To the Editor:

Norman Cohn leaves unanswered the question why collective psychopathological anti-Semitism is an essentially Christian phenomenon [“The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy,” June]. It may be that the fantasy of Jews as a brotherhood of evil arose not merely as a “device for immunizing Christians against the attractions of the parent religion,” for few 4th-century Christians were attracted to Judaism, but also as a much-needed explanation of the rejection of Jesus as Messiah by the people who knew him best.

Author Cohn’s hope of forestalling “aberrations” requires not only facing the implications of collective psychopathology, but the elimination of their causes. It is therefore relevant for us to consider whether there can be a non-anti-Semitic Christian explanation of the Jewish rejection of Jesus.

Robert Feinschreiber
Department of Economics
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

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To the Editor:

Norman Cohn’s article . . . is historically satisfying but offers no new or adequate psychopathological explanation. Does Mr. Cohn understand the unconscious? His inability to appreciate the fantasy of the Negro as the bad, powerful father is due to lack of regard for the irrationality of the unconscious, racial and individual. . . .

This view of the Negro as the fantasied large bad father coincides with an explanation for prejudice offered by the psychoanalysts Richard F. Sterba in 1943 and Lawrence S. Kubie in 1964. The 1943 paper reported fantasies of white parents during the Detroit race riots and points out hatred of the Negro as a father-substitute with the aim of his death and castration. Kubie related anti-Negro feeling to the child’s frustration at the large size of the father as well as other factors. The distinction between the infantile origins of anti-Negro and anti-Semitic psychology remains obscure as we look for the reasons some succumb to prejudice while others do not.

(Dr.) Paul Lowinger
Department of Psychiatry
Wayne State University
Detroit, Michigan

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To the Editor:

Norman Cohn’s article is . . . one of the more interesting essays to have appeared in COMMENTARY recently For a director of a center for research in collective psychopathology to discover that projection and Oedipal problems in relation to anti-Semitism are ideas that have been “kicking around” in psychiatry for a long time is one surprise. But the uncritical acceptance of these notions is almost as surprising. Argument by metaphor and analogy may be literarily pleasant but it is scientifically untenable. To apply principles of a specious theory of personality development to incidents of collective behavior and social movements is . . . reductionism. Clearly, socio-cultural behavior demands analysis in socio-cultural—not psychoanalytic—terms. If reductionism is valid, then let’s look for anti-Semitic genes. Cohn’s argument is all the more suspect, since he notes elements of social structure which may be pertinent to his argument (little or no anti-Semitism in India or China, where religious and ethnic pluralism is great) but clearly does not understand his own observations. Sociological analysis of anti-Semitism seems well beyond Mr. Cohn’s understanding, and that is too bad, since he fails to inspect the data and settles for the literary, psychoanalytic point of view, which is not science, but ideology.

Michael Schwartz
Department of Sociology
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana

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To the Editor:

. . . Mr. Cohn’s admission that Jews lived in China and India for centuries unmolested, . . . aroused my curiosity. Aren’t Hindus and Chinese also troubled unconsciously by the Oedipus complex and the “abnormal fear and hatred of parental figures”? . . .

I suggest to all writers on the subject of anti-Semitism that if you want to play cards, call a spade a spade. Say where the blame lies: on people, not unconscious drives. And upon whom? On the popes, the archbishops, the priests, the ministers, the leaders of every sect and cult of Christianity who practiced, encouraged, and taught anti-Semitism, and who did not utter a single word of protest against murder. . . .

Charles Levine
New York City

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To the Editor:

. . . Credence in the ancient blood libel persisted in this country into the 20th century. I refer to the incident in the 30’s when the police chief of Massena, N.Y., questioned the local rabbi after the disappearance of a local child . . . to the horror of American Jewry. And the naive police chief was surely not the only American who held this belief.

I had a personal encounter with it in 1936 in my native city of Montreal. At that time I was friendly with a law student at Mc-Gill University. He was of Irish descent, an observant Catholic, a graduate of a local English Catholic college, and a pleasant and intelligent person. We were walking along the street, one sunny spring day, during the week of Passover, when somehow we got around to discussing the old blood-libel. It dawned on me that my friend actually believed in its truth and I asked him whether he really believed that I used matzos made with the blood of Christian children. I shall never forget his reply. “Of course not,” he said, “but the fact that the Jews don’t do it now doesn’t mean that they did not do so in the past.” It was his firm conviction that, like cannibalism among other peoples, the use of Christian blood was not given up by the Jews until modern times.

