Not in God's Name

by Jonathan Sacks

  Eventually Europe moved on, but not before two events that were to have significant consequences centuries later. The first took place in Spain, where, under threat of persecution, Jews had been living in fear from 1391, Spain’s Kristallnacht when synagogues were burned and Jews massacred, until their expulsion in 1492. Many, under threat, had converted. Some were suspected of maintaining Jewish practice in private and became victims of the Inquisition. Others, though, embraced the new faith and achieved positions of prominence in Spanish society.

  It was then that a new phenomenon appeared: the persistence of prejudice after its overt cause had been removed. The ‘new’ Christians were still hated by some, now not for their religion but for their race. Legislation was introduced to protect Limpieza de sangre, ‘purity of blood’. The first such statute appeared in Toledo in 1449. Originally opposed by the Church, it received the approval of Pope Alexander VI in 1496 and lasted well into the nineteenth century. It was the first appearance in history of the racial antisemitism that would flow through mainland Europe four and a half centuries later.

  The second significant development was Martin Luther. Initially favourably disposed to Jews, he believed that the reason they had not converted was the ineptitude and cruelty of the Catholic Church. Approached with love, he thought they would become Christians en masse. When they did not, his anger knew almost no bounds. In 1543 he published a pamphlet entitled On the Jews and their Lies that became a classic in the literature of hate. Synagogues should be burned. Jewish homes should be destroyed. Jews should be made to live in a single room or stable to know that they were no more than ‘miserable captives’. Their prayer books and Talmuds should be confiscated and their rabbis forbidden to teach. They should be forbidden to travel and given no legal protection until the world was rid of what he called ‘our plague, pestilence and misfortune’. The pamphlet was reprinted several times during the Nazi era, and its suggestions paralleled by the Nuremberg Laws.

  Luther’s outburst ensured that hostility to the Jews would persist after the Reformation, and it left a lasting impression in countries where Lutheranism held sway. The striking Christian exception was John Calvin, who held the Hebrew Bible in high regard and was less inclined than most to denigrate the Jews. This had a lasting effect on Holland in the sixteenth century and England in the seventeenth, as well as on the Pilgrim Fathers in America. These were among the first places to develop religious liberty.

  It is at this point that the story takes a remarkable and tragic twist. Western Europe in the eighteenth century turned to Enlightenment in the belief that reason could overcome the prejudices of the past. In the nineteenth century this was followed by Emancipation, through which minority religious groups, among them the Jews, were granted civil rights in the new nation states, held together not as in the past by religion but by citizenship and civil law. Yet prejudice persisted, as it had done in post-expulsion Spain.

  Among its practitioners were some of Europe’s leading minds. Voltaire called Jews ‘an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by who they are tolerated and enriched’. He added, generously, ‘Still, we ought not to burn them.’9

  Immanuel Kant spoke of Jews as ‘the vampires of society’ and called for ‘the euthanasia of Judaism’.10 Georg Hegel saw Jews and Judaism as paradigms of a ‘slave morality’, unable to conceive or practise a religion of love.11 By rejecting Christianity, Jews had been stranded by history and were left as a ‘fossil nation’, a ‘ghost-race’.

  Johann Gottlieb Fichte believed Jews were the enemy of freedom: ‘As for giving [the Jews] civil rights,’ he wrote, ‘I see no other way than that of some night cutting off their heads and attaching in their place others in which there is not a single Jewish idea.’ Alternatively they should be ‘packed off’ to ‘their promised land’.12 Arthur Schopenhauer spoke of Jews as ‘no better than cattle’, as ‘scum of the earth’, and as a people to be expelled. Friedrich Nietzsche castigated Judaism as the ‘falsification’ of all natural values. His great originality is that, instead of criticising Jews for rejecting Christianity, he blamed them for giving birth to it in the first place.

  Anyone who blames religion for creating hate should consider these examples and think again. Philosophical antisemitism from Voltaire to Heidegger is a little-known phenomenon but a devastating one. As European culture became secularised and religious anti-Judaism mutated into racial antisemitism, the consequences were lethal. Christians could work for the conversion of the Jews, because you can change your religion. But you cannot change your blood or your genes. Antisemites could therefore only work for the elimination of the Jews. The result was the Holocaust.

  Over the course of this period from 1095 to 1945, a number of myths emerged, two of which are of unusual interest. The first was the Blood Libel. In Norwich in 1144 a child named William was discovered stabbed to death. A rumour circulated that Jews were responsible. No one took it seriously at the time, but it became a cause célèbre five years later when an account appeared, written by a monk named Thomas of Monmouth.13 It claimed that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood to make matza, the ‘unleavened bread’ eaten on the festival of Passover. It was patently absurd: if anything is abhorrent to Jews, it is blood (a single speck found in food renders it inedible in Jewish law) and child sacrifice. The Blood Libel was officially condemned by several popes – among them Innocent IV, Gregory X, Martin V, Paul III and Nicholas V – as well as by Emperor Frederick II. That did not stop the accusation spreading throughout Europe. There were more than 150 recorded cases, many leading to massacres of the local Jewish population.

