Not in God's Name

by Jonathan Sacks

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  On Saturday 14 February 2015, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein opened fire at a cultural centre in Copenhagen where the artist Lars Vilks, who had previously received death threats for his cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, was speaking at a seminar on freedom of expression. One man was killed, and three policemen wounded. Shortly after midnight the same gunman made his way to a Copenhagen synagogue, where a celebration was taking place, and killed a Jewish security volunteer. In Paris on 9 January 2015, Amedy Coulibaly, as part of the terrorist attack in which twelve people working for the magazine Charlie Hebdo were killed, made his way to a kosher supermarket where people were shopping for the Sabbath, killing four Jewish customers. In the course of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, four gunmen made their way to a building that contained a Chabad house, a small Jewish religious centre. There they killed six Jews including the rabbi and his six-months-pregnant wife after first sexually assaulting and mutilating them. Indian intelligence picked up radio transmissions in which the attackers were told that ‘the lives of Jews are worth 50 times those of non-Jews’. These were strange diversions from what were otherwise clearly focused attacks.

  Why the Jews? That is the question of this chapter. It is clear why the terrorists attacked the journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo. They knew whom they were seeking. They wanted to kill the editor and cartoonists. They knew exactly where they would be: at an editorial meeting. Charlie Hebdo had been notorious for mocking religion, and among their many targets was Islam. The killings in Paris in January 2015 were part of a pattern that included the attacks on the publishers of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in Denmark, and Theo van Gogh. These were precisely targeted assaults. So why Jewish shoppers in a Jewish supermarket?

  Equally it is clear why the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008 took place. These were part of the ongoing violence between Muslims and Hindus, Pakistan and India, that includes four wars (1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999), and fifty-eight terrorist incidents since 1984, most notably the Mumbai train bombings of 11 July 2006 that claimed 209 lives. It was clear also why the terrorists chose restaurants and hotels. They wanted to damage the Indian economy, curtail tourism and maximise publicity. So why a young rabbi and his wife, in a country where there are almost no Jews?

  It is often said that Islamist attacks on Jews are about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. But the Paris supermarket and the Mumbai centre were not Israeli targets, nor were the victims Israelis. As the above quotations show, and as the intercepted message about the lives of Jews being worth fifty times those of non-Jews confirms, this is about Jews. It is antisemitism, not anti-Zionism. This, as we will see, is something new in Islam.

  The reason for focusing, in this chapter and the last, on antisemitism is not to draw attention to Jewish suffering. The major casualties, now and in the past, of Christian–Muslim conflict have been Muslims and Christians. It is they who died during the Crusades and they who are dying now in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Antisemitism is important because it illustrates more clearly than any other phenomenon the psychological and social dynamic of hate. It helps us understand what may be operative in human conflict over and above the normal clash of principalities and powers, nations and interests. Its return within living memory of the Holocaust signals more than a danger to Jews. It is, as it always has been, the first warning signal of a world order in danger of collapse.

  Today the Arab and Islamic world is awash with Judeophobia. An Anti-Defamation League study released in May 2014 found ‘persistent and pervasive’ anti-Jewish attitudes after surveying 53,100 adults in 102 countries and territories worldwide. It found that 74 per cent of those surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa held antisemitic attitudes. The corresponding figure was 24 per cent in Western Europe, 34 per cent in Eastern Europe and 19 per cent in the Americas. In 2011 a Pew Research Center study found that favourable views of Jews were ‘uniformly low’ in the predominantly Muslim regions it surveyed: 4 per cent in Turkey and the Palestinian territories, 3 per cent in Lebanon, and 2 per cent in Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan.

  Three features link today’s Islamic antisemitism with its counterpart in Germany in the 1930s. The first is that both represent what historian Robert Wistrich calls an obsession. There are almost no Jews in most of the fifty-six nations that comprise the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation. There were once, but in the 1940s and 1950s almost all left or were driven out. In Germany they comprised 1 per cent of the population. A joke in the 1930s captured the unreality of the situation. Two Germans are discussing the source of their nation’s troubles. One says that it is the Jews. The other replies, ‘The Jews and the bicycle riders.’ ‘Why the bicycle riders?’ asks the first. ‘Why the Jews?’ replies the second.

  As became clear after the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which stripped them overnight of all their citizenship rights, the Jews had no influence or power whatsoever, either within Germany or without. Between 1935 and 1939 Hitler, who made no secret of his genocidal intentions towards the Jews, tested the proposition again and again. Were Jews powerful? Did they control Germany? Did they have significant influence over Britain or America? Did they have friends or allies anywhere in the world who would come to their assistance? Only when he had proved to his own satisfaction that Jews were in fact friendless and powerless, could he proceed with safety to accuse them of being so powerful that they controlled the world.