Recently, this man, who is now a distinguished lawyer, the former vice-president of the Canadian Bar Association, and a former lecturer at the law faculty of McGill University, was elevated to the bench of the Superior Court of the province of Quebec. I doubt whether in this ecumenical age, he still retains belief in the validity of the ancient libel, but our encounter continues to provide food for thought. . . .

Samuel H. Abramson
New York City

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To the Editor:

Reading Norman Cohn’s article brought to my mind what Robert Alter said in the same issue [“The Apocalyptic Temper”] about “archetypes” as “an academic exercise” in literature. Using such archetypes in history, together with some rudiments of psychoanalysis, one can formulate any (“modern”) theory, . . . while disregarding all the facts. As an historian I would like to mention some of those facts:

1. Genocide has been practiced throughout history, not exclusively against Jews in the 20th century. Armenians were massacred during World War I in Turkey, apparently without benefit of any myth of world-conspiracy. And Stalin massacred many millions by “creating” varied myths of a number of world-conspiracies including that of a capitalist-American-Trotzkyite-Zionist, etc. conspiracy. The Nazis themselves planned and began (partially) to execute the Aussiedlung and extermination of Slavic peoples with the goal, as formulated by Himmler on March 15, 1940, alle Polen zu vernichten. A later RSHA plan envisaged the evacuation to Siberia of some fifty million Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, and Bielorussians—all of this without any “Protocols of the Elders of Slavonia” or any myth of world-domination.
2. Dr. Colin states that “one can imagine how the Protocols were greeted in Poland and Rumania!” . . . This writer happened to be “a participant-observer” in Poland in those years and knew about anti-Semitism but was not aware—and is not aware today—of any considerable impact of the Protocols in that country.
3. Without here going into the problem of identification of the (bearded) Jew with the “bad” father, it should be mentioned that attacks on Orthodox Jews with long beards are not characteristic of German troops only. Memoirs of East European Jews who came to New York in the last decades of the 19th century relate how bearded Jewish peddlers who went into non-Jewish neighborhoods near New York’s Lower East Side usually returned home, beaten, and minus their beards. In Poland, the so-called Haleczyki (soldiers of Polish ethnic origin who served with the Allied armies in France during World War I and who, after the war, were allowed to proceed to resurrected Poland under the command of General S. Haller) were the first to tear out Jewish beards there. . . .
4. Nor can the fact that “people dissociated themselves from the Jews and their fate” serve to indicate the influence of the myth, since this dissociation is factually not true for Tsarist Russia and Germany before the Nazi regime. There were Russians who fought in Tsarist Russia with the Jewish self-defense units against pogroms, just as there were liberals who fought in the Duma (Parliament) and elsewhere in behalf of the Jews. Nor is the picture in Germany before 1932 all black either in terms of association with, or support of, Jews (and I can again speak as “a participant-observer”). . . . In a dictatorial state—in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia—one does not need . . . any explanation for not having “the courage” to become a martyr; very few people have that kind of courage.
5. Also valueless is the association of the Protocols with the accusation of sorcery since the Middle Ages. Accusations of sorcery and witchcraft against heterodox peoples . . . are to be found among the Greeks and Romans, among Christians in connection with Jews, Moslems, and certain Christian sects. There are also some Asian-African denominations which are not free of this tendency. And the Jews themselves? The Bible contains more than a dozen references to sorcery and witchcraft in connection with non-Jews. The same holds true for the Talmud, Midrash, and later literature. . . .

In summary, Dr. Cohn’s speculations can find very little, if any, support in the facts. The Protocols were used as a rationale or justification for action against Jews in the same way as other “myths” (Stalin’s, among others) were used (and are still being used) to justify policies against larger groups. They may or may not all be classified as psychopathological.

Bernard D. Weinryb
Dropsie College
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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To the Editor:

“Exterminatory anti-Semitism, [which] appears where Jews are imagined as a collective embodiment of evil, a conspiratorial body dedicated to the task of ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind,” is not primarily “a matter of fantasy,” to be understood best by psychological or psychoanalytic investigation, as Professor Norman Colin suggests. . . . Rather, it is primarily a matter of ideology, in turn based mostly on theology: . . . a consequence of the Christian belief in a potent and dangerous Devil, with whom Jews (as well as the Albigensians and other heretics) . . . were seen as allied and therefore dangerous. . . .

