“If to hate the Jews is to be a good Christian, then we are all good Christians,” wrote the humanist Erasmus early in the 16th century; and if from the Crusades to the Enlightenment there was no such word as “anti-Semitism,” there was scorn and hatred of the Jew, the outcast, shut away in his ghetto. Such scorn and hatred were a matter of course in medieval Europe, needing no justification. Then, with the 18th century and the Age of Reason, came the notion that all men are equal before the law, and it was under the aegis of this idea that the principles which were to govern the “Jewish question” up to the 20th century were formulated. Jews could enjoy the same legal rights as any other citizen; anti-Semitism was a matter of political opinion, or of personal taste; and, finally, an anti-Semite would make an exception of the “good Jews” he was personally acquainted with.

Jews, it appeared, were being given the chance to prove they could be, like all en lightened persons, good, loyal citizens, useful to the state. It was entirely up to them to make all the old anti-Semitic prejudices vanish—or so it seemed. And the Jews fell in with this view, striving conscientiously and passionately to contribute to the development of commerce, industry, the general prosperity. They became soldiers, diplomats, civil servants, Nobel Prize winners. Some sought to be more German than the Germans, more French than the French—even to the point of running with the pack and becoming anti-Semites themselves.

During the course of this era, which we might call the “probationary period”—probationary for Christians as well as for Jews—the latter enjoyed a relative tranquillity. The principles set forth above concerning their relation to the state were generally acknowledged in all the great European countries—in all, that is, except the Russia of the Czars, Where anti-Semitism was an official state policy and where the essential form of modern anti-Semitic propaganda was perfected by the political police in various documents like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Both the idea of using anti-Semitism as a state policy and the legend of the “Elders of Zion” were inherited by Hitler, whose appearance brought the extended “probationary period” to a bloody close.

It took the Nazi crematoria to make Europeans recognize that the diagnosis of the Enlightenment had been faulty. After Hitler, anti-Semitism could no longer be regarded as just one political opinion among others, one taste among many; nor could it be seen as decisively determined by what Jews did or did not do. The mainspring of anti-Semitism now had to be sought not in the Jewish character but in the obscurer reaches of the historically conditioned Christian psyche. This is the new lesson that seems to have been learned in Western Europe from the tragedy of 1939-45. In the Communist regimes of East Europe, however, no such lessons have been learned; indeed, the Nazi slaughters have only served to give the old anti-Semitism new shape and form.

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II

In considering anti-Semitism in Western Europe today, I shall concern myself mainly with France, since France has always been a leader in the intellectual life of Europe; it is, moreover, the country which I happen to be most familiar with.

Traces of anti-Semitism can still be found in certain areas of French life—the medical profession, the navy, the diplomatic service (a Jew can become President of the Council or Minister of Foreign Affairs, but his chances of being appointed an ambassador are practically nil). On the whole, however, many changes for the better have become apparent since the war.

The memory of Nazi persecutions remains strong and vivid, and the consequence, it seems to me, has been to stimulate a preoccupation with the “Jewish question,” which, in turn, has reinforced the tendency to think of Jews as a completely singular group, a people utterly set apart. This is not necessarily an expression of anti-Semitism—often, indeed, the contrary. Readers of COMMENTARY may recall in this connection the remarkable essays by Jean-Paul Sartre which were published in the magazine in 1948.¹ Since then, countless other discussions of the “Jewish question” have appeared in print, both by Jews and non-Jews, and for the most part friendly to the Jews, who are seen as tragic victims of persecution. (It may be noted in passing that the inspiration for the non-Jewish thinking on the subject has been Christian rather than secular.)

A corollary of the new preoccupation with the Jewish question has been—and this is true for the French people as a whole rather than for intellectuals alone—that anti-Semitism is no longer politically respectable. The consensus of public opinion views anti-Semitism as a frightful and shameful prejudice (though as always, no one is averse to hearing anti-Semitic sentiments expressed in private, and in colloquial French usage the word Jew may still connote miser, usurer, cunning dealer). In the press, for example, no propagandist today dares admit openly that he is anti-Semitic, or in favor of special measures against the Jews; all he can say is, “I am not an anti-Semite, but. . .” and though this but may be followed by a good deal of venom, it is now a necessary preliminary.

