There is another kind of anti-Semitism, however, which is much more widespread than the racial variety. It does not refer to this pseudo-philosophic approach; in fact it even emphatically rejects it. This brand of anti-Semitism simply affirms that the Jews are a disastrous element for any constructive culture, for the healthy life of nations. Anti-Semites of this variety accuse the Jews of infecting occidental philosophy and art with a destructive, disintegrating spirit. Some pretend that the Jews are responsible for the demoralization of business life, that they are racketeers; now seeing in them the creators of a ruthless capitalism, now accusing them of being the spearhead of Communism, of spreading revolution and dissension wherever they go and destroying all genuine patriotism. All agree that as a foreign element in the body of a nation the Jews are parasites. This kind of anti-Semitism, although not expressly based on the Nazi philosophy, is at the present time a consciously employed and dangerously demagogic weapon of Nazism.
The rising tide of anti-Semitism in the United States should serve to remind us that in the tragedy of Europe, where one country after another succumbed to Axis invasion, anti-Semitism was the forerunner of Nazism. In gaining sympathizers within such countries as Austria, Holland, Poland, Hungary, and France, anti-Semitism served to weaken the resistance toward Nazism. Charles Lindbergh’s speech at Des Moines and the attitude of the Senate subcommittee investigating war propaganda in the movies are reminiscent of the well-known tricks of Nazi propaganda. Today anti-Semitic propaganda in the United States, conscious or unconscious, means helping Hitler and breaking the moral defense line against Nazism. The more one who calumniates the Jews assures his hearers that he is not an anti-Semite, the more we must distrust him as a dangerous demagogue. Using the well-known formula of Mark Antony—“Brutus is an honorable man”—he lulls his hearers into a sense of security, the more readily to introduce his poison.
This demagogic brand of anti-Semitism is just as incompatible with genuine democracy as the racial variety. It invokes, in the first place, a limitation of the rights of certain citizens in order to diminish their influence. Now a limitation of rights, or any unequal treatment, is admissible in a democracy only if the individual in question is mentally or morally irresponsible or if he has been proved lacking in loyalty to the country. The anti-Semites, in contrast, would place restrictions on individuals solely because they are Jews.
Some of them—and they are the great majority—believe that the simple fact of Jewish descent is enough to justify a limitation of rights, and feel themselves very generous and free from prejudices if they concede that there may be some persons of Jewish descent who may be excepted from this general restriction. They do not see the injustice of vilifying an individual because of his descent, of presupposing that he is morally unreliable in consequence of a fact for which he is by no means responsible. To concede exceptions for Jews who overcome their “disadvantages” by special merits is to reveal still more clearly the obvious injustice of the whole concept. There is a certain irony in the fact that the same people who claim that democracy is in danger when the President exercises certain extraordinary powers in an emergency do not hesitate to violate by anti-Semitic propaganda the most elementary principles of democracy.
Some anti-Semites limit themselves to fighting only against those Jews who belong to the Jewish religious community. Obviously any restriction of the rights of a citizen in consequence of his religious conviction is contradictory to the democratic idea. It was surely a thoroughly undemocratic attitude that inspired Hohenzollern Germany, secularized France, and, above all, England before the Emancipation Bill to deprive the Catholics of many rights and to treat them as second-class citizens.
But, anti-Semites will object, shall we stand inactively aside while the Jews conspire to poison our morality and culture and use us for their selfish purposes? Certainly we should fight all immoral influences from whatever source, but no reasonable and serious man can pretend that all evil comes from the Jews, or even that there are more Jewish racketeers, more Jewish philosophers and artists of a destructive nature than may be found among the “Ayrans.” As the German poet Hebbell puts it, “A Jew is neither better nor worse than any other human being.” Moreover, certain bad characteristics that are common among the Jews are a result of the immeasurable injuries which non-Jews have inflicted upon them. Rather than incite our indignation, those defects should awaken our conscience and call forth a mea culpa.
The myth of a conspiratorial Jewish clan ruling the world is as ridiculous a fable as the widely spread tale of world domination by the Jesuits. Great masses of people have always been susceptible to such fantastic illusions and are always glad to have a scapegoat. They willingly swallow propaganda to the effect that some Jewish world center is responsible at one and the same time for Communism and capitalism, for wars and pacifistic defeatism—for whatever, in short, is regarded as a particular danger in a given country at a given moment. But it seems incredible and disappointing that in our day such ridiculous old myths as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and one about “ritual murders” are again revived by certain so-called scholars. This kind of “science” reminds us of the fantasies of Ludendorff [a famous World War I German general] and his wife, who pretended that Bolshevism was a product of Jews and Jesuits working together.
