Not in God's Name

by Jonathan Sacks

  Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote about the crucial interview he had to undergo to be qualified as a scientist to work at a nearby chemical factory, making him necessary enough to the German war effort not to be killed immediately. The examination was conducted by a Doktor Engineer Pannwitz. Levi says that he had ‘often wondered about the inner workings’ of this man:

  Because the look he gave me was not the way one man looks at another. If I could fully explain the nature of that look – it was as if through the glass of an aquarium directed at some creature belonging to a different world – I would be able to explain the great madness of the Third Reich, down to its very core.

  Everything we thought and said about the Germans took shape in that one moment. The brain commanding those blue eyes and manicured hands clearly said: ‘This thing standing before me obviously belongs to a species that must be eliminated. But with this particular example, it is worth making sure that he has nothing we can use before we get rid of him.’20

  Establishing the subhumanity of the Jews was a major part of the Nazi education programme between 1933 and 1939. It was an elaborate, multifaceted effort involving textbooks, children’s stories, cartoons in newspapers and periodicals, posters, films, research institutes, learned journals, think tanks and professional bodies. The Education Ministry decreed that ‘no student shall graduate unless he has perceived that the future of a Volk depends on race and inheritance’.21 People had to be educated out of any sympathy for the Jews before the mass murders began. As Rudolf Hess, commandant of Auschwitz, said, ‘Look, you can see for yourself. They are not like you and me. They do not behave like human beings. They are here to die.’22

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  The second stage is establishing victimhood. Just as it is necessary to rob your enemies of their humanity, so you have to find a way of relinquishing responsibility for the evil you are about to commit. You must define yourself as a victim. It follows that you, in committing murder, even genocide, are merely acting in self-defence. It is the victim who is responsible.

  This was Hitler’s constant and deeply paradoxical claim. As Jeffrey Herf points out, he and his propagandists had to maintain two completely contradictory ideas: ‘one rooted in the grandiose idea of a master race and world domination, the other in the self-pitying paranoia of the innocent, beleaguered victim’.23 In general, as Vamik Volkan notes, dualists tend to combine ‘paradoxical feelings of omnipotence and victimization’.24 On the one hand we are masters of the universe; on the other we are the devil’s slaves.

  At the 1938 rally at Nuremberg, Hitler accused ‘the Jewish world enemy’ of ‘the attempted annihilation of the Aryan states’.25 In a broadcast address in April 1942, he explained that ‘The hidden powers who drove England in 1914 into World War I were Jews’, adding that ‘the power that paralyzed us in that war’ was ‘a Jewish one’.26

  The Jews, claimed Hitler, were currently responsible for America’s opposition to Germany. Roosevelt was a mere puppet of the Jews. ‘The Jews in the USA hold power with the help of the Jewish government, bleed the people white, and oppress them.’27 We know, said Hitler in a radio broadcast in December 1941, ‘what power stands behind Roosevelt. It is the eternal Jew.’28

  The English too were their slaves: ‘Today we know who we are facing in England: the world enemy number 1: international Jews and the power-hungry, hate-filled world Jewry.’29 Goebbels echoed the point, saying about the English that in their ‘brutality, lying, pious hypocrisy, and pietistic godliness, they are the Jews among the Aryans and belong to that group of men who must first be smashed in the teeth before one can hope to speak rationally with them’.30 The lead article in Der Volkische Beobachter proclaimed: ‘Churchill promises Germany to Jews as Plunder; Solidarity of World Parasite Renewed.’31

  Jews were also responsible for communism. Hitler told a Nazi gathering in Munich in November 1941, ‘The greatest servant of Jewry is the Soviet Union.’32 As for the question of how Jews could be behind both capitalism and communism, the United States and the Soviet Union, his answer was simple: ‘Regarded superficially, plutocracy and proletarian dictatorship are as different as fire and water. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin. Their common denominator is the Jews.’33

  Hence Hitler’s remark, made in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, and repeated publicly several times, that if the Second World War were to happen, it would be the Jews’ fault, and Germany would be performing a service to the world by exterminating them:

  I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and have been mostly derided…I want today to be a prophet again: if international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.34

  Ten days after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Goebbels published an essay in which he wrote, ‘The Jews are guilty! If in a dark hour war should one day break out in Europe, this cry must resound over our whole part of the earth. The Jews are guilty! They want war, and they are doing everything in their power to drive the peoples into it.’35 In his New Year address, 1 January 1940, Hitler asserted, ‘The Jewish-capitalist world enemy that confronts us has only one goal: to exterminate Germany and the German people.’36

  On 21 January 1945, with defeat staring Germany in the face, Goebbels published his last major article about the Jews, the claims coming together in a crescendo:

