Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Fundamentalist and oil-rich Saudi Arabia, the same soil from which Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda movement have sprung, is a major hotbed of the type of Muslim jihad that specifically calls for the terrorist murder of Jews and Christians. Government dailies even print gory nonsense about the “well-established fact” that “Jews spill human blood for their holiday pastries.” But a no less anti-Semitic outlook holds sway in more secular Arab societies such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. This hysteria cannot be adequately understood in terms of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Certainly, the cause of Palestine has periodically been hijacked by radical Islamists and pan-Arabists in order to broaden their political support in the Muslim world. But the “Jewish question” in radical Islam (as with its Western totalitarian predecessors) is not centered on Palestine, and certainly does not see Palestine as a purely territorial issue amenable to rational bargaining. The ideological anti-Semitism that characterizes Islamist thinking is driven by something else: an irrational belief that history itself is determined by the evil machinations of the Jewish people. In this respect the Islamists seem to be directly following the Nazi model, with its fixation on a mythical Jewish power that strives for global hegemony. Of course, the two models and the two situations are not identical, and the context has changed as well. The “Jewish question” radically changed its contours with the establishment of a Jewish state and Israeli military power in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the creation of Israel could not, on its own, blunt the potential of anti-Semitism as a global phenomenon. It seems rather to have attenuated its force for about two decades, even while a new version of the problem metastasized. Zionism in effect has shifted the focus of postwar anti-Jewishness to an assault on the dominant collective representation of contemporary Jewish existence—the State of Israel itself. Since 1948, the major ideological and political threat to the survival of the Jewish nation gradually switched from Europe to the Arab-Islamic world, fueled by a politicidal “anti-Zionist” ideology whose main thrust has always been the destruction of Israel as an independent state.

  THE EUROPEAN LEGACY

  To grasp the origins of the demonology behind contemporary Islamist versions of anti-Semitism, one needs to be aware of its characteristics as they first crystallized at the end of the nineteenth century. Fin-de-siècle European anti-Semitism was deeply pessimistic. It was obsessed with the “decadence” of Christian and “Aryan” civilization, supposedly in thrall to a newly emancipated and “victorious” Jewry. From the radical journalist Wilhelm Marr’s prophecy of Finis Germaniae (1879) to Edouard Drumont’s La Dernière Bataille (1889) and the Teutonomaniac Houston S. Chamberlain’s Foundations of the 19th Century (1899), we find the same specter of Jewish power and gentile demise invoked by a new class of best-selling publicists and populist intellectuals. The anti-Semites inhabited a murky fantasy-world imbued with quasi-apocalyptic visions of European decline, colored by occult sectarianism and permeated with notions of retributive punishment on a cosmic scale. They elaborated negative millenarianism in secular garb—a “reactionary modernism” that reluctantly adapted to democratic mass politics and class conflict while preaching a backward-looking utopia based on pre-modern feudal or even tribal models. In this fin-de-siècle world of economic disorientation, rapid social change, and eroding traditional values, populist anti-Semitic movements arose that became the seedplot of Nazism. They were especially powerful in the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the young Hitler acquired the “granite-like foundations,” as he called them in Mein Kampf, of his Weltanschauung. The main elements of twentieth-century ideological anti-Semitism were already in place by 1914, when Hitler was twenty-five years old. These elements included: the beliefs that nationalism was an irresistible force and that race was a secular equivalent of Destiny or Providence; the fear of pollution by alien, inferior races; the angst provoked by Marxist class struggle and the leveling tendencies of mass society; and the hatred, nourished by movements of the radical Right and Left, of capitalism, modern urban civilization, and liberal democracy.

  European anti-Semites usually shared a belief in occult, sinister forces working to undermine social hierarchy, order, authority, and tradition. They were alarmed by the spiritual vacuum induced by the declining hold of Christianity, and especially by the working classes’ attraction to apocalyptic, revolutionary Marxism. Above all, they shared an obsession with the mythological figure of the satanic, ubiquitous, immoral, and all-powerful Jew. Here was, as Richard Wagner put it, the “plastic demon of modern civilization,” whose unquenchable will to destroy gentile society lay behind all negative processes of change, providing a coherent explanation for the resulting anomie. “All comes from the Jew, all returns to the Jew.” This classic formula of Edouard Drumont in 1886 exemplified the delirious causality embraced by modern anti-Semites. The principle of evil is not in ourselves; it comes from outside. It is the product of conspiracy and devilish forces whose incarnation is the mythical Jew. The mass slaughter of World War I, with its destruction of traditional elites, collapse of established monarchies, and sudden flurry of revolutionary coups in central Europe (above all the Bolshevik triumph in Russia, whose autocracy had been the fountainhead of the ancien régime in Europe), immeasurably envenomed and radicalized antiSemitism. The massacres of Jews by the White Armies during the Russian Civil War (1918–20), the fierce anti-Semitic backlash against Jewish participation in the German and Hungarian revolutions, and the juxtaposition of the “Jewish” and “Red” perils in east-central Europe were all alarming signals of growing extremism.