This kind of anti-Semitism can therefore be understood far better by studying history, and the history of Church doctrine and practice in particular, than by studying psychology. . . .

One example of Cohn’s tendency to show uncritical reverence for psychoanalysis, while relegating history to a secondary place, is his assigning of the blame for medieval anti-Semitism to the unconscious Oedipus complexes of the Christian populace, rather than to the conscious theology of the medieval Church, which was much more anti-Semitic then than it had been previously. . . .

Little if any change in Oedipus complexes occurred between the 8th and 14th centuries, although anti-Semitism was far more virulent in the latter period. There were, however, great changes in Christian theology, the most important of which was a greatly increased emphasis on, and fear of, the Devil, . . . largely the result of specific historical factors omitted or minimized by Colin; among them are the separation of the Byzantine and Roman Churches in 1054, the imposition in 1075 of sacerdotal celibacy in the West, the crusades preached by the Church from 1095, and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

It was this Council which decreed that all Jews wear identifying badges, thereby . . . creating officially-sanctioned targets for whatever hostilities and vexations arose within the populace—and during the plague- and fear-ridden Middle Ages there were many. Equally important was the doctrine of transubstantiation, which defined the wine and wafer of Christian communion as changed literally, rather than metaphorically, into Christ’s blood and flesh at the time of ingestion. Since believing Christians were thus religiously required to engage in literal cannibalism whenever they took communion, it is not surprising that they believed, or could easily be brought to believe, that adherents of other faiths did likewise. These are but two examples of specific changes in Christian theology at that time, understanding of which is far more helpful in explaining the medieval blood libel than timeless psychological conjectures about Oedipus complexes.

Theological dualism, a frequent consequence of strife and desperation, was a central ideological concept which invaded Christendom in the medieval period. It led in practice to the denial of the concept of one God, to its replacement by the dualistic notion of two deities, God and Devil, and to the belief that those humans allied with the Devil—first Jews, then many others—had to be repressed or annihilated for God’s kingdom to be built. This demonological dualism was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, heretics, “witches,” and others not submitting completely to church or state power.

We used to think that that kind of diabolistic dualism died with the growth of science, but it continues to exist in our own century, although, as Cohn shows, it can take different forms. Nowadays it masquerades as scientific, and many people accept it as such, particularly when they know relatively little of history, and of Church history in particular. . . .

Twenty-seven years ago, the late Professor Morris R. Cohen of CCNY pointed out the ignorant, irresponsible, and fundamentally anti-scientific quality of psychoanalytic historical methodology. In a scathing review of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, written for Jewish Social Studies, he showed how Freud “is not interested in, and shows no familiarity with, the actual conditions of life among the ancient Israelites and their neighbors. Nor does he pretend to any command or knowledge of the Hebrew text of the Bible which is practically our only source of information for the history of the Hebrew religion. . . .”

Norman Cohn also seems quite unaware of the role of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in the Holocaust itself, as unwitting, and possibly witless, Trojan horses facilitating the Nazi takeover, and as assistant murderers afterward. . . .

Throughout the early period of Hitler’s rise to power, during which the justified fears of German intellectuals and Jews about political events were increasing . . . the flourishing German psychoanalytic profession functioned on the basic, unquestioned assumption—which Cohn seems still to share—that the fundamental causes of people’s anxieties were their childhood experiences. The Nazis were frightening, yes; but the fundamental, genetic basis of the anxieties, of which the present anxiety was merely reminiscent, was really fear of the potentially castrating father. And in Germany, as here, the psychoanalytic clientele included a disproportionate number of those shaping cultural and political thinking. . . .

The degradation under the Nazis of German medicine, which, as in this country, accepted psychiatry as its ideological leader, is a matter of shameful historic record. What is not usually realized, however, is that psychiatry not only helped provide the ideology of mass murder, but that it supplied the first victims also. These were allegedly hopeless mental hospital patients, killed by their own psychiatrists as “socially useless” after war began with Poland in 1939.