A remarkable instance is the attitude of the Poujadist movement. Born of a league of discontented taxpayers—in France all taxpayers are discontented—it developed into a political force, electing more than thirty deputies to the National Assembly, and openly demanding a change of regime. Poujade’s political advisers were recruited from among the sworn enemies of the regime, which is to say from the old Vichyites and collaborators; his supporters were mainly drawn from the class of small businessmen and retailers who have suffered keenly from the competition of the large department stores. Since many of these stores are owned by Jews, the situation was opportune for making open anti-Semitic propaganda.

But what actually happened? After some zigzagging and internal conflicts, the Poujadist movement withdrew from its position of open anti-Semitism: while Poujade freely attacked all “foreigners” living in France, he never attacked Jews as such.

Since Hitler and the war, the Catholic Church too has shown a marked change in its position on the Jewish question. At the beginning of this century, anti-Semitic writings were published by many prelates and canons with no interference or protest from Rome. But during the past decade or so, the Church has tried to stem the tide of anti-Semitism in countless ways—through sermons and pastoral letters and by censoring its own publications. In many cities of France, especially, interfaith groups known as “Jewish-Christian friendships” and made up of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants have done valuable work in promoting tolerance. Here it may be interesting to note a parallel change in the attitude of converted Jews. The percentage of Jewish converts to Christianity in France has increased a little since the war, but they no longer try to conceal their origin, as they used to, and they rarely take a conspicuous part in anti-Jewish polemics. On the contrary, they now tend to go out of their way to reveal the fact that they are converts from Judaism, even declaring that in becoming Christians they have only become “better Jews.”

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The situation is pretty much the same in other West European countries—except for the Iberian Peninsula, which is in fact a world of its own. In England and Switzerland, for example (which were, of course, never occupied by the Nazis), an inherent social and political equilibrium has always guarded against the possibility of any violent eruption of anti-Semitism as such: and it is the same today. The general observations I have made for France certainly hold for Belgium and Holland where the German occupation was much harsher, and, as a consequence, the anti-Nazi reaction of the people much more violent.

In the Scandinavian countries, anti-Semitism continues to be the prerogative only of a number of cranks. One of these, a certain Gunnar Aberg, has been flooding five continents with his anti-Semitic leaflets for some twenty years; the names on his mailing list are apparently culled from telephone directories. In this literature we find the usual Hitlerite content: the “Jewish world plot,” the Jews as the “enemies of humanity,” and all the rest of it. Where does Gunnar Aberg get his money? Some say that he himself is a millionaire, others that the name is the cover for a secret organization which was endowed with substantial resources by the Nazis before their downfall. But nobody really knows.

Italy has for centuries been free of anti-Semitism, Jews having been settled there since the time of the Roman Empire and having been culturally assimilated since the Renaissance. Religious or racial hatred, moreover, seems always to have been inimical to the Italian spirit. Nevertheless, it seems to me that today Italian attitudes toward Jews still bear the marks of the year 1938, when Mussolini thought it politically expedient to launch a campaign of persecution against the Jews of Italy; and of 1943-44, when the Nazis were in direct control of Italy. Anti-Semitism was an international sore, and it showed itself even in a country whose people are by nature incapable of self-exaltation through racism.

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III

The public opinion polls that have been undertaken on the subject of anti-Semitism in Germany are revealing²:

Question: Do you think that the National Socialists have increased feeling against the Jews, or do you think that their anti-Jewish propaganda has had the opposite effect?

Question: What is your over-all attitude toward the Jews?

Question: What do you think is the primary, fundamental cause of anti-Semitism: is it the characteristics of the Jewish people, the Jewish religion, anti-Jewish propaganda, or what else?

Question: Would you marry a woman (or a man) of Jewish origin?

Between one-third and two-thirds of the German people, then, continue to regard Jews as “different” from themselves, and to reward the “difference” as unfavorable to the Jews. On the other hand, there are few violent anti-Semites around, and few scandalous incidents: all the more so because of the small number of Jews remaining in Germany. (The most common type of incident is the profanation of cemeteries.)

