To the Editor:
In reviewing Ben Halpern’s Jews and Blacks [Books in Review, October 1971] Irving Howe attempts to escape criticism of his own conclusion, that “. . . Christians today are not likely to feel so strongly about the myth of Judas as did Christians at any point in previous Western history,” by apologetically proclaiming that his thesis is only an assumption not based on “proof.” I suspect, however, that Mr. Howe does wish his subjective conclusion to be taken seriously, no matter how little literary substantiation he offers.
Mr. Howe contends that anti-Semitism is bound to diminish because of the advances of a “. . . creeping skepticism . . . which eats into the substance of all religious life. . . .” This thesis presupposes anti-Semitism to be a religious belief, like heaven and hell or the virgin birth, that will be discarded with the advent of intellectualism and theological doubt. If anti-Semitism is so easily dissolved by the acidity of religious skepticism, how does Mr. Howe account for the unlikely apparition of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, where religious skepticism and indeed total rejection of Christianity and its mythos has been the official government doctrine since 1917? So much for Mr. Howe’s dismissal of contemporary anti-Semitism.
As Judeophobia does seem to appear regardless of religious milieu—be it orthodox Christianity, Communist atheism, or Nazi paganism—it is more accurate to view anti-Semitism as a cultural phenomenon of Occidental civilization. Despite more than one thousand years of cultural ingraining, Mr. Howe is certain that contemporary Christians will not be likely to “perpetuate traditional Christian myths about the Jews.” Obviously Mr. Howe is counting on his “. . . great mass of drowsy churchgoers . . .” to resist with creeping skepticism what Earl Raab describes as the common reservoir of anti-Semitic beliefs, “built almost ineradicably into our literature, into our language, into our most general cultural myths.”
Irving Howe accuses Ben Halpern of “. . . not paying nearly enough attention to that process of creeping skepticism. . . .” Perhaps Mr. Halpern knows that intellectual development, no matter how fashionable or salient an explanation, has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism; for as Giorgio de Santillana sadly observed, “there is more in a culture than is inscribed in its rational decisions.”
William Evans Krisel
Arlon, Belgium
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Irving Howe writes:
Anti-Semitism may not be a “religious belief,” but in the West it has been closely connected with the myths, traditions, and institutions of Christianity. When William Evans Krisel says it is a “cultural phenomenon of Occidental civilization,” why does he suppose he is contradicting me? Have not the myths, traditions, and institutions of Christianity been a major, perhaps the major, component of “Occidental civilization”?
It seems reasonable to suppose that an educated young Christian whose relationship to his church is tenuous will be less susceptible to savagery as a result of the myth of the Jew as Judas than was his fervently believing great-grandfather. That’s all I was saying, and why it should rouse Mr. Krisel to such anger I don’t know.
As for the rejection of religion by the Soviet government, that doesn’t yet tell us anything about the way the Christian mythos, with an intertwined tradition of hostility toward Jews, may continue to hold the imagination of millions of Russians.
It’s not clear to me whether Mr. Krisel’s preposterous reference to my “dismissal of contemporary anti-Semitism” is a consequence of ill-will or an inability to read. In either case, I can assure him that I have never made such a “dismissal.”
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