  These events greatly encouraged the mass dissemination of nineteenth-century anti-Semitic stereotypes and ideologies. The climate was ripe for a far more effective translation of conspiracy theories into political praxis than had been the case before World War I. German defeat in that war, crushing economic reparations imposed by the Allies, the resultant loathing for the democratic West, the devastating inflation of 1923, chronic political instability in the Weimar Republic, growing fear of communism, and the ravages of the Great Depression were so many milestones on the road to Nazism. From each one, the sense of helplessness grew, and the longing to blame someone or something for it grew with it. Nazi anti-Semitism thus sprang from popular fears, and at the same time stoked and organized them.

  THE NAZI-ARAB NEXUS

  Nazi doctrines exerted considerable fascination on the Arab world during these years. Both pan-Arabism and pan-Islamic ideologies in the Middle East looked to Hitler’s Germany as a model for national unification, a counterweight to Western imperialism and a source of revolutionary dynamism. Anti-Semitic and anti-British feelings (which anticipated some of the anti-Americanism rampant today) created a powerful sense of affinity between German Nazis and Arab nationalists in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. A former Syrian Ba’athi leader, recalling the atmosphere of the late 1930s, wrote:

  We were fascinated by Nazism, reading its books and the sources of its thinking, particularly Nietzsche, Fichte and Chamberlain. And we were the first who thought about translating Mein Kampf. We, who lived in Damascus, could appreciate the tendency of the Arab people to Nazism which was the power which appealed to it. By nature, the vanquished admires the victorious.

  Arab nationalists, radicals, and Islamic militants were clearly influenced by the anti-liberal and anti-Western spirit of fascism, its emphasis on youth, its pattern of organization, and, above all, its cult of power. In Iraq, the Director-General of Education, Dr. Sami Shawkat, told students in Baghdad in the autumn of 1933: “There is something more important than money and learning for preserving the honor of a nation and for keeping humiliation at bay. That is strength. . . . Strength, as I use the word here, means to excel in the Profession of Death.”

  Seventy years later, Saddam’s Iraq provided a sinister confirmation of this outlook in its determination to develop weapons of mass destruction and its readiness to use them against internal as well as external enemies. The idolization of power, together with the totalitaria
n mystique of the nation, was already developed by many Arab radicals in the 1930s and 1940s. Their visions of grandeur were exacerbated by a feeling of deep malaise, and even trauma, which the encounter with Western civilization had inflicted upon Arab society. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna in Egypt, represented the pristine anti-Western and fundamentalist version of this backlash. From the outset, the jihadists around al-Banna developed the cult of the leader and preached fascist doctrines of “unity and discipline” and “martial strength and military preparedness.” Like Ahmad Hussein’s Young Egypt movement of the late 1930s, they were militantly anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, supporting the boycott and harassment of the Jewish community in Egypt.

  The Muslim Brothers, with their vision of a judenfrei Palestine as a rallying-point for removing all Western influences from the Middle East, belonged to the first wave of Islamic fascism. The second wave, which swelled after the Six Day War, had as its leading ideologue one Sayyid Qutb, a revolutionary Egyptian intellectual executed by Nasser only a year before the Arab defeat. For Qutb and his followers, the invasion of Western culture had thrown Muslims back into a state of pre-Islamic barbarism (jahiliyya) dominated by social chaos, sexual permissiveness, polytheism, apostasy, and idolatry. His notorious text of the early 1950s, Our Struggle with the Jews, portrayed the Jews as the “eternal enemies” of Muhammad and the Islamic community who used Christianity, capitalism, and communism as weapons in their war to subvert the Muslim religion. The Islamists of today have faithfully followed Qutb in attributing Marxism, psychoanalysis, sociology, materialism, sexual depravity, and the destruction of morals and the family to “Jewish” influence. In this cultural war, they see Zionism and Americanism as kindred expressions of an existential threat to Muslim identity.

  ANTI-SEMITISM TODAY

  Today, the identity crisis affecting millions of Muslims is spawning its own brand of Islamic neo-fascism. That crisis is accentuated by accelerating urbanization, overpopulation, and endemic poverty, as well as the prevalence of suffocating dictatorships throughout the Arab world. Without the bogeymen of America and Israel, however, Arab despots would be hard put to explain to their own peoples why the modern world is passing them by. Why is Cairo infinitely poorer than Tel Aviv? Why is heart surgery so much better in London than in Damascus? Why do Arab immigrants prefer Los Angeles or Detroit to Baghdad or Beirut?