The many . . . errors in Cohn’s presentation require more space for discussion than is available here. But Morris R. Cohen’s characterization of Freud’s Moses may apply also to the methods used by Norman Cohn, director of the newly created Center for Research in Collective Psychopathology, an organization whose task it is to find out why the Holocaust occurred, and whose very name suggests that psychology is expected to furnish the answer. “It is a sad disappointment,” Morris R. Cohen wrote in 1939, “to find that one who has been acclaimed as the greatest psychologist of all times should be able to throw so little light on the causes of Jewish persecution.”

(Dr.) Nathaniel S. Lehrman
Department of Psychiatry
Albert Einstein
College of Medicine
Bronx, New York

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To the Editor:

. . . It is not enough to rejoice that Jews are less suspect at present of carrying on such a secret conspiracy. Our goal should be to cauterize men’s imaginations of this kind of mythology wherever it occurs. A most effective means to this end, I find, is Dr. Cohn’s clear and incisive exposure of the sily credence given to the Protocols. Let us hope and pray that the wish he expresses in his final paragraph is not at all “utopian” but one that we can and will gradually realize. . . .

(Rev.) William C. McFadden, S.J.
Department of Theology
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.

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Mr. Cohn writes:

My article on the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy is the short concluding chapter (somewhat adapted for publication in COMMENTARY) of a whole long book on the history and sociology of that deadly delusion. Many of the points raised by your correspondents are fully dealt with in the body of the book, which is to be published next spring by Harper & Row. Meanwhile, by way of clarification and amplification, I offer the following comments:

Mr. Feinschreiber’s argument and mine are not mutually exclusive. Certainly the question of the messiahship of Jesus was the first cause of Christian anti-Semitism, and indeed of the split between the Synagogue and the Church. But the “demonization” of the Jews came rather later, and in the circumstances I indicated; see, for instance, James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, London, 1934, and Jules Isaac, Genèse de l’antisémitisme, Paris, 1956.

I am grateful to Dr. Lowinger for his interesting comments on the fantasy of the Negro as the “bad” father. I did point out in my article that the Negro has, like the Jew, been the recipient and victim of powerful unconscious negative projections. American psychoanalysts with whom I have discussed the matter seem to think that the Negro is seen above all as the embodiment of those id-impulses which, traditionally, white Americans have tended to repress in themselves: laziness, dirtiness, spontaneous lust. If he is indeed sometimes seen as a father-figure, it must surely be above all as a physically powerful, sexually overwhelming father. The image of the mysterious, remote, omnipotent father, whose power for evil springs from occult, rather than crudely physical sources, is certainly more easily wished upon the Jew (or in certain circumstances upon the Jesuit, the Communist, or the “imperialist”) than upon the Negro. It is significant that even when white supremacists talk of Negroes as involved in a world-conspiracy, they imagine them as followers, not as leaders. And there are, after all, obvious sociological reasons why this should be so. Incidentally, we could do with a lot more empirical investigation into the various types of unconscious negative projection, in relation to the groups to which they get attached. I can think of few fields of behavioral science where systematic comparative research is more needed.

I agree with Mr. Schwartz that anti-Semitism cannot be adequately interpreted without due attention to the socio-cultural aspects, and in my book these receive very full treatment. Moreover, in the article itself I emphasized that some kinds of anti-Semitism can be adequately interpreted in sociological terms alone. But in these concluding reflections I was trying to account for the persistence and influence of one very special and highly unrealistic anti-Semitic fantasy, which has exercised an extraordinary fascination even in countries where there have been no Jews for centuries; and here, I believe, an understanding of the unconscious does help. After all, unconscious fantasies certainly do find socially institutionalized expression in many ways—for instance in much religious belief, symbolism, and ritual. This is a fact, and it cannot be disposed of by such clichés as “reductionism.” It is indeed a pity when sociologists and anthropologists, out of a narrow loyalty to their own discipline and training, cut themselves off from that whole dimension of human life which is the unconscious. Fortunately, not all of them do so; and in my experience those who do not are the ones who can think most fruitfully about problems of this kind.

Mr. Levine is quite right in thinking that Christian propaganda has played a large part in disseminating the most deadly forms of anti-Semitism—though if he really supposes that my article ignores this, he must be a very careless reader. The problem, however, remains: why the particular fantasies embodied in the ritual murder accusation and the Protocols ? I gave reasons why in Christendom Jews are peculiarly liable, as a collectivity, to have such Oedipal projections thrust upon them. These reasons do not apply in China or India, where nothing points to the Jews as “parental” figures. Of course Hindus and Chinese have equally destructive unconscious fantasies, but they express them in other ways.