When we consider this popular anti-Semitism from the Catholic point of view, we find it even more incompatible with Christian doctrine than with democracy. We do not intend here to enter into a full theological examination of the mystery which according to Catholic doctrine is connected with Israel. Israel, once the elected people of God, Who, in the Catholic concept, calls upon it above all to profess the faith in Christ, is regarded as the prodigal son by the Holy Church and its conversion is the deepest desire and hope of Christianity. The words of St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans (Chapter 11) express this position toward the people of Israel in so far as the religious question itself is concerned.…
The concept of Christianity excludes any prejudice against a race, a people, or a nation. Every human being, having an immortal soul, is, when baptized as a member of the Corpus Christi Mysticum (Mystical Body of Christ), a child of God, regardless of his descent. All the liturgy is penetrated with the consciousness of a community which transcends all nations, races, and peoples. And all men who do not belong to this Catholic—that is to say, universal—community are considered, no matter what their race or nationality, as catechumens in spe or as beloved errant brothers. Monsignor Saliege, Archbishop of Toulouse, declared some years ago: “I cannot forget that the root of Jesse flourished in Israel and gave there its fruit. The Holy Virgin, Christ, the first disciples were of the Jewish race. How could I not feel myself bound to Israel as the branch to the trunk, which bore it? Besides this I know only one morality and it has universal validity. In every man I see and esteem the sublime dignity of human nature. Catholicism cannot admit that belonging to a certain race should deprive a man of any of his rights. Catholicism proclaims the essential equality of all races and all individuals. A universal religion, Catholicism does not acknowledge differences in the scale of human values that are based on blood or race.”
The most hideous element in modern anti-Semitism is the ambiguity in the definition of “Jew.” Sometimes one opposes Jew to Christian, sometimes Jew to Aryan. But in reality anti-Semitism today always has a disguised racial background; when a man who believes himself a Catholic is an anti-Semite, he pharisaically attempts to cover what is really a racial infection with a religious mantle. This is obviously the most hideous hypocrisy. Instead of desiring the conversion of the Jews, as the Church does, he prefers to have them remain far from Christ because his antipathy is in reality nourished from sources quite different from religious zeal. These anti-Semitic so-called Catholics, having become a prey of prejudices and racial passions, want to silence their Catholic consciences by pretending that they fight the Jews because they have crucified our Lord. Are they not aware that they themselves
crucify Him again by their anti-Semitism? Do they forget that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was not exclusively the specific answer of the Jewish people to God but the answer of fallen humanity? Do they believe that the Romans or the Germans would not just as readily have crucified Him?…
Every real Catholic understands that the present persecution of the Jews and anti-Semitism in general is a part of the anti-personalism, the collectivism, which must be considered the most anti-Christian revolution the world ever witnessed. Every Christian must understand that anti-Semitism is not a problem that exclusively concerns the Jews, but that the dignity of the individual is at stake and that he must therefore feel, in the face of anti-Semitism: Tua res agitur!—This concerns you!
For in the long run anti-Semitism always ends in anti-Christianism, as the development of the Nazi doctrine so abundantly proves. This connection between anti-Semitism and anti-Christianism is not accidental but is determined by an inner logic.…
THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN WEST*
Die Erfüllung
1937
In the memoirs for 1937, von Hildebrand tells about writing and delivering this lecture. In this excerpt from it we see him seeking out the theological foundations of “the Jewish question.” He develops the idea of the Jews as the “Menschheitsvolk”—the “representative people of humanity.” Even though he holds, as do all Christians, that the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New Testament, he also holds that the Jews still have a central place in salvation history. Of course he affirms that Christians ardently desire the conversion of the Jews, but this does not prevent him from speaking with the greatest reverence for the “mystery of Israel,” nor from acknowledging the wrongs that Christians have inflicted on the Jews over the centuries, nor from feeling a profound solidarity with the Jews, movingly expressed at the end, nor from protesting against anti-Semitism even in its “subdued” forms.
The battle for the Christian West, which is raging furiously today, draws the question of the nature and spiritual roots of the West into the center of intellectual analysis and debate. It is therefore not coincidental that the question of the Jews and the Christian West is presented first in this lecture series on the Jewish question. It is a matter of equal concern for Jews as well as Christians, and its resolution contains significant consequences for both sides.…
Israel—Representative People of Humanity
The Old Testament is divine revelation. Yet it is also the history of the Jewish people, an expression of its essential character, its ethos, its poetry; and these elements too have a deep share in the inner formation of the West, one that cannot simply be thought away, even if these elements are of course incomparable with the purely revealed content of the Old Testament.
Like no other people, Israel was a classical representative of humanity. I do not say that it possessed this role on the basis of its natural disposition but that it became this by divine election. This election is a free act of God, requiring no human or natural justification. And yet, this election and the special revelation so deeply bound up with it, formed and molded Israel and its history in the deepest and most interior way. The spirit of Israel as we find it in the Old Testament is inseparable from the fact of this election and from the light of revelation given to the Jews, just as the cultural expressions of the Christian Middle Ages are inseparable from the fact of Christian revelation.