  The problems of Germany after the First World War had nothing to do with the Jews. Likewise the problems of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan had nothing to do with the Jews. They were about internal issues. Could secular nationalism of the kind that emerged in Egypt, Syria and Iraq deliver on its promises of democracy, prosperity and restored national pride? After the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 an alternative gained favour, first set out by Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. Might the better way be a return to the pristine Islam of its early centuries, when it conquered large swathes of the Middle East, the Maghreb and al-Andalus (Spain and Portugal) with astonishing speed and bestrode the narrow world like a colossus? This momentous question has nothing to do with Jews, or bicycle riders. Note, however, that the one feature the new Islamism shares with the secular regimes it seeks to replace is antisemitism.

  The second aspect that links the new antisemitism with its German forerunner is its irrational, self-contradictory character. Jews were hated in Germany because they were rich and because they were poor, because they were capitalists and because they were communists, because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere, because they believed in a primitive faith and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing. Hitler believed that Jews were controlling both the United States and the Soviet Union. How could they be doing both? Because they were Jews.

  Likewise in the twenty-first century it is impossible both to celebrate the 9/11 attacks and the genius of the al-Qaeda terrorists who planned and executed them, and at the same time say it was the work of Israel and its secret police, the Mossad. Both the cleric who said that Jews are ‘cutting off heads in Iraq’ and his audience knew that there are no Jews left in Iraq other than a handful of the elderly who cannot move. The Jewish community of Iraq was, outside Israel, the oldest in the world and one of the most distinguished. It was there that Jews were taken captive after the destruction of the First Temple, there by the waters of Babylon that they sat and wept as they remembered Zion, there that, eight centuries later, great rabbinical academies were founded, and there that the masterpiece of rabbinic Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud, was composed. In the 1940s there were 140,000 Jews in Baghdad. By the time the American army arrived in 2003, there were twenty. The Jews cutting off heads in Iraq are figments of the imagination and everyone involved in this pretence knows they are. So by what psychological mechanism do rational human beings come to believe in fantasies?


  The third feature the two antisemitisms share is that they are new. The importance of this cannot be sufficiently emphasised. People tend to assume that since there have been instances of hostility to Jews going back to pre-Christian times, its reappearance is simply the old dragon reawakening. The new is just the old reborn. This is not so.

  There are indeed negative remarks about Jews in both the New Testament and the Qur’an, just as there are negative remarks about other nations in the Hebrew Bible. As we saw in chapter 2, xenophobia is as old as the human condition. There are evolutionary reasons why we develop favourable attitudes towards our in-group and hostile ones towards others. Antisemitism as such, however, is not ancient. The word itself was only coined in the 1870s, usually attributed to the German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879. In the Middle Ages Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth century they began to be hated for their race. That is what was new.

  The case of Islam is slightly different. The distinguished historian of Islam, B.S. Lewis, has argued that historically Islam had contempt for Jews but not hate.8 You do not die from contempt, but you do from hate. The myths that shaped the new antisemitism entered Islam from the outside, as we will see. They are not indigenous to it. So we are dealing with a phenomenon that is obsessive, irrational and, if not entirely new, then at least a significant mutation of previous forms of hostility.

  Chapter 2 argued that violence is born, together with the better angels of our nature, in the phenomenon of human groupishness. We are altruistic to members of our group, and hostile to members of other groups. This gives rise to xenophobia. But xenophobia, though it may cause wars, does not in and of itself give rise to the demonisation of opponents, a sense of victimhood and the resultant altruistic evil. You do not go around murdering women and children because of some biological imperative of survival. That requires culture, and as we saw in chapter 3, the specific form that disables the moral sense and leads otherwise ordinary individuals to commit bestial crimes is pathological dualism – itself a mutant form of the theological dualism of ancient Iran and Greece that infected sectarian groups within Judaism and Christianity in the late pre-Christian and early Christian times. Pathological dualism emerged in Germany after the First World War. A not dissimilar dualism, between the faithful on the one hand and the Greater and Lesser Satan on the other, dominates Islamist and Iranian discourse today.

  What turns dualism into a pathology? The Gnostics were dualists, but they were not violent. Manichaeism, another form of dualism, won enormous popularity between the third and seventh centuries, spreading from Rome to China and beginning to rival Christianity as a world force. But its adherents were persecuted, many were killed, and by the fourteenth century it had almost disappeared. The Qumran sect and the Christians of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts tended to retreat from the mainstream of society to pursue their mystical speculations and wait for the true God to defeat his earthly impostor. So what was this further factor?

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  The scholar who did more than most to provide an answer was the French literary theorist and cultural anthropologist René Girard, in his book Violence and the Sacred (1972).

  Together with Freud, a deep influence on his work, Girard reversed conventional wisdom. It is not religion that gives rise to violence. It is violence that gives rise to religion. Freud argued that the primal act of violence in prehistoric times came when the children of the tribe combined to murder their father, whose monopolisation of the females of the tribe they resented. They were then haunted by guilt: what Freud called the return of the repressed. God, for Freud, was the voice of the dead father, internalised by the children as the voice of conscience.