Mr. Abramson’s anecdotes are fascinating, if depressing. I have heard similar tales in the United States, and not only about Catholics. Until quite recently, the demonological kind of anti-Semitism seems to have flourished in the Bible belt.

For one who claims to be an authority on the history of anti-Semitism and of the Nazi exterminations, Mr. Weinryb makes a remarkably poor showing; for almost all his comments are demonstrably inaccurate, when they are not simply irrelevant. I shall deal with them as briefly as possible:

1. I never suggested that all genocides or massacres involve myths of world-conspiracy. There are grounds for thinking that in advanced societies they do usually involve the dehumanization of the victim-group in one way or another; this certainly applied to the massacres of the Armenians in Turkey. But here I was dealing with the Nazi massacres only; and the role which the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy played in these is fully documented in my book. Incidentally, Mr. Weinryb is wrong about the planned massacre of fifty million Slavs: in Hitler’s mind these peoples were, in a very special sense, “creatures” of the Elders of Zion. The sources for this too will be found in my book.
2. If Mr. Weinryb really did observe in person how the Protocols were greeted on their arrival in Poland (which is what I was talking about), then his memory must be playing tricks on him; not surprisingly, after a lapse of forty-six years. I suggest that he refresh it by reading, for instance, the “cry for help and rescue for Poland” issued by the Polish episcopate in the summer of 1920. The influence of the first of the four Polish editions of the Protocols (Warsaw, early 1920) is unmistakable.
3. Here Mr. Weinryb contributes something of value. These additional examples of the rage evoked by the Jewish beard powerfully reinforce my general argument.
4. Certainly there have always (yes, even in the Middle Ages) been Gentiles who opposed the persecution of Jews, often at great risk to themselves; I have never denied it. My argument was that indifference was much more widespread and dissociation much easier than they would have been if Jews had never been the subject of demonological propaganda. If Mr. Weinryb seriously doubts this, I can only advise him to consult some of the basic works on the history and sociology of anti-Semitism; or else, to consult someone who remembers the strange rumors about Jewish power and Jewish machinations which spread even in the Western democracies during the Nazi period.
5. The link between the Protocols and traditional accusations of sorcery is not a matter of opinion but of facts—notably, the facts concerning the immediate precursors and first editors of the Protocols: once more, I must refer Mr. Weinryb to my book. That accusations of sorcery have often been brought against other out-groups is true, but in no way affects my argument.

After such a display of misinformation and bad reasoning, Mr. Weinryb’s conclusion comes as an agreeable surprise, for it is almost sound: “the Protocols were used as a rationale or justification for action against Jews in the same way as other ‘myths’ (Stalin’s and others) were used (and are still being used) to justify policies against larger groups.” Quite so—except that in this case the myth did not have to be manufactured ad hoc but was already to hand, in the form of an ancient body of superstition. But what interests me is why, despite their manifest absurdity, such myths are at times so effective, why their appeal is so widespread and powerful—in fact, why they are worth using at all. I suggest that it is because they speak to infantile and paranoid (or quasi-paranoid) propensities from which very few of us are wholly free.

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As for Dr. Lehrman’s long and (to put it mildly) discursive essay, I am quite baffled. Dr. Lehrman bids us beware of psychiatrists as a lot of potentially murderous quacks, and advises me personally to study the history of medieval religious attitudes and of the post-medieval witchcraft mania. But I am a historian who has been specializing in these very fields—and writing about them—for over twenty years. Dr. Lehrman, on the other hand, himself a psychiatrist, and in an institution where he must have other psychiatrists as his daily associates . . . I give up.

However, as a matter of fairness to my own colleagues I must mention that Dr. Lehrman is totally misinformed about the Center for Research in Collective Psychopathology at the University of Sussex. This is an interdisciplinary (and international) organization which has on its staff historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnologists, as well as some (quite unmurderous) depth-psychologists of various persuasions. Also, the Center is concerned with many matters apart from the preconditions of the Holocaust.

One final comment: None of your correspondents has tackled my analysis of the various ways in which, when embodied in an ideology, paranoid fantasies can condition the behavior of certain social groups (in this case, the organizations of Jew-killers) and influence that of whole societies. This is disappointing, for I believe that this part of the article is the one that could most profitably have been debated.