  The crushing of dissent, the repression of women, the scale of mass illiteracy and underdevelopment, and the oil riches of corrupt ruling elites provide part of the answer. For decades, authoritarian Arab regimes turned the bitter feelings of humiliation and rage among the masses against the “colonialist” West. The Islamists have continued in this vein, adding their own paranoid suspicions of modern secular civilization. Fear of apostasy fuses with hatred of America, Jews, and non-Muslims in general. Rank homophobia and a fiercely puritanical, repressive vision of veiled and enslaved womanhood are added to the mix. Indeed, European fascism, for all its male-oriented warrior barbarism, was almost liberating in its attitudes toward women compared with the Taliban or Saudi Wahhabism. Militarism, the glorification of force, and a nihilistic cult of death are, however, traits that Nazis, fascists, and Islamists share completely in common. The morbid addiction to destruction and revenge drives them to paint the world red with blood in their mad rush to introduce utopia in the here-and-now. Added to this is the totalitarian belief, very much shared by Stalinists, in the all-encompassing power of propaganda, party organization, and terror—a mystique reinforced by the seemingly limitless manipulative possibilities of modern technology joined to ideological dogma. The individual is considered totally malleable and subordinate to the revolutionary cause, whether it be “living space,” “racial purity,” the “Arab Renaissance,” the “classless society,” or the jihad. Promethean doctrines, to which human life is so eagerly sacrificed, can only be vindicated by the success of a global revolution that grants political hegemony to true believers in the cause. Whether millions die in the attempt is irrelevant in the light of either the eternal laws of nature and history or the will of God.

  Totalitarian anti-Semitism reached its genocidal extreme with Hitler’s ideology and a political praxis that, though it grew up on Christian soil, was ultimately determined to replace and supplant Christianity. National Socialism was racial politics carried out under the sign of the Apocalypse, in which the global struggle between the “Aryan” world and Jewry stood at the center of a closed system of thought. Anti-Semitism was transformed into a crucial lever in the restructuring not only of Nazi Germany but of the entire international order—initially as a weapon for undermining Hitler’s domestic adversaries and then for subverting or neutralizing opposition to his policies abroad. Hitler emphasized that the destruction of world Jewry was a precondition for restoring the natural hierarchy within the nation and between the races. The Darwinian racism that he espoused was not the root of his anti-Semitism; it was simply the “scientific” language he employed to give more credibility to his eschatological political agenda. Its deeper sources lay in a pseudo-religious, Manichean vision of a world in which “the Jew” was the negative wellspring and dark side of history driving mankind relentlessly toward the abyss.

  Nazi ideology led to acts of murderous race-cleansing of varying kinds during World War II, but only the Jews were singled out for total extermination. The war against them was conceived as an apocalyptic Vernichtungskrieg for global hegemony. What Hitler did was to transform the demonological fantasies of both Christian and anti-Christian anti-Semitism into a practical political program on a universal scale. The choice of the target grew out of centuries of Christian teaching that had singled out the Jews as a deicidal people. But the Shoah was a modernized high-tech version of “Holy War” carried out by totalitarian atheists. These atheists consciously sought to eradicate both the Enlightenment legacy of reason and the entire Judeo-Christian tradition of ethics.

  The topography and lexicography of post-Holocaust antiSemitism changed dramatically after 1945, yet the essential elements of ideological continuity have been remarkably tenacious. Today, the geographical center of gravity is neither Germany nor the European continent (despite the alarming revival of old prejudices) but the Arab-Muslim world and its diasporic offshoots. Anti-Jewish rhetoric in the new millennium tends to be Islamic, anti-globalist, and neo-Marxist far more than it is Christian, conservative, or neo-fascist. Whether the assault comes from the far Left or Right, from liberals or fundamentalists, its focus now is above all the collective Jew embodied in the State of Israel. Despite the incessant hair-splitting over the need to separate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, this has in recent decades become a distinction without a meaningful difference. Whatever theoretical contortions one may indulge in, the State of Israel is a Jewish state. Whoever wants to defame or destroy it, openly or through policies that entail nothing else but such destruction, is in effect practicing the Jew-hatred of yesteryear, whatever their self-proclaimed intentions.

  THE SOVIET LEGACY

  The case of Soviet communism is particularly interesting in this regard. In 1931, Josef Stalin officially denounced antiSemitism as “zoological,” a form of cannibalism. This was formally consistent with the original internationalist policy of Marxist-Leninism and the older communist view of antiSemitism as a reactionary tool of the ruling classes to divert attention away from the class struggle. By 1949, however, Stalin was beginning to sound like Adolf Hitler when it came to “the Jewish question.” He adopted the classic Nazi mythology of “rootless cosmopolitanism” and applied it to Soviet Jews. Stalinist accusations which developed out of this slogan followed the pattern of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This had an obvious propaganda value in Soviet Russia, as it did in all of the East European satellite countries that fell under communist control in the late 1940s, where anti-Semitism already enjoyed great popularity. The fictitious “world conspiracy” invented by the Stalinists offered a suitable backdrop for tot
alitarian claims to world rule alongside the crusade against Wall Street, capitalism, and imperialism.

  Stalin’s shift toward the Nazi paradigm became transparent in the Slansky show trial in Czechoslovakia (1952–53), which proceeded as if all Jews were potentially Zionists and all Zionist groups were “agents” of American imperialism. This was followed by the extinction of Soviet Jewish culture and a planned “final solution” of the “Jewish question” by mass expulsion to Siberia. This disaster was averted only by Stalin’s sudden death (on Purim, incidentally) fifty years ago.