  The second, some 750 years later, was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Devised by members of the Russian Secret Police based in Paris, it was a document that purported to be the minutes of a secret Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination by controlling the press and economies of the world. Fabricated from works of fiction and conspiracy theories, none of which was originally about Jews,14 it was exposed as a forgery by The Times in 1921. It nonetheless sold widely, first in Russia, then in Germany, where its use in Nazi propaganda turned it into, in Norman Cohn’s phrase, a ‘warrant for genocide’.15

  What makes these two myths fascinating is the way they exemplify the splitting-and-projection that gives dualism its unique psychological hold. The Blood Libel is a Christian projection (that is not to say that Christianity embraced it or was responsible for it: recall the papal rejection if it). It makes no sense within the framework of Judaism. But it made sense to some believers in transubstantiation, the idea that the bread and the wine used in the Eucharist are not symbolically but actually the body and blood of the Son of God. The term ‘transubstantiation’ was first used by Hildebert de Lavardin, Archbishop of Tours, around 1079, and the doctrine itself was formalised by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It is precisely between these dates that the Blood Libel appears.

  Likewise, the Protocols. They were first published in Russia in 1903 when the Jews were undergoing the trauma of the Kishinev pogrom. Following the pogroms that had broken out throughout Russia in 1881 and the antisemitic May Laws of 1882, millions of Jews from the Pale of Settlement were in flight to the West. A pamphlet written at that time by an assimilated Jew, Leon Pinsker, gave full and poignant expression to what it felt like to be Jewish in Eastern Europe at that time. ‘Among the living nations of the earth,’ he wrote, ‘the Jews are as a nation long since dead.’ They are ‘a living corpse, a people without unity or organisation, without land or other bonds of unity, no longer alive yet walking among the living’.

  That such a people, rightless refugees, could be engaged in secretly running the world was self-evidently preposterous. Yet if understood as a repressed and projected desire on the part of its fabricators, it made eminent sense. These were the last dreamers of Russian imperial grandeur before the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 ended
their world for ever. It explains why Hitler, with his dreams of world domination, was so taken by the Protocols, though he was well aware of their exposure as a forgery (the fact that Jews denied their veracity was, for him, perfect proof that they were true). ‘No one could be so brilliant’, Hitler said to Goebbels on 13 May 1943, ‘as to describe the Jewish striving for world domination as well as the Jews themselves.’16

  What makes these myths relevant today is that they were both subsequently introduced into the Middle East and Islam. The Blood Libel was introduced to the Middle East in the early nineteenth century by Christians, in Aleppo (1811, 1853), Beirut (1824), Antioch (1826), Hamma (1829), Tripoli (1834), Dayr al-Qamar (1847), Damanhur (1877) and Damascus (1840, 1848 and 1890). Until that time, charges of ritual murder levelled against Jews were virtually unknown within Islam. The most famous case was the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840. A Capuchin monk in Damascus disappeared. His fellow monks, assisted by a local French diplomat, accused the Jews of killing him for ritual purposes. Heads of the Jewish community were imprisoned and tortured. Some died. Others confessed. The case became widely publicised in Europe and provoked protests until the Ottoman authorities investigated the charge and admitted that the accusations were false. This did not stop the libel spreading elsewhere and there were further notorious cases in Algeria in 1897–8 and Cairo in 1901–2.

  In 1983 the Syrian defence minister Mustapha Tlass wrote a book, The Matza of Zion, arguing that the original charge in the Damascus affair was in fact true, and that Jews continue to kill Gentile children to use their blood in making matza for Passover. The book has been translated into English and reprinted several times. On 8 February 1991, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, the Syrian delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission praised this ‘valuable book,’ saying it ‘unmasked the racist character of Zionism.’17 In 2001 the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram reiterated the charge, adding, ‘The bestial drive to knead Passover matzahs with the blood of non-Jews is [confirmed] in the records of the Palestinian police where there are many recorded cases of the bodies of Arab children who had disappeared being found, torn to pieces without a single drop of blood.’18

  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was introduced, along with Mein Kampf in Arabic translation, into the Middle East in the 1930s by, among others, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammed Amin al-Husayni, who had spent the Second World War in Berlin, producing Arabic broadcasts for the Nazis and recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen SS. It continues to be reprinted and widely sold and read. In 2002 a forty-one-part television dramatisation of the Protocols, entitled Horseman without a Horse, was shown on a Lebanon-based satellite television network owned by the terrorist organisation Hezbollah during Ramadan.19 In 2003 a similar series, Al-Shatat (‘Diaspora’), was shown on Syrian television.20

  The Protocols, despite widespread knowledge that they are a forgery, figure prominently in the discourse of the Islamists and appear in the Hamas Charter. In this context an observation made by several recent writers is worth noting. They refer to a discovery made by the FBI in 2007 in the course of preparing for the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial (on 24 November 2008, five former officials of the Foundation were found guilty of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists).