The general tendency among Germans with regard to the Jews shows itself in a desire to avoid any disturbing questions, an attitude that comes from the ubiquitous desire to explain away the whole Hitler era. The dangers of that tendency were well defined by the Catholic publicist, Walter Dirks, writing in the Frankfurter Hefte (March 1956):

The active or latent anti-Semitism of a minority would not be dangerous if the . . . German people as a whole were not tempted to unburden itself, at least a little, of the responsibility for even its passive participation in Nazi atrocities, by claiming that “something must have been the matter with the Jews.” Indeed, there was something the matter with the Jews, as something is the matter with Germans and Frenchmen and Americans, which at times makes people anti-German, or Francophobes, or anti-Coca-Colaites. Thus . . . the shame of German persecution of the Jews is not purged from She heart of the German people. This qualifying, quiet, secret urge to find a trace of justification for these persecutions, in order to justify one’s own passivity at that time, will create opportunities for active anti-Semitism in other circumstances. . . .

Positive education against anti-Semitism—a project which concerns many responsible Germans—is obviously up against great psychological difficulties. Those Germans who were committed Nazis (as the majority were) either continue to believe that Jews are the bane of the universe, or feel a measure of resentment against Jews for having forced an admission of error out of them; those who were not Nazis may very well feel a like resentment because of German sufferings in the first postwar years, and their disgust at the subsequent rehabilitation and whitewashing of so many former Nazis may contribute to this resentment.

Under these circumstances the indirect message of the work of art seems to have been more effective than direct admonition, as appears from the success of various recent novels like Heinrich Böll’s Wo Warst Du Adam?, (Adam, Where Art Thou?) Rudolph Schrörs’s Der Stein und der Dreizack (The Stone and the Trident), or Das Brandopfer (The Burnt-Offering), by Albert Goes; and particularly from the success of the dramatic version of The Diary of Anne Frank, which is now being played simultaneously in seven cities of Germany, to hushed full houses.

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After a silence of more than ten years, a number of books finally appeared in German dealing specifically with the Nazi crimes against the Jews.³ These books received a great deal of attention throughout 1956: radio programs repeatedly mentioned them, and practically every newspaper in the country devoted a lot of space to them. As co-author of one of these books, I read every review that came out and I was struck by the similarity of the titles chosen for them by the various editors—who represented many different political groupings and tendencies: “Documents of Shame,” “Documents of Crime,” “Documents of a Shameful Epoch,” “It Would Be a Crime to Forget!” and the like. Others were even more explicit: “Let’s Have the Courage to Face the Truth,” “Let’s Look the Truth in the Face.” And the Speaker of the Bundestag, Dr. E. Gerstenmayer, proclaimed publicly, “The truth hurts but is salutary.”

A long article published in the important newspaper Frankfurter Neue Presse had this to say:

. . . Some day the psychologists will be able to explain the mysterious silence which continues to surround the subject of the extermination of the Jews. . . . When President Heuss declared recently that he himself had never heard the names of Auschwitz and Belsen until after the war was over, he was speaking for almost all Germans. An iron curtain of silence had been raised.

But Heuss did not mean to say (who among us could?) that he had not witnessed heartbreaking tragedies, or seen deportations of Jews or the bestial hunt for women, children, and old men, who were sealed up in-box cars for the trip from which there was no return. Such shame cannot be wiped out by hiding behind the iron curtain of silence set up by the assassins themselves. Our children ought to know what happened in order to understand the barbarism to which, for twelve years, the whole German people submitted, and in order that they may finally understand other things which must needs remain incomprehensible to them so long as they are ignorant of the cold-blooded massacres preceding them. . . .

The last remark refers, of course, to the “sufferings of the Germans,” to the bombardment of their big cities, etc., etc.

There remains the handful of impenitent Nazis who have not given up, who continue to affirm that the fault lies with the Jews. In a country the majority of whose present leaders are sincerely trying to set up a democratic society, these Nazis are of course able to profit by the laws that guarantee a free press, and they voice their propaganda openly. There was a time when they simply denied the fact of the Nazi crimes and branded any such suggestion as a Jewish invention: by now, this explanation has become impossible, and they have found an extraordinary argument, broached, if I am not mistaken, by the Nazi review Der Weg (in Buenos Aires): “The massacres of the Jews may very well have taken place, but they were unknown to the Fuhrer, and organized by German anti-Nazis in order to compromise the National Socialist movement.” Interestingly enough, these propagandists claim that they are not anti-Semites.

