To the Editor:
Jacob Katz, in “Accounting for Anti-Semitism” [June], observes that
The term anti-Semitism made its first appearance in Germany in the fall of 1879. It was introduced into public discourse by Wilhelm Marr, one of the leading figures in an anti-Jewry campaign. . . . The men who coined and propagated it wished to convey the idea that their objection to Jews had nothing to do with traditional Jew-hatred.
More than forty years ago, I learned from Leo Strauss that “anti-Semitism” was coined by a “bashful Jew-hater.” I also remember his saying that this coinage belonged to the attempt to cloak race prejudice in the language of science. It is doubtful, however, that the concept of a Semitic race has any better foundation than that of an Aryan race—or of a white or black race. There are certainly Semitic languages, and peoples whose language is Semitic. Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages, although comparatively few Jews outside Israel are fluent in Hebrew. By any recognizable standard, most Jews are not Semites, and most Semites are not Jews. When someone said to Strauss that so-and-so was anti-Semitic, he used to respond, “You mean he does not like Arabs?” There is no logic whatever in the fact that “anti-Semitism” should refer exclusively to Jews, and I have often wondered why Jews should ever have been collaborators in the currency given to this nasty euphemism.
Harry V. Jaffa
Claremont, California
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To the Editor:
Jacob Katz offers his opinion as to the cause of the Holocaust. As the former owner of a bookstore in San Francisco containing more than 5,000 volumes of history and social science (donated, incidentally, by the poet Kenneth Rexroth), I have my own theory, based largely on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and the writings of Konrad Lorenz.
First, it is necessary to agree that civilization—city-based culture of farming and trading and money—was “invented” by the predecessors of the Jews, and that “civilization is Jewish.”
Second, we have to understand that the growth of population over the whole earth requires and makes inevitable a world-system of ideology, politics, and trade—religious or non-religious, socialist or capitalist, whatever it might be called—and that all systems of civilization are “capitalist,” that is, founded on commodity-production and the ideology necessary to make it function.
If these two assumptions are accepted, then the Holocaust is understood as, first, the hatred and resentment of civilized life by peoples coming into it out of savagery and primitivism. Thus we have hatred of the Jews, who appear to impose on mankind the rule of God and law, monogamy, the stringencies of money and debt, restricted physical movement in an animal preferring to roam free (the animal being man), and practices of business and trade needed to keep the system going in spite of the reluctance of most people to go along, to buy and work, to—in the words of James Joyce—“Puff the Blaziness On.”
Christians also do the work of the Jews, of course—some of them Puritans, American businessmen on a great scale, others. Those Christians are hated too, but not as violently. . . .
We have, then, hatred of the Jews because they practice the skills of civilized life with great energy and determination, and because others are trying to emulate them in creating a world order. Looked at in this light, the Holocaust is best understood as, in the words of B.F. Skinner, “a struggle between two very powerful racial-cultural groups as to which would dominate the Cosmos—the Germans and the Jews.”
Horace Schwartz
Santa Rosa, California
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To the Editor:
Jacob Katz’s article seems to leave out direct references to the Bible while quoting from secondary sources such as the Babylonian Talmud.
According to the prophet Zechariah (Chapter 14), the Messiah will some day defeat the enemies of the Jews as He gathers “all nations against Jerusalem.” But the outcome will be that “the Lord will smite all the peoples that have fought against Jerusalem.” . . .
It seems to me that the prophecies relating to the vindication of Israel vis-à-vis the Gentiles should be considered as a reason for anti-Semitism. Most non-Jews, whether in Christendom, Islam, or wherever, do not look kindly upon the fulfillment of these prophecies and therefore are ultimately against the Jewish people. . . .
Herman C. Baader
Allentown, Pennsylvania
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Jacob Katz writes:
Leo Strauss’s ironic observation about the bashfulness of the man who invented the term “anti-Semitism”—covering over as it does a plain hatred of Jews—conforms with my own theory about the motivation behind its invention. My thanks to Harry V. Jaffa for drawing my attention to Strauss’s perception, though to use it as an argument to refute anti-Semitism seems to me a futile exercise. In any case, the historian’s task is not to refute anti-Semitism, but to understand it by tracing its emergence and development within a historical context. This I tried to do in my book, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism 1700-1933, though I could only hint at it in my COMMENTARY article.
My own method is contrary to what Horace Schwartz is obviously attempting in interpreting the phenomena on the basis of a preconceived theory, whether Freudian or otherwise. Such an interpretation may suit the philosopher’s métier, but not the historian’s.
And lastly, to have recourse to the hidden intentions of the prophets, as Herman C. Baader does, is the way of theologians or more precisely homilists, rather than historians.
