of American retailiation. From the Russian point of view, the Jews of Eastern Europe are potential subversives. Since the heart of the Jewish world lies in New York, any attempt to organize Russian Jewry to communicate with its ethnic brothers outside the Soviet Union, is a dangerous intrusion of American influence into the vital urban centers of Russia. The Jews are not like the Tartars and the Yakuts who enjoy the rights to an organized national culture within the Soviet boundaries. These Mongols are not overwhelmingly outnumbered by six million relatives in the United States.
(6) The Soviet desire to expand its power in Asia and Africa obviously implies that Arabs are a Russian’s best friends. Like De Gaulle the Soviet leaders are too opportunistic to allow Jewish interests to inhibit them. If antisemitism is fashionable among Arabs it will become fashionable among Russians and Chinese. The Jews have nothing to offer the Soviet Union that the Soviet really wants. Since the Russians can hardly denounce the Jews for being Bolsheviks, we will end up as the “tools of reactionary imperialism” and “the puppets of fascism”. How times change.
Let’s face it. Antisemitism is a chronic disease. It is neither a sickness of the right nor the left. It is neither conservative nor liberal. It is no more the device of exploiting capitalists than the tool of ambitious Marxists. It is no more dependent on Christian theology than on the pagan hate of Cicero or Hitler. It is a function of human paranoia and simple nationalism -and for these conditions there is no present cure.