Another disagreeable symptom is the proliferation of more or less fictionalized “war memoirs,” such as “entertaining” accounts of the private lives of the Nazi bigwigs, or apologias for them edited by wives or widows like Frau Rudolf Hess and Frau Joachim Ribbentrop, or reminiscences by Marshals of the Wehrmacht. The German book market is glutted with this kind of thing. Recently a list was published of books acquired for the soldiers’ libraries of the new German army. Certain volumes of the kind I have just described were purchased (for instance, the memoirs of General von Manstein), but no books dealing with the Nazi crimes were included—the reason given in explanation: lack of funds. Many newspapers protested against this significant omission, and the matter was hotly debated for a number of weeks. The latest word I have received is that Das Dritte Reich und die Juden is being added to these libraries.

Summarizing, one may say that on the whole, more than ten years after the Hitler debacle, Germany, once again powerful and independent, is beginning to go through a phase of ideological soul-searching, centered mainly on the problem of past responsibility. The country has come to a parting of the ways, with the Jewish question the crucial test. There are many indications that a real moral stock-taking will enable Germany to become fully aware of its past, to overcome its anti-Semitic forces, and to establish itself as an organically healthy democracy. The fact that a new generation, not personally stained by the past crimes, is slowly replacing the old one, certainly lends hope for the future.

I have not included East Germany in this discussion, since I view the problem of anti-Semitism there as part of the general situation in Communist East Europe, which is treated in the following section. Here, however, it should be noted that the official propaganda of East Berlin makes a great point of the so-called anti-Semitism in West Germany, heaping together true and false allegations and confusing the various problems, with the result that some Germans are be ginning to succumb to the old Hitler equation of Judaism with Communism.

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IV

The first symptoms of open anti-Semitic discrimination in the USSR date from 1939, that is to say, from the German-Soviet pact, when a numerus nullus for Jewish students was instituted in the Soviet military and diplomatic schools. In the same period, Stalin informed Hitler through von Ribbentrop⁴ that he would continue to make use of the Jewish intelligentsia as long as he needed to, but that when it became convenient—that is, as soon as he had educated a new non-Jewish intelligentsia—he, too would liquidate the Jews.

Evidently it became “convenient” in 1947, when the campaign against “cosmopolites” was launched. It was then that the suppression, arrest, and execution of Yiddish writers, artists, and journalists began. The second stage was inaugurated in 1953, hard on the heels of the trial of Slansky and others in Czechoslovakia; with the so-called “doctors’ plot” (also termed a “Zionist” plot) for justification, Stalin conceived a plan for the mass deportation to Siberia of the Jews of the USSR. Already the dossiers of all Russian Jews had been classified by the MVD in Moscow and were being scrutinized with the idea of deportation in mind; that such an immediate and total deportation was indeed the plan was confirmed by Khrushchev himself, at a meeting of Communist leaders in Warsaw last year.

Before the plan could be carried out, however, the mad dictator died. After de-Stalinization, after Khrushchev’s speech, one might have expected the Kremlin to renounce, among other things, its anti-Semitic policy; but a closer look revealed that this was not to be the case. The text of Khrushchev’s speech that was circulated among the Communist parties of other countries was carefully purged of the section dealing with the responsibility of Stalin for the organization of the “doctors’ plot.”

In contrast to other victims of Stalinist terror, the Jewish intellectuals and writers executed in 1947 were not publicly rehabilitated in the wave of de-Stalinization; members of their families were simply called in by the police, who privately explained the 1947 murders as “a crime of Beria.” Nor were the anti-Jewish purges of the last years of Stalin’s reign followed by any kind of reparation. The top Jewish functionaries who were demoted or dismissed have not been restored to their former positions, and the strategic jobs continue to be held by non-Jews. (Today Lazar Kaganovich is the only Jew in the Central Committee of the Russian Communist party—a body composed of one hundred and thirty-three members.) In the Soviet of Nationalities, the “autonomous” Jewish region of Birobidjan is represented by four Russians and one Jew. In short, the program Stalin announced to von Ribbentrop has been largely realized.