  Who drives the Russians, English, and Americans into the fire, and sacrifices masses of foreign lives in a hopeless struggle against the German people? The Jews!…Who invents new programs of hatred and extermination against us, and in so doing makes this war into an awful act of horrendous self-slaughter and self-annihilation of Europe’s life, its economy, education, and culture? The Jews! Who invented, implemented, and jealously watches over the repulsive alliance between England and the USA on the one hand, and Bolshevism on the other?…Jews, only the Jews!…Wherever you look, you see Jews.37

  Defining yourself as a victim is a denial of what makes us human. We see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility. The victim, ascribing his condition to others, locates the cause of his situation outside himself, thus rendering himself incapable of breaking free from his self-created trap. Because he attributes a real phenomenon (pain, poverty, illiteracy, disease, defeat, humiliation) to a fictitious cause, he discovers that eliminating the cause does not remove the symptom. Hence efforts must be redoubled. If you kill witches for causing illness, the witches die and the illness remains. So you must find more witches to kill, and still the illness remains. Blame cultures perpetuate every condition against which they are a protest.

  They also corrupt others. One of the noblest of all human instincts is compassion. We reach out to help victims even though they are strangers, even though there is no other bond between us other than our shared humanity. But compassion can be exploited. When self-defined victims lay claim to compassion in a less-than-noble cause, they turn people of goodwill into co-dependents. Seeking to assist, they reinforce the pattern of behaviour they wish to cure.

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  When dehumanisation and demonisation are combined with a sense of victimhood, the third stage becomes possible: the commission of evil in an altruistic cause. Nazism presented itself as a profoundly moral movement, designed to purify the nation from alien elements poisoning its bloodstream, restore the greatness of the Aryan race, rid the world of false doctrines like capitalism and communism, and rescue the Volk from degeneracy. From the beginning, Hitler defined his task in moral and aesthetic terms. In Mein Kampf he wrote that ‘the highest purpose of an ethnic state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements that bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher human nature’.38

  One of the classic texts of altruistic evil is the spee
ch of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, to a conclave in Poland on 4 October 1943:

  I want to make reference before you here, in complete frankness, to a really grave matter. Among ourselves, this once, it shall be uttered quite frankly; but in public we will never speak of it…I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the annihilation of the Jewish people. This is one of those things that are easily said. ‘The Jewish people is going to be annihilated’, says every party member. ‘Sure, it’s in our programme, elimination of the Jews, annihilation – we’ll take care of it.’ And then they all come trudging, eighty million worthy Germans, and each has his one decent Jew. Sure, the others are swine, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Of all those who talk this way, no one has seen it happen, not one has been through it. Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have endured this and – excepting cases of human weakness – to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. In our history, this is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory.39

  The first time Himmler visited Auschwitz, the experience made him vomit. Yet he made the same rigorous demands of himself that he made of his subordinates. He steeled himself to return. On that next occasion,

  He stopped beside the burning pit and waited for a pair of gloves. Then he put on the gloves, picked one of the dead bodies off the pile, and threw it into the fire. ‘Thank God,’ he cried with a loud voice. ‘At last I too have burned a Jew with my own hands.’40

  Hitler declared in Mein Kampf that in exterminating the Jews, ‘I am doing the Lord’s work.’ He maintained this belief until the very end. His last testament, written on 29 April 1945, a day before he committed suicide, reiterated his claim that neither he nor ‘anyone else in Germany’ wanted war in 1939. ‘It was desired and launched exclusively by those international statesmen who either were of Jewish origin or worked for Jewish interests.’ Jews are the ‘truly guilty party of this murderous battle’. In the last sentence of his final message to the world, he called on Germans to ‘continue in pitiless resistance against the world poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry’.41

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  E.H. Gombrich, the great art historian, worked at the BBC during the war, analysing German wartime propaganda. In a lecture after the war he explained that what made it effective was ‘less the lie than the imposition of a paranoiac pattern on world events’. Pathological dualism creates a self-contained world which becomes self-confirming. ‘Once you are entrapped in this illusionary universe it will become reality for you, for if you fight everybody, everybody will fight you, and the less mercy you show, the more you commit your side to a fight to the finish. When you have been caught in this vicious circle there really is no escape.’42 In the light of this we begin to understand the moral force of monotheism. The belief in one God meant that all the conflicting forces operative in the universe were encompassed by a single personality, the God of righteousness, who was sometimes just, sometimes forgiving, who spoke at times of law and at others of love. It was the refusal to split these things apart that made monotheism the humanising, civilising influence that, in the good times, it has been.

  Theology creates an anthropology. Discovering God, singular and alone, the first monotheists discovered the human person singular and alone. Monotheism internalises what dualism externalises. It takes the good and bad in the human situation, the faith and the fear, the retribution and the forgiving, and locates them within each of us, turning what would otherwise be war on the battlefield into a struggle within the soul. ‘Who is a hero?’ asked the rabbis, and replied, ‘One who conquers himself.’ This is the moral drama that has been monotheism’s contribution to the civilisation of the West: not the clash of titans on the field of battle, but the quiet inner drama of choice and will, restraint and responsibility.