  Girard had a less fanciful explanation. Early societies, he argued, did not yet have a legal system – laws, courts, prisons and punishments – to enforce order. Instead they practised reciprocity, the rule of Tit-for-Tat that, as we saw, was the first principle to emerge from computer simulations of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. They acted generously to others until they encountered a hostile response. They then did to the others what the others had done to them.

  The trouble with this strategy – as biologists also noted when they began creating computer programmes that outperformed Tit-for-Tat – is that it gives rise to potentially endless cycles of retaliation. It begins with a single act of murder. This sets in motion a blood feud, vendetta or clan war. It is one of the oldest and most familiar themes in fiction: the Montagues versus the Capulets, the Jets against the Sharks, the Tattaglias versus the Corleones. Short of mass assassination, there is no natural end to the cycle of retaliation.

  Girard’s thesis is that the most effective way by which the two groups can end the cycle is by killing a third party, one who is neither a Montague nor a Capulet, who stands outside the feud, and whose death will not lead to another cycle of retaliation. The victim must be, in other words, an outsider, someone either not protected by a group, or the member of a group not in a position to inflict its own retaliatory violence.

  By sacrificing the outsider, a revenge killing has taken place, so both sides can feel that justice has been done, but in such a way as to stop the cycle since the victim is not a member of either of the contending groups. Hence Girard’s contentions that, first, the primal religious act is human sacrifice; second, the primal sacrifice is the scapegoat; and third, the function of religion is to deflect away internal violence that would otherwise destroy the group.

  This, for Girard, is a statement not merely about the ancient past but about the present and future also. All societies generate internal conflict that can become violent and self-destructive. Therefore all societies require religion, which performs the task of ‘casting out’ the violence, deflecting it away from the group itself by placing it on an external victim, thus turning violence outwards instead of allowing it to turn destructively inwards.

  As a social phenomenon, the system works only when there is a generally agreed scapegoat. The victim must be sufficiently like or close to the feuding parties to be a plausible substitute. You could not end a feud between two Italian families in Verona by going off to China to kill someone there. The victim must also be capable of being portrayed as the cause of the present troubles, otherwise killing him would make no sense. Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, witches were blamed for diseases, crop failures and other mishaps. The Illuminati, an eighteenth-century German sect, and the Freemasons have both been accused of secretly plotting to rule the world. In his novel The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown imagined a conflict between two shadowy Christian groups, the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei, the former a secret society, the latter a Catholic sect. Conspiracy theories have flourished for centuries.

  However, the particular combination of conspiracy theory and substitute victim involved in the creation of a scapegoat requires a difficult mental feat. You have to be able to believe at one and the same time that the scapegoat is both all-powerful and powerless. If the scapegoat were actually powerful, it could no longer fulfil its essential function as the-victim-of-violence-without-risk-of-reprisal. You do not choose a lion or a crocodile as your sacrificial victim, since if you do, you are more likely than it is to land up as the victim. But if the scapegoat were believed to be powerless, it could not plausibly be cast as the cause of our present troubles. You could not, for example, choose a group of illiterate, unemployed migrants as your scapegoat. You could kill them without fear of reprisal, but you could hardly portray them successfully as controlling the banks, the media and the White House. The simultaneous presence of contradictory beliefs is a sure sign of the active presence of a scapegoat mechanism within a culture.

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  For a thousand years the scapegoat of choice in Europe and the Middle East has been the Jews. They were the most conspicuous outsiders: non-Christians in a Christian Europe, non-Muslims in an Islamic Middle East. But this chapter is not primarily about antisemitism. It is about what gives rise to it. Antisemitism is on
ly contingently about Jews. Jews are its victims but they are not its cause. The cause is conflict within a culture. It is the potential internal violence that, if expressed, has the power to destroy a society.

  Recall Girard’s point: the scapegoat is the mechanism by which a society deflects violence away from itself by focusing it on an external victim. Hence, wherever you find obsessive, irrational, murderous antisemitism, there you will find a culture so internally split and fractured that if its members stopped killing Jews they would start killing one another. That is what happened in Europe in the seventeenth century and again in two world wars in the twentieth, and it is what is happening today in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war-torn regions in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

  To understand the emergence of the Jew-as-scapegoat we must focus on certain key historic moments. The first is 1095 when Pope Urban II delivered his call for the First Crusade. In 1096 some of the Crusaders, on their way to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in northern Europe: in Cologne, Worms and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than be seized by the mob and forcibly converted to Christianity. It was a traumatising moment for European Jewry, and the portent of worse to come.

  From this point onwards Jews in Christian Europe began to be seen by many not as human beings at all but as a malevolent force, an evil presence, a demonic and destructive power that mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others. Jews were accused of desecrating the host, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. They were held responsible for the Black Death, the epidemic that in the fourteenth century cost many millions of lives. It was an age in which Jews lived in fear.

  That period added to the vocabulary of the West such ideas as public disputation, book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da-fé, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom. In duration and intensity it ranks among one of the most sustained chronicles of hatred in history. It was dualism of the most stark and devastating kind.