But what is perhaps most significant at the moment is the fact that the charge (made in connection with the Slansky trial) of a “Zionist world plot” against the Soviet Union has never been withdrawn; Rajk and Kostov were posthumously rehabilitated, but Slansky and his fellow (Jewish) “conspirators” remain condemned for “Zionist bourgeois intrigues.” The charge, of course, has been kept alive at least partly because it is useful to the Russians in their pro-Arab, anti-Israel foreign policy. That this policy of hostility to Israel reflects, among other things, anti-Semitic attitudes on the part of the Soviet leaders seems indisputable.⁴ In any case, Khrushchev has not hesitated, on different occasions, to make a public show of his personal views on the Jewish question. In the spring of 1956, when receiving the French socialists in Moscow, he exclaimed, during the course of a discussion of the Dreyfus Case: “Here in a socialist state, the Jews ought to know their place, and I don’t think Comrade Kaganovich who is with us here will, as a good Marxist, contradict me.” At about the same period, at a meeting of the newly elected Polish Politburo, he singled out Roman Zambrowski, its sole Jewish member, for attack. “I think that the Polish Communist party should see to it that only Poles are in its leadership,” he remarked, emphasizing the word “Poles.”

Finally, it seems that new deportations of Jews to Siberia have recently taken place in the western part of the USSR—in Vilna and Lvov, particularly. These deportations may have been a response to the fact that many hundreds of Jews were suspected of being too sympathetic to the movement of liberalization going on across the Polish border. When the deportations started, the Polish consulates of the cities affected were besieged by thousands of Jews who had lost their Polish nationality in 1941 and now wanted to regain it and re-enter Poland. (Many such Jews were permitted to emigrate to Poland, where recent developments have prompted them to seek passports and leave for Israel.)

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Instinctively, Russian Jews have known for a long time what was in store for them. I remember one, a Hasidic rebbe who came to France shortly before the last war: he argued that the Nazis, in aiming at the physical extermination of the Jews, were less dangerous to Judaism as such than the Communists, who attacked their minds also. All sources indicate how right the Hasidic rebbe was. Rabbi Joseph Miller, one of the group of American rabbis who in 1956 visited the Soviet Union, recently wrote in Look magazine: “As a result of forty years of post-Czarist anti-Semitism, which reached its bloody peak during Stalin’s time, two and a half million Russian Jews face cultural and religious extinction—not to mention, in some cases, actual physical extinction in Siberia. Plainly and simply, the Red leaders want to destory the Jew as a Jew.” Other statements by visitors to Russia, and refugees from it, testify roundly to the new terror, the new oppression that continually weighs on the heads of the Jews.

That the ultimate aim is “to destroy the Jew as a Jew,” has been confirmed by Soviet sources themselves. The 1952 edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia, in the article entitled “Jews,” unmistakably expresses this aim. According to this article, the Jews are neither a race nor a nation, but a human group sui generis, held together partly by bonds of faith, but mainly by the “class interests” of the Jewish bourgeoisie and clergy. The Jews, from the Soviet point of view, are a subdivision of bourgeois society, and Communists can cite Marx’s essay on the Jewish question in support of this view. The encyclopedia article says explicitly: “In the USSR and in the people’s democracies the Jews are very quickly assimilated by the people among whom they live. Such is not the case in the capitalist countries where a marked class differentiation exists among the Jews themselves.”

For more than twenty years, then, the Soviet leaders have systematically pursued a policy, whatever its zigzags, of forcible assimilation of the Jews; in many respects one is reminded of the anti-Semitic policies of the Czars. “One-third will die, one-third will be assimilated [converted], one-third will emigrate”; such, almost a century ago, was the program of the infamous Pobiedonostsev, and there is not a member of the present Politbureau who has not worked for the realization of the first two points of this program. But the resemblance goes still further. The “Zionist plot” of 1953 was only a new version of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and in both cases the author of the forgery was the same: the political police of the Russian empire.