Israel was the classical representative people of humanity (Menschheitsvolk) on two grounds. It was this, first of all, through the unique spirit that it radiated and by which it was permeated: Israel was the only people conscious of man’s metaphysical situation before God, the only people whose life unfolded in conspectu Dei—in the sight of God. If we think of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or of Moses and David, we never encounter just one or another ethnic characteristic (völkische Eigenart) but man qua man in his direct confrontation with God. Man stands before us in all of his heights and abysses, man in his yearning for God and in his apostasy from God, man caught in the surge of his disordered passions, and man in his need for redemption. Sin is never considered harmlessly and lightly, as in certain phases in the history of another people (by which I mean the Greeks, who also, in a completely different sense, can be described as a classical representative people of humanity). The abysses of human nature that at times open in the Jewish people are terrifying, and yet they are experienced as abysses, they are seen for what they really represent in conspectu Dei. Let us recall the instance of David with the wife of Uriah, of the scene with Nathan the prophet, and of David’s repentance. Again and again we encounter the quintessential tragedy of man. Everything is filled with an ultimate solemnity, with the seriousness of the situation of man, suffused by the breath of God.
All that is human can be grasped in its true greatness and depth only when seen in the light of God, in whose image man is created. Every attempt of an anthropocentric humanism to see man in himself and cut off from his ordination to God leads to a complete flattening and hollowing of everything human. Every pure humanitarian idealism is weak and pretentious, like the attempts of Icarus to fly. The true seriousness, the uplifting greatness and importance of human existence, only becomes apparent against the backdrop of the great dialogue between man and God, where the need for redemption and the dependence of man on God is clearly grasped.…
Israel was the only people to whom, before the fullness of time, God showed his countenance, the only people he called by name, in such a way that they came into full consciousness of the need for redemption and cried out to heaven for two thousand years: “Ostende nobis, Domine, faciem tuam et salvi erimus”—“Show us your face Lord and we will be saved.” Objectively, the entire world at that time stood in a state of advent, but Israel alone was aware of this. Of course, Israel still walked in a state of semidarkness, for the full light of divine truth had not yet been illuminated. Yet while the others still walked about entirely in the darkness, unaware of their situation, Israel was conscious of its state of semidarkness and longed for the full light.
The history of Israel—which, as Theodor Haecker says, alone among the nations had a sacred history—has to do not just with the concerns of a particular people but with what is of real and ultimate significance for every human being. One would have to be blind to read the Old Testament without being deeply moved by the grandiose, indeed, the classical humanness (Menschlichkeit) by which everything is suffused, yet which follows solely on the fact that everything is filled with a sacred breath of eternity. “In lumine tuo videbimus lumen,” says the Psalmist, “In your light we see light,” and this applies to the entire greatness of humanity that the Old Testament brings before our minds. Mighty and fearsome, like the waves of the sea, are the passions that rage in this people; exalted and of inexorable clarity, like the light of the sun, is the consciousness of sin whence arises the spirit of deep repentance.
In the Old Testament, we encounter all of the decisive and most important human stances in their classical forms: the faith and “Here I am Lord” of Abraham; the trust in God of Isaac; the powerlessness of man and his surrender to God in Job; the struggle of man with God in Jacob; the repentance of David; the most ardent earthly love in the Song of Songs, so classical in its setting that it could become the symbol of the love of the Church for Christ; the pride and falling away from God with Solomon; the dance around the golden calf, just as the Israelites had left Egypt; and the holy reverence before God of Moses, surely the most fundamental stance of all authentic human existence. Certainly, the Church and its saints point us in the direction of a world of incomparably deeper and more sublime human stances; in those who are redeemed, the fundamental human stances appear in a much loftier way, and above all we find in them a fullness of supernatural life, which we could seek to no avail in the Old Testament. Yet given the situation of advent, which at the time was still objectively the case, the fundamental stances that fill the Old Testament are the classical responses.
While the world of Greek cul
ture and thought is the fountainhead of Western intellectual life and culture, while this people shines into human history like a bright spiritual light, while one finds among the Greeks the home of authentic philosophy and art, Israel is the home of a universal humanity in which quite other depths of human existence are illuminated. Here the drama of man as such is played before our eyes; here we have to do with realities—arrogance and concupiscence, persecutions and sorrows, love and hate, yearning for God and immersion in mundane things, true faith and idolatry, sin and repentance, rebellion against God and adoring reverence, apostasy from God and love of God—realities that are of ultimate relevance to anyone bearing a human countenance, whether cultivated or uncultivated, talented or untalented, master or slave.
Israel was the only people whose inner point of unity lay not at a racial or cultural level but on the religious level. True belief in the one God and the awaiting of the Messiah constituted the “form” of Israel’s unity. The knowledge of that which for all of humanity is the one great, ultimate, and decisive concern held Israel together interiorly. Israel was the representative people of humanity because it was the religious people par excellence and because the religious question is the question of humanity as such, because God is the absolute concern for all human beings, the concern that addresses each human being individually, whatever his particular characteristics may be: Tua res agitur!—This concerns you!
My Battle Against Hitler Page 30