  During their search they came across a document dated 22 May 1991 prepared by Mohamed Akram, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States. Entitled ‘Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America’, it included the following passage: ‘The Ikhwan (i.e. the Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.’21 When people accuse others of seeking to control the world, it may be that they are unconsciously projecting what they themselves want but do not wish to be accused of wanting. If you seek to understand what a group truly intends, look at the accusations it levels against its enemies.

  Which brings us to the present. At the very time Europe was attempting to ensure that the Holocaust could never happen again, antisemitism in the form of its two most effective myths was being reborn in the Middle East, and from there has spread to parts of Islam. As early as 1986, Bernard Lewis issued this warning:

  At this time there are some signs that the anti-Semitic virus that has plagued Christianity almost since the beginning may at last be in process of cure; by a sad paradox, the same profound religious hatred has now attacked the hitherto resistant body of Islam. It may be that the moment of choice has gone, and that the virus has already entered the bloodstream of Islam, to poison it for generations to come as Christendom was poisoned for generations past. If so, not only Arab but also Jewish hopes will be lost in the miasma of bigotry. The open democracy that is the pride of Israel will be polluted by sectarian and ethnic discrimination and repression, while the free institutions that are the best hope of the Arabs will be forgotten, as the Middle East sinks under the rule of the cynics and fanatics who flourish in the soil of hatred.22

  This chapter has been about how dualism moves from being theological or metaphysical to become pathological and a source of violent hate. It happens when a victim – an individual or group – is turned into a scapegoat as a way of projecting outwards the violence that would otherwise destroy a society from within. The paradigm case in the history of the past thousand years has been the Jews. What makes antisemitism central to the argument of this book is that when it becomes violent it represents the first and clearest sign of a civilisation in crisis. With few exceptions, Jews were not massacred during the first thousand years of Christianity, or in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, or classically within the nations of Islam, where Jews often fared better than they did in Christendom.

  Dualism becomes lethal when a group of people, a nation or a faith, feel endangered by internal conflict. This happened in Christianity in the eleventh century in the wake of the Great Schism of the Church, in 1054, when the state Church of the Roman Empire divided into its Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) branches. It happened in Germany after defeat in the First World War, the punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, the hyperinflation of the 1920s and the weakness of the Weimar system. It began within Islam after its last major bastion of power, the Ottoman Empire, fell in 1924. The tensions then generated between secular and religious approaches to politics, between different groups within the national boundaries arbitrarily imposed by Britain and France, as well as historic tensions between Sunni and Shia, and moderate and radical interpretations of the faith, still reverberate today.

  At work in this whole process is the basic principle of group dynamics. We saw in chapter 2 that we are naturally inclined to favour members of our group and fear members of another group. One result is that in almost any group, the greater the threat from the outside, the stronger the sense of cohesion within. People who lived through the Blitz, the aerial attack on London in the Second World War, say they felt a sense of kinship between strangers they never experienced before or after. Our most primal instincts of bonding within the group occur when it confronts an external enemy.

  That is why ruthless politicians, threatened by internal discord, focus on and sometimes even invent external enemies. Paranoia is the most powerful means yet devised for sustaining tyranny and repression. If tyrants can invoke religion – persuading people that it is their faith, their values and their God that are under attack – it becomes more powerful still, since religion evokes our most self-sacrificial instincts. The classic instance is antisemitism, and where you find it at its most virulent, there you will find despotism and denial of human rights. The murder of Jews is only one result. The real victims are the members of the host society itself. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with them. No free society was ever built on hate.

  T
he trouble with the use of scapegoats is that it is a solution that compounds the problem. It makes internal tension bearable by turning the question ‘Why has this happened?’ into the question ‘Who did this to me?’ If it is someone else’s fault, not mine, I can preserve my self-respect intact. For at least a thousand years a narrative has been available that blames the Jews. So powerful is the rapid-response emotional brain that, under stress, it can entirely overwhelm the slower-moving prefrontal cortex, the distinction- and decision-making mind, turning otherwise ordinary human beings into Crusaders in one age, perpetrators of genocide in another, and suicide bombers and jihadists in a third.

  And when the violence is over, the problems remain, since the scapegoat never was the cause of the problem in the first place. So people die. Hope is destroyed. Hate claims more sacrificial victims. And God weeps.

  5

  Sibling Rivalry

  A little more than kin, and less than kind.

  Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act 1, scene 2, line 65)

  Yet we are still missing a piece of the puzzle. The phenomena we have described thus far – identity, splitting, projection, pathological dualism and the scapegoat – are general. They could affect anyone. They have no special connection with Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They help us understand violence but not the fraught relationship between the Abrahamic faiths. There must be some additional cause to explain the Crusades, jihads, forced conversions, inquisitions, burnings at the stake, pogroms and suicidal terrorism in religions dedicated to love, forgiveness and compassion. What is it that brought Jews, Christians and Muslims, spiritual children of a common father, to such animosity for so long? I want, in this chapter, to track down that factor, the puzzle’s last piece. It begins with a powerful Freudian insight whose significance Freud himself seems to have repressed.