In the Soviet Union, of course, public opinion, in the Western sense of the term, is non-existent, or at least inoperative, so that only the official policy counts. Nevertheless, it is still possible to speculate on the private feelings of the people. What we can say with some assurance is that the new economic and social structure created by the revolution of 1917 contributed to diluting and weakening the traditional anti-Semitism of the people; on the other hand, the German occupation of Russia, which spread the contagion of hatred and cruelty, and the subsequent Stalinist moves against the Jews (not to mention the current hostility to Israel) have contributed to reviving anti-Semitism; finally, as in the Russia of the Czars, there are traditionally anti-Semitic regions: chiefly the Ukraine.

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We are even better informed about the state of anti-Semitism in the so-called peoples’ democracies. Official anti-Semitism was implanted in the satellite states between 1948 and 1953, beginning with attacks on “bourgeois Jewish nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism” and culminating in the monstrous trials (copied from the pre-war Moscow Trials) whose chosen victims were Jews—Communist or otherwise. Anti-Semitism among the people of these countries is probably even stronger than in Russia, and has the same deep roots: a powerful anti-Semitic tradition stimulated into new life by the years of Nazi occupation. We are also better informed on concrete manifestations of anti-Semitism in the satellite states. When the Polish newspapers began to speak freely on all sorts of questions, we learned that there had been outbreaks of anti-Semitic incidents in Poland, such as the defiling of cemeteries. Then it became dear that these incidents were minor symptoms, that something far more serious was happening. The pro-Moscow minority in the Polish Communist party was using anti-Semitism as a weapon against Gomulka and blaming the atrocities of the Stalinist period on the Jews. Gomulka has attempted to stem this anti-Semitic tide, but reports tell us that panic has spread among the 50,000 Jews still in Poland: some twenty thousand of them applied to the Israeli consulate for visas last December. Their emigration was authorized and is now in progress—at a monthly rate of between 2,500 and 3,500. Many observers now believe that in two or three years Poland will be a country practically without Jews,⁵ though there are indications at the moment that Jewish emigration may soon be restricted by the government.

In other “peoples’ democracies” the identification of Stalinist oppression with the Jews seems also to be made. The fact is that during the Nazi occupation of East Europe, many Jews joined the Communist party, and from the start filled numerous leading positions; it has been easy for the masses to blame their troubles of the Stalinist era on Jews. The Jewish refugees from Hungary, for instance, who constitute nearly 5 per cent of the total number in the recent wave of refugees, are unanimous in complaining about Hungarian anti-Semitism, which continues to pursue them even in the refugee camps. So far as it is possible to judge, popular anti-Semitism remains equally strong in Rumania, where persecutions of Jews as such have been taking place since 1948. By contrast, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia have an honorable record as far as Jews are concerned. It is to be particularly noted that emigration of Jews has never been forbidden in these two countries, and here is the true test.

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This brief survey, then, would seem to indicate that the Nazi atrocities have led to a diminution of anti-Semitic sentiment (or at least activity) and a new point of view on the “Jewish question” in all those countries where democracy has a foothold—including, with some obvious qualifications, West Germany. But in that part of the world where tyrannical regimes are in force, anti-Semitism continues to lie in readiness for political use whenever the occasion arises. For the truth is that anti-Semitism, far from being a political opinion or a matter of taste, is a crucial test for the whole body politic. There is a fundamental incompatibility today between a tyrannical regime and the survival of Judaism; conversely, any regime which persecutes Jews is a tyrannical regime. One may judge for oneself the significance of the distinction between Nazism, which aimed directly at the physical extermination of the Jews, and Communism, which seeks to destroy Jewish identity. But of one thing there can be no doubt: the future of the Jews, their very survival as Jews, is indissolubly linked to the future of the Western democracies.

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¹ Published in book form as Anti-Semite and Jew (Schocken).

² See Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung 1947-1955, Verlag für Demoskopie, pp. 128-131.

³ Theresienstadt, 1941-1945, by H. G. Adler (reviewed in COMMENTARY, July 1956); Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (The Third Reich and the Jews), by L. Poliakov and G. Wulf; Die Endlösung (The Final Solution), by G. Reit-linger (reviewed in COMMENTARY, January 1955); Er ist wie Du (He Is Like Unto You), by E. Sterling.

⁴ See Walter Z. Laqueur’s “Soviet Policy and Jewish Fate,” COMMENTARY, October 1956.

⁵ See Lucjan Blit’s “Poland and the Jewish Remnant,” COMMENTARY, March 1957.

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