  Hence the unique mixture of light and shade in all the characters of the Hebrew Bible. Abraham and Isaac pass off their wives as their sisters. Jacob deceives his blind father and takes his brother’s blessing. Moses loses his temper. David commits adultery. Solomon, wisest of men, is led astray. The Bible hides none of this from us, and for a deeply consequential reason: to teach us that even the best are not perfect and even the worst are not devoid of merits. That is the best protection of our humanity.

  Dualism, as we have noted, comes in many forms: between mind and body, in-group and out-group, and between the higher and lower instincts between which we must constantly choose. It may be that binary opposition is one of the fundamental ways in which we understand the world. But divide humanity into absolute categories of good and evil, in which all the good is on one side and all the evil on the other, and you will see your own side as good, the other as evil. Evil seeks to destroy the good. Therefore your enemies are trying to destroy you. If there is no obvious evidence that they are, this is a sign that they are working in secret. If they deny it, this is proof that the accusation is true, else why would they bother to deny it? And since they are evil and we are good, they are the cause of our present misfortunes and we must eliminate them so that the good to which we are entitled, the honour we once had and the superiority that is our right can be ours again. That is the pathological dualism that leads to altruistic evil with murderous consequences.

  Can dualism be as serious as this chapter has suggested? After all, Nazism had nothing to do with religion, and Judaism and Christianity rejected the worldview of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. Could dualism really surface in the monotheistic mainstream? If so, how? These are our subjects in the next chapter.

  4

  The Scapegoat

  We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

  Jonathan Swift

  ITEM: 26 November 2014. Remarks by Jordanian MP Khalil Attieh after the murder of four rabbis during prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue, broadcast on Roya TV: ‘By Allah, it is an honor to incite against the Jews. It is a great accomplishment to provoke and incense them…if this is terrorism, we are terrorists. Indeed, I make use of the hatred of the Jews, as all Arabs should, because the Jews respect neither treaties nor human beings. They respect nothing. That accursed ambassador did me a great honor by saying that I hate the Jews. Yes, I hate the Jews. I hate the Jews. I hate the Jews.’1

  ITEM: 7 November 2014. Friday sermon by Jordanian cleric Sheik Bassam Al-Amoush: ‘They [the Jews] are the slayers of peoples. If you study the history of the great wars, you see that the Jews were behind them. If you study anarchy between nations, the Jews were behind them…they strive to establish a secret global government through Freemasonry. The Jews are a corrupting people. Even Hitler the racist wrote in Mein Kampf, when he killed Jews: “The reason is that they corrupt the German youth, and I need the German youth to turn into real men so that I can take over the world.” ’2

  ITEM: 7 September 2014. Remarks by former Jordanian MP Sheik Abd Al-Mun’im Abu Zant, broadcast on Al-Aqsa TV: ‘We have to understand the true nature of the Jews, because the entire world is deceived and tormented by them…They are liars. They allow cannibalism, and the eating of human flesh…On their religious holidays, if they cannot find a Muslim to slaughter, and use drops of his blood to knead the matzos they eat, they slaughter a Christian in order to take drops of his blood, and mix it into the matzos that they eat on that holiday.’3

  ITEM: 21 January 2010. Former President of Malaysia Dr Mahathir Mohamad: ‘Jews have always been a problem in European countries. They had to be confined to ghettoes and periodically massacred. But still they remain, they thrive and they hold whole governments to ransom…Even after their massacre by the Nazis of Germany, they survived to continue to be a source of even greater problems for the world.’4

  ITEM: 17 January 2009. Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaqub, broadcast on Al-Rahma TV: ‘If the Jews left Palestine to us? Would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them…They are enemies not because they occupie
d Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing…You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the earth…You Jews have sown hatred in our hearts, and we have bequeathed it to our children and grandchildren. You will not survive as long as a single one of us remains.’5

  ITEM: 12 September 2004. Turkish journalist Ayse Onal reports on the sharp turn to antisemitism in the Turkish press, giving the following examples: ‘335 children and teachers were murdered in Beslan by the Jews. The barbarism of 9/11 was a Jewish plot. Turkish society and family values are being destroyed by the Jews. It is the Jews who are cutting off heads in Iraq. They [the Jews] are so blinded [with hatred] that in order to conceal the Jewish finger [role] in all of that, they sometimes butcher [their fellow] Jews as well. It was them [the Jews] who bombed their own synagogues. And when their own families died, they shed false tears.’6

  ITEM: 29 April 2002. Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud, Al-Akhbar: ‘The Jews are accursed in heaven and on earth. They are accursed from the day the human race was created and from the day their mothers bore them…These accursed ones are a catastrophe for the human race. They are the virus of the generation…With regard to the fraud of the Holocaust…many French students have proven that this is no more than a fabrication, a lie and a fraud…But I…complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart, “If